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MISCELLANIES

BY

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.

SECOND EDITION

NEW YORK: EDWARD H. FLETCHER,

141 NASSAU STREET. 1851.

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850,

BY EDWARD H. FLETCHER,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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Beri ram Smith Mar -934

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PREFACE.

The Discourses, Reviews, and Sermons, composing the present volume, have, several of them, been already issued separately ; and of the opening article, the present is the third edition ; others of them appear now for the first time. It was thought, by some of the author's friends, that the book might find purchasers ; and the writer will have been recompensed, should it please " The Great Taskmaster" to give to the desultory pages aught of usefulness, in their influence on the minds of any of their readers. For the Bake of its publisher, who is also the proprietor of the copyright, the author would hope for the volume sufficient currency to save him from loss in the venture he has made. W. R. W.

New York, Nov. 1, 1849.

CONTENTS.

Page The Conservative Principle, ------------- 1

Appendix to the Conservative Principle, -*------ 78

Ministerial Responsibility ---------••••-91

The Prayers of the Church needed for her rising Ministry, 111

The Church the Home and Hope of the Free, ------ 129

The Strong Staff and the Beautiful Rod, ------- 143

The Jesuits as a Missionary Order, ---------- i69

The Life and Times of Baxter, ------------ 194

Christ a Home Missionary, ------------- 220

Publications of the American Tract Society, ------ 241

Increase of Faith necessary to the Success of Christian

Missions, ------------ ------- 261

The Preaching of another Gospel accursed, ------- 283

The Sea giving up its Dead, ------------- 297

The Lessons of Calamity, -------------- 311

The Church, a School for Heaven, ---------- 337

The Prayer of the Church against those delighting in War, 367

Appendix— The Cagots of France, 383

THE

CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

IN OUR LITERATURE.

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE HAM- ILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, MADISON COUNTY, N. Y., ON TUESDAY EVENING, JUNE 13, 1843.

TO

THE REV. JOHN 8. MAGIMIS, D.D.,

PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY IN THE

HAMILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION,

IS, AS A SLIGHT MARK OF HIGH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION,

INSCRIBED

BY HIS FRIEND.

W. R. W.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE "CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE," &c.

Other engagements, which prevented the author from preparing this Address for the press, and for a time banished it entirely from his mind, must be, in part, his apol- ogy with the Societies who requested its publication, for its late appearance. Yet what of truth it may contain is not less true now than at the time of its delivery. Some additions made at the commencement of the Address, with regard to the proper defi- nition of literature, and the permanent influence which may belong even to its more transitory productions, will, he trusts, not be found alien to the theme. But the chief cause of delay has been the writer's consciousness how far his treatment of the subject fell below the intrinsic importance of the topic. This consciousness, had he not bound himself to publish, would have prevented his appearance even at this late hour.

To prevent misconstruction he would add the remark, that a full review of our national literature in all its aspects, the more encouraging as well as the more gloomy^ was no part of his design. It was his task to point out certain of the perils, and to indicate the sufficient and sole remedy.

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

This Address, originally delivered before the Adelphian and iEonian Societies of Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, has, from its theme, found more ac- ceptance than the author had at all anticipated. In preparing a second edition, he has subjected the whole to such hasty revision as his other engagements allowed, and made some other additions both to the text and notes.

New York, 1844.

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The present edition has some slight revisions, and considerable additions have been made to some of the notes ; but these additions are, from want of leisure, less exten- sive than the writer had wished to make them.

New York, November, 1849.

THE CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE IN OUR LITERATURE.

Gentlemen : — In acceding to the request with which you have honored me, and which brings me at this time before you, I have supposed that you expected it of the speaker to present some theme relating to the common- wealth of literature ; that commonwealth in which every scholar and every Christian feels naturally so strong an interest. The studies in which you have here engaged, and which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves and its power over others. That love of country, which in the bosoms of the young burns with a flame of more than ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an additional interest in the cause of letters ; for as you well know, the literature of the nation must exercise a powerful influence on the national destiny. Acting as it does not merely on the schools, but also on the homes of a land, it must from those fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of. blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our goodly land. You know that it is not mere physical advan- tages that have gained or that can retain for our country its political privileges. You have seen how the physical con- dition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst the moral condition of a people is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. You remember that the same sun shone on the same Mara- thon, when it was the heritage and the battle-ground of freemen ; and when, in later and more disastrous days, it re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his Ottoman oppressor. You look to literature, and other moral causes, then, as determining to some extent the future history of our land. You are aware that literature is not always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise a conservative influence. It is like the vegetation of our

4 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

earth, of varied nature. Much of it is the waving harvest that fills our garners and piles our boards with plenty; and, alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the edifice it seems to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your country, you must therefore feel an eager anxiety for the moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. And of your number most are looking forward to the work of the Christian ministry ; and, from the past history of the world, you have learned in what mode the progress of liter- ature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been, in its turn, acted upon ; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press have sometimes been found in friendly alliance, and at others enlisted in fearful antagonism. How shall it be in your times ?

By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps the place to say, more than the mere issues from the press of a nation. The term is generally applied to describe all the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people as far as they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art of printing. But it may well be questioned whether the term does not in justice require a wider application. Lan- guage, as soon as it is made the subject of culture, seems to give birth to literature. And such culture may exist where the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have acquired the art of writing. Such were the Tonga Islanders, as Mariner found them. The melody and rhythm of their dialect may have been partially developed, and their bards, their musicians, and their orators have become distinguished, ere the language has had its grammarians or its historians. The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its Cadmus has appeared to give it an alphabet. The old Gaelic poetry, on which Macpherson founded his Ossianic forgeries, was a part of the nation's literature while yet un- written. And if, as some scholars have supposed, the poems of Homer were, in the times of the author, preserved by memory and not by writing, it would be idle to deny, that, even in that unwritten state, and whilst guarded only in the recollection of travelling minstrels, they were a glorious and influential literature to the Greek people, a KTri^a e$ aei to them, and to the civilization of Europe for all ensuing times. And even in nations having the use of letters, there is much

IN OUR LITERATURE. 5

never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded as forming part of the literature of the people. The unre- corded intercourse of a community, neither transcribed by the pen, nor multiplied by the press, may bear no inconsid- erable part in the literary culture of that people, and form no trivial portion of their literary products. Of the elo- quence of Curran and Sheridan much was never reported, or reported most imperfectly ; and yet in its effects upon the immediate hearers in courts of justice or houses of Par- liament, deserved the name and honors of literature, alike irom the literary culture it displayed on the part of the speaker, and from the literary taste it formed and cherished, on the part of the auditory. Some of the most distinguished among the*living scholars of France were, whilst professors in her colleges, eminent for the eloquence of their unwritten lectures. Were not even such of those lectures of Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin as never reached the press, yet really and most effectively contributions to the literature of the land ? The departed Schleiermacher of Germany had the reputation of being among the profoundest thinkers and the most eloquent preachers of his time. His sermons, it is said, were never written ; nor were most of the pulpit dis- courses of a kindred spirit, Robert Hall, of England. Al- though many have been published, more must have perished. Yet were not those, which the living voice but published to a single congregation, truly a portion of German and British literature, as well as those which the press published to the entire nation, and preserved to succeeding times 1 Thus the arguments of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the float- ing proverbs, or the current legends of the nation, and the ballads, and even the jests, which no antiquary may as yet have secured aud written down, are expressions of the pop- ular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored only in the memory, instead of receiving the surer guardian- ship of the written page, may, writh some show of reason, be claimed as forming no small and no uninfluential part of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a land embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, whether that intercourse be oral or written. It is the expo- nent of the national intellect, and the utterance of the pop- ular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises all the intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to the newspaper ; from the body of divinity to the primer or

6 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

the nursery rhyme — the epic poem and the Sunday School hymn — the sermon and the epigram — the essay and the sonnet — the oration and the street hallad — the jest or the bye-word — all that represents, awakens, and colors the pop- ular mind — all that interprets, by the use of words, the nation to themselves, or to other nations of the earth.

This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual advancement of the people at the time of its production, but it exercises, of necessity, a powerful influence in hasten- ing or in checking that advancement. It is the Nilometer on whose graded scale we read not merely the height to which the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, or the degree to which it has sunk, but also the character and extent of the harvests yet to be reaped in coming months along the whole course of those waters. Thus it registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but presages as well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant future. The authors of a nation's literary products are its teachers — in truth or in error ; and leave behind their im- print and their memorial in the virtues or vices of all those whom their labors may have reached. The errand of all language is to create sympathy ; to waft from one human bosom the feelings that stir it, that they may awaken a cor- responding response in other hearts. We are therefore held responsible for our words because they affect the happiness and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips takes its irrevocable flight, and leaves behind its indelible imprint. It is, in the stern language of the apostle, in the case of some, a flame " set on fire of hell ;" and consuming wherever it alights, it " setteth on fire the course of nature ;" as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of salvation, " ministering grace unto the hearers." Reason and Scripture alike make it idle to deny the power of speech over social order and morality ; and literature is but speech under the influence of art and talent. And a wrritten litera- ture is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form than it usually wears. We know that God and man hold each of us responsible for the utterance of the heart by the lips. Human tribunals punish the slanderer because his words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts its reckoning for " every idle word," because that word, however lightly uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and went out to influence, for good or for evil, the souls of others.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 7

And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, of a man's lips are thus influential, and enter into the matter of his final account, it cannot be supposed that these words, when fixed by the art of writing, or scattered by the art of printing, either have less power over human society, or are in the eye of heaven clothed with less solemn responsibili- ties. A written literature embalms the perishable, arrests the progress of decay, and gives to our words a longer life and a wider scope of influence. Such words, so preserved and so diffused, are the results, too, of more than ordinary deliberation. If malicious, their malice is malice prepense. If foolish, their folly is studied, and obstinate, and shame- less. The babbler sins in the ears of a few friends, and in the privacy of home. The frivolous or vicious write! sins, as on a wider theatre, and before the eyes of thousands, while the echoes of the press waft his words to distant lands and later times. And because much of this literature may be hasty and heedless, ludicrous in tone, and careless in style, soon to evaporate and disappear, like the froth on some hurried stream, we are not to suppose that it is there- fore of no practical influence. The English stage, in the days of the last two Stuarts, was of a reckless character ; — the child of mere whim, the progeny of impulse and license. Many of its productions were alike regardless of all moral and literary rules — the light-hearted utterance of a depraved generation : full of merry falsehoods and jesting blasphemy, fantastic and barbarous in style, as well as irreligious in their spirit. Yet he must be a careless reader of history, who, because of its reckless, trivial, and profligate character, assigns to it but a limited influence. It did, in fact, gre- viously aggravate the national wickedness whence it sprung.

The trivial and the ephemeral as they float by, in glittering bubbles, to the dull waters of oblivion, may yet work irre- parable and enduring mischief ere their brief career ends ; and the result may continue, vast and permanent, when the fleeting causes which operated have long gone by. Who now reads Eikon Basilike, the forgery of Bishop Gauden, ascribed to the beheaded Charles I. ? Yet that counterfeited manual of devotion is thought by some to have done much in bringing back the house of Stuart to the English throne.*

* " Many have not scrupled to ascribe to that book the subsequent resto- ration of the royal family. Milton compares its effects to those which were wrought on the tumultuous Romans by Antony's reading to them the will

8 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

Who in this age knows the words of Lillibullero ?# Yet the author of that street ballad, now forgotten, boasted of hav- ing rhymed, by his song, the Stuarts out of their kingdom. Thus a forged prayer-book aided to restore a dynasty, as the ragged rhymes of a street song helped to overturn it. We err grievously, therefore, if we suppose that the frivolous is necessarily uninfluential, and that when the word passes, its effects also pass with it. According to Eastern belief, the plague that wastes a city may be communicated by the gift of a glove or a riband. The spark struck from the iron heel of the laborer may have disappeared ere the eye could mark its transient lustre, yet ere it expired have fired the train which explodes a magazine, lays a town in ruins, and spreads around a wide circuit alarm and lamentation, be- reavement and death. Trifles may have no trivial influence. What is called the lighter literature of the age may be even thus evanescent, yet not inefficacious. By its wide and rapid circulation it may act more powerfully on society than do graver and abler treatises, and its authors, if unprincipled, may thus deserve but too well the title which the indignant Nicole gave to the comparatively decorous dramatists and romance writers of France, in his own time ; a title which his pupil Racine at first so warmly resented, that of "public poisoners."

Of literature, therefore, thus understood, thus wide in its range and various in its products, thus influential even where the most careless, and thus clothed with most solemn re- sponsibilities because of its influence, it is our purpose now to speak.

You perceive, gentlemen, that amongst ourselves, as a people, literature is subject to certain peculiar influences, perhaps nowhere else found in the same combination, or operating to the same extent as in our own land. We are a young nation, inhabiting, and called to subdue, a wide terri- tory. Youth is the season of hope, enterprise, and energy - — and it is so to a nation as well as an individual. Our

of Caesar. The Eikon passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth." — Hume.

* "It may not be unworthy of notice, that a merry ballad, called Lillibul- lero, being at that time published, in derision of the papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even by the King's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This incident both discovered, and served to increase the general discontent of the kingdom." — Hume.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 9

literature is likely, therefore, to be ardent, original, and at times perhaps boastful. They are the excellences and the foibles of youth. We entered, as by right of inheritance, and in consequence of our community of language, upon the possession of the rich and ancient literature of Britain, at the very outset of our national career. As a people we enjoy, again, that freedom which has ever been the indul- gent nurse of talent in all times and in all lands. The peo- ple are here the kings. And whilst some of our sovereigns are toiling in the field, others are speaking through the press. Our authors are all royal by political right, if not by the birthright of genius. Providence has blessed us with the wide diffusion of education, and the school travels, in many regions of our land, as it were, to every man's door. It is not here, if it may elsewhere be the case, that the neglected children of genius can complain that " chill penury repressed their noble rage." In addition to the advantages of the common school, our writers, publishers, and instructors, are sedulously preparing literature for the use of the masses. The popular lecturer is discussing themes of grave interest ; while the cheap periodical press is snowing over the whole face of our land its thick and incessant storm of knowledge. This knowledge, it is true, is not all of the most valuable kind. The wonders of steam are dragging the remoter por- tions of our union daily into closer contact, whilst a free emi- gration is bringing us the denizens of other lands, and the men of other tongues, until the whole world appears about to be made neighbors and kinsmen to America ; and the nation seems daily melting into a new and strange amalgam, in consequence of the addition of foreign materials from with- out, to the heterogeneous mass already found fusing within our own country.

All these causes are operating, and must operate long and steadily, upon the character of American literature. It be- comes an important inquiry then, what moral shape this lit- erature is assuming under these plastic influences. You ask, as change succeeds change, and as one omen of moral progress, or social revolution, follows close upon another : " Watchman, what of the night ?" And gazing into the deep darkness of the future, you would fain read what are the coming fortunes of our people and their literature. Allow me then to dwell upon some of the evils that endanger our rising literature, and threaten to suffuse the bloom of its 3

10 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

youth with their fatal virus. I would next bring before you the remedy /which as scholars, patriots, and Christians, we are bound to apply to these evils, and to which we must look as our preservative against the approaching danger.

Evils to be found' besetting and perilling American litera- ture, and the remedy of those evils, will afford our present theme. I may seem to dwell for a time, at least, upon the darker shades of a picture, that may, I fear, appear to some of my respected hearers, overcharged in its gloom. I must also from the nature of the subject enter into some details, that will, I must expect, severely tax the patience of all who are listening. I can only cast myself upon your indulgence ; find an apology as to the length of some statements, and the denser shade cast by others, in the wide and varied nature of the subject, and its mingled difficulty, delicacy, and im- portance ; asking the aid of Him whose blessing can never fail those that trust in Him, the author of all knowledge, and the final arbiter who will bring into judgment all our employ- ments, whether literary or practical, social or solitary.

We would then dwell for a time, on some of the dangers that threaten the rising literature of our land. If the fore- ground of the landscape be dark, we trust to show in the distance the sure and sufficient remedy of these dangers ; and though night be spread on the summits of the nearer and lower mountains, we see glittering on the crest of the remoter and loftier heights beyond, the Star of Hope, that portends the coming day, and under the edge of the darkest cloud we seem to discern already the gleams of the approach- ing sun. Our country may suffer and struggle, but we trust it is not the purpose of Him who has so signally blest and so long defended us, that she should suffer long, or sink far, much less sink finally and for ever.

First then among the evil tendencies that beset our youth- ful literature, and are likely to thwart and mar its progress, we would name, the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the times. We are as a nation eminently practical in our char- acter. It is well that we should be so. But this trait in oui national feelings and manners has its excesses and its con sequent perils. Placed in a country where labor and integ- rity soon acquire wealth, the love of wealth has become a passion with multitudes. The lust of gain seems at times a national sin easily besetting all classes of society amongst us. Fierce speculations at certain intervals of years engross the

IN OUR LITERATURE. 11

hearts of the community, and a contagious frenzy sends men from all walks of life and all occupations into the field of traffic. Fortunes are rapidly made and as rapidly lost. The nation seems to be lifted up as on a rushing tide of hope and prosperity. It subsides as rapidly as it had risen ; and on every side are seen strewn the wrecks of fortune, credit, character, and principle. All this affects our literature. We are in the influential classes, a matter-of-fact and money- getting race. This tends, in the minds of many, to create a distaste for all truth that is not at once convertible into wealth, and its value to be calculated in current coin. In the clank and din of our never-tiring machinery, the voice of wisdom is often drowned, and the most momentous and stirring truths are little esteemed because they cannot be rated in the Price Current or sold on the Exchange. We are impatient to see the material results of every truth, and to have its profits told upon our fingers, or pressed into our palms. So, on the other hand, if any principle, plan, or ex- pedient, be it true or be it false, will effect our purpose, pro- ' duce a needful impression, and secure an end that we deem desirable, we are prone to think it allowable because it is effective. We idolize effect. And a philosophy of expedi- ency thus springs up, which sacrifices everything to imme- diate effects and to mere material results — a philosophy which, in practice, if not in theory, is driving rapidly against some of the very bulwarks of moral principle that our fathers believed, and believed justly, to be grounded in the law, and built into the very throne of God.

Now we need not say that where this utilitarian and mechanical spirit acquires the ascendancy in our literature, it must operate dangerously on the state and the church. The prosperity which is built on gain, and the morality that is built on expediency, will save no nation. Wo to that na- tion in which Political Economy swallows up all its The- ology ; and the law of self is the basis of all its wisdomr The declining glories of Tyre and Holland, each in her day mistress of the sea, and guardian of its treasures, may read us an admonitory lesson as to the fatal blight that such a spirit breathes over the freedom, the arts and the learning of a land.

We are, by the favoring Providence of God, placed under political institutions which more readily yield to and reflect the popular will, than the government and laws of other.

12 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

lands. The literature of our nation, more directly than that of earlier times, or of older countries, moulds the political action of the nation. Let but the spirit of expediency and of gain sway our political literature in the thousand journals of our country, and in the myriads of voters whom these journals educate and govern ; let the same spirit possess the great parties ever to be found in a free nation, and the aspir- ing leaders who are the champions and oracles of those par- ties, and what would soon be the result? A peddling policy, that, disregarding the national interest and honor, would truckle to power and favor, carry its principles to market, and convert statesmanship into a trade. The country would be visited by an impudent, voluble, and mercenary patriot- ism, that shrinking from no artifice, and blushing at no meanness, would systematize the various arts of popularity into a new science of selfishness. The legislation of the land and its intercourse with foreign nations would be en- grossed by trading politicians ; huckstering their talents and influence to the party or the measure or the man, that should bid in the shape of emolument or office, the highest price for the commodities which they vend. The expert statesman would then be he who consulted most assiduously the weather-vane of popular favor, that he might ascertain to what point his conscience should be set. And should such time ever come over our beloved land, could our liberties endure when guarded only by hands so faithless, or our laws be either wise or just, when such men made and such men administered them ?

Let the same love of selfish gain pervade the pulpits of our land : let the messengers of the gospel learn to prophesy smooth things, and instead of the " word in season," let them substitute the word in fashion — let them retail doctrines that admit no personal application, truths that wound not the conscience and pierce not the heart, and morals enforced by no motives of love to God, but by mere considerations of gain or honor — let them compile unoffending truisms and dexterous sophisms, and put these in place of unpalatable truths — let them listen to the echoes of popular opinion ever- more, that they may in them learn their lessons of duty ; and where soon is the gospel so administered, and where is the church, if left but to such instruction ? The far-sighted law of righi, as God ordained and administers it, would be overthrown, that in its stead might be set up the law of interest,

IN OUR LITERATURE. 13

as short-sighted man expounds it ; and a creed by which the world is to be humored, flattered and adored, would be audaciously preached at the foot of a cross which ransomed that world only by renouncing and only by defying it. No — gain is not godliness.

But man was made for other purposes than to coin or ex- change dollars. The fable of Midas pestered with his riches, and unable to eat because his food turned to gold, is full of beneficial instruction in such times as ours. Man has wants which money cannot supply, and sorrows which lucre can- not heal ; although cupidity may teach him often to make expediency or immediate utility the standard of his code of morals. Conscience, too, will utter at times her protest, slip aside the gag, and declaim loudly against practices she cannot approve, however they may for the time profit. A literature merely venal will not then meet all the necessities of man's nature. And not from conscience only is the reign of covetousness threatened and made insecure. Mere feel- ing and passion lead men often to look to other than their pecuniary interests, and in quest of yet dearer objects they trample on gain, and sacrifice the mere conveniences to secure the higher enjoyments of life. But here, in this last named fact, is found the source of yet another danger to our literature. Passion is not a safer moral guide to a people than interest.

2. Let us dwell on this new inimical influence by which our literature may suffer. Our age is eminently, in some of its leading minds, an age of passion. It is seen in the character of much of the most popular literature, and espe- cially the poetry of our day. Much of this has been the poetry of intense passion, it mattered little how unprincipled that passion might be. An English scholar lately gone from this world (it is to Southey that we refer), branded this school of modern literature, in the person of its great and titled leader, as the Satanic school.3 It has talent and genius,

3 Another English scholar, whose writings may be quoted as affording evidence of a re-action that has followed the influence of Byron, holds this language. Speaking of the heroes of Byron, he remarks: "They exhibit rather passions personified than persons impassioned. But there is a yet worse defect ; Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human bang, but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, weak of mind. They must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no

14 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

high powers of imagination and language, and boiling energy ; but it is, much of it, the energy of a fallen and revolted angel, with no regard for the right, no vision into eternity, and no hold on Heaven. We would not declaim against passion when employed in the service of literature. Inform- ed by strong feelings, truth becomes more awful and more lovely ; and some of the ages which unfettered the passions of a nation, have given birth to master-pieces of genius. But Passion divorced from Virtue is ultimately among the fellest enemies to literary excellence. When yoked to the car of duty, and reined in by principle, passion is in its ap- propriate place, and may accomplish a mighty service. But when, in domestic life, or political, or in the walks of litera- ture, passion throws off these restraints and exults in its own uncontrolled power, it is as useless for purposes of good, and as formidable from its powers of evil, as a car whose liery coursers have shaken off bit and rein, and trampled under foot their charioteer. The Maker of man made conscience to rule his other faculties, and when it is dethroned, the result is ruin. Far as the literature to which we have alluded

strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions — in whom all is vani- ty ; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what is low in sentiment or infirm in character?" It is not the language of theologians we are now quoting, but the words we have transcribed are those of ua prophet of their own" — of a living dramatic poet — Henry Tay- lor, the author of " Philip Van Artevelde." Elsewhere he uses the aid of verse to pronounce a similar judgment.

"Then learned I to despise that far-famed school

Who place in wickedness their pride, and deem Power chiefly to be shown where passions rule,

And not where they are ruled ; in whose new scheme

Of heroism, self-government should seem A thing left out, or something to contemn —

Whose notions, incoherent as a dream, Make strength go with the torrent, and not stem, For 'wicked and thence weak,' is not a creed for them.

11 1 left these passionate weaklings : I perceived

What took away all nobleness from pride, All dignity from sorrow ; what bereaved

Even genius of respect : they seemed allied

To mendicants, that by tin; highway side Expose their self-inflicted wounds, to gain

The alms of sympathy — far best denied. I heard the Borrowful sensualist complain. if wilh compassion, not without disdain."

IN OUR LITERATURE. 15

spreads, it cherishes an insane admiration for mere talent or mental power. It substitutes as a guide in morals, sentiment for conscience ; and makes blind feeling the irresistible fate, whose will none may dispute, and whose doings are beyond the jurisdiction of casuists or lawgivers. It has much of occasional tenderness, and can melt at times into floods of sympathy : but this softness is found strangely blended with a savage violence. Such things often co-exist. As in the case cf the French hangman, who in the time of their great revolution was found, fresh from his gory work of the guil- lotine, sobbing over the sorrows of Werther, it contrives to ally the sanguinary to the sentimental. It seems, at first sight, much such an ill-assorted match as if the family of Mr. Wet-eyes in one of Bunyan's matchless allegories, were wedded to that of Giant Bloody-man in the other. But it is easily explained. It has been found so in all times when passion has been made to take the place of reason as the guide of a people, and conscience has been thrust from the throne to be succeeded by sentiment. The luxurious and the cruel, the fierce and the voluptuous, the licentious and the relentless readily coalesce ; and we soon are made to per- ceive the fitness of the classic fable by which, in the old Greek mythology, Venus was seen knitting her hands with Mars, the goddess of sensuality allying herself with the god of slaughter. We say much of the literature of the present and the last generation is thus the caterer of passion — lawless, fierce, and vindictive passion. And if a retired Student may " through the loopholes of retreat" read aright the world of fashion, passion seems at times acquiring an un- wonted ascendancy in the popular amusements of the age. The lewd pantomime and dance, from which the less refined fashion of other times would have turned her blushing and indignant face, the gorgeous spectacle and the shows of wild beasts, and even the sanguinary pugilistic combat, that some- times recals the gladiatorial shows of old Rome, have become, in our day, the favorite recreations of some classes among the lovers of pleasure. These are, it should be remembered, nearly the same with the favorite entertainments of the later Greek empire, wThen, plethoric by its wealth, and enervated by its luxury, that power was about to be trodden down by the barbarian invasions of the north.

It is possible that the same dangerous ascendency of pas- sion may be fostered, where we should have been slow to

16 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

suspect it, by the ultraism of some good men among the social reformers of our time. Wilberforce was, in the judg- ment of Mackintosh, the very model of a reformer, because he united an earnestness that never flagged with a sweetness that never failed. There are good men that have nothing of this last trait. Amid the best intentions there is occasionally, in the benevolent projects even of this day, a species of Jack Cadeism, if we may be allowed the expression, enlisted in the service of reform. It seems the very opposite of the character of Wilberforce, nourishes an acridity anu violence of temper that appears to delight in repelling, and seeks to enkindle feeling by wild exaggeration and personal denunci- ation ; raves in behalf of good with the very spirit of evil, and where it cannot convince assent, would extort submis- sion. Even truth itself, when administered at a scalding heat, cannot benefit the recipient ; and the process is not safe for the hands of the administrator himself.

Far be it from us to decry earnestness when shown in the cause of truth and justice, or to forget how the passion awakened in some revolutionary crisis of a people's history, has often infused into the productions of genius an unwonted energy, and clothed them as with an immortal vigor. But it is passion yoked to the chariot of reason, and curbed by the strong hand of principle ; laboring in the traces, but not grasping the reins. But set aside argument and truth, and give to passion its unchecked course, and the effect is fatal. It may at first seem to clothe a literature with new energy, but it is the mere energy of intoxication, soon spent, and for which there speedily comes a sure and bitter reckoning. The bonds of principle are loosened, the tastes and habits of society corrupted ; and the effects are soon seen extending themselves to the very form and style of a literature as well as to the morality of its productions. The intense is substi- tuted for the natural and true. What is effective is sought for rather than what is exact. Our literature therefore has little, in such portions of it, of the high finish and serene repose of the master-pieces of classic antiquity, where passion in its highest flights is seen wearing gracefully all the re- straining rules of art ; and power toils ever as under the ses- vere eye of order.

3. A kindred evil, the natural result and accompaniment of that to which we have last adverted, and like it fatal to the best interests of literature, is the lawlessness, unhappily

IN OUR LITERATURE. 17

but too rife through large districts of our territory, and in various classes of its inhabitants. Authority in the parent, the magistrate or the pastor, seems daily to be held by a less firm tenure. Obedience seems to be regarded rather as a boon, and control resented as usurpation. The restraints of honesty in the political and commercial intercourse of society seem more feebly felt. In those intrusted by the state and by public corporations with the control of funds, the charges of embezzlement and defalcation have within the last few years multiplied rapidly in number and swelled fearfully in amount ; until, catching the contagion of the times, sovereign states are found questioning the obligations of their own contracts, and repudiating their plighted word and bond. In the matter of good faith between man and man, as to pecu- niary engagements, the wheels of the social machine groan ominously, as if they were, by some internal dislocation and collision, ready to tear asunder the fabric of society. Pri- vate revenge and the sudden ebullitions of popular violence, disregarding all delays and setting aside all forms, seem in some districts ready to supplant the quiet administration of the laws, and dispensing alike with judges and prisons. The laws of God, too, are often as lightly regarded as the laws of human society. In the growing facility of divorce, the statute of Heaven intended to guard the purity of home, and lying at the foundation of all society, is to some extent in- fringed upon : while our railroads and canals have run their lines fearlessly athwart the Sabbath ; and it seems a question whether the flaming Sinai should be allowed to stand any longer in the pathway of modern improvement.

And amid such scenes of disorder and commotion, it is — scenes illustrating so fearfully the depravity, inveterate and entire, of the human heart — it is, we say, amid such scenes that men are rising up to remodel all society. In some of these proposed reforms there is a reckless disorganization, and in most of them, we fear, scarce a due appreciation, of God's primitive but incomparable institution for the social happiness of the race, the family or household. In its sepa- rate interests, its seclusion and distinctness, are involved, we cannot but think, much of the virtue, the tranquillity and the felicity of mankind.

At the attempt we ought not perhaps to be so much sur- prised, as at the principles on which it proceeds. On these we look with irrepressible astonishment. They assume the

4

18 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

natural innocence of man, and trace all his miseries and all his crimes to bad government, to false views of society, and to ignorance respecting the true relations of man to man — - relations which after the lapse of so many centuries they have been the first to reveal. They would not merely over- look, but deny that melancholy truth, the Fall of Man from his original state, and his consequent native depravity ; a truth never to be forgotten by all that would exercise a true benevolence to their brother man, and by all that would build up a stable government. In denying this truth, they contradict all the experience, all the history, and shall we not add, all the consciousness of our race. A truth which even blinded and haughty heathenism mournfully acknow- ledged— a truth which Revelation asserts so emphatically and so often, cannot with impunity be forgotten by any that would attempt the reform of man's condition. Vague and wild in principle, and comparatively barren of results, must all reforms be that would make all their improvements from without, and feel that none is needed within. It seems to us, in the moral economy of society, much such an error as it would be in medical science to prescribe to the symp- toms and not to the disease ; and to aim at relieving the petty details and discomforts of sickness, while unable to discover and incompetent to treat the primal, radical evil, the deep-seated malady out of which these external symp- toms spring. It is not man's condition alone that needs bettering, but his heart much more. We would honor even the misguided zeal of our brethren of the race who seek in any form to lessen the amount of human misery and wrong ; but the claims of our Common Father, and the wrongs He has met at our hands, are to be acknowledged by all who would pity, with an effectual compassion, human sorrow, and remedy with an enduring relief, social disorder and wretchedness. To forget or to contradict these truths, is to reject the lessons alike of history and scripture. All reform ho based is itself but a new, though it may be unconscious, lawlessness.

We have said that proposals of social reform are not causes of wonder. Already human life is less secure in many por- tions of our republic than under some of the European mon- archies ; and frauds and embezzlements are less surely and less severely punished. In some of our legislatures, in the very halls, and under the awful eye, as it were, of the

IN OUR LITERATURE. 19

embodied Justice of the State, brawls and murders have oc- curred, in which our legislators were the combatants and the victims. And yet in such a state of things, when human life is growing daily cheaper, and the fact of assassination seems to awaken scarce a tithe of the sympathy, horror and inquiry, which it provoked in our fathers' times — it is in such a state of things, that by a strange paradox, a singular clem- ency for the life of the assassin seems to be springing up. In a nation lax to a fault in the vindication of human life when illegally taken away, the protest is made most pas- sionately against its being taken away legally ; and the abo- lition of Capital Punishment is demanded by earnest and able agitators. Would that the picture thus dark were but the sketch of Fancy ; unhappily its gloomy hues are but the stern coloring of Truth. Can the patriot, as he watches such omens, fail to see the coming judgment? Can he shut his eyes against the fact so broadly printed on all the pages of history, that anarchy makes despotism necessary ; that men who are left lawless soon fly for refuge even to a scep- tre of iron, and a law of blood ; that a Robespierre has ever prepared the way for a Bonaparte, and the arts of the reck- less demagogue, like Catiline, have smoothed the path for the violence of the able usurper, like Caesar? Of all this, should it unhappily continue or increase, the effects must with growing rapidity be seen in the injury done to our lite- rature. There is a close and strange connection between moral and literary integrity. Not only does social confusion discourage the artist and the scholar, but disjointed and anar- chical times are often marked by a want of laborious truth, and of seriousness and earnestness on the part of the popu- lar writers. A passion for frivolity, a temper that snatches at temporary triumphs by flattering the whim of the hour, and a science of agreeable, heartless trifling, spring up in such days to the bane alike of all eloquence, and of all truth. 4. Another of the perils which seem to us lying in the way of our rising literature, is a false liberalism. To a manly and Christian toleration we can never be opposed. Something of this toleration is required by our free inter- course with many lands. The wonders of steam are melting the nations most highly civilized into comparative uniformity and unity. Our colonists are the emigrants of many shores. In this audience are found blended the blood of the Celt and the Saxon, the Norman and the Roman. We are scions

20 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

alike from the stock of those who fought beneath, and those who warred successively against the eagles of the old Latin empire. Our varied origin seems giving to America, as its varied learning has given to Germany, a " many-sided mind ;" a sympathy at many points with mankind, and with widely diversified forms of society. More easily than the English, the ancestors whom many of us claim, we adopt the pecu- liarities of other nations. And all this is well. But when we suffer these influences to foster in us the notion that all the moral peculiarities, and all the forms of faith, marking the various tribes from which our country is supplied, and with which our commerce connects us, are alike valuable ; when, instead of an enlightened love of truth wherever found, we learn indifference to all truth, and call this new feeling by the name of superiority to prejudice ; when we learn to think of morals as if they were little more than a conven- tional matter, the effect of habit or tradition, or the results of climate or of the physical constitution of a people, we are learning lessons alike irrational, and perilous, and untrue.4 The spirit of Pope's Universal Prayer seems to many, in consequence of these and other influences, the essence of an enlightened Christian charity. They cannot endure the anathemas of Paul against those who deny his Lord. They would classify the Koran and the Shaster with the Scrip- tures. Some have recently discovered a truth of which those writers were themselves strangely ignorant, that the Deistical and Atheistical scholars of France, the Theorna-

4 It is well that we should cherish an humble sense of our own fallibility ; but whatever may be true of us, God and Scripture are infallible. The Crea- tor, too, so constituted his universe, that there is truth in it, and throughout it; and he has so constituted man as to thirst with an inextinguishable longinsr after truth. An utter despair of obtaining it, and a general acknow- ledgment that we are altogether and inevitably in the wrong, is alike a state of misery to man, and a dishonor done to God. It may give birth to a sort of toleration, but it is the spurious toleration of Pyrrhonism, a liberality that patronizes error, but that can be fierce against the truth for as the wise and meek Carey complained, skeptics may be the most intolerant of mankind against the truth. They resent naturally that strong conviction and that ardenl zeal, which they hive not for themselves, but which the consciousness of truth possessed, and the benevolent desire of its general diffusion, natu- rally inspire in the hi liever. They envy the votaries of the truth, their calm, immovable assurance. A Christian toleration appreciates the innate power of truth to diffuse and protect itself, and pities error, while resisting it. The liberality of skepticism denies existence to truth, and canonizes error as a sufficient substitute, and sets men afloal on a shoreless, starless ocean of doubt. Or as a young poet of England has not infelicitously described it, it prescribes to mankind the task of conjugating falsehood through all its mooda,

IN OUR LITERATURE. 21

chists who prepared the way for its revolution, the men who loaded the Crucified Nazarene and his religion with all out- rage, were in truth Christians, although they knew it not themselves. Just as much, it seems to us, as Nero was an unconscious Howard; just as much as Catiline was, in mo- dest ignorance of his own merits, " a Washington, who had anticipated his time."

It is worse than idle thus to confound all moral distinctions. To suit these new and more liberal views of Christianity, it has become of course necessary to revise the gospel, and to supersede at least the ancient forms of the Christian religion. Thus in a land, the literature and religion of which are becoming more and more known to some of our scholars, Strauss has eviscerated the New Testament of all its facts, and leaves in all its touching and miraculous narrations but the fragments of a popular myth — intended to shadow forth certain truths common in the history of human nature in all ages. The nation to which he belongs, and which claims to be the most profound in metaphysical speculation and in varied learning, of all the nations of our time, is reviving in some of its schools an undisguised Pantheism, which makes the universe God ; and thus, in effect, gives to Job and the dunghill on which he sate, the ulcers which covered him, and the potsherds with which he scraped himself, the honor of being all, parts and parcels alike of the same all-pervading Deity. And this is the wisdom, vaunted and profound, of our times ; a return, in fact, to those discoveries described of old in a venerable volume which we all wot of, in the brief and pithy sentence — " The world by wisdom knew not God." The result of its arrogant self-confidence was blind- tenses, and cases, and teaches them mutual forbearance as the result of their common infatuation.

( " Let them alone," men cry, " I lie, thou liest, they lie : What then? Thy neighbor's folly hurts not thee!" Error is Freedom ! such the insensate shout Of crowds, that like a Paean, hymn a doubt: Indifference thus the world calls Charity. ********* 1 " Battles at last shall cease."

At last, not now : we are not yet at home. The time is coming, it will soon be come. When those who dare not fight For God, or for the right, Shall fight for peace !'

From " The Waldenses, and other Poems ;"

by Aubrey de Vere. Oxford, 1842. P. 127.

22 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

ness to the great fact blazing on the whole face of creation, and deafness to the dread voice that speaks out of all history, the truth that there is a God. And hence, not so much from any singular cogency in his reasoning, as from the palata- bleness of the results which that reasoning reaches, Baruch Spinoza, the Pantheist Jew, is, after a long lapse of years of confutation and obscurity, rising again in the view of some scholars in Germany, Britain, and America, to the rank of a guide in morals and a master of religious truth.5 When

5 Of the system of Spinoza it has been said by the acute Bayle, certainly no bigoted adherent to Christianity, and no prejudiced enemy of skepticism, that "it was the most monstrous scheme imaginable;" and again, that "it has been fully overthrown, even by the weakest of its adversaries." In a similar spirit, Maclaurin, the^celebrated British mathematician, had remarked, " It does not, indeed, appear possible to invent another system equally ab- surd." (Dugald Stewart's Progress of Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 116. Am. Edition.) Stewart quotes from Colerus, the author of the earliest Life of Spi- noza, the singular anecdote, that " one of the amusements with which he was accustomed to unbend his mind, was that of entangling flies in a spider's web, or of setting spiders to fighting with each other; on which occasions (it is added), he would observe their combats with so much interest that it was not unusual for him to be seized with immoderate fits of laughter." {Ibidem, p. 351.) Stewart, we think, lays too much stress on this incident, when he finds in it a proof of Spinoza's insanity. It was, certainly, not the most amiable trait in the character of a philosopher for whom his disciples have claimed a remarkable blamelessness and even piety. We cannot ima- gine such an amusement as delighting the vacant hours, and such merriment as gladdening the heart of a Christian philosopher like Bayle or Newton. Trivial as it was, it betrayed the spirit, and furnished no unapt emblem, of the system he elaborated in his philosophy, where an acute mind found its amusement in entangling to their ruin its hapless victims in a web of sophis- try, that puzzled, caught and destroyed them; and grim Blasphemy lay waiting to devour those who fluttered in the snares of Falsehood.

Yet this system, the product of such a mind, has been recently, with loud panegyrics of its author, commended anew to the regard of mankind on either side of the Atlantic. Paulus, the celebrated Neologian divine of Ger- many, had issued, years ago, an edition of his works. Amongst ourselves and the scholars of England, such views have obtained currency mostly, it is probable, from the admiration professed for Spinoza by such men as Goethe, and others, the scholars and philosophers of Germany, for whom we have contracted too indiscriminating a reverence. Goethe's course was paradox- ical. Rejecting revelation as impossible, for the singular reason that if it came from God it must be unintelligible to men, and declaring God as pre- sented in the teachings of Christ Jesus, to be an imperfect and inadequate conception, Goethe held that the Divinity revealed in the Bible involved difficulties which must drive an inquirer to despair, unless he were "great enough to rise to the stand-point of a higher view ;" in other words, a higher point of observation than that occupied by Christ. "Such a stand-point ductlic early found in Spinoza; and he acknowledges with joy how truly the views of that great thinker answered to the wants of his youth. In him lie found, himself, and could therefore fortify himself with Spinoza to the best advantage." These are the words of Eckerman (EcLerman's Convers. icitk Goethe. Boston, p. 37), who played with Goethe the part that James Bosweli

IN OUR LITERATURE. 23

such a form of philosophy becomes prevalent, all forms of religion are alike true, or in other words, are alike false ; and room is to be made for a new religion by which man shall worship Nature or himself. So difficult is it for the gospel to suit men's waywardness. It was the objection of the old Pagans to Christianity, as we learn from Origen, that it was too universal a religion ; that every country should of right be allowed a religion of its own ; and Chris- tianity was arrogant in asking to be received as the one faith

acted to the great lexicographer and moralist, of England, recording as an humble admirer, the conversations of his oracle. Of the moral character of some of the productions of Goethe we need not pause to remark. There are principles developed in his writings that needed "fortifying." We would but notice a difficulty which the language of his admirer suggests. Goethe is made to speak of Spinoza as the thinker "in whom he found himself1 To us, the uninitiated, it seems hard to reconcile this test by which he recognized and adopted his master's system, with his passionate words else- where, recorded by the same admiring Eckerman, (p. 309.) " Man is a dark- ened being ; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes ; he knows little of the world, and less of himself. / know not myself and may God protect me from it." How the rule of the old Greek wisdom, " know thy- self," might seem folly to the modern German we can conceive : and how the view of his own heart might shock and appal one who would fain idolize his own wisdom and virtue, we can, with as little difficulty, imagine. But how one who shrunk from knowing himself, could, by knowing himself, recognize the truth of a system of Pantheism, is to us inconceivable. A religion that begins in dogmatic ignorance as to our own nature, and ends in dogmatic omniscience as to God's nature, does not commend itself to our reason, more than it does to our sympathies, or our hopes.

An affecting proof may be gathered from the same volume (pp. 405, 407), how easily the Pantheism of the schools slides into the Polytheism of the multitude. Goethe had received a cast of a piece of statuary. A model from Myron's cow with the sucking calf, was sent him by a young artist. "Here," said he, "we have a subject of the highest sort — the nourishing principle which upholds the world, and pervades all nature, is brought before our eyes by this beautiful symbol. This, and others of a like nature, I esteem the true symbols of the omnipresence of God." What the omnipresence of the Deity, in the system of Pantheism is, we need not linger to remark. Skep- tics have affected to wonder at the unaccountable perverseness of the chil- dren of Israel forging and adoring their golden calf at the foot of Sinai ; but here we have the practice palliated by a master-spirit of skepticism, amid the boasted illumination of the nineteenth century. A cow with her calf is, according to Goethe, " the true symbol ," of the all-pervading, all-sustaining Divinity, who comprises, and himself is, the universe. Did Pantheism but rule the schools, we can see how easily idolatry in its most brutish forms might be revived among the populace ; and the ox-gods and onion-gods of Egypt at which even a heathen Juvenal jeered, might, amid all our vaunted advance in knowledge, receive again the worship of our scholars. Pantheism is the philosophy of Brahminism with all its hundred thousand graven images, from Ganeshu with his elephant's head to Doorga with her necklace of hu- man skulls. The men who had outgrown the Bible, and found themselves wiser than the Redeemer, might, under the auspices of Pantheism, return to the worship of Apis, and adore the gods of the dairy and the stall, as they

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of all countries. But now the opposers of this gospel dis- cover that it has the defect of not being universal enough ; and they wish a wider faith, that will embrace the race, let them think as they please, and worship as they may. Thus would this school reconcile all religions by evaporating them. In Germany, the country that has most cultivated this hid- eous error, it has as yet, we believe, prevailed chiefly among portions of the literary classes, and not reached the peasant- ry; and the nation thus affected are less prone to reduce their opinions to action, and are both more speculative and less practical than ourselves. But let such a doctrine come amongst us and grow to be popular. Let it pass from the libraries of a few dreaming scholars into our common schools, our workshops, our farm-houses, and our homes. Like an active poison released from its confinement in the dim labo- ratory of the chemist, where it was comparatively unknown and innocuous, let it be sprinkled into every pipkin simmer- ing upon the cottage hearth on either side of the Allegha- nies ; let our newspapers drop the doctrine, as a manna of death, from their multitudinous wings, around every hamlet and habitation of the land, and what were the result 1 Where, in one short week, were our freedom, our peace, or our morals? all a buried wreck, submerged beneath a weltering ocean of misery and sin. The soul with no immortal herit- age— crime released from its fears of the avenger — and sor- row stripped of its hope of a comforter; the world without a Governor, and the race left fatherless, with the fact of the

stood chewing their cud, or suckling their calves. Then the science and taste of the nineteenth century would be required to take, as the emblem of their aspirations, the craven Hebrews of Ezekiel's vision ; " men with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the East." — (Eze. viii. 16.) The Christian missions of our time, assailing eastern heathen- ism, would be repaid by an irruption of Oriental Pantheism into our schools of philosophy; the Sufis of Persia and the Brahmins of India would re- taliate on the native lands of their Christian antagonists, and our Careys and our Martyns would be chargeable with having assailed, in the Pantheistic faith they found in the East, a higher truth than they had themselves brought from the West. A living German historian, whose works have found translation and currency in England (Schlosser), in his History of the Eighteenth Century, has intimated broadly, that the most ancient tradition makes Pantheism the original faith of the world.

Thus does the philosophy that would fain soar over the head of our Saviour, to a higher and more adequate view of the Divine Nature, find itself grovel- ling at last in the very mire of beast-worship. It is, with no impaired rev- erence for his Bible, that the Christian student turns from such spectacles of human presumption and impiety, to muse on the sovereignty and adore the wisdom of Him, who thus " taketh the wise in their own craftiness."

IN OUR LITERATURE. 25

redemption and the hope of the resurrection alike blotted out ; surely these are doctrines no false claims of liberality can palliate. And yet to such tremendous results is tending much of the miscalled liberality of our times.

This false liberalism is aiding the lawlessness of which we have before spoken, in rejecting all regard to precedent, and all reverence for antiquity.

5. But in the natural antagonism of the human mind to such excesses as these, is seen rising a fifth principle, that of Superstition ; and though opposed to the last error, yet in its own way preparing injury, from still another side, to the literary interests of our nation. It may seem to some idle to talk of superstition as a peril of the nineteenth century. But an age that devours so eagerly the prodigies of Animal Magnetism, is not quite entitled to talk superciliously of the superstition of their forefathers in having been believers in witchcraft. Much of the history of the human mind is but a history of oscillations between opposite extremes of error. There is naturally, in the soul of man, a recoil from the narrowness of the mechanical and utilitarian spirit, as well as from the lawlessness and the false liberalism of which we have already spoken as evils of the times ; while the deifica- tion of passion, another of those evils, makes welcome a religion of absolutions and indulgences. And in this recoil, that antiquity which these former influences would reject, this new principle would not only retain but idolize. It is difficult to cast off all regard for those who have preceded us. It is not easy to persuade ourselves that we are men and that our ancestors were but brutes. And there are, conse- quently, several indications in the science, literature, and art of the times, of a current setting steadily and rapidly towards reverence for the past, a regard for the imaginative and the venerable, in place of the cold idolatry of the useful ; a drift- ing back of the popular mind towards the times when the Roman church was a dominant power in European civiliza- tion. The Dark Ages once spoken of in our school-boy days, are now more respectfully entitled the Middle Ages. Their schoolmen, once derided, are now studied by some scholars, and quoted by more. Cousin, the leading meta- physician of France, has edited an unpublished work of Abe- lard, as some of the Protestant theologians of England have been republishing treatises of Aquinas. In church music the ancient chant is revived. In church architecture, the Gothic,

5

26 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

but a few years since thought uncouth and cumbrous, and almost but another name for barbarous, the architecture of the old time-worn cathedral, and the ruinous abbey, is now regarded as the very perfection of beauty — " the frozen mu- sic"6 of the art. In English poetry, the classical school of Pope has given place to the romantic school of Scott and Byron, in which the customs and the religious opinions of the old ages of chivalry are more or less brought again to recollection ; whilst most of the scholars of Britain seem in- clined to transfer the honors of the Augustan age of their literature from the reign of Queen Anne to the elder days of Queen Elizabeth. A powerful party in its Established Church are attempting to revive the doctrines of Laud, San- croft, and the school of the Nonjurors ; and to develop the Catholic element in their church polity to an extent which to others it would seem must render union with, and subjection to Rome, the final and inevitable result of the general ascendency of the party. Indeed the practical cha- racter of the English mind, and their disposition to reduce to action all opinions, would seem to forbid that the prose- lytes of the new school should retain a foothold on the steep declivity where their teachers contrive to stand, by the aid of subtle distinctions. The nation once indoctrinated must rush down to Rome. By a sort of moral gravitation inherent in the Catholic system, the lesser must be attracted to the larger body, and the more recent be absorbed in the more ancient. All attempts to stay them, on such a system, would be like arresting an avalanche, mid-way on its descent, and securing it to the sides of the Alps by strips of court-plaster. In the literature of France, the contest a few years since so eagerly waged among that mercurial people between the classical and the romantic schools, would seem now to have been decided to the advantage of the latter, thus attaching the European mind, as by a new bond, to the Mediaeval times. In some of the French historians, and the French are now among the best of the modern writers of history, a return has even been made to the picturesque style of the old Mediaeval chroniclers. Much of this may be, and proba- bly is, the fleeting fancy of the season. And all these things may seem to some minds but fantasies of the day, and fash- ions that are soon to pass ; but it should be remembered

6 Mad. de Slacl.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 27

that such fantasies have in passing shaken thrones, and sub- verted dynasties ; and that such fashions of feeling, if we call them so, have maddened whole nations, and in the days of the French Revolution armed France, almost as one man, against the rest of Europe, as in the days of the Crusades they had hurled Europe, in one embattled mass, upon Asia. Favored by these, among other influences, the Church, which is the great representative of superstition in Christen- dom— it is the Romish church we mean — is rising rapidly to some of her lost eminence and influence. She is multiplying amongst us her colleges, many of them under the charge of that order, the Jesuits, who were once the most renowned instructors of Europe. Upon the field of Foreign Missions she is jostling eagerly each successful Protestant Mission in Asia, in Oceanica, or on our own continent. De Smet, a Jesuit missionary, boasts of the hundreds of Indians bap- tized near the mouth of the Columbia River, far beyond the Rocky Mountains ; and rumors are already spread that the Papal See is to be requested to constitute Oregon into a Romish bishopric.7 But what is far more wondrous is the rejuvenescence of this Church in the old strong-holds of Protestantism in Europe. Germany, a few years since, saw scholars like the Stolbergs and the Schlegels passing over from Protestantism into the Papal communion. Scotland, over whose grey mountains seems yet brooding the stern and solemn earnestness of her old reformers — the land where Knox destroyed the monasteries, "dinging down" the rook- eries that the rooks might not return, has seen of late her Romish chapels not only, but her Romish nunneries, erected, and not left untenanted by votaries. Geneva, once the Athens of the Reformation, is itself threatened with the ca- lamity of becoming a Romish State.8 In England, the bul-

7 Since created.

8 Such is the testimony of a recent traveller, a clergyman of Scotland, the Rev. Dr. Heugh, in his " Notices of the State of Religion in Geneva and Bd- gium," Glasgow, 1844, pp. 205-210. "In the Genevese territory itself, the progress of Popery is rapid beyond all precedent. For a long period subse- quent to the Reformation, there could have been few, if any, resident Catho- lics within the territory. A great and rapid change has recently taken place. During the long occupation of Geneva by the French, that is from 1798 to 1814, both infidel and Popish influence made alarming progress. In the latter year, a small additional territory was annexed, by treaty, to Geneva, and being taken from Savoy, the population was entirely Catholic. It was at this period that the Roman Catholic religion won the support of the State, equally with the Protestant. From that time, the activity of the Popish

88 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

wark of European Protestantism, the progress of the Romish Church in numbers, wealth, boldness, and influence, within the last few years, has been most rapid. And in some por- tions of the earth, this artful and versatile power, rich in the arts of centuries of diplomacy, and so long the ally of Des- potism, and herself almost an incarnation of Oppression,

clergy and their party has been unremitting ; and by the formation of schools, by domiciliary visitation, by public processions, by preaching, by the press, they are straining every nerve to reduce long rebellious Geneva to her ab- Ijured allegiance to the See of Rome. Far from attempting to conceal their efforts, their object, and their confident expectations, they glory in avowing them ; they already exult in their anticipated success ; and with too large a proportion of such a population as they have to do with, confidence is re- garded as the prestige of victory. It is not long since the Popish party modestly requested that the chief church in Geneva, Calvin's church, the cathedral itself, should be restored to them. Except when the eclat of a com- munion attracts a throng of Unitarian formalists, the cathedral, we have seen, is nearly empty at the usual worship of the Sabbath; and the cold of winter is such an overmatch for Unitarian ardor, that during that season they surrender their cathedral, without a sigh, to the undisturbed possession of the fogs and frosts, inviting the few worshippers who are not quite be- numbed, to assemble in a small and more comfortable place adjoining. The Roman Catholics sought the restoration of a place of worship for which the Protestants appear to have so little need, accompanying the request with the sarcastic intimation, that they would keep the cathedral open all the year round, and that their numbers would keep it warm enough even during the winter s cold. The clergy, it is said, avow their conviction, that the question of occupancy is but a question of time; that there is no doubt that Geneva will soon be their own again; and remark with good humor, that the Prot- estant motto will require no change, and will soon be fulfilled in another sense than that in which its authors meant it — ' After darkness, light?* The progress of the Popish population, completes the danger. By the annexation of the new territory, and also by a perpetual immigration of poor Savoyards, in quest of the comforts of Geneva (like Hibernianlmmigration into Britain), the Roman Catholics have now upwards of 27,000 out of a population rather under 60,000; and during the last five years, the Catholic population in- creased by three thousand, while that of the Protestants diminished by two hundred, the former by immigration into the territory, the latter by emigration from it. That advancing minority will become, and probably will soon become, an actual majority, and then, suffrage being universal, Geneva may, by the vote of a majority of her citizens, lose her rank among Protestant states, renounce by open profession the Protestantism which in fact her ministers and her people have already betrayed, and reannex herself to Rome. **********

They have Unitarianism established already, and Catholicism virtually estab- lished along with it, with the near prospect of its arriving at an ascendency, possibly an exclusive ascendency." These are not the hasty and ill-advised opinions of a foreign visitant, after the lapse of a few days of hurried observa- tion. He quotes from a publication of the distinguished Merle D'Aubign6, the author of the will-known History- of the Reformation. In a work of his, if La Question dc VEglise" that eminent man, himself a resident of Geneva, says: "The faith of our fathers made Rome tremble at the name of Geneva ; now, alas ! Geneva trembles at the name of Rome. * * * Are we sure

J " Fust tcnebras, lux," the motto on the escutcheon and coin of Geneva.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 29

seems coquetting with Democracy, and courting the spirit of Social Progress. It reminds one of the prediction of the excellent Bengel, who, with all his errors in the interpreta- tion of Scripture prophecy, was a scholar eminent for learn- ing, acuteness and profound piety, that the last days would witness a league of Socinianism and Romanism — the spirit of tradition and the spirit of rationalism.9 In fact this Apos- tate Church, branded as the Babylon of New Testament prophecy, seems disguising her wrinkles, and painting her face until it is rent10 again — rent, we mean, with some un- seemly contradictions of her old principles. Like Jezebel, in her gay old age, with tired head and lacquered eyes, she is seen looking out from her palace windows, not like the relict of Ahab, to upbraid, but to soothe and to allure the Jehu of the age — the Spirit of Radicalism, and the party of the movement, as with glowing axle, it drives the chariot wheels of innovation over every obstacle. And literature must feel, and is already feeling, in various departments, the weight of this new element, the element of superstition amid the conflicting influences of our age. The contributions, for instance, of Romish authors to English literature, have both in amount and ability been trebled, probably, within the last twenty years. As to the cramping and degrading power of all superstition on the mind, the restraints it imposes on the

that Popery, triumphant, and perched upon our high towers, will not one day, and quickly, mock with bitter derision the blindness of our citizens'? The air is heavy, the atmosphere is choking, the night, perhaps the tempest, approaches. Let us enter then into our bosoms — let us reflect in that inner temple, and raising our cry to heaven, let us say, O God, save the country, for men come to destroy it. * * * * * Rome cannot change. All around us she advances. She builds altar after altar upon the banks of our lake. The progress is such amongst us, from the facility which stran- gers have in acquiring the right of citizenship, that quickly (every one ac- knowledges it) the Romish population will exceed the Protestant population of Geneva. * * * * Let Rome triumph at Rome, it is natural. Let Rome, as she assures herself, triumph at Oxford ; the conquest will be great. But let Rome triumph at Geneva, then she will raise a cry that will echo to the extremity of the universe. Genevese ! that cry will announce to the world the death of your country.'' It is the quotation and translation of Dr. Heugh that we here have used.

9 " In the last times Popery and the Socinian heresy (a denial of the proper deity of Christ) will run into one another." — Memoir of John Alb. Bengel by John C. F. Burk) translated from the German by Robert F. Walker^ London, 1837, p. 301.

" But though Socinianism and Popery at present appear virtually aloof, they will in process of time form a mighty confluence} that will burst all bounds and bring every thing to a crisis." — Ibid.s p. 322.

i° Jerem. iv. 30.

30 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

march of science, and its violence wrought against physical as well as moral truth, let the story of Galileo tell, and let the records of Spain and her Inquisition attest.

We would never forget, in speaking strongly of the errors of the Romish Church, the piety and genius that have been found in members of her communion. The memory of her Kempis, her Fenelon, her Pascal, her Arnaulds, and her Nicole, must ever remain dear to the Christian. But we would remember that to some of the best of these her chil- dren, she was but a harsh and persecuting step-mother, and that she cast out that most able and devout body of men, the Jansenists of France, with ignominious cruelty — branding their name, suppressing their books, and sparing not their dead. Nor, while we cherish with the tenderest reverence and affection, the names of some among her saints whose shoe-latchets we are not worthy to unloose, can we forget the wrongs she has inflicted upon humanity, and her blas- phemies against God — can we blanch the long and dark catalogue of her corruptions and errors, or dare to overlook the sentence of prophecy, branding her with infamy, and dooming her disastrous splendor to a fatal eclipse, and her power to a final and utter overthrow.

Here then, if we have not deceived ourselves, are perils besetting the future course of our literature, not only real but formidable. Many of the details, that were unavoidable, may have seemed to some of our hearers trivial, but in our view they are trivia], only as are the weeds which float in the edge of the Gulf-stream. Light and valueless in themselves, they yet serve to remind the weary navigator what coast he is nearing, and what the currents whose noiseless power is drifting his bark away from her appointed course. Did any one of these several causes operate separately, it would be more easy to prognosticate from the signs of the times, re- garding the destinies of American literature. The utilitarian and mechanical spirit would threaten our literary glories with the fate of Holland, whose early splendor of scholarship was so fatally beclouded by her subsequent lust of gain. The prevalence of passion would conform us to the imbecile, lux- urious, trifling and vindictive character that mars so much the glory of modern Italy. The reign of lawlessness would revive in our history the later ages of Republican Greece, its anarchy, violence and misery. The sway of a false lib- eralism would renew on American shores the crimes and

IN OUR LITERATURE. 31

sufferings of the reign of terror in France, when Anacharsis Clootz led his motley representatives of the whole human race to do homage to the French Republic, and the Arch- bishop of Paris abjured Christianity ; as the victory of super- stition would bring us into a resemblance with the former condition of Spain, when rejoicing, as her king did, in the title of the " Most Catholic" among the subject monarchs of the Romish See, the country saw absolutism filling the throne, and the Inquisition filling every other place. Utilitarianism, the first of these evil influences, would replace the Bible by the ledger, the Price Current, and the bank note list. Pas- sion, the second, would fill our hands with the viol, the song- book, and the stiletto, or perchance the bowie-knife. The third, or lawlessness, would compel every man to put on sword and pouch, and turn robber and homicide in self-de- fence, snatching what he could and standing sentry over his spoils. The reign of a liberalism, such as we have seen in Germany, would send us to the study of Polyglott grammars, and furnish us for our religious reading with a manual of Pantheistic Philosophy ; while the domination of the fifth would give us the chaplet of beads, and the Index of pro- hibited books to guide our prayers, and direct our studies ; and meanwhile the Inquisition would take under its paternal charge the erring and refractory press. But acting, as we have said, not separately, but conjointly, it is more difficult to predict the coming history of our literature. The several causes we have indicated will, when acting as antagonist forces, hardly neutralize, although they may often exaspe- rate each other ; and some of them are likely ultimately to acquire the ascendency over and extinguish the others.

The influence of a demoralized and demoralizing literature it is scarce possible to portray in too gloomy colors. There were days in the history of revolutionary France when it would have been difficult to say which had been the more destructive engine, the press as worked by Marat, or the guillotine as managed by Robespierre. If the one was reek- ing continually with fresh blood, and heaped up its hecatombs of the dead, the other ran with a more deadly venom, that corroded the hearts of the living. Our cheap press, from its powers of diffusive influence, would make a literature that should be merely frivolous, and not flagrantly vicious, one of no little harm to the mental soundness of the nation. A race of heroes, such as Plutarch portrays, could never grow

32 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

up if fed only on the spoonmeats and syllabubs of an elegant literature, and finding their entertainment in the lispings and pulings of a feeble sentimentalism. If the press be more than frivolous, if it have become licentious, its ravages on a reading community, and in a free country — and such a com- munity and country God has made ours — are incalculable. For character and private peace, for honesty and morals, for the domestic charities, and for life itself, there /emains no asylum on earth, when such a press is allowed to run a muck against the victims that its caprice, its interest or its pique may select. There have been newspapers circulating in Christian America, that would have been hailed in the cities of the plain, on the day ere the avenging fires fell from Heaven, as the utterances of no uncongenial spirit, the work of men morally acclimated to breathe that atmosphere of putridity and death. There have been seen, as editors, men whose hearts seem to have become first ossified, and then carious, in the exercise of their vocation, alike hardened in feeling and corrupted in principle, men who had no mercy, no conscience and no shame. And such men have been not only suffered but applauded, courted and bribed, while " a reading public," to use a phrase of the times, has been found to gather eagerly around the moral slaughter-houses, over which such spirits presided ; and has delighted itself in snuffing the fumes of each fresh sacrifice, feeding on the garbage, and drenching their souls in the puddles there supplied. The extent of the moral taint already spread from such foul sources of corruption, who can estimate ? Were such to become the pervading and controlling spirit of our literature, that literature, and the. society which sustains it, must col- lapse and perish, a loathsome mass of festering corruption.

For a profligate literature destroys itself and the commu- nity who patronize it. Let literature be sold into bondage to immorality, and its days are thenceforward numbered, as well by the very nature of the human mind, as by the laws of the divine government. Genius, when grinding, like a blind Samson, in the prison-house of vice, ultimately per- ishes in its task, and leaves no heir. It may not so seem at first. A delirious frenzy may appear to call forth fresh elo- quence and harmony, and every Muse, dissolute and shame- less, may wave aloft the thyrsus of a mad Bacchante. Science and art, and wit and eloquence, have thus aided in the erec- tion of shrines to immorality ; but they have languished and

IN OUR LITERATURE. 33

died amid their toils. 4» profligate people soon ceases to be intelligent, and their literature loses all living power, all ability to perpetuate itself. The literature of the dead past is soon all that remains to a vicious community. And when the proudest monument of unprincipled talent and perverted genius has been completed, and stood perfect in beauty, its last chapiter -carved and fixed, its topmost pinnacle glittering on high, its last statue polished and fitted in its appointed niche, the nation may have exulted in the splendor of their • immoral poetry, and eloquence and art. But that nation, even in the hour of its triumph, stands before its trophies, bereft of the talents that had aided in its work, desolate and lone, like him who reared from its ruins the city of palm- trees, the fated city over which hung the old but unslumber- ing curse of Heaven. His children fell as the walls of his new foundation rose ; and he stood at the last in the home he had reared, a solitary man, with none to inherit his labors — "For Hiel the Bethelite in those days built Jericho. He laid the foundations thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub." Lite- rature slays its children, when building under God's curse. Talent prostituted in the cause of vice pines amid its suc- cesses and dies ; and an imbruted community, it is generally seen, by a just retribution of Providence, soon buries in ob- livion the literature that has corrupted and barbarized it.

Whether, then, we love the cause of letters or of religion, whether our country or its honor, whether science or piety be dear to us, we need to dread a depraved literature, and we have cause with jealousy to watch every influence that may threaten to work such corruption. We have seen that perils of this kind are not wanting amongst us.

II. But where, it may be asked, is the remedy of the evils that beset us, and against these perils is it in our power to find and apply any preservative ?

Such defence, we reply then, against the possible corrup- tion of our literature is not, amongst us at least, to be found in legislation. We look with jealousy on every thing that seems to abridge the freedom of the press. And, again, legislation is with us but the emanation of the popular taste. When that taste has itself become vitiated, it will of course hardly seek to reform itself, or submit to the necessary re- strictions. Nor is there a sufficient guard in education. Our newspapers are in this land almost an integral part of our

6

84 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

education, and no process that reached the schools only and not the journals of the land would be sufficient. And our scholastic education is itself but the utterance of the moral taste and fashion of the times, and will therefore be very- slow to detect and check its own deficiencies. Nor is there hope for us in philosophy. That never yet reached the masses, and often in the classes it has reached, it has been like the Epicurean philosophy in Roman society, a fermenting prin- ciple that hastened the decay and dissolution of the common- wealth. Not in general knowledge, for that may be the knowledge of evil quite as much as of good, and the intelli- gence that stores the head and neglects the heart, has cursed many, but saved none. And if all these resources are insuf- ficient, what have we left ?

The remedy that shall guard and purge, and invigorate and fructify our literature, must have power, and to possess power it must come from without ; not from man, not from society — but from something older, higher and mightier than society or man. But to avail with us, it must not only have power, but popular power. Our government is a govern- ment of popular opinion, and no doctrine that confines itself to the schools or to certain select classes in society, a sacer- dotal or an aristocratic class, can suffice. It must also have permanent power, and be beyond the reach of change from the changing customs and fashions of the time. And where shall such a remedy be found ; rebuking a cold utilitarianism, curbing the fierceness of passion, awing the lawless, enlight- ening and shaming the falsely liberal, and emancipating the slave of superstition ? Looking at the variety and complexity of the evils to be overcome, where, it may be asked, shall we seek it? Human authority is insufficient, and mortal wisdom is dumb. Yet we believe that such a principle of recovery and conservatism exists, and one that has in perfection all the several elements needed to success. It has power ; for it comes from God and stretches into eternity — popular power ; for it was made by the maker of man's heart, and has in all ages of history and amid all varieties of culture proved its power over the masses, and commended itself to the hearts of the people — -permanent power ; for it has lasted while empires have fallen, and sects and schools of philoso- phy have risen, vaunted, flourished, faded and been forgotten. It claims all times, and its rewards and denunciations are fetched from beyond the grave and lay hold upon another

IN OUR LITERATURE, 35

world. Is it again asked : Where is this remedial agent — this branch of healing for the bitter waters, the Marah foun- tains of our literature ?

We answer : It is the cross of Christ. Let us not shrink to say it.

The Cross of Christ is the only Conservative Principle of our Literature.

Towards this point, as will be seen, all our earlier remarks have tended ; and it will furnish the theme of all that yet remain to be made. Nothing else can save our literature. This can — though alone, it is sufficient. The cross of Christ, we say it again, is the only conservative principle of our lite- rature. Nor let any be startled. Bacon spoke of Theology as the haven of all science. It was said by a highly gifted woman, Madame de Stael, who cannot be charged as a pro- fessional or prejudiced witness in the matter, that the whole history of the world resolved itself naturally into two great eras, that before Christ's coming, and that which has followed his advent. And we find John von Midler, a distinguished scholar and historian of Germany, holding this language as to his favorite science, in which he had made such eminent proficiency. Animadverting on a defect of Herder in his "Philosophy of History," "I find," said Mtiller, "every thing there but Christ, and what is the history of the world without Christ?"11

And in fact the whole history of our world has looked forward or backward to the fatal tree reared on grim Gol- gotha. The oblation there made had the promise and immu- table purpose of God with it to insure its efficacy over the whole range of man's history antecedent and subsequent, and along the whole course of the Mystery of Divine Prov- idence, as seen in the government of the world.

Let us, we entreat you, be understood. By the Cross of Christ we do not mean the imaged cross, as borne on the banners of the Inquisition, with the emblems of Judgment and Mercy floating over the scenes of the Auto da Fe, where the judgment was without justice, and the mercy was a mere lie.12 Nor the Cross as borne on the shoulder of the cru-

11 Tholuck in Princeton Bibl. Repertory, vol. iv., p. 229.

12 A rugged and knotty cross, with the sword of Justice displayed on one side and the olive branch of Mercy on the other, was the device borne on the banner of the Spanish Inquisition, and its motto was, " Arise, O Lord, and plead thine own cause." Limborchi Histor. Znq. Amstd.) 1692, (p. 370.)

36

CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

sader, whilst, pleading the name of Christ, he moved through scenes of rapine and massacre to lay his bloody hand on the Holy Sepulchre. Nor do we mean the cross, as, carved and

The inscription on that of the Inquisition at Goa was " Misericordia et Jus- titia,'' and its emblem a figure of St. Dominic, with the right hand proffering the olive branch and the left displaying the sword. (Ibidem.)

The remark in the text, on the utter falsehood of the claims made by the Inquisition to mercy, refers mainly to its usual forms in passing judgment. As the canonical law forbids ecclesiastics from shedding blood, the clerical jvdgcs of that tremendous tribunal were accustomed in handing over the heretic to the secular courts for execution, to annex the earnest recommen- dation that he should be treated by these secular judges with mercy, and not harmed in life or limb, whilst expecting and even requiring that these ex© cutioners of their will should destroy limbs and life in the fire.

Llorente, in his history of the Spanish Inquisition, animadverts severely on this hollow and heartiess mockery of Christian tenderness. It appears in a very prominent manner on the singular records which Limboreh, an earlier and Protestant historian, published as an appendix to his History, containing the sentences of the Inquisition established at Toulouse, in France, and among whose victims were found many of the Albigenses and \\ aldenses. The sentences are the identical records of the Sacred Office, at. Toulouse, from 1307 to 1323. "They deserved," is the remark of Gibbon (Decline and Fall, chap, liv.), "a more learned and critical editor." The elaborate work of Rev. S. R. Maitland, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, upon the Waldensian history, entitled, " Facts and Documents illustrative of the His- tory, Doctrines, and Rites of the ancient Albigenses and Waldenses, Lon- don, 1S32," lays great stress, and justly, on this record, which it describes, "as less known than it deserves to be." Speaking of other documents, Maitland remarks — "In fact, I have brought forward the public documents hitherto noticed very principally with a view to authenticate and illustrate this one, which I consider to be the fullest, and the most decisive. Of its genuineness, I believe there never has been, and never can be, any doubt." (P. 213-)*

* Although we do not remember that Maitland alludes to the fact, the MS. of these records of the Toulouse Inquisition seems to have passed into England. In a work ed- ited by T. Forster, London. 1830, and entitled, " Original L<(tir.< of L<>ck>. Algernon Sidnt y, and Ant hotly. Lord Shaftesbury," a manuscript (evidently that which Lim- boreh used), is described as forming part of the large library of an English merchant Bottled at Rotterdam, by the name of Benjamin Furly. In a catalogue o\ his library. ;is sold by auction in 1714, the parchment volume is "spoken of as being, "of all rarest books the most rare, ana beyond valuation" (Pref. pp. cxviii, cxix.) Having been at the sale bought in by the family, a son of Furly sold it " to Archbishop Seeker for the British Museum," p. cxix. Furly, its proprietor, Was one of the early Quakers, a learned man. and author, with Geome Fox and Stubbs, of that strange and erudite attack on the complimentary use of the plural you, in addressing a single individual, entitled u A Battledore/or Teachers and Professors to learn Singular and Plural ;" and was in habits of intimacy with Locke, when in Holland, and with Le Clerc and Limboreh. To this remarkable Manuscript and its contents. Locke, in the correspondence pub- lished in the above volume of Forster (a Catholic descendant of the Quaker Furly), Beems to allude, pp. 21, 26, 29. 30, and 32. On the publication of Limborch'8 volume, Locke presented copies of it to his English friends (p. 54), and amongst others to Kid- der. Bishop of Hath and Wells. If Seeker were the purchaser, it would seem that the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than that of the British Museum, would be the place of deposit fortius ancient Register. A Manuscript collection of similar Inquisitorial Records is frequently quoted by a living scholar of France. C. Schmidt, Theological Professor in the Protestant Seminary o\' Strasburgh, in his " Histotre des Cathares ou Albigeeie, 2 vote. Paris, 1849." It is the great Doat Collection, in several folio volumes of manuscript, preserved in the " Bioliotheque NationaleJ1 at Paris {Schmidt}vo\. L, pp. viii, and 382), and being transcripts made in 1G69 by Jean de

IN OUR LITERATURE. 37

gilded, it is seen glittering on the spires of a cathedra], or hung in jewels and gold around the maiden's neck, or em-

Amongst their victims was John Philibert, a priest of the Romish church, who had, after having been sent to apprehend a fugitive Waldensian, become, himself, a convert to the sect. The Church " having nothing more in her power to do against him adequate to his demerits" {cum ecclesia ultra non habeat quid facial pro tuis demeritis contra te), pronounced sentence of degra- dation from the priesthood; and, upon his degradation, that he should be abandoned to the judgment of the secular court, at the same time " affec- tionately beseeching such secular court, as the requirements of the canon law demand, to preserve to thee life and limbs unharmed" (eandem affecluose ro- gaides prout suadent canonical sanctiones ut tibi vitam et membra ULibata con- scrvct.) Limborch, p. 255. Two other Waldensians are, with the same gentle phraseology and earnest entreaty, committed to the secular court. — (p. 265.) In the recorded degradation of Philibert from his priestly office (p. 275), the recommendation of mercy is repeated with new emphasis. The seneschal of Toulouse, the secular judge into whose hands he passes, is "earnestly required and entreated to moderate his sentence regarding the heretic, so that it extend not to peril of death or mutilation of limb." (Ipsum tamen instanter requirimus et rogamus ut citra mortis periculum et membri mutita- tionem suam circa te sentcntiam moderetur.) A husband and wife, Walden- sians, are again committed to the mercies of the secular tribunal in the like select and chary phrases (p. 291). A similar affectionate entreaty {affectuose rogantcs) is used in delivering a female Waldensian to the chief judge of the king, the lieutenant of the seneschal of Toulouse (p. 381), and two Beguins to the same secular judge (p. 336), and yet two other Beguins, who are relin- quished into the same hands (p. 393).

It was, then, part of the gracious etiquette of the Inquisitorial tribunal, like Pilate, at the sentence of Christ, to wash her hands clean of the blood of those she gave up. More eager than Pilate, she insisted on the penalty she required others to inflict. But chary as she was of allowing the violent death which followed to appear as her act, or to stain her records, the truth breaks out in several places on the same records; as where one Petrus Lucensis, who abjured his errors, speaks of some earlier victims of the Inquisition as having been condemned by the inquisitors and prelates of the Roman church, and " left to the secular arm and burnt" {condemnati per inquisitor es et pre- latos ecclesiaz Romano?) et relicti seculari brachio et combusti), p. 360. The formula of abandonment to the secular arm was followed by the stake as its invariable sequent — " condemnati et per sccularcm curiam combusti" pp. 310, 313, 319, 320, 323, &c.

And the inquisitors not only expected -this sequent, but, as it appears from Llorente's history of the kindred Inquisition in Spain, they required and enforced it. It is from the second edition of his original work, as published at Paris, in 1818, in 4 vols. 8vo., and not from the American re-print of his abridged work, that we quote. The sentence of the Inquisition, he remarks, closes with a prayer to the judges to treat the sufferer with humanity (I. 122) ; but there were> he observes, several instances in which the secular magis- trate, choosing to take the inquisitors at their word, and to suppose their

Doat, Conseiller du roi, from the registers of the Inquisition at Alby, Carcasonne, Toulouse, Narbonne, &c, in their proceedings against the Albigenses. Schmidt hoped that the triumph of freedom In Italy would soon give access for similar researches into the mediseval history of the Inquisition in that country. A re-issue of the Toulouse MS. in England, with such annotations as Gibbon wished, and a free collation of the Doat materials in France, were greatly to be desired. Schmidt, whose own work seems the result of great research, seems disposed severely to criticise the cotemporary treatise of the German scholar Halm, on the kindred theme of the Heretics of the Middle Agos.j

d» CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

broidered on the slipper of a pontiff.13 The cross, as we understand it, has no sympathy with a religion of shows and spectacles, of mummeries and pageants, of incense and music, and long-drawn aisles, and painted windows, and gorgeous pictures, and precious statuary. .

language sincere, did not send the culprit to punishment, and the judge was, in consequence, arraigned himself, as one suspected of heresy (I. 125). " The prayer, then," it is his language that we use, "was but a vain formality, dic- tated by hypocrisy." (Ibid.) So again, in animadverting on the case of Marine de Guevara (II. 253, 254), he exclaims, "Who would not be moved with indignation to see this act of the tribunal closing with a recommenda- tion, on the part of the inquisitors, to the royal judge in ordinary, that he should use with the accused, gentleness and mercy, whilst they were not ignorant as to what was to ensue 7 * * * If, on the condemned being placed in the hands of the corregidor, this officer should allow himself to sentence the victim to perpetual imprisonment in some fortress, instead of sentencing to capital punishment, they would have carried their complaints to the king, and perhaps even have launched, their censures against him, and have brought him to judgment as one guilty of having opposed himself to the measures of the holy office — of having violated his oath to lend to them aid and assistance, and of being a favorer of heretics. What, then, means this hypocritical affectation? * * It is for their purposes to induce the belief that they have no share in the death of the accused, who is their neighbor, and that thus they have not incurred the penalties of ecclesiastical irregu- larity, pronounced against those priests who have had a share in the death of any person." Llorente, it will be remembered, was a Romanist; had, himself, been for years an officer of the Inquisition ; and wrote with its re- cords before him.

Of such infamous jugglery with truth and the forms of Christian kindness it is not, then, harsh to say, that "its mercy was a mere lie."

Several of the victims of the French Inquisition are charged, amongst other offences, with confessing their sins to Waldensian or other pastors, "who, as they knew, were not priests ordained by any bishop of the Romish church."— Limborch, pp. 264, 226, 230, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 290, &c. The tenet of apostolic succession, as coming through Rome, and necessary to a valid ministry, was then one element in the storm of wrath that burst upon these sufferers. One of them, Raymond Dominic, who seems to have been arraigned in 1322, is charged, amongst other errors, with holding that " the baptism of water, given by the Church to boys, was of no worth, because the boys consented not, but rather wept." We give the mis- spelt Latin of the Inquisitorial scribe : " Item quod baptismus aquefacius per ecclesiam pueris nichil valebat, quia pueri non consenciebant ymo Jtcbant" — p. 348. He and his wife had been fugitives for eleven years. When asked why, at his first citation, he had not appeared and confessed, but fled, he replied, it was from pity for his seven children of either sex, for whom he

13 " The Pope is present. He is seated on a throne or chair of state; the cardinals, in succession, approach and kiss his hand, retire one step, and make, three bows or nods: one to him in front, and one on the right hand, and another on the left ; which, I am told, are intended for him (as the per- sonification of the Father), and for the Son, and for the Holy Ghost, on either side of him ; and all the cardinals having gone through these motions, and the interior priests having kissed his toe — that is, the cross embroidered on his shoe— high muss begins."

Rome in the Nineteenth Century,

Harper's Edition, vol. ii., pages 246, %A7,

IN OUR LITERATURE. 39

r But by this title, we mean the cross, naked, rugged, and desolate, not pictured, save on the eye of faith, and upon the pages of scripture — not graven but by the ringer of the Spirit on the regenerate heart ; the cross as Paul preached

feared that they would die of hunger if he and his wife had been then im- prisoned, and that he proposed to come in and confess when his children should have become able»to help themselves. — p. 349. So also his wife, being asked the reason of their flight, replied, it was chiefly from love and pity for their little boys — "propter amor em et compassionem puerorum suorum par- vulorum" — who would perish of hunger. — p. 250. Such incidents reveal some of the scenes of domestic anguish this ruthless tribunal created.

The same records of the Tribunal at Toulouse may throw some light on a question lately agitated — whether the oath of the Romish bishop, taken at his consecration, is to be translated as requiring of him the persecution of heretics. In the proceedings of the French Inquisition we find the Latin word in question occurring in the oaths taken of the secular magistrates to aid the Inquisition in the detection and suppression of heresy ; in the pen- ances assigned those who recanted their heresy and were to prove their sin- cerity by informing against and delivering up others; in the forms of abjura- tion imposed upon penitents ; and in the complaints of the sufferers against the Romish church for its treatment of them ; and again in the stafement by her own officers, of that church's conduct towards errorists. On page 1, the secular magistrates of Toulouse, under the French King, are sworn to defend the faith of the holy Roman Church, and to "pursue (or persecute) and take, and cause to be taken, accuse and denounce to the church and inquisitors, heretics, their disciples, favorers, and harborers — "hereticos credentes, J auto- res et receptalores eorumdem persequemur" &c. This was sworn on the Holy Gospels of God, and a similar oath was taken of the " consules" of Tou- louse, p. 1. Similar oaths may be found imposed on the secular tribunals, in pp. 292, 334, &c. So those admitted to penance, on recantation, are charged, " Prceterea persequamini fiereticos quibuscunque nominibus censean- tur et credentes et fautores et receptatores et defensor es eorum" to persecute heretics, by whatever names they be designated, and their disciples, favorers, harborers and defenders, p. 341 ; and a similar penance, on p. 347, includes also " fugitives for heresy.3' A William Garrick, Professor of Laws, admit- ted to penance, but banished from the kingdom of France, in the year 1321, "swears and promises to the best of his power, to persecute heretics of every condemned sect, and those whom he knows or believes to be fugitives for heresy, and to cause them, to the best of his power, to be apprehended and delivered up to the inquisitors of heretical pravity.5' — p. 283. Certain offend- ers, condemned to imprisonment, "abjure heresy and swear to keep, hold and defend the orthodox faith — to persecute heretics and their favorers, and to disclose and reveal them wherever known to be." — p. 202. A relapsed Waldensian is charged with falsifying his oath, "par ere mandatis ecclesiae et inquisitorum et persequi Valdenses et alios hereticos" to obey the mandates of the church and its inquisitors, and persecute Waldensians and other here- tics, and is charged with thus returning, tanquam canis ad vomitum. — p. 254. So the church, describing her own conduct, uses the same word. Philibert, already named, one of their own priests, whom the purer faith of the Wal- densians had won over, is charged with holding these Waldensians to be good men and a good sect, and of good faith in which men might be saved, " although he knew that the Roman Church and the inquisitors of heretics per- secuted and condemned them." — quamvis sciret quod ecclesia Romana et

INQUISITORES HERETICORUM PERSEQUERENTUR IPSOS ET CONDEMrNARENT.

Here is the church describing herself.— p. 254, John Brayssan, another of

40 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

it, ami the first Christians receircd it. This doctrine, wo suppose to bare two aspects. The first, Christ crucified, as

becoming our free and full justification by a blood that pur- ges from all sin, and avails tor the world.* It was the reas-

theae Waldensians, is charged with belonging to that sect of Waldensians, or Poor Men of Lyons, w which the sacred Romish church, mother and mistress of all (churches), long since has condemned as heretical, and the same, as being truly such, j tmsacrosancta Romana tcclesia

nutter omni:. Etccftim tanquam kereticam condtmpn

TAHQl am vna: r.vii'M PSSSSQUITUS BT CONDEMPNAT. p. 20#. So, tOO, the

complaints of tin' Buflerers use the same word. The Waldensians are repre- sented as asserting rashly [Umtrwrvt oseertm/), "that the sacred Roman

church sins and deals with them unlaw fully and unjustly, because it

p, "JO 7. Another, John Chauoat, of the same hapless sect, is charged, amongst his other misdemeanors, with saying and asserting {tUds t ass( ris)r "that those who persecute these same ( w . s ?), to wit, the prelates of the Roman church and the inquisitors of heretical pravity, act unjustly, and in unright- eously apprehending them and detaining them, and In giving up to the secu- lar arm those who will nor desert that sect."- p, 263, We have seen, and the martyrs Of the valleys felt, what the inquisitors eall their "eanonieal sanetions," which, amongst other things, required the use of a heartless form oi mercy, while giving up the victim to merciless tortures and death. We need not be surprised to find, though the Inquisitors seem to regard it as unaccountable temerity, that these ** — A the aforesaid sect,

wandering from the right path, neither receives nor regards as ot any worth, hut spurns, rejects, and contemns*1 {sptrnu\ ••, pp. 263

and 207. Familiar as were those blessed confessors with the Bible, they probably recollected, in connexion^ with at least this portion ot the venerable " eanonieal sanetions," the language of the Psalmist, an earlier sufferer : " His words were softer than oil. yet were they drawn swords." 0>s- Iv. 21.)

If the Episcopal oath is, then, to be construed by the analogy o( other ancient usage oi the word on the part oi' the same ehnreh, we can be at no loss as to its signification. The word, "persecution" is become, through the tant influence, an odious term. Many excellent Catholics, as individuals, repudiate the thing itself, Hut, as Bishop Hopkins, oi Ver- mont, has shown in his 9th lecture on the Reformation, the Roman church has authoritatively established persecution as her duty. Individuals have no right to create or decide the doctrine o( the church. She claims infallibility and immutability ; and, although from the force oi public opinion and the Stances, she may allow certain doctrines and claims to re- main in abeyance, they wait but the fitting season to revive and reclaim their old influence. And what the supreme Pontiff; himself, judges of such individual and modem modifications of the old doctrines we may augur from that Encyclical letter issued by the reigning Pontiff of our own tim< s

\ \ I . in •

3). Writing the Virgin Mary,

whose aid he in\ >) by her heavenly

ation, into salutary counsels (p. 356), he reminds the bishops and dig- nitari in the language of his canonized p in the

fid that

<

•

;. Rejecting, therefore,

Indignantly, the proposed restoration and regeneration suggested by some,

IN OUR LITERATURE. 41

sertion of this doctrine which wrought the glorious Refor- mation. The second, Christ crucified, as the principle of our sanctijication, under the influences of the renewing Spirit, that conforms the believer to his Lord, and crucifies

as necessary to the well-being of the church (p. 36S), he denounces as " an absurd and erroneous sentiment, or rather the ravings of delirium, the opinion, that, for everyone whatever, is to be claimed and defended, the, liberty of conscience." — p. 376 ; " to which most pestilent error {peslilcntissimo errori)," he goes on to remark, "the way has been prepared by that full and unbounded liberty of opinion which prevails widely, to the injury of the church and the commonwealth ; some with extreme impudence pronouncing that from it are to flow advantages to religion." — p. 376. Reading history by lights of his own, he proceeds to declare that "experience has shown, from the earliest antiquity, tliat States, the most eminent in wealth, power, and glory, have fallen by this one evil, the ungoverned freedom of opinion, license of discourse, and the love of innovation ." — p. 376. "To the same class," he proceeds, "is to be referred that worst and never enough to be execrated, and detestable (deterrima ac nunqua?n satis exsccranda et detestabilis,) liberty of the press" {libertas artis libraries). — p. 378. We must close our quotations, but such language proves distinctly that the principles of toleration and freedom that, in our country, have made persecution for religion unpopular, are not yet the principles of the Romish See. Individuals may disavow and repudiate the use of force to compel religious uniformity; but, with such declarations before us, from the head of the Romish Church, the very " Seat of Verity and Unity," as the Romanists term it, it requires great heedlessness, or singular credulity, to suppose that Rome has changed her principles, how- ever she may vary her policy or modify her tactics to the emergencies of the time and the scene.

That Rome has not repented of the blood she shed in former centuries, for the suppression of heresy, the same document sufficiently attests, where, in the face of all history, and in spite of admissions as to their moral excellence, made by such high Catholic authority as Bossuet, the reigning Pontiff goes on to speak of the" Waldensians, and other sons of Belial of the same class" (aliorumque hujusmodi fliorum Belial), as being the "filth and shame of the human race" (qui humani generis sordes ac dedecora mere), and "therefore deservedly so often smitten by the anathema of the Seat of the Apostles. — p. 388. It is not for any man to use such language of such confessors of Christ, and especially for one holding the seat once stained by Alexander VI., to talk so unreservedly of " the filth of the human race."

He might well remember that the connexion of his own Pontifical line with the Borgias of the one sex, and the Marozias of the other, is a fact much later and surer, as to the evidence establishing it, and the influence emanating from it — both much nearer and much clearer, than the Apocry- phal claim that line has set up of apostolic descent and authority. To an American Christian it affords but little evidence of the possession of an " apostolical seat," or the inheritance of an apostolical spirit, to have launched such butchery of old, and to scatter such Billingsgate now, upon

" O, Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains, cold ; E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old.

* * * *

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient, fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks."

* * * *

7 Milton.

42 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

his evil nature within him. Thus it was that Christ was not only crucified himself, but required a]so every disciple to come after him, taking up also his own cross, and Paul speaks of himself as crucified unto the world. This last aspect of the doctrine of the cross, we have thought, has been rather overlooked by some of the Reformers, in their zeal against self-righteousness, and against a false and asce- tic piety. Such was Cecil's opinion,14 whom none can sus- pect of any want of reverent feeling for the Reformers. But

14 " Man is a creature of extremes, * * * * Popish heresy of hu- man merit in Justification, drove Luther on the other side into most unwar- rantable and unscriptural statements of that doctrine." — CeciVs Works, N. Y. 1825. Vol. iii., p. 419.

" The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional habit. The Church of Rome made much of this habit. The contest accompanying and following the Reformation, with something of an indis- criminate enmity against some of the good of that Church, as well as the evil, combined to repress this spirit in the Protestant writings ; whereas the mind of Christ seems, in fact, to be the grand end of Christianity in its operation upon man." — Ibid., p. 308.

" A want of the spirit of the cross in its professors increases the offence of the cross — that humility, patience and love to souls, which animated Christ when he offered himself on the cross for the sins of the world." — Ibid.. p. 381.

The works of an Irish clergyman, the Rev. Henry Woodward, a writer of genius and piety, an original thinker, and a determined Protestant, contain some remarks to the same effect. -As his writings are little known in the American Churches, we shall append a lengthened extract. It is made from his " Essays and Sermons. Fourth edition London, 1844." (Vol. i., pp. 5-14.)

"Justification by faith, or that free forgiveness which is offered, without our own deservings, through the righteousness of Christ, has, we all know, been styled by a great authority the 'articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesice.' But, profoundly important and absolutely essential as this great doctrine is, still it may be questioned whether its rank, comparatively with other doc- trines, is not higher in the scale of Protestantism than in that of the Scrip- ture revelation generally ; whether in other words, it does not occupy a, more prominent part in the system of Christianity, as opposed to Popery, than in the system of Christianity, considered in itself. On the denial, or at least on the practical rejection of that vital doctrine, the fabric of Romanism was built ; and, consequently, its vindication and re-establishment were felt by the reformers as no less than ' life from the dead.' Like the man who rejoices over his one lost sheep when found, more than over the ninety-and- nine which went not astray, they naturally prized this article of the faith once delivered to the saints, as if Christianity had centred in that alone. But, assuredly, if the first Protestants had been called to fight their battles With a church which oppugned, not only justification by faith, but the unity Of the Godhead — or the divinity of Christ — or the personality and inspiration of the Holy Spirit — or a future state of rewards and punishments — they would not, in that case, have suffered their zeal to run so exclusively in the channel ofwh.it is termed, emphatically, evangelical doctrine.

" However this may be, certain it is, that in the controversial attitude into Which the opposing force of Popery has thrown us, we take our stand, as

IN OUR LITERATURE. 43

if we look to the New Testament, it is very evident that both were blended in the doctrine as the early Christians received it The cross was not only their confidence, but the model of their conformity. It is, we have supposed, a defect here — a neglect of aiming at this high standard of devotedness, on the part of many of us Protestants, that has

Protestants, in an especial manner, upon the impregnable ground of justifi- cation by faith alone. To maintain this position, we know that no weapon can avail, but ' the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God ;' and, in rightly dividing the word of truth, we direct against the advocates of human intercessors and human merits that portion of the sacred canon which most clearly states the terms of our acceptance with God. Hence has resulted the pre-eminence which many of our writers have given to the epistles, above even the gospels themselves : a station which, I am convinced, they could not have held, but for the relative position in which the Protestant churches are placed. And hence, also, has resulted the comparative rank with which not only the writings, but the character of St. Paul, have been generally invested. Amongst mere human beings, I fully grant, that none can, deservedly, be placed higher. But it may, perhaps, be questioned, whether the example of this great apostle has not obtained an influence which no mere man should exercise over a large proportion of the Protestant mind. It is my firm conviction, that many of our religious professors shape their habits of feeling and of living after the pattern, rather of St. Panl, than of the blessed Jesus.

" I do not. mean that this is done by any, consciously, and of set purpose : nor do I charge the most restless spirit which stirs in the religious bustle of the day, with a premeditated design to set the disciple above his Master, or to honor the creature more than the Creator. But, that numbers form their tastes, and take the standard of their duties, from the life of St. Paul, rather than from the life of Christ, I judge, from effects and fruits, to be accounted for on no other principle. The present state of the religious world is, in fact, precisely what might be expected, if there were a general agree- ment to erect the former, instead of the latter, into the grand exemplar. The imitators of Christ, and the imitators of St. Paul, be it observed, must, in one respect, bear a mutual resemblance ; they must both fail in equalling the model at which they aim. In the one instance, it would be blasphemy to deny it. In the other, the event is no less certain ; because those that look not unto Jesus must want the very principle which made the apostle of the Gentiles what he was. We can, then, but compare failure with failure. Nevertheless, I would put it to any candid and intelligent observer, whether a large proportion of professors, at this moment, are not more like carica- tures of St. Paul, than the faintest, or even the most distorted reflections of the mind that was in Christ Jesus; whether the spirit that animates the religious body does not resemble the ardor, the energy, and the impetuosity of the one, rather than the calmness, the composure, and the serenity of the other.

" God forbid that I should mean to throw disparagement upon the charac- ter of the great apostle here alluded to. No human being, I believe, ever trod more closely in the steps of his Divine Master. In personal holiness he rose, perhaps, as high as is possible to man ; and in the wide extent of the blessings which he diffused he has confessedly no rival. Still, St. Paul was but a man — but one individual of the species. And as such, his charac- ter, when held up for general imitation, cannot fail to lead his followers— the far greater part at least — in a wrong direction.

44 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

given to the Oxford Tractarian movement, and to the present efforts of Romanism, most of their hold upon the public mind. Apparent estrangement from the world, and a self- denial that rises superior to the ordinary idols of society, will commend to the respect of mankind even much error in those thus estranged and self-denying. It throws a glister-

" This must, infallibly, be the effect of every human model, if too closely aimed at. In common life, we often see how awkwardly the most graceful peculiarities of one man sit upon another ; how that which appears amiable and natural in the original, degenerates into mere affectation in the copy. And so it is in the Church of Christ. Though all the members of one body, * yet all have not the same office :' each has his peculiar temperament, his distinctive character, his appropriate sphere. Some are called to lead, and others to follow : some are fitted for privacy and retirement, others for public life and active duty. In short, the shape and coloring of the Christian are as endlessly diversified, as are the cast and mould of our natural features. Hence it follows, that for all to imitate the same human pattern, is to run counter to the course of Providence, and to resist the operations of that Spirit who divideth to every man, severally, as he will.

"And thus it is, that if I am right in the conjecture which I have hazarded, the reason is at once explained, why, in proportion to the quantum of religious agency now at work, so little solid and genuine fruit appears. The fault lies in this, that all are striving to do the same work ; and thus, instead of having an organized body, we have a multiplication of one mem- ber. So that if St. Paul were to descend amongst us, and repeat his well- known question, 'Are all apostles?' multitudes, if sincere, must rise up and say, ' We are — we are, at least, endeavoring to become so.' Nay, are there not some who might answer him in his own words, ' We suppose that we are not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles V

"In spite of all our errors, there is, nevertheless, I trust in God, much of the invaluable material of solid and practical religion in this country. And if there be, partly, at least, from the cause assigned, an over-earnestness and activity in our system, and if the streams that flow are disproportioned to the fountain that should feed them, the remedy is near at hand. Let us leave all human cisterns, and draw at once from the fulness of Christ. Let us look unto Jesus, and set the Lord always before us.

" And here I would introduce an observation, in my mind, of no small importance. There is, I conceive, an independent proof of our Saviour's divine nature, to be derived from the universal applicability of his example. No other pattern is suitable to all ; but his, like a master-key, fits every lock. Human examples are only partial exhibitions of Divine grace. They are moulded by their own peculiar circumstances, and fitted for the special de- partment they have to fill. They are, in a word, like streams which take their direction, and pursue their several windings, in a course tracked out for them, and for them alone. And hence, it is impossible for one man impli- citly to follow in the footsteps of another, without some unnecessary and unnatural deviations from that line which the order of Providence has as- signed him. But Christ is, as it were, an exhaustless fountain, not flowing in one channel, but overflowing in all directions. He is not, if I may so speak, an individual character : but all characters of excellence unite in him. In imitating Christ, no man is led out of his natural sphere, or thrown into a forced and affected attitude. Every movement after him is performed with freedom, and his likeness sits easily and becomingly upon all that bear it. Tiie liigh and low — the rich and poor— the gifted and the ungifted — the con-

IN OUR LITERATURE, 45

ing veil of sanctity even over the gross corruptions of Ro- manism ; and her impostures and enormities are often over- looked by those who see standing in her shrines her martyrs of charity, her Vincent de Pauls, and her Francis Xaviers. A pining recluse, scourging himself in sober sadness, as the expression of his deep sense of sin, may be a pitiable spec- tacle of delusion ; but he is not in the eyes of the world generally, as odious a sight as that presented by a self-satis- fied, self-indulgent professor of a purer creed, living in all ease and pleasure, conformed to the world in all its follies,

templative and the active — all classes and all dispositions, find, in the exam- ple of Jesus, the teaching which they want ; and all are led, by looking unto him, precisely in the path most suitable for them to walk in. We see at once, in that comprehensive model, the bright contrast to whatever we should shun, and the most attractive exhibition of all that we should aim at, in our Christian course. Whatever our besetting sins may be, whether of excess or of defect, they stand equally condemned by a comparison with him. Thus, the restless and over-active spirit is calmed by the contempla- tion of his nights of solitary prayer ; and the indolent are stimulated to exer- tion by his ceaseless labors of love. The high and lofty are brought low, when they behold their Lord and Master washing his disciples' feet ; and the poor in this world's goods are taught contentment by him who ' had not where to lay his head.5 This subject could, indeed, be endlessly pursued. Enough has, I trust, been said to prove the point assumed, namely, that a character which can thus adapt itself, in the way of example, to every pos- sible variety of man; which can pour forth a healing virtue, equally applica- ble to the most opposite extremes ; and which can thus spread its influence over the wide extent of the whole human race ; that such a character cannot be bounded within the narrow circle of our nature, but must partake of the infinitude of God.

" Let us, then, I repeat it, prepare for the impending crisis in that spirit which alone can enable us to meet it. Let us array ourselves in the whole armor of God. Let us put on the Lord Jesus Christ. All weapons of our own forging must fail. They have been long tried ; and they have been tried in vain. If we go forth against our enemies, in dependence on an arm of flesh, we miscalculate the force to which we are opposed. For in that case human adversaries are but instruments : the real controversy is with God. Not because he has a favor to our enemies, but because he has a favor unto us, and because he is a jealous God towards those who professedly maintain his cause. Persuaded I am, that until we throw ourselves unreservedly upon him — till we fall back on God, and take up our position on the Rock of ages, discomfiture and defeat will baffle and confound us in every effort.

" But some may say, ' We grant these theories to be true, but what can individuals do ? Where is the controlling and disposing mind, to combine their movements and direct them to a common point?' To this, I answer, that there is an all-disposing Mind on high. Let us, then, do our own part. Let us arm ourselves with the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Let our light shine forth in the triumphs of his patience, the splendor of his innocence, and the victorious energy of his love. Let us stand thus equipped as Chris- tian soldiers, and we shall not want a leader. God will teach our hands to war, and our fingers to fight. Our cause will be the cause of Heaven ; and we shall go forth conquering and to conquer."

46 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

and vaunting of a doctrinal orthodoxy that produces no emi- nence in holiness. Christians must live more upon the cross, seeing in it not only the principle of their faith, but also the pattern of their obedience — the cross not only as cancelling their sin, but also as crucifying their lusts. Such is the two- fold aspect of the great truth, the basis of all scriptural doc- trine and practice, the centre of all its mysteries and all its morality — the cross of Christ.

Let us now, for a moment, turn to the history of that cross, in order that we may perceive more clearly its strange elements of power. Place yourselves, then, in imagination, amid the multitude, that, swayed by curiosity, or inflamed by hate, are rushing from the hall of judgment, and sweeping along their hurried and tumultuous way to the hill of cruci- fixion. Reeling under insults, a meek sufferer, whose head is bound with a crown of thorns, and his face swollen with blows and wet with the spewings of the mob, is threading, slowly and painfully, his way through that exasperated crowd, who are all athirst and ravening for his blood. He has reached the spot selected for his death. There he stands faint, but mute and uncomplaining, whilst the cruel prepa- rations are made that shall consummate the sacrifice. Amid shouts, and taunts, and fiercest blasphemy, he is nailed and lifted up. As the cross becomes erect, and he hangs at last before that excited multitude, methinks I see exultation, like a rising breeze, ruffle that sea of upturned faces. And there he is raised on high, how utterly friendless and abject to the eye of man ; for even the thieves upbraid him, that hang and writhe beside him.

But were your eyes unsealed, as the prophet opened those of his servant at Dothan, you would discern, beside and above that howling rabble, a more august gathering. Le- gions, whose feeblest warrior would have turned to paleness the cheek of Caesar at the head of all his hosts, are gazing there ; yet withheld by some dread sentence, they do not in- terpose. Angels that excel in might and in glory, watch that desolate sufferer with adoring interest. That much outraged victim, seemingly rejected of man and abandoned of God, is my Maker. In that lowly form is veiled the incarnate Godhead. The angels that smote Sennacherib's host, and slew the first-born of Egypt, dispeopling a camp and decima- ting a nation in a night, have bowed often their heads to this being, as their Lord and their Creator. Excited as are

IN OUR LITERATURE. 47

his enemies, they could frame no consistent accusation against him to justify their enmity. There, under reproach, anguish and cursing, dies the only one of Adam's race that knew no sin. For no guilt of his own is he suffering, but to cancel that of his murderer, man. Thus viewed, what elements of grandeur and tenderness, of the loftiest splendor and the lowliest condescension, blend in that dread sacrifice ! Do men look with interest on greatness in misery ! It is here : the King of Glory dying as a malefactor. Are they touched with sympathy for distress ? How deep was the anguish even of his patient spirit, when he cried out, invoking a Father who had hidden his face ! Should wisdom attract, here was the great Teacher whom all Judea had admired, speaking as never man spake — the heavenly Teacher for whom Socrates had taught himself and his scholars to hope. He is here giving his lessons on the cross. The good man dying ignominiously, of whom Plato had glimpses, is here, the exemplar of perfect innocence, enduring the treatment due to consummate wickedness. That sacrifice stirs all worlds. Hell misses its expected prey, and the spell of oe- spair over the accursed earth is broken, while Heaven stoops to behold its King incarnate and dying, that He may recon- quer to his allegiance a revolted province of his empire ; in the same act indulging his mercy, and satisfying his justice, whilst his expiring breath together magnifies his law and enunciates his gospel. That sacrifice may well have power with man, for it has power with God. To the human mind, it presents in the closest union and in their highest energy, all the elements of sympathy, awe and tenderness. It blends a Divine majesty that might well overawe the haughtiest, with a winning gentleness that would reassure the most desponding. It may well be, at the same time, a theme for the mind of an angel to study, without grasping all its vast- ness ; and a motive for the mind of the Sabbath-school child to feel, without being repelled by its loftiness. It has pow- er, practical power — popular power — permanent power. It is God's remedy for sin ; and with the accompanying influ- ences of his Spirit, it can avail as the remedy for all forms of man's sin, as that sin is infused into, and as it is found envenoming either the literature of the world, or any other product of the human mind. Let us but transcribe that truth into the heart, and illustrate it in the life, or rather let the renewing grace of God's Spirit so transfer it into the

48 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

soul of man, let me be enabled to believe in this Divine Suf ferer, as my Saviour — to feel that with him I am dying to the world, and that with him, too, I shall rise again from the grave, see him on the judgment throne, and follow him into the gates of Paradise ; and with these truths firmly grasped by the mind, what has the world left wherewith to allure, wherewith to appal me ? I have thrown myself loose from the trammels of earth. Its cords have perished at the touch of an ethereal fire. Disengaged from its entanglements, its bonds sundered, and its snares parted, I soar aloft, to sit, in the language of Paul, in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. I rise yet higher, and in the awful language of Peter, I, the heir of corruption, and once the bondsman of death, am made " a partaker of the divine nature." Here is power.15

Let that power of the cross but go forth in its appropriate channels, in a holy, devoted ministry — in the more elevated piety of the church, and in a Christian education of the young given by the church, if the State may not give it : — let that power, we say, but go forth in these channels, and with God's blessing upon it, the world is saved. Carry that truth into all the scenes of human activity, or suffering — into the market-place, and the halls of legislation ; into the schools of philosophy, and the student's cell, and the editor's desk, the cabins of poverty and the dungeons of crime ; let it fence the cradle and watch the death-bed ; and it will be found equal to every task, competent to every emergency, and

15 It has been promised at times that the removal from the Christian system of its old, orthodox doctrines, as to the Atonement and Deity of our Saviour, would, and it alone could, conciliate the favor of men of taste and refinement. The language of Lessing, himself unhappily a sceptic, but a critic of the highest name in German literature for taste and judgment, would not sustain such promises. It has been quoted by Pye Smith, in his Scripture Testimony to the Messiah (2d ed. Lond. 1829, vol. iii., p. 236), " I agree with you, that our old religious system is false ; but I cannot say, as you do, that it is a botch-work of half-philosophy and smatterings of knowledge. I know nothing in the world that more drew out and exercised a fine intellect. A botch-icork of smatterings and half-philosophy is that system of religion which people now want to set up in the place of the old one; and with far more invasion upon reason and philosophy than the old one ever pretended to. If Christ is not the true God, the Mohammedan r Ligion is indisputably far better than the Christian, and Mohammed himself was incomparably a greater and more honorable man than Jesus Christ; for he was more truth-telling, more circumspect in what he said, and more zeal- ous lor the honor of the one and only God, than Christ was, who, it" he did not exncily give himself out for God, yet at least said a hundred two-meaning things to lead simple people to think so; while Mohammed could never be charged with a single instance of double-dealing in this way."

IN OUR LITERATURE. 49

mighty to exorcise every evil spirit. The earthly miracles of our Lord were in some sense but anticipations and earnests of the moral miracles which that doctrine of the cross has wrought, is now working and will continue to work. Yet, — yet, does this Saviour open the blinded eyes of passion, and breathe strength wherewith to obey him into the palsied will of the sinner. .

1. And first let us test the energy of the cross, in its ap- plication to the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the age. It meets all the just wants of that spirit. Utilitarians demand the practical, and this is a doctrine eminently practical. Let us but observe this trait in Christ's own history. He might have theorized brilliantly and perhaps safely to him- self. He might have been the Plato or the Homer of his age, a Plato far more profound, a Homer far more sublime than the old Grecians. But he threw aside all such fame. He furnished the substance and subject of the most glorious literature the world has seen, but he left it for others to write that literature. His business was doing good. He was a practical teacher, and a practical philanthropist. And as to the actual working, and the every-day results of the doctrine since the Saviour's times, it is seen how Commerce confesses that her way has been often prepared and protected by the missionaries of this cross ; and how the statesman bears witness that his government has owed the stability, order and virtue of the community to the preaching of this cross ; and how the scholar attests that science has flourished best under the peaceful and sober influence of this religion of the cross. The gospel is eminently practical, then, and so far, it conciliates the spirit of utilitarianism.

But the doctrine of the cross is not sordid and selfish, and, so far, it corrects the mechanical, utilitarian tendency of our times. Against the lust of gain, it sets, in strong contrast, the example of Christ's voluntary poverty, and in solemn warning, the Saviour's declaration how hardly the rich man enters the kingdom of heaven. Against the disposition which would set material interests above all others, and teach us to regard the tangible goods of earth as the only real or the only valuable possessions, the gospel shows Christ set- ting moral far above all material interests — and uttering the brief and pithy question, before which avarice turns pale, and ambition drops his unfinished task : " What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or

8

50 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" If, as the great English moralist said, that which exalts the future, and disengages man's mind from being engrossed by the present, serves to elevate man to the true dignity of his nature ; how great the practical value of a faith, in whose far-reaching visions, time dwindles into a speck, and eternity becomes the paramount object of man's anxieties and hopes, where Truth is made more valuable than all things, to be bought at all risks, while Truth is not to be sold for the world. — And the prevalent selfishness which lies at the basis of that mechanical and utilitarian spirit of which we have spoken, is sorely rebuked by the very thought of a Divine Redeemer, who, moved by no selfish aims, but in disinterest- ed kindness, compassionately visits, and by the sacrifice of himself ransoms his envenomed foes ; and whose gospel makes all mankind my brethren in a common sin, doom, and ransom ; and bids me freely give to my fellow-man what I have most freely received.

Imbue, then, your literature with that spirit, and men learn that they are not mere calculating, money-getting machines, that they have an immortal soul within them ; — and that the earth which they till and parcel out, and conquer and govern, is but the lodge of their few wayfaring years, as they are journeying to their home in the far eternity. Then the miser, as that world, revealed by the cross, heaves into view, unclutches his gold. Then the manoeuvres and tactics, the trickery and juggling of parties in the church and the state, show in their native meanness, beside the simple, sublime and unselfish scheme of the Redeemer. The views of eternity, gained at the foot of that cross, open a wider horizon to the noblest flights of science. The views of duty there learned, give a higher finish to all the details of industry and art. Give literature thoroughly to feel and diffuse this doctrine of the cross, and while, on the one hand, it is saved from fruitless speculations, and made em- inently practical ; it is, on the other hand, effectually snatch- ed from under the wheels of a mechanical age, and saved from being trodden into the mire beneath the hoofs of a sor- did selfishness. Thus the human mind, in its pursuit of let- ters, is made practical, but not mechanical ; and while taught to aim at the widest usefulness, is raised above a grovelling utilitarianism, that measures all good by selfish advantages, and the standard of present expediency.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 51

2. Bring again this doctrine to the trial, in its power over passion. We have remarked its effects on the tyranny of Mammon ; let us try its energies on the prowling spirit of Belial. In the death of the Mediator and Propitiation, it has provided for the free forgiveness of the most aggravated sins. To those who have become the slaves of their un- bridled passions, it holds out therefore the prospect of re- covery, and the promise of a pardon, full and immediate. It cheers those who had learned to despair of their own moral renovation. It announces hope for the world's out- casts. Those whom human society had shut out as irrecov- erable, and as sunk below the notice and sympathy of their fellows, it pursues and reclaims. In circumstances the most discouraging, and characters the most hopeless, it delights to work its miracles of mercy. It rears the flowers and fruits of virtue on the scarce cooled crust of the flowing lava of passion, that but lately had poured forth its devastating floods over every green thing. But while thus welcoming the vilest, it makes no peace with their evil passions. It exorcises the fiercer, to foster the gentler of these impulses and affec- tions of man's heart. Of this religion, the Lamb and the Dove are the chosen emblems ; meekness and kindness, the instruments of its triumphs ; and its law the law of love.

Hence its signal power to humanize and civilize when introduced into those portions of society where it had before been unknown. See how it has tamed the rude, uplifted the degraded, and cleansed the polluted, and righted the oppressed in the islands and upon the continents to which the missionary has carried it. It has, indeed, much yet to accomplish even in the bounds of the Christian church. Bring it to bear more fully upon the habits and feelings of the church, and it will destroy there the supremacy of mere emotion and excitement, operating as they sometimes do to produce a false fire not from Heaven. It substitutes principle as the guide of life, instead of that treacherous and change- ful sympathy which is often made the rule of our way. It summons the disciple to view his Master's journey, Which kept ever its unfaltering gaze on the cross as its end, and looked steadily onward to the baptism of ignominy and agony that was to crown the long conflict ; and it bids him in emulation of his Master's example, to lead no random life, the mere sport of caprice and impulse. It rebukes those Christians who may be described as living by jerks,

52 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

and whose fitful activity has all the contortions of the ad- ventitious life of galvanism. When allowed its full scope over the inner world of the heart, see its power to produce high and symmetrical excellence in Leighton and Doddridge and Baxter and Pearce, and, why should we hesitate to add, in the heavenly-minded St. Cyran and Fenelon ? See the men whom it has thoroughly possessed, in whom it operated, pervading all their passions, and making them to become like Brainerd or Martyn or Xavier, "living burnt sacrifices" on the altar of God. We see no lack of noble feelings and high emotion there. It is no painted flame that shines there ; much less are these the lurid fires of a malignant, persecu- ting zeal. The victim is consumed in the flames of a heav- en-descended charity, a holocaust to God, while all around is made radiant with the golden and lambent lustre of his love.

For the doctrine of the cross is far from extirpating pas- sion. It but regulates it. No doctrine like it awakens and sustains the holier passions. All is purified and subordinated to the love of God, and man returns thus to the likeness of his unfallen self — to bear again some traces of his original character ere sin had marred his nature, or sorrow darkened his path ; and when all his powers and passions ministered to virtue and contributed to his happiness.

Let literature then become but the handmaid of this doc- trine of the cross, and it can no longer pander, as it has too long done, to the fiercer or baser appetites of mankind. How much has the cultivated talent of the race, in its va- rious literary tasks, set itself to divide and destroy, to corrupt and intoxicate mankind ! Genius has shouted to swell the discord, and its cry has exasperated the strifes of the world, instead of being their peace-maker. How often has the scholar yoked himself to the brazen car of Moloch, or de- meaned himself to heighten the idolatrous revel in the groves of the wanton Ashtoreth ! How much of literary achieve- ment has perished in consequence of the corruption that so deeply engrained it,16 or has continued and lived only to

16 It is a remark of Sharon Turner, in his History of England during the Middle Ages (vol. iv., p. 143, note), how much of the Greek classical poetry was allowed to perish or destroyed by the Eastern Emperors, because of its immorality. And some of the authors whose productions have thus disap-

E\ were, in the judgment of their countrymen and contemporaries, of i<;h genius. He names, among the writers whose remains thus perished wholly or in great part, Menander, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philemon, Alexis, Sappao, Grinna, Anacreon, Miinnenuus, Bion3 Alcman, and AIcujus.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 53

spread around moral infection ! Looking back over the history of our world, as preserved by those who knew not, or obeyed not this gospel, it is a humiliating record. The tumult and rage of passion seem endless. One wide and restless sea overspreads the scene. But when the gospel moves over this waste, dovelike in spirit, it comes like the dove to the ark of our diluvian father, bearing the message of peace and the omen of hope — the leaf that betokens the assuag- ing of the waters, the cessation of the storm, and the re-appear- ance of earth, from its long baptism of death, all radiant in new-born verdure and beauty.

No skill in negotiation or prowess in war can avail like this gospel to establish peace among the nations. No police, however well-appointed and vigilant, has equal power to giv^e order and security to the nation or the city within itself. No principle or art, no degree of refinement and no measure of knowledge, can succeed like the religion of the cross in giving true peace to the household. To destroy, in all these relations of society, the tyranny of the vindictive passions, no power is like that of the gospel. Its efficacy to raise and restore the slaves of the baser appetites of our nature, we have already seen. A literature, then, controlled by this gospel, will not be the literature of mere blind passion. And no principle is so likely to eject from our literature this unreasoning vehemence of passion, as the great truth of Christ crucified, iterated and reiterated in the ears of our people.

3. Apply it again, as a conservative principle, to counter- act the lawlessness of our times. If ever it appeared as if there might be a just revolt against the will of Providence, it seemed to be at the time when the meek Saviour, inno- cent, lowly and loving, was sold by the traitor, deserted of his disciples, assailed by the false accuser, and condemned by the unjust judge, whilst a race of malefactors and ingrates crowded around their Deliverer, howling for his blood, the blood of the Holy One. But though the cup was bitter, it was meekly drunk, for it had been the Father's will to mingle it, and his was the hand that held to the lips of the Son the deadly draught. Lawlessnesss is hushed at the sight of Gethsemane. In the garden and at the cross you see illus- trated the sanctity of law as it appears nowhere else. It was Mercy indeed that was forcing her way to the sinner ; but as she went, she was seen doing homage to Justice, and paying the debt, ere she freed the captive. That dread

54 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

transaction proclaimed the truth that transgression could never in God's universe occur with impunity ; and that if one did not suffer, another must. Tenderness was there lavish- ed, such as the heart of man never conceived in its hour of most impassioned and concentrated affection. Yet that tenderness leaned on the sternest principle. The Father loved the Son thus sacrificed as his well-beloved one ; yet it "pleased the Father to bruise Him." Surely here is found no precedent for the lawless tenderness. that exonerates the criminal and blames the law. It is not at the cross of Christ that ministry has learned its lessons, which employs itself in weaving silken scabbards, in the vain hope to sheathe the lightnings of God's law ; or which is full of dainty contri- vances to muffle " the live, leaping thunders" of Sinai, and make them no longer a terror to the evil-doer. In the last scenes of the Saviour's life that law was not contemned, but " magnified and made honorable." So Christ would have it be ; and a true church of Christ would say : So let it be. What submission is here taught us to the ap- pointments of God — even though he slay us ! Where can self-denial, that rare and splendid grace of the Chris- tian, be so effectually acquired, as in watching the scene of his Master's passion, presented beneath the olives of Geth- semane, while the sod beneath is wet with great drops of bloody sweat, and the leaves above are stirred with the sobs of that ascending prayer, " not my will, Father, but thine be done." Subjection to the law of God is one of the best preparatives for submission to all the just laws of human society. " Paralytic laws," as Bentham expressively called those statutes of the Old World, which, from the expensive- ness of the courts and forms of justice, are inaccessible to the poor, are indeed a sore evil. But it may well be ques- tioned whether they are much worse than epileptic laws, as we may style those convulsive and spasmodic efforts at jus- tice, that are not unknown in the New World ; that sum- mary resolution of the legislative, the judiciary and the execu- tive branches of government into the sovereign will of the multitude ; the legislation which a mob in its hot haste enacts and executes in the same breath, compressing into one single act, all the various and dilatory tasks of the law- maker, advocate, judge, jury, jailor, and hangman. Send the spirit of Christ's cross through a land, and what a law- biding community would it become. The sanctity of law

IN OUR LITERATURE. 55

and right would then hedge around the property, character and interests of each member of society. It would make a latch sufficient protection for the vaults of a bank. Men's word would be their bond. Our schools and colleges would then be filled with youth, docile and modest, who would not begin their studies by undertaking to teach their instruc- tors, nor consider it their earliest duty to exercise a pater- nal authority and supervision over the Faculty of the In- stitution, whose instructors they deign to patronize by being there matriculated. Our sanctuaries would present the spectacle of Christians united in affection, bearing one an- other's burdens and so fulfilling the law of love. Far as the spirit of the gospel has already influenced literature, it has beer made a literature friendly to public order, and the ally of law, thinning where our popular literature too often serves but to multiply the tenants of our jails ; and teaching the disciples of the Crucified to render honor unto whom honor is due, and fear to whom fear.

4. Look, next, at its power to check the false liberalism of the times, in its wretched effects on the moral integrity and purity of our literature. This form of evil has many shapes. All we cannot discuss. We would but enumerate its strange speculations as to Scripture ; its false liberality as to religious faith ; its false toleration in morals ; and lastly, its demon pride setting itself up to supersede Jehovah. All these how sternly does the cross of Christ rebuke and re- pudiate.

Trust some of these liberal teachers, and all the old truths of Scripture vanish. Instead of its solid grounds of history, its significant prophecy, and all its varied, unerring inspira- tion ; they would usher us into a mere cloud-land of shifting speculations, unsubstantial and formless and evanescent. They would disembowel the Bible of its facts, and leave be- hind a few cold truths of Natural Religion, most awkwardly told, the fragments of a myth about the development of Human Nature. But take their theory to the cross. Look up at that sufferer. Read his discourses ; follow his miracles ; and believe, if you can, that this is not a history of facts. The confession of the infidel Rousseau bursts to your lips : " If this be a fiction, the inventor is yet more wondrous even than the hero of the narrative." You have the fullest circumstantial details of Christ's life, the country and age in which he lived, the cities he visited and the persons he

56 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

met. The Sermon on the Mount is a fact, if you throw aside all the history in which it is found imbedded. Its ex- istence and its excellence are facts inexplicable rationally on any other theory than that of the truth and virtue and in- spiration of the Author. Pilate and Herod were facts. Je- rusalem was a fact. Gethsemane was a fact. Calvary was a fact. And he who hung there, on the fatal tree of anguish and shame, asserted not myths, but facts — wrought not myths, but facts — loved not in myth, but in fact ; and the salvation he has offered, the Heaven which he has opened, and the Hell from which he has warned us — all — all are facts. Wo to those who treat all as myths, until, not mythi- cally but really, they for ever forfeit the one, and plunge irrevocably into the other. To study the narrative of the gospels, apart from the prejudices of a preconceived system, and believe it a fiction, is impossible. Then were all history a fable.

Try by the same test the spirit to which we refer, in its false liberality as to religious faith — its chameleon character, finding true piety in all creeds and worships, and identifying, as being but one God, Jehovah the God of the Scriptures with the Baal and Moloch whom he cursed, with Juggernaut, whose worshippers are crushed beneath chariot-wheels, and with Kalee even, when wearing her necklace of human skulls, and when invoked by the Thug, ere he strangles his victim. No, the Bible knows no such toleration and liberal- ity as this. It exclaims, "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples."17 A man may be, as a liberalist would term him, religious, and rear costly shrines from his devotional feeling, and yet God say of him that he had forgot- ten his Maker, and his religion was therefore valueless. The exclusive character of Truth, disdaining all compromise, was apparent in all Christ's course. He did not blend Sad- duceanism, Pharisaism, and Herodianism, and Heathenism, into one religion, a mere compost of creedless, Pantheistic piety ; and sanction all as meaning the same thing. On the contrary, he denounced all, provoked all, was assailed by all, and at last is seen dying by the confederated malice and hate of all. Truth was not, on his lips, a motley compound of all human opinions, an eclecticism from all varieties of human

J7 Hosea viii. 14.

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error, but, like its Divine Author, immutable and one, sanc- tioning no compromise and allowing no rival.

Try these falsely liberal views, as to the toleration to be shown in questions of morals. Literature in our day pro- fesses to cultivate a sympathy for all classes, even for those who trade in vice, and eat the bread of wickedness. It has discovered that highwaymen, prostitutes and pickpockets have their literary rights, and should be fully represented in their own fashion in the great commonwealth of letters. A literature of felons is accordingly written, and alas, it is also read, corrupting our language with the slang of cut-throats, and our youth with their contagious immorality. Was this, now, the spirit of our crucified Lord ? He was indeed the friend of sinners. He sate in the publican's house as a guest ; he frowned not from his feet the weeping penitent, whose very presence seemed to others to shed contamination around her. But although thus forgiving to the sinner when contrite, he never dallied with sin itself. Paul seems to have found converts to the cross in the household of the atrocious Nero; but he never improves the advantages thus afforded him, to draw revolting pictures of the excesses of Nero's drunken hours ; nor has he recorded what to our modern novelists would have been invaluable, the confessions he might have heard from the criminals who were wafted with him over the Mediterranean, in the prison ship that bore him to Rome. There were things of which Paul says he thought it a shame even to speak. Well had it been for the purity of our literature and the innocence of our youth, had the writers of our age condescended to learn wisdom at the feet of Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. Peter, another of the first preachers of the cross, speaks of sinners who had, " like the dog, turned to their own vomit again, and like the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." But the apostle of the circumcision never stooped to picture the loathsome detail, and thus in effect to partake the ban- quet of the one, and share the bath of the other. Modern literature, aye, elegant literature, amid all the vaunted refine- ment of the nineteenth century, has done both, in order to enlarge our knowledge of nature and life, and to teach us superiority to the exclusiveness of vulgar prejudices. With such forms of liberalism the cross and its preachers have no sympathy.

The cross repudiates the demon pride of this false liber- 9

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alism. In Eden, Satan but ventured to promise " Ye shall be as Gods," hinting a distant likeness to God as the reward of sin. Modern Pantheism has renounced the qualifying terms, laid aside all hesitation, and converting the promise of future good into an assertion of present privilege, it exclaims au- daciously, "Ye are God." Hence, at the funeral, a few years since, of a great metaphysician of Germany,18 one of the leaders of this philosophy, it is said that some of his admirers spoke of him reverently as a singular incarnation of God. But bring such dreams of pride to the atoning cross. He who hung there tasted death for every man. And why? We had all sinned : he died the just for the unjust ; and without the shedding of blood there is no re- mission. And there I learn my desert. In the fate of the second Adam I read the character of the first Adam, whose place he took, and whose doom he averted. I am a doomed sinner, by nature a child of wrath. The taint of an endless curse is on my soul. The blood of a divine atonement was necessary to purge me from fatal blots. Do they tell me of the innate innocence of man's nature ? I point them to virtue, perfect, peerless and divine, as it was incarnate in Christ Jesus. But that excellence was not welcomed in the world it came to redeem ; but on the contrary, it seemed to be the more fiercely hated, the more brightly it shone ; and it was revealed before the eyes of the race only to be ma- ligned, persecuted and slaughtered. At the cross of Christ I learn, then, that I must come down into the dust of lowly penitence, or I perish. His kingdom is for the poor in spirit ; and his most diligent followers are to confess them- selves but unprofitable servants. Is it in such scenes, and under the eyes of such a teacher, I am to claim equality and oneness with God? No ! such thoughts, every where ab- surdly impious, are there most offensively absurd and most unpardonably impious. And, as with a battle-axe, does the cross of Christ cleave and annihilate these arrogant fictions of that liberalism cherished by some who yet call themselves Christians.

Yet, on the other hand, the gospel meets all those just claims of the soul, to which this liberalism has addressed its flatteries. The doctrine of the cross, with a true liberality, allows all national peculiarities not in themselves sinful. It

is Hegel

IN OUR LITERATURE, 59

welcomes the savage and the slave into the brotherhood of the race, and is prepared in the most degraded and forlorn of all the tribes of the earth, to eject the brute, acknowledge the man, and develope the saint. It lays the basis of a true, universal, Catholic church ; — not the local, arrogant and usurping church of Rome, which, to make plausible its poor claim to universality, must anathematize the myriads of the Greek and Syrian churches, and all Protestant Christendom ; but that one church, real though invisible, which comprises the multitudes no man can number, and no man can name ; the Christians of every land, age and sect, that hold the Head, and love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.19 The idea of unity, so dear to the liberalist, the cross alone truly reveals. It shows a unity of Providence in the whole history

19 It was one of the grave offences in the excellent commentary of that devout Jansenist, Father Quesnel, on the New Testament, which brought down upon him and his work the fulminations of the Vatican in the famous Bull Unigenitus, that he had wrongly defined the Catholicity of the Church. Two of the one hundred and one heretical propositions selected from his Ex- position, the 72d and 76th, are these : " It is a mark of the Christian Church that it is Catholic, embracing both all the angels of heaven, and all the elect and righteous of the earth, and these of all times." And again, "Nothing i8 more expansive than the Church of God, for all the elect and all the righteous of all times make it up." — (Magn. Bullarium Rom., Luxemb., 1727, torn. viii.) It can, we think, be shown that this true invisible Church, com- prising the truly righteous, the elect of all times, lands, and kindreds, is the only Catholic Church known to the Scriptures ; the only Catholic Church of which Christ will acknowledge the Headship ; or membership in which ensures salvation. Romanism could not, however, hold her power if such a theory of Catholicism were to prevail. The 72d Prop, is taken, apparently, from duesnel's remarks upon Heb. xii. 24 : as is the 76th from his Commen- tary at the 20-22d v. of Ephes. ii. His observations on the latter passage, by their beauty, tempt us to a longer quotation. " ' And are built upon the found- ation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone ; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.5 How majestic and how admirable, my God, is thy Church ! How worthy the work of its builder ! Nothing can be so august, for it is thy palace. Nothing so holy, for it is thy temple. Nothing inspire such reverence, for it is thine abode. Nothing is so ancient, for patriarchs and prophets have labored upon it. Nothing is so immovable, for Christ is its foundation. Nothing is more compact and indivisible, for He is its corner-stone. Nothing more lofty, for it lifts itself to the skies, and even into the very bosom of God. Nothing is better in its proportions, or better in arrangement, for the Holy Spirit is the architect here. Nothing is more beauteous or more variegated, for precious stones of all kinds are built into it, the Jew and the Gentile, those of all ages and countries, of either sex and of all conditions. Nothing is so expansive, for all the elect and all the right- eous of all ages make it up. Nothing is more inviolable, since it is a sanctu- ary consecrated to the Lord. Nothing is so divine, since it is a living struc- ture, in which the Holy Ghost has his dwelling, which He vivifies — which He sanctifies. There is but one God, one Christ, one Church. None is to

60 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

of the world — a unity of piety in all dispensations from those days ere yet the ark was launched, to those of a new heaven and a new earth, when there shall be no more sea — a unity of origin, in the common descent of our race — a unity of transgression in our common sin — a unity of account in our gathering before Christ's bar, and a unity of brother- hood in our one ransom paid at Christ's cross.

Let but our literature be saturated with this doctrine of the cross, and it will conquer all miscalled liberalism by showing the source of its errors and meeting its just claims. It will set up the truth, and require the renunciation of every error. But it will set up the truth in love ; and there will be ultimately one Lord, and his name One ; and He will not be the material and sinful God of Pantheism, but the Everlasting One, uncreated, impassible, spiritual, sinless and supreme, distinct from the universe he made and governs — the Creator, and not the creature.

5. And lastly, would we say, the cross thus mighty to demolish liberalism, has also equal energy as the antagonist of superstition, which was spoken of as the last of the evil influences besetting our youthful literature.

Instead of forms and rites, the great resource of supersti- tion, the gospel of the cross requires a spiritual worship, and an inward conversion. It has no regard for mere penances and austerities as practised for their own sake, or from a belief in their intrinsic merit. The doctrine of self-torture, so dear to the saints of Romish legends, is unknown to the gospel. Christ did not hew his own cross, nor was he his own scourger, as have been many saints that shine in the papal calendar. Instead of that antiquity of ten or twelve or fifteen centuries, of which Antichrist vaunts so much, the cross reveals a more ancient antiquity of eighteen cen- turies. Instead of its hazy and dubious traditions, scripture verity ; and instead of its councils and fathers, and a long succession of sinners wearing tiaras, and claiming names of blasphemy — a primitive Apostolic church, and Christ " for

be adored besides the God whom we adore in three Persons. None wor- ships Him but as he loves Him, and none worships and loves Him as he should, but by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and but in his body, which is the Church." Such views of Catholicism might well, for their spirituality, their wisdom, and their truth, be allowed to supplant and expel the arrogant and carnal dreams of a visible Catholic Church, that have been too prevalent even beyond the precincts of Home.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 61

the chief Apostle and Bishop of our profession," whose priesthood is the unchangeable priesthood of Melchisedec, and whose dominion is an everlasting dominion. It acknow- ledges no religion that is merely a religion of the senses or the imagination. The feelings that stirred Paul at Athens, as he stood amid its altars and gazed on lines of images crowding its every street, would have sprung up as naturally within him, had he stood beneath the vaults of many a cathe- dral, with its " dim religious light," and rich with the trophies of the pencil and the chisel. Against the idolatry of the material image of the cross and its sculptured burden, as seen in the Romish reverence of the crucifix — against the idolatry of the material emblems of bread and wine in the sacrament, as they are deified in the Romish doctrine of Transubstantiation — against the popular idol of all Romish countries, the earthly parent of our Saviour, the human and sinful mother, to whom they have transferred the media- torial office of her divine and sinless Son — against all these aspects of the worship of the creature, there is no better remedy than the faithful and full presentation of the true doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, the world's Creator, Redeemer and Lord. As Christ gave it, and as Paul dis- pensed it, the gospel of the cross is the grand Iconoclast principle of the age. And as of old it routed the gods from the summit of shadowy Olympus, and in later days drove into darkness all the deities of the Valhalla ; so will it ul- timately abolish all the idols out of the earth. And not the graven image only of wood and of stone, but the idols also of which Bacon has spoken, the idols of the forum and the cavern, the prejudices of the busy, and the errors of the studious.20

20 The writer has long believed, and elsewhere remarked years since, that in the inevitable conflict of the truth with Romanism in our days, we need to allow and to emulate more than some Protestants seem disposed to do, the excellences of individuals and of individual practices in that anti-Chris- tian communion : and that, especially in the field of missions we may learn from her history much to inspirit, and somewhat to instruct us. Since the delivery of this address he has met with the following observations from a writer on missions, whose work is probably in the hands of but few Ameri- can Christians. Though containing incidental expressions the present writer might not have preferred to employ himself, they seem so admirable on the whole, in sentiment, temper and style, that he could not deny himself the gratification of copying them. They are from the French of M. Bost. He is known to English Christians as the author of a history of Moravian- ism, published by the London Religious Tract Society, and of a life and collection of the letters of Felix JXefi; whose intimate friendship he enjoyed,

62 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

To bring out the great truth to the cross, in one of its two-fold aspects, as the principle of sanctification no less than of justification, Protestantism may learn some not use- less lessons even from the Romish church. That abnega- tion of self, that deadness to the world, and those heroic

and whose opposition to Romanism, we need not say he shares. He is an active and efficient laborer in the revival of evangelical truth in the churches of Switzerland. He published, in four volumes, a French version of the History of Christian Missions, written by the excellent Blumhardt, formerly head of the Mission School at Basle, which has sent so many laborers into most quarters of the earth. Blumhardt1 s death left the work incomplete. In his own original preface to his French translation from the German, M. Bost has these observations on the justice to be rendered the Romish Church. We present them in a free and hasty version from his French original.

" But here I reach a point yet more important than any that has preceded it. It is one upon which I am happy to find my sentiments in unison with those of my author :* as they will also prove to be, I think, with those of every man who has studied history in a spirit of impartiality. I refer to the two-fold judgment to which the facts of history conduct us, as to the good and the evil, the two sides that are found in the Romish Church, whether re- garded at any given moment in her existence, or at different eras in her career. I shall dwell, at some length, on this grave topic.

" If all that were required, were but to discuss this subject in generalities and as an abstract question, the affair would be one of the utmost facility. History presents us in this Church, on the one hand, objects so grand and lovely, and on the other, those so atrocious, that it becomes impossible to persist, as regards this community, in that narrow judgment which sees in her only every thing divine, or only every thing devilish. On the contrary we find there to a demonstration a decided intermixture of God's work and of the work of Satan ; just as one may see a few paces from the spot where I am writ- ing, two streams that flow the one beside the other, in the same channel, the one all turbid and discolored — the other blue as the skies.t A little farther on they intermingle, but even yet they remain distinct- the good does not destroy the evil — the evil does not destroy the good. It would then be a matter of no difficulty to decide this question in the peaceful study, and amid the silence of our retirement. There it is perfectly simple, and admits of no dispute. The Romish church has exhibited in all ages, just as she con- tinues in our own times to exhibit, a decided alliance of evil and good : and of these, each perhaps is carried to a degree in which it surpasses what is to be found any where else.

"But if we utter this judgment before the public, immediately passions are inflamed, interests are wounded, and we touch, so to speak, the raw flesh. In fact, the papacy, like a snake bruised beneath the wheels of a passing chariot, but that is not killed, is so far from dead, as to be rising again, and beginning anew to hiss and bare its fangs. Powerless as it will be before God, whenever God shall see fit to command it again into the pit, it is as yet more powerful than man, and seems, under more than one aspect, to resemble the strong man armed who is named in the Gospel. She is all the stronger and better armed, from the fact that to all the weapons of brute force, she knows how to unite those of artifice and restless intrigue, and even to associate with these, in many cases, the influence of profound piety. By

* M. Blumhardt. >

{ t The allusion is probably to the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve near Geneva.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 63

sacrifices, in which some of her confessors have excelled, have served to the staunchest Protestants as the incentives of a holy emulation. Leighton in one age, and Zinzendorf in another, were supposed to have enkindled their piety,

turns, with clasped hands, with eyes raised to heaven, and clad in sackcloth, she is the ardent and high-minded missionary ; and next she is the courtier, climbing, flattering, and domineering ; attacking, by the arts of policy, no less than by the aids of religion, bearing down the devout by appeals to his conscience, and-holding out lures to the ambition of the diplomatist ; caress- ing now the anarchist, and now the despot ; the foe of republics, and yet the assassin of kings ; changing her hues like the chameleon, as you observe her at Dublin, at London, at Madrid, or at Paris ; winning over the sterner spirits by her Trappists, and the libertines by her Madonnas ; drawing you heavenward by her incense, her concerts and her sacred processions , and allowing you to slide into hell by her cheapened absolutions, and by pen- ances, that exempt you from the repentance of the heart ; founding schools in Italy, and overturning them in France ; by turns, O'Connell, La Mennais, Xavier, Vincent de Paul, Ravaiilac and Fenelon ; it is the same church who, in the middle ages, copied for us the sacred scriptures, and who, in our times, is burning them. At the present time, the blows which are aimed at her have been called forth, it must be allowed, rather by scepticism than by zeal for God. And although we may know what will be her last end, yet we know not its exact moment; and above all, we know not how much she may yet grasp, before she sinks. She is threatening England. She is infiltrating herself into all parts of the United States. She is rising anew in France ; and there she is met (and this is the observation we have been desirous thus to introduce), by a spirit of partizanship on the side of her adversaries, which, inclining them to treat her as enemies are usually treated, with blows, blows continually, and nothing but blows, does not stop to ask, if even she have not, in some points, claims upon our justice.

" And yet, it is to Protestants that we speak, if we believe that on our side is found the truth, let us walk in the truth, as did the Master whom we claim to follow. Let us, in consequence, be just even towards the most unjust. Let us learn to guard ourselves against that absurd and heedless vanity which sees in its own ranks but splendid virtues, and in the opponents but faults and wrongs. Let us recollect that injustice never yet was able to found an enduring structure; — that the disciple of Jesus is teachable towards all, ever ready to learn, prompt in humbling himself, eager to find good wherever it is to be met, readily and with joy acknowledging it, and above all, having sufficient confidence in the sacred cause of Christ's Gospel, never to fear being generous to any party, be it what it may. Many see danger in the concessions that might possibly be made. But in what concessions l In those which should be unjust ? We ought never to make any such ; not because they would be concessions, but because they would be errors. In those which should be just? We ought to make all such, and to make them without fear. Without fear, did I say? — We ought to tremble lest we should leave a single one unmade — to tremble, lest we leave to our enemy a single point in which he would have the advantage over us; a single virtue in which he surpassed us. In truth, the kingdom of God is a combat of holiness against sin, much more than it is a conflict of opinions, of dogmas, or of hierarchies. Let this rule, then, without ceasing, be heard resounding over our heads : ' By their fruits shall ye know themJ And let us not say, or rather let us cease saying, as it often has been done, that this rule is a vague one ; for on whom does our censure in such case fall ? And who is He that gave us it, but the Only Wise, the friend of the lowly and simple in heart, who brings down questions the most profound and the most abstract, to princi-

64 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

and formed in part their religious character, amid the Jan* senist Catholics of France, with whom each had mingled. Wesley, in his admiration of the character and graces of some of that communion, and in his endeavors to bring

pies the most popular and practical, reducing them to questions of obedi- ence, of love, and of lowliness 7

" Protestants then let us continue to be ; ,mt let us be humble. Protest- ants let us be ; but let us not proceed, from an apprehension of wronging the doctrine of divine grace, to fall into a dread of good works, or perhaps to regard as good works, and works quite sufficient, the style of doing good, as by turning a crank, adopted in certain societies, in which one does good with his neighbor's money, and in his ambition to convert the world, forgets too often his own proper and personal sanctification. Protestants let us be ; but let us know how to pardon others besides St. Paul, if they mortify their body, and keep it in subjection, through fear lest having preached to others, they become themselves castaways. Let us relinquish those vague and con- temptuous declamations against superstition, which better become the enemies of the gospel than disciples of the Saviour. And let us remember, that if it be wrong to build on a good foundation ' hay, wood and stubble,' we must yet, at the same time, know how to respect that laborer who, be- sides these worthless materials, brings gold and precious stones, and this, perhaps, in greater abundance than ourselves. Let us not fear to make the declaration. From that moment in which the Protestant Church shall have imitated, embraced and reverenced all that there is of excellence and super- iority in the Romish communion, from that moment the Romish com- munion must fall, and will in fact fall, because of the crying abuses con- tained within her ; but not one instant sooner. And until that time, she will, on the contrary, continue to exist, for the purpose of humbling us, for the purpose of holding us in check, for the purpose of counterpoising us in those points in which we refuse to obey, and for the purpose of accomplish- ing a sort of good which we have not learned to do. God compensates for one extreme by allowing another ; and it is not until the day when our prin- ciples shall no longer present any void and any vacant spot, that we can claim to look for the fall of a system which will then oppose to us nought but in- feriorities. Then the two communions, like two dark clouds, surcharged with opposite electricity, will approach each other to intermingle and become one : a spark from the higher regions will produce a sudden fusion, and a shower of grace pouring itself upon the earth, there will then start up in abundance new harvests, on the one side and on the other.

*{ But it is not the mere exactitude of doctrinal orthodoxy, that will be honored to bring about this wondrous result. It will be rather the sacred union formed between Truth and Holiness ; and our God will then be glo- rified, not amid some of his people only, but in all his saints.

" Such are the declarations that I have believed myself bound to make in the outset, when publishing this work : there are, I believe, some readers that will need them. We shall, along our way, and this long before the six- teenth century, find many Protestants, it is true: but yet we shall see, too, that God glorified himself also in men who were imbued with many preju- dices; and the reader must have little Christian feeling, who is not touched with admiration, and softened into tenderness, at the sight of a multitude of things that present themselves to our view, even in those ages when super- stition had already invaded the church.

11 Finally, when all this shall have been said and admitted, it is yet most true, and history proves it to demonstration, that in proportion as Rome more and more intermingled herself in the government of the church, in

IN OUR LITERATURE. 65

the light of their example before his own societies, by his publication of the lives of Xavier, De Renti, and Gregory Lopez, incurred from some heedless Protestants of his age, the imputation of covert Romanism. He complains thai he had thus been represented by one of our own Sten- netts, as but a disguised Papist. David Brainerd, too, in the earlier years of his heroic mission, found himself fol- lowed by a like rumor, that he was but a concealed Roman- ist. We do well to remember in our conflict with error, that a prevalent worldliness is, in God's eyes, as great a practical heresy as is the tenet of justification by works. And a worldly orthodoxy in Protestantism will never avail to subdue a devout superstition in Romanism, because it is not in the nature of Beelzebub to cast out Beelzebub, as our Saviour has told us.

In the collision, not only impending but already begun, at so many points of the foreign missionary field, between the Church of Rome and the Churches of a purer faith, God is making a merciful provision to strip the Churches of the Reformation of their remaining worldliness and errors, to crush in them all self-dependence and all vain-glorying, and, shutting them up to a simpler faith and a more heroic ardor, to nail them more closely, as by a blessed necessity, to his own cross as their one refuge and exemplar. Rome may, from the very amount of superstition she brings with her, find her missionary labors in the lands of Pagan superstition more rapidly crowned with success, than those of her rivals, in the adhesion of nominal proselytes to her standard. But her victories will be less solid and enduring than the slower conquests of Protestantism. Where resorting, as she has so often done, to worldly intrigue, and calling to her aid the arm of the secular power, she will often find her advan- tages but short-lived, from the original sin that gave their first seeming prosperity. The Sandwich Islander, for in-

that same proportion also did the Spirit of God withdraw from it. The safety and the life of every church whatsoever are found in obedience to the laws of Christ.

" I would no further anticipate the details contained in the body of this work ; but I found myself compelled to defend, as in advance, those views, and as I may emphatically call it that comprehensiveness of principle, which it has seemed to me are demanded alike by Christian truth, by Christian wisdom, and by Christian humility." — A. Bost.

Histoire de l'etablissement du Christianisme,

Geneva, 1838. t. I. Preface du Traducteur, pp. viii— xiii

10

68 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

stance, is not likely soon to forget that the missionary of the' chair of St. Peter came to his islands with the cannon of Catholic France forming the van-guard, whilst the crucifix and the brandy-flask filled, as it were, the two hands of the intrusive missionary church.

As to the ultimate influence this ambitious and versatile church is to win on our own shores, the statesman may well have his doubts. Never let Protestantism, even in resisting Rome, be driven to adopt measures of proscription and persecution. If for the time, here and in other lands, Rome may attempt a union with the free tendencies of the age, and seek to identify herself with the cause of Social Pro- gress, it yet seems but little likely that she will be able to maintain a very firm and lasting alliance with our " fierce democracy." That democracy is bent upon change and impatient of control, whilst this church proclaims change in- compatible with truth, and demands control as necessary to unity. M. de Tocqueville has supposed that the love of our people for unity will naturally, and most powerfully, com- mend to them the church holding out so wide-spread and magnificent an exhibition of it. But, on the other hand, there is, as yet, rife amongst us a passion for independence, and our institutions generally foster a free and early de- velopment of individual character, which will work in a con- trary direction. And Rome, again, whatever she may claim to be abroad, is essentially a secular power at her own proper home. By her own hearth she is an autocrat, the most absolute. In her forms of government there, in her European alliances, and in well nigh all the recollections of her history, she is essentially a petrifaction of despotism. It will, therefore, be difficult, even for her ingenuity, to weld together the old tyrannies of the East and the new liberties of the West. Still, it is not in such considerations that we trust

The Christian, looking higher than the mere statesman, relies for his country's freedom, as well as for the purity of his country's faith, on the cross of Christ. The provi- dence of God has abolished here all religious establishments, and proclaimed unlimited toleration. Puritanism fled hither for a refuge. The hierarchies of the old world would gladly find here a new and rich domain. God has thus, apparently, intended to make our land an arena for the unfettered con- flict of the crucifix and the cross — an open field for the con-

IN OUR LITERATURE. 67

test between the idolatrous materialism and the divine spiri- tualism of the doctrine of Christ crucified. If the American Churches are but true to the gospel, they need not fear. If they are not true to it, God will find another people who will be. Its ultimate and universal triumphs are sure as the flight of time. We read in the unerring volume of scripture, not the history of the past alone, but that of the future as well. Prophecy had uttered, and sealed up to the times of the end, the doom of Romanism, centuries before our birth, even when it was yet but as a hidden leaven, working, in concealment and darkness, its stealthy way to the hearts of the nations. And while the sceptre of the universe shall continue, as continue it will, to lie in the hand that was pierced for us and nailed to the tree of Golgotha — while Christ reigns, Antichrist cannot. Here are our auguries for our country, our age, and our race.

Bring up all forms of error, and we say, however numer- ous and however venomous the viperous brood, the heads of all are yet to be crushed against the cross of Calvary. Produce all the spiritual diseases, aggravated, various and loathsome, that have made earth one huge lazar-house, and we lay our hand upon the cross and say, here is the catholi- con, the sure and sufficient remedy for all the countless maladies of the soul. Receive, love, diffuse and exemplify that doctrine ; and every error is subverted, and every truth is ultimately established.

" Ye are the salt of the earth," said the founder of Chris- tianity to his disciples. They were the conservators of the world's knowledge, virtue, freedom and peace. In the Church was to be found the quickening and recuperative energy, that was to stay each moral plague of society, and preserve its masses from a universal corruption, which would else allow them to settle down into an utter and putrid deliquescence of the social elements. The followers of Christ were thus conservative, not from their talents but from their principles, not by their personal endowments or worldly rank, so much as by their relations to the gospel and God, sending up their intercessions to Heaven, and holding up the light of their example and their testimony before man, advocates with one world and patterns to an- other. Their faith was then the principle of their spiritual vitality, and that faith centered in the atoning and availing sacrifice of the cross, as its sole trust and its highest model.

08 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

In our examination, therefore, of literature and its depen- dence upon the cross, we have been but appropriating to a narrower field, what our Saviour said of the wide circuit of the world. We say of its literature what He said in the broadest sense of all its interests. And if any should deem our claims of the literary power of the gospel unwarrant- ed or exaggerated, their accusation, it will be seen, rebounds from us as a reproach on the wisdom of Him who " spake as never man spake."

We might glance at the effects upon the interests of literature, of the resurrection of the true doctrine of the cross at the era of the Reformation. We might look to the splendid and varied literary results of the revival of this doc- trine among the Jansenists of France, when the literature of the nation, in logic and in style, in sobriety and manly vigor of thought, as well as in purity of moral and religious character, was so rapidly advanced by the devout Port Roy- alists21— when Tillemont produced the erudite, candid and accurate history that received the praises of Gibbon, when Nicole wrote so beautifully on Christian morals, Le Maistre stood at the head of the French bar, De Saci furnished to the nation what remains yet their best version of the Bible,22

21 " It would not be too much to assert, that this mass of men of high intellect, and filled with noble objects, who, in their mutual intercourse, and by their original and unassisted efforts, gave rise to a new tone of expression and a new method of communicating ideas, had a most remarkable influ- ence on the whole form and character of the literature of France, and hence of Europe ; and that the literary splendor of the age of Louis XIV. may be in part ascribed to the society of Port Royal."

Ranke's History of the Popes. Thilad. 1841. Vol. ii. p. 208.

22 An English scholar, James Stephen, Esq., the nephew, we believe, of Wilberforce, in a brilliant article upon the Port Royalists, contributed to the Edinburgh Review in the year 1841, has pronounced this glowing eulogy on the version of De Saci. " In those hours De Saci executed, and his friend transcribed, that translation of the Holy Scriptures, which to this moment is regarded in France as the most perfect version in their own or in any other modern tongue. While yet under the charge of St. Cyran, the study of the divine oracles was the ceaseless task of De Saci. In mature life, it had been his continual delight ; in the absence of every other solace, it pos- sessed his mind with all the energy of a master passion. Of the ten thou- sand chords which there blend together in harmony, there was not one which did not awaken a responsive note in the heart of the aged prisoner. In a critical knowledge of the sacred text, he may have had many superiors, but not in that exquisite sensibility to the grandeur, the pathos, the super- human wisdom, and the awful purity of the divine original, without which none can truly apprehend, of accurately render into another idiom, the sense of the inspired writers. * * * Protestants may with justice except to many a passage of De Saei'e translation ; but they will, we fear, search their own libraries in vain for any, where the author's unhesitating assurance of t\w

IN OUR LITERATURE. 09

Lancelot aided by his grammars the progress of classical science, Pascal in so many walks displayed such rare and varied excellence, while Arnauld thundered as the doughtiest theologian of the schools — when Racine, the pupil of the community, became the most finished of French poets, Boileau, their friend, the most perfect and most pure of French satirists, and Madame de Sevigne, their admirer, the most graceful and simple of French letter-writers.

The cross of Christ thoroughly appreciated and ardently loved is an adequate remedy for all the evils of the world, and necessarily, therefore, for all the evils of the world's literature. It contains the only elements which can coun- teract all the perils we have described, satisfy the demands of the human heart, and correct the wanderings of the hu- man reason, and thus remedy the evils, be they literary or political, of society, by supplying those wants of our nature out of which these evils have sprung, and by restraining the excesses to which these wants lead. As to the casuistry and superstition, the fanaticism and persecution, that have sometimes abused the name of the cross for their shelter, we can only say that the doctrine is no more chargeable with these its perversions, than is the dread Name of God re- sponsible for all the fearful profanation made of it, when it is used as an oath to give sting to a jest, or to add venom to a curse.

But some feel, and others have intimated that the cross of

real sense of controverted words permits his style to flow with a similar absence of constraint, and an equal warmth and glow of diction." A calmer critic, and one more versed in the text and versions of the scriptures, Dr. J. Pye Smith, unites in awarding eminent merit to the translation of De Saci. In his Four Discourses on the Sacrifice and Priesthood of Christ, (Lond. 1828,) he remarks upon the advantage of studying a difficult passage with the consultation of various translators. " Eve» translations which may, as a whole, be inferior, will often exhibit instances of successful expression, in single words and clauses, most remarkably bringing out the beauty and genuine force of the original. Among the modern versions I beg leave to point out the extraordinary excellence, particularly in the New Testament, both as to fidelity of sentiment, and felicity of expression, which distinguishes the French translation of Isaac le Maistre de Sacy, one of the illustrious society of Port Royal, and a noble sufferer for truth and conscience." (pp. 273, 274.) The chief defects of the work grew out of its being founded on the Vulgate, and its being frequently ra-ther a beautiful paraphrase, than a literal version. It is, like the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, the Letters of the Marian Martyrs in England, the letters of the excellent Samuel Ruther- ford of Scotland, the Latin Psalms of Buchanan, and some of the religious works of Grotius, a part of the prison literature of the church, having em- ployed its venerable author during his incarceration, as a confessor for the truth, under the dominant influence of Jesuitism at the French court.

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Christ has been tried, and has failed. The church has tried substitutes for it indeed, and these have ever failed. But the cross itself has not yet been tried by the church contin- uously and fully. Protestantism even has talked too much of it as justifying the sinner, but shrunk from it as sancti- fying him. As to its failures, when really tried, they have never been more than apparent. In the hurry and cry of the conflict, the voice of evil is louder than that of good. When most seeming to fail, the cross is but like its Founder, when amid the growing darkness of his last agony, the Dragon seemed writhed around him, and the fatal sting of death was transfixing him. For a time the race of mankind might seem to have lost their Redeemer, and the gates of Hope, as they swung slowly back, appeared about to close for ever upon a sinking world. But when that darkness was past, and the field of battle was again seen, it was the 'Dragon that lay outstretched and stiffened, with bruised head — all feeble and still, in the shadow of that silent cross ; while radiant in the distance were the open portals of heaven, and earth Jay bathed in the lustrous dawn of a new Hope,

" For the gates of Paradise Open stand on Calvary."*

And when some forty days have passed, there is seen in the glittering air over the summit of Olivet, the form of the unharmed and ascending Redeemer. As victor over death and hell, he is leading captivity captive, returning to his proper and native glory, and going before to prepare a royal mansion and a crown of righteousness for all his cross-bear- ing followers. Thus was seeming failure the secret and the forerunner of real victory. So has it since been. The days of the French revolution, when infidelity was ready to tri- umph, ushered in the era of foreign missions, when Satan's oldest seats underwent a new invasion. So will it continue to be. Every conflict, sore and long though it may be, will but add to the trophies of the Redeemer's cross, till around it cluster, as votive offerings, the wreaths of every science and the palms of every art — and that instrument of shame and anguish be hailed as the hinge of the world's history and destiny, the theme of all our study, and the central sun of all our hopes, the sanction to the universe of all God's

Montgomery.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 71

laws, and the seal to all the elect of our race of an endless redemption from the belief, power, and practice of all evil. In the coming years of the world's history, the presaging eye may look forward to the fierce clash of opinions, the tumult of parties, and the collision of empires. But when the waters are out, and one barrier after another is overwhelmed, and one sea-mark topples and disappears after another beneath the engulfing flood, God is but overturning what man has built. The foundation of his own hand will remain un- shaken. The floods of the people cannot submerge it ; the gates of hell cannot prevail against its quiet might.

We feel that we need your forgiveness for the length to which we have pursued this topic. But the subject, in its earlier portion at least, was a complex one ; on the latter portion of it, if any where, the Christian loves to linger ; and dwelling as we had been compelled to do on the gloomier side of the picture, we may now be pardoned, if the eye loves to rest on that light from heaven, and those radiant and celestial omens, that descend upon this darkness from the cross of our Lord.

And now, in conclusion, will you allow, gentlemen, the stranger, as he is to most of you, who addresses you, to ap- peal to you as students ? Your studies have taught you how the best interests of the nation are bound up with those of learning ; and we have endeavored at this time to revive a lesson your respected and beloved instructors have often enforced, that the interests of learning are bound up with those of the gospel, and that there only is found a knowledge which to have learned, will form the best preparation for rightly improving all other knowledge ; — which not to have learned, will render all other learning finally nugatory to its possessor.

Amid the various and multiform evils that threaten our literature, the cross of Christ is the one conservative prin- ciple, and it needs but to be fully presented, to prove ever the sufficient remedy. We entreat you then, for yourselves, to view habitually this cross in either of its aspects, as re- vealing the way of the sinner's justification, and as showing the process of the believer's sanctification.

Look to it as your salvation. You need to be transformed by its holy influences. There learn the love of God as poetry cannot paint it — the wisdom of God as philosophy in her boldest flights never surmised it — the holiness of God,

''73 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

as not even Sinai proclaimed it. Receive this crucified Christ as your Saviour. Say, as you raise your eyes to this throne of suffering mercy, in the language of that old monkish verse from the Dies Irae, which Johnson, stern as was his rugged nature, could never repeat without bursting into a flood of tears —

" Q,ueerens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus ; Tantus labor non sit cassus ! 23

Again, many or most of you look to be preachers of this gospel. Be the cross your theme, Christ, as there lifted up, will draw all men unto him. Do not yield blindly to the rage for novelty. There are those who cannot be satis- tied with any thing as old as the gospel, and as unchange- able as Christ. Like the Israelites, they loathe even manna, when made their daily bread. Remember, this appetite for change is not to be cured by indulging it, and is itself a symptom of moral disease. With all skill used in varying the mode of its presentation, still let your theme be one ; and shrink not from the censures of those who demand some- thing newer than the truth, and better than Jesus Christ, *■* the same yesterday, to-day and forever." And the more the school or the press may eject this doctrine, but the more let. the pulpit insist upon, reiterate, and thunder it forth, in all the tongues of the earth. For it is to you a surer pledge of success than that imaged cross which Constantine put into the labarum of the empire, was of victory to the im- perial hosts whom it so often guided to conquest. Do not crucify that Lord " afresh" by your sins. Nor trust to your office and work as preserving you from these. See in Paul, the distress an apostle felt, lest having preached to others he himself should prove a cast-away. The anxieties of such a hero and martyr, lest he should turn and perish, may well arouse you to a salutary self-distrust. The pulsations

23 ** Wearily for me thou soughtest,

On the cross my soul thou boughtest, Lose not all for which thou wroughtest." It is to Mrs. Piozzi that we owe this anecdote of Johnson. " When he would try to repeat the celebrated Prosa JEcclesiastica pro Mortuis. as it is called, beginning Dies Irai, dies ilia, he could never pass the stanza ending thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of tears; which sensibility I used to quote against him when he would inveigh against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and feeble, and unworthy the subject." — Crokcr's Boswcll, London} 1839, vol. ix. p. 73.— (See Appendix , Dies Ira.)

IN OUR LITERATURE. 73

of that mighty heart, in its strong apprehensions, are even now to be felt, as after the lapse of centuries, it seems yet to throb and heave under the pages of the epistles. Value not any professional learning apart from an experimental knowledge of the cross of Christ. Remember that the man mighty in prayer, and full of the Holy Ghost, and who knows, as a preacher, but the scriptures in his own vernacular tongue, may take his place, as a theologian24 and a pastor,

24 We may well ponder the language upon this subject of a scholar who is not liable to the imputation of enthusiasm, ignorance, or partiality. Speaking of the Bereans who searched the Scriptures, Bishop Horsley, in his Nine Sermons on the Resurrection, <$*c. (New York, 1816, pp. 165, 166), takes occasion to remark upon the knowledge that may be gained from the mere English version, by a collation, diligent and prayerful, of its parallel passages. "It is incredible to any one who has not in some degree made the experi- ment, what a proficiency may be made in that knowledge, which maketh wise unto salvation, by studying the Scriptures in this manner, without any other commentary or exposition than what the different parts of the sacred volume mutually furnish for each other. I will not scruple to assert that the most illiterate Christian, if he can but read his English Bible, and will take the pains to read it in this manner, will not only attain all that practi- cal knowledge which is necessary to his salvation, but by God's blessing, he will become learned in every thing relating to his religion in such degree, that he will not be liable to be misled, either by the refined arguments, or the false assertions of those who endeavor to ingraft their own opinion upon the oracles of God. He may safely be ignorant of all philosophy except what is to be learned from the sacred books ; which indeed contain the highest philosophy adapted to the lowest apprehensions. He may safely remain ig- norant of all history, except so much of the history of the first ages of the Jewish and of the Christian church, as is to be gathered from the canonical books of the Old and New Testament. Let him study these in the manner I recommend, and let him never cease to pray for the illumination of that Spirit by which these books were dictated, and the whole compass of ab- struse philosophy and recondite history shall furnish no argument with which the perverse will of man shall be able to shake this learned Christian's faith."

The testimony as to the amount of theologicial science to be attained from the study of the English version, has the more force, coming as it does from a controversialist of the highest rank, a scholar of great robustness of intel- lect, and eminent for his attainments not only in biblical criticism, but also in physical science ; and who was known, withal, to have few sympathies with the Methodists and the Dissenters of England, and their pious but often uneducated ministry. The editor of the works of Sir Isaac Newton, the chaplain of Bishop Lowth, and the antagonist of Priestly, was no vulgar scholar. Orme has said of him, that he " never wrote what did not deserve to be read," and characterizes him as "stern, bold, clear, and brilliant, often elegant, sometimes argumentative, and always original, and as a critic, learned but dogmatic." (Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 249.) Such a man was little likely to indulge in language of undue disparagement as to those literary advantages in which he himself so abounded. We allude here to his testi- mony, only for the sake of enforcing a protest we would, here and elsewhere, now and at all times, make against the language of depreciation, sometimes incautiously used, regarding the competency as theologians of some of our ministers who have missed the advantages of a classical education} but who

11

74 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

far above you with all your knowledge of criticism and lan- guages, if you rely on that learning and neglect to cultivate piety. The true exegesis of the Scriptures is, after all, that put upon them by the Holy Spirit who first indited them, as He unfolds them to the prayerful student, and he who puts him- self, with few earthly helps, under that teaching, will profit more than the man who with all earthly helps neglects that teaching. Steep then all your attainments in prayer. And never so far forget your obligations to true learning, and your vows to Christ, as to speak or think lightly of the de- vout, though less learned student of the Scriptures, who bears meekly, and commends earnestly that cross it is your business and his, in common, to exemplify and extol in the eyes of the world.

Lastly, let that cross be your pattern. Let Christ and him crucified, be not a mere phrase or profession, but a living reality. That sacrifice on the cross was the embodi- ment of all true glory, and the concentration of all moral excellence. Be prepared to suffer in the school of Christ. "If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." Such is the law of success in the world of mind and of eternity. Learn the mute energy of meekness daring to suffer, persisting to love, and scorning to complain, as illustrated in Christ dy- ing for his murderers, and proffering to the world a recon- ciliation bought by his own blood for those who had shed that blood ; and extending to his embittered foes pardon which their sins alone had made necessary, and which his unparalleled compassion alone made possible. Remember that your rest, and your reward and your record, are not here, as His were not here. It was not that you might seek a snug parish and a fat salary, that the Master en- listed you — not that you might gather round you the flat- teries, and become the idol of an attached church and an admiring congregation. You were bought by the agonies and shame of Calvary for a sterner task. You are not carpet-knights, come out to shiver a lance in sport ; the actors in some gay tournament, where " ladies' eyes rain influence." Your work is a sad reality in a world of sin

are yet vigorous thinkers, and prayerful and most diligent students of the English version. We must record our humble dissent from such sweeping censure and depreciation, and while the name and memory of Andrew Fuller remain, we scarce need to quote even the authority of Horsley in our favor, who with all his stores of learning and his vigorous genius, was certainly not a sounder or abler theologian than the Kettering pastor.

IN OUR LITERATURE. 75

and wo, where you are called to a continuous and perilousT onset, fighting against principalities and powers, and spirit- ual wickedness in high places ; and the field around you is strewn with many a memorial of defeated hope, of suc- cessful temptation, and exulting wickedness. You will not then content yourself with a mere decorous, dozing and perfunctory discharge of your weekly task-work in the pul- pit. You are a man of the cross — it will be your aim to train up the churches to the same standard and in the same spirit. They will learn that the charity of the cross is one seeking rather to enrich others, than to hoard for itself. When the churches are more thoroughly pervaded by this spirit, there will be no longer a lack of funds or of labors for our foreign missions ; nor will the nations rush by myri- ads into hell, whilst the church is grudgingly telling out her few dollars for the work of evangelization, and calcu- lating how much money may be saved from the expense of the world's salvation, not economizing for the cross, so much as economizing from its demands.25 You will remind

25 The resources of the later Christian Church for the general diffusion of their faith may possibly resemble, in character, those of the earlier church. In a work, from the preface of which we have already quoted in a former note, the History of Missions by Blumhardt in its French version by M. Bost, we find M. Blumhardt making these observations on the missionary character and success of the early Christians. He is reviewing, at the close of the fourth century, the fall of Heathenism and the triumph of Christianity in the Roman empire, and the influences that produced these results. (Livre II. C. V. Vol. i., pp. 203-215). Having observed (p. 205), "that the Church is in its very nature an institution designed to form men into Christians, and not merely to gather together those who have already become such," and having remarked upon the various powers that aided, modified, and cor- rupted the Christian Church in its action on Roman Paganism, he holds this language as to the arms that the primitive Christians employed in the victories they won (p. 209). "We may perceive, amid this train of events, the law of perpetuation which was pursued by the messengers of salva- tion. All their preaching they grouped around the one figure of Christ as the Sovereign, Saviour and Judge of the human race, and this doctrine, again, they evermore based upon the Scriptures, to which they continually referred, not as to a human system, to which other systems might in turn be opposed, but as to a direct revelation from God. This course supplied to the Church, at once, the basis, the standard, and the unity that it needed, and also, at the same time, what was its most powerful means of conversion and of diffusion. The great cause of the success of the gospel was to be found in its very nature. A faith, that taught men their reconciliation with God, brought into the world a principle of life, which nothing else could rival, and for which nought else could compensate. This it is which gave to the Christians, at the very outset, the courage, and we may well call it, the audacity, with which they always facecl their adversaries. One might tremble for a Tertullian, had we not known the strength on which he leaned. * * The Christians had on their side an irresistible might, not in

76 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE

the churches that they were enlisted beneath the gory cross, the badge of the Master's anguish and shame, that, as far as man is concerned, they might rather give than receive ; — ■ that no vulgar pangs bought their peace ; and it was no easy task for their Lord to purchase for them their hope of Heaven. If impelled and permitted yourselves to go forth to the heathen, you will look to Golgotha, and find there motives whose impulsive power is never spent, and an example, whose self-sacrificing benevolence can never be rivalled. It is one of the traditions of the age of chivalry, that a Scottish king, when dying, bequeathed his heart to the most trusted and beloved of his nobles to be carried to Palestine. Enclosing the precious deposit in a golden case, and suspending it from his neck, the knight went out with his companions. He found himself, when on his way to Syria, hard pressed in battle by the Moors of Spain. To

the form of reasonings so much as of facts. l That which we have seen and heard, and our hands have handled, of the word of life, declare we unto you.1 And as these sacred truths from the beginning had been preserved in au- thentic writings, the Christians devoted themselves to the dissemination of these their sacred books, and to the translation of these books into various languages, with a zeal that had no parallel : and this form of proselytism was to be found nowhere else than in Christianity." * * * * Having ad- verted to the secondary causes, as found in the existing condition of society, that favored the spread of the gospel, he proceeds (p. 211) to the remark. " But it was above all the love that was diffused among the believers, that must strike and win the hearts of the pagans, in this era of selfishness and of cruelty. In this respect, the Church presented a spectacle such as Paganism had never beheld; and on this topic, indeed, nothing stronger could be said, than was afterwards said by Julian himself, as in one of his edicts he addressed his Pagan subjects : ' Is there not reason for us to be ashamed as we look upon others ? The Jews allow not one of their number to sink into beggary ; and the accursed Galileans support not only their own adherents, but even those of our party also? We alone are unable to point to any institution of a kind resembling theirs.'

" Such, then, were the powerful arms of which the faith availed itself in this memorable epoch in its history. There existed no missionary societies properly so called ; it was the entire Church of Christ Jesus that took upon itself the task of proclaiming the gospel. Nor did there exist missionary treasuries, or any. provision of that kind, whether it were that missionaries then had little or no use for money, or whether it were that each member of the church, rich or poor, finding his own happiness in the aid he lent to this work, found also with ease the requisite means. All the institutions of this kind that have been seen growing up in our times, as the fruits of a growing zeal, have their place only as the day has not yet come, when each member of the Church shall have again become for himself a zealous servant of the SaViour." We append to these remarks of Blumhardt the note annexed to the concluding sentences above quoted, by M. Bost. "It is worthy of* remark, that all this was written by the presiding officer of one of our best missionary institutions, for the entire paragraphias been trans- lated with almost literal exactness."

IN OUR LITERATURE. 77

animate himself to supernatural efforts as it were, that he might break through his thronging foes, he snatched the charge entrusted to him from his neck, and flinging it into the midst of his enemies, exclaimed, " Forth, heart of Bruce, as thou wast wont, and Douglas will follow thee or die :" and so he perished in the endeavor to reclaim it from the trampling feet of the infidels, and force his own way out. Even such will you feel your own position to be when en- countering the hosts of heathenism. Your Master's heart has flung itself in advance of your steps. In the rushing crowds that withstand you, there is not one whom that heart has not cared for and pitied, however hostile and debased, unlovely and vile. It is your business to follow the leadings of His heart, to pluck it, as it were, from beneath the feet of those who, in ignorance and enmity, would tread it into the dust. From the cross, as from a lofty eminence, it has cast itself abroad among these " armies of the aliens." And not like Douglas, is it yours to follow it and die ; you fol- low it and live. You follow it, and the heathen live. And whether your post be at home or abroad, among the des- titution of the West, or that of the ancient East, whenever glory, ease or wealth may seek to lure you aside from your work, look to that cross, and remember him who hung there in agony for your sins. Let the look which broke Peter's heart check your first infirmity of purpose, recall each wan- dering thought and rally anew all the powers of your faint- ing spirit. Be Paul's determination yours. " God forbid that i should glory save in the cross of our lord Jesus Christ, by which 26 the world is crucified unto me, and i unto the world."

May we all believe in, and bear that cross here, that it may bear us up in the day of the world's doom !

26 « Whereby." Versions of Tyndale, Cranmer, and Geneva i and not " by whom" as the Rhemish and the English Received Version.

APPENDIX.

THE "DIES IR^."

(Seepage 72.)

A small volume, not without interest, might be compiled from the literary history of the Dies Irae, and the versions it has received into various Euro- pean languages, and from examples of the powerful influence it has exercised upon the feelings and course of individuals. It can scarce be regarded as a waste of time to observe and analyze the power this hymn, from the awful- ness of its theme, and its own quaint, antique, and massive grandeur of structure, has acquired over the hearts of men. Unlike the Stabat Mater, another hymn of the Romish service, with which by mere critics it is ordi- narily classed, it is free from idolatry. A devout Protestant cannot unite in the Stabat Mater. It degrades the Redeemer by idolizing his earthly pa- rent. But in the Dies Iras, salvation is represented as being of Christ alone, and as being of mere grace : " Qui salvandos salvas gratis." Combining somewhat of the rhythm of classical Latin, with the rhymes of the Mediaeval Latin, treating of a theme full of awful sublimity, and grouping together the most startling imagery of scripture, as to the last judgment, and throwing this into yet stronger relief by the barbaric simplicity of the style in which it is set, and adding to all these its full and trumpet-like cadences, and uniting with the impassioned feelings of the South whence it emanated, the gravity of the North whose severer style it adopted, it is well fitted to arouse the hearer. It forms a part of the Romish service for the dead. Albert Knapp, one of the living sacred poets of Protestant Germany, and the compiler of a large body of hymns, the Liederschatz, has inserted a German version of it in his voluminous collection. (Evang. Liederschatz. Stuttgart, 1837. Vol. ii. p. 786, Hymn 3475.) He compares the original to a blast from the trump of the resurrection, and while himself attempting a version of it, declares its original power inimitable in any translation. (Ibid. p. 870.) This is the judgment of a man not to be contemned as a critic or a translator, for Knapp himself is called by a recent German critic, who seems far removed from any sympathy with the religious school to which Knapp belongs, " un- questionably the most distinguished religious poet of the day." (jT/iimm's Literature of Germany, Lond. 1844 ; p. 260.) Knapp refers to other versions of it made by the distinguished scholar, Aug. Wm. Schlegel, by Claus Harms, one of the most eminent of the living evangelical preachers of Germany, as well as by J. G. Fichte, by A. L. Follen, J. G. Von Meyer, and the Cheva- lier Bunsen, the friend of Niebuhr and of the late Dr. Arnold, and now the Ambassador of Prussia at the Court of St. James. The translation of Bunsen, with some slight variations, is appended by Tholuck to his sermon on the Feast day of the Dead. (Tholuck, Predigten. Hamburg, 1838, vol. I. pp. 28, 149.) Professors Edwards and Park, in their Selections from German, Literature (Andovcr, 1839), quote the remark of Tholuck, as to the deep sen- sation produced by the singing of this hymn in the University church at Halle : M The impression, especially that which was made by the last words,

APPENDIX. 79

as sung by the University choir alone, will be forgotten by no one." They introduce also the words of an American clergyman, present on the occa- sion, who says, "It was impossible to refrain from tears, when at the seventh stanza, all the trumpets ceased, and the choir, accompanied by a softened tone of the organ, sung those touching lines, " Quid sum miser tunc dictu- rus" &c. Like Knapp, they unite in the judgment, that no translation has equalled, or can equal the original Latin. (German Selections, p. 185.) Dr. H. A. Daniel, another German scholar, in his Bliithenstrauss alt-latein, Kir- chenpoesie, Halle, 1840, has inserted, besides the original Latin, and the Ger- man version of Bunsen (pp. 78 and 116), another version of his own (p. 110). Goethe has introduced snatches of the original Latin into the first part of his Faust.

The larger work of Daniel on the Mediaeval Hymns, his "Thesaurus Hym- nologicus," has not come into our hands. Dr. G. A. Konigsfeld, in his Latei- ni-sche Hymncn und Gesdnge aus dem Mittelalter, Bonn, 1847," has given (pp. 155 and 264) his German imitation of this hymn, with some interesting notes upon its variations and history. Together with Lisco, hereafter named, he refers to an earlier Essay by G. C. P. Mohnike, in his Kirchen. u. lit. hist. Studien, \r Band, \s Heft, Stralsund, 1814, as having very thoroughly dis- cussed the origin and literary fortunes of this remarkable composition. This Essay we have failed to find.

With the thoroughness that distinguishes the scholars of his nation, a liv- ing Protestant theologian, Dr. Frederick G. Lisco, preacher at the church of St. Gertrude, in Berlin, already advantageously known to British and American Christians, from his work on the Parables of our Lord, translated and issued in the Edinburgh Biblical Cabinet, and author of a popular com- mentary on the New Testament, has prepared and issued an edition of the Dies Irae (Berlin, 1840), containing seventy translations, fragmentary or com- plete, of this magnificent hymn, mostly into German, with notes of much interest and research. To a similar work on the Stabat Mater (Berlin, 1843), Lisco subjoined seventeen additional versions of the Judgment Hymn. One of these is a translation of it into modern Greek, by the Rev. Mr. Hildner, a Missionary of the (English) Church Missionary Society at Syra, and was sent by its author to the Litt. Anzeiger of the distinguished Prof. Tholuck. As double rhymes in Greek may be a curiosity to some readers, we subjoin tne verse already quoted, in the modern Greek garb given it by Mr. Hildner.

'JUarOVV (fc) KSKOTT L01O /AMOS Ko7TOJ jif] fiaTCLl(i)IJL£VOS 1

Hildner' s remark is that, dear as the Hymn had always been to him, it had ever borne a higher place in his regard after having heard it sung in the cele- brated Sixtine Chapel at Rome. Lisco' s Stabat Mater did not reach the hands of the present writer until after the first edition of this address, nor did he succeed in procuring the sight of his Dies Irce until after the second edi- tion had been issued.

Though some have claimed the honor of the authorship for the eminent Bernard, and others given to it an earlier and pontifical parentage in assign- ing it to Gregory the Great, Lisco and Mohnike and Gieseler refer it to Thomas de Celano. Lisco' s main reliance in this seems, that it is explicitly and with- out hesitation ascribed to him by Wadding, in his two works on the His- tory and the Writers of the Minorite Order, (Annates Minorum, Laigd. 1625, and Scriptores Ord. Minorum, Romce, 1650.) These German scholars seem fond of remarking that although Celano was of Italian birth, his native place being the town of that name in the Neapolitan territory, some of his life was spent in the service of his order, on the banks of their own Rhine, at Co- logne, and elsewhere.

Lisco refers to one German, Lecke, who wrote and published twelve sev- eral versions of the Dies Irae.

80 APPENDIX.

The authorship of the hymn is generally ascribed to one of the Franciscan order, or the Minorites as they are also called. Thomas de Celano, the friend and biographer of Francis of Assisi, the founder of this order, and who lived in the thirteenth century, is generally supposed to have written it about the year 1250. (Gieseler's Ch. Hist. 1st Am. Ed. II. 288. Knapp, Liederschatz II. 870. Thohick and Daniel ut supra.) Celano, it may be observed by the way, is one of those on whose authority is made to rest the legend that Francis received the stigmata or miraculous impressions of Christ's wounds. (Alban Butler, Ldves of Saints.) It has also been attributed to others of the same order, as to Matthew of Aquasparta, a general of the Minorites, who died with the rank of Cardinal, in 1302, or to Frangipani, the Dominican, who died in 1294. (Knapp, Lisco, ut supra.) Churton, the author of the " Early English Church," would give it, however, a much earlier origin, or he has fallen into a gross anachronism ; for he places it in the lips of the dying Thurstan, the Archbishop of York, who ended his course in the year il40, a full century before the time generally fixed for its composition by T. de Celano. (Chur- ton, Am. Ed. p. 272.)

Issuing, as it certainly did, from an age of great superstition and corrup- tion, it is remarkable that it should be so little incrusted with the prevalent errors of the time. The lines " Quern patronum rogaturus Cum vix Justus sit securus ?3i seem almost a renunciation of the Romish doctrine of the ad- vocacy of saints. Like the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, it remains as a monument of the truth, that in ages of general declension, God had his own hidden ones, and that beneath the drifting and accumulating mass of heresies and human inventions and traditions, there was an under- current of simple faith in Christ, that kept alive and verdant some less noticed portions of the blighted vineyard of the church. If really the work of the historian of the stigmata of the fanatical Francis of Assisi, it affords another of the many examples that show how much excellence and how much error may exist together.

The Franciscan order, in its earlier history, would seem to have cultivated sacred poetry. Francis, its founder, was the writer of some Italian verses, " two in the earliest poetical flights in the language," (Eustace. Classical Tour, II. 148) ; to Thomas de Celano, the authorship of the Dies Irae is generally attributed ; and to another Franciscan, Jacopone, is ascribed by the chief authorities the composition of the Stabat Mater.

The received Text of the Judgment Hymn, as incorporated into the Church Service in the Romish Missal, is not supposed to be by any means its origi- nal shape. The revisions of devotional poetry, which have in our own times awakened loud complaint, as if they were modern and audacious examples of a temerity unknown to our fathers, were practised in earlier times ; and, in some cases, retrenchment was improvement. The earliest forms of the Dies Irae are thought to be that in which it is found inscribed upon a mar- ble slab in the Church of St. Francis, at Mantua, and that in which it is given by Felix Malleolus (Hammerlein). In the Mantuan text, it has the aspect, by its introduction, of a devotional and solitary meditation, rather than of an anthem for the use of an assembly ; beginning with the following verses, the entire excision of which, by the Romish Missal, leaves in the fifth verse (thus made the first) an opening peal of startling majesty.

1. Cogita, anima fidelis, Ad quid respondcre velis

Christo venturo de ccelis. m

2. Cum deposcet rationem, Ob boni omissionem, Ob mall commissionem.

3. Dies ilia, dies ine,

Q,uam conemur praevenire, Obviamque deo irae.

APPENDIX. 81

4. Seria contritione, Gratias apprehensione, Vitae emendatione.

Then follow the first sixteen verses of the present received Text ; but, in- stead of the 17th of this, " Oro supplex" &c, comes as the conclusion of the Mantuan text, being, (with the four introductory verses above given,) the 21st verse,

Consors ut beatitatis

Vivam cum justiflcatis,

In aevum asternitatis. Amen.

The text of Hammerlein has the .first sixteen verses as we find them in the Breviary, with some verbal variations ; and then follow eight verses, more reg- ular in structure than the close as found in the Received Text, and contain- ing (which the latter does not) an idolatrous reference to the Virgin Mary, as herself, instead of her Son, being the Root and Offspring of David. The close, as found in the popular and ecclesiastical shape of the Hymn, seems an irregular and fragmentary condensation of these verses — the more forcible from its greater brevity, and, to a Protestant, welcome by its unaccountable omission of the Mariolatry.

17. Oro supplex a ruinis

Cor contritum quasi cinis; Gere curam mei finis.

18. Lacrymosa die ilia, Cum resurget ex favilla Tanquam ignis ex scintilla,

19. Judicandus homo reus, — Huic ergo parce Deus,

Esto semper (tunc ?) adjutor meus.

20. duando coeli sunt movendi, Dies adsunt tunc tremendi, Nullum tempus poenitendi.

21. Sed salvatis laeta dies ; Et damnatis nulla quies, Sed daemonum effigies.

22. O tu Deus majestatis, Alme candor Trinitatis, Nunc conjunge cum beatis.

23. Vitam meam fac felicem, Propter tuam genetricem, Jesse florem et radicem.

24. Praesta nobis tunc levamen, Dulce nostrum fac certamen, Ut clamemus omnes. Amen.

Although the exact relation of these texts to each other is a matter of ' doubt, it seems the more probable that the Received Text is the truncated remnant, left after a double revision ; the first excision having removed the introductory stanzas, as found on the marble in the church of St. Francis, and, when this retrenched text was elongated by additional verses at the close, as in the text of Hammerlein, a second revision greatly condensed these ; and each excision benefited the Hymn.

A French scholar, ia an article contributed to the Rcvuq des deux Mondcs,

12

83 APPENDIX.

Paris, since the appearance of Lisco's work, but in which wc do not re-' member any reference to the work oi the German scholar, has traced what

he supposes intimations and germs oi the Dies lra\ both as to its phrase- ology and its metre, in the Latin hymns of the Romish church, in the cen- turies preceding its composition. He has also entered at much length, and it would seem with much delicacy and justness of criticism, into the char* acter oi the music that some of the most distinguished composers of Italy and Germany have prepared for the Dies Inc.

Upon the Dies lra\ Mozart has founded his celebrated Requiem, the latest and not the least celebrated of his works. The excitement of his feelings whilst employed on this musical composition, is supposed to have hastened his end, which occurred, indeed, before he could fully complete the task. Among the great names who have sought to marry its poetry to immortal melody, may be enumerated Cherubini, Haydn, Jomelli, Palastrina, and Pergolesi.

Of tlie various versions the Hymn lias received into the French language, We are unable to speak. Lisco {D. I. 116) alludes to one by Gonon, a CYI- estine monk, in the beginning oi the 17th century, and (in his App. to the St. M. -\S) gives another oi the date oi 1702, apparently from a Catholic prayer book. A Jesuit oi France, whose work we have seen, issued, some- where about the time oi the first great Revolution of that country, in a vol- ume oi Latin poetry, an expansion of the Judgment Hymn, in oilier metre, and in Latin oi more classical style, in each change betraying, it would seem to us. a want of discrimination and taste.

Among the poets of England the Dies lne has found hosts of admirers, and many translators. The admiration which Sir Walter Scott felt for it is well known. He has introduced an English version of a few oi its opening stanzas into the Lay oi the Last Minstrel, whence Bishop Heber adopted it into his Hymns for the Church Service. They are too few to give any just idea oi the original, and the measure of the old Hymn is not as well re- tained as in the best German versions. Knapp, Daniel ami Bunsen all pre- serve the double rhymes of the Latin original; Scott and the earlier Eng- lish translators have given but a single rhymed ending to their verses, fn this respect the English version of the London Christian Observer (Vol. xxvi. p. '26), copied by Edwards and Park (German Selections, p. 15), also comes short oi its model, as Joes that oi the Rev. Isaac Williams, one of the writers oi the Oxford Tracts, and who contested unsuccessfully with the Rev. 3lr. Garbett, the election to the Professorship of Poetry in Oxford, on the retirement oi Keble. Williams1 version may be found in his Thoughts in Pus! \ ears {Am. erf., /'. 308). The school of Oxford Tractarian Theology, to which this writer belonged, seem to have been, from their admiration of the Mediaeval Church, as well as from its own intrinsic merits, strongly at- tracted to the Judgment Hymn. One oi their number, Rev. E. Caswafl, who has gone over to Rome, has in his Lyra Catholiea (London, 1849), a version of the Hymns oi the Breviary, given an English rendering (p. 241), that may \ ie. for Closeness and felicity, with that of Trench, named hereafter. Another Writer, of the same type ill doctrine with the Oxford Tractarian, the Rev. W. J. Irons, has published [Dies Ji\c, by \V. J. Irons, London, S. Masters, 1849) a version, with music, described as retaining the metre and double rhyme oi the original. This last work we have failed to meet

A writer in tin1 New- York Evangelist (October, 1841), has judiciously re- tained the double rhyme, but the reader misses the antique simplicity and rugged Btrength of the original. Sir Walter Scott in his letter to a brother poi t, Crabbe, n marks i "To my Gothic car. the Ste Mater, the Dies Irce, and BOme oi the other hymns of the Catholic chinch, are more solemn and afiecting than the fme classical poetry oi Buchanan; the one has the gloomy dignity oi a Gothic church, and reminds us constantly of the worship to w mob it is dedicated ; the other is more like a pagan temple recalling to our memory the classical and fabulous deities.'1 (Locknari's Lijc of Scott) Phil"

APPENDIX. 83

t arJdpftla, 1838, vol. i., p. 430.) In his last, days of life and mason, ho was overheard quoting it with fragments of the Bible, and the old Scotch Psalms.

" Wo very often,' says his kinsman and his biographer, "heard distinctly tho cadence of the Dies Ira*." (/bid., vol. ii., p. 734.) Its lines haunted in liko manner the dying hours of an earlier and Inferior poet, the Earl of Roscom- mon. He was the author of an English version of the hymn, and, as wo learn from Johnson's Lives of tin; Poets, he Uttered, in the moment when he expired, with great energy arid devotion, two lines of his own translation Of the Dies Iraj :

"My God, my Father and my Friend, Do not forsake me in my end."

Another nobleman, on the Continent, Count von Hcrnstofi; a native of Denmark, who died in Berlin, in the year 1835, is mentioned by Lisco (D. /., j>. 139), as having produced his German rendering of the Judgment Hymn, upon his death bed. Milman, another distinguished name in English po- etry, has, in his History of Christianity, rated this hymn as superior to any of the poetry of the Christian church in the early ages. " As to tin; hymns (setting aside the Te Deum), paradoxical as it may sound, I cannot but think the latter and more barbarous the best. There is nothing, in my judgment, to be compared with the monkish " Dies Jraj, dies i//a," or even the fctabat Mater. (Milmarii (idlii^nanVs Ed. JJ., ]>. 330, note). Roscommon's trans- lation, already the subject of reference, is said by Warton to be largely in- debted to the earlier version of Crashaw, a sacred poet of true genius, whoso rendering Of the Dies Jrcu was, in the judgment of Pope, the best of his com- positions. ( WillmoLfs Lives of Sacred Poets, Load. 1839, vol. i., p. 317.) This work of Crashaw may be found in Andersons British, Potts (vol. iv., p. 745). Crashaw was one of the clergymen of the English church, who during, or soon after the days of Laud, and probably from the influence of that school whoso leader and martyr Laud was, went over, as by a. natural progression, into the Romish communion. Drummond of llawthornden has also imitated the Dies free. (Anderson, iv. 682.) Evelyn, the author of the Sylva, and the friend of Jeremy Taylor, seems also to have tested his strength upon tho same task. In their correspondence; Taylor asks a copy of his friend's ver- sion. (Memoirs of Evelyn, Vol.. 1 V. p. 26.)

An English version of tin; Hymn has been given, amongst our own schol- ars, by the Rev. J. Newton Brown (Baptist Memorial, New York, October, 1848), now one of the .Secretaries of the Baptist Publication Society in Phil- adelphia; and another rendering of the Hymn, the most successful of tho English versions in double rhyme, appeared in the Newark Daily Adverti- ser of March 17, 1847. In that Journal, as in the New York Observer, it was awarded generous and just commendation, as is understood, by a distin- guished pastor and professor, whose praise is true honor. Although appearing anonymously, the version in the Newark Daily Advertiser was by Abraham Coles, M.D., of Newark, N. J., whose friends may well congratulate him on having achieved so successfully a difficult task, in which so many, and of eminent name, have been his competitors.

That accomplished Christian nobleman, Lord Lyndsay, in his Work on Christian Art (Lond., 1847, vol. I., pp. ccvii., ceviii.), has contributed another to the long list of attempts to transfer this Hymn into our own tongue. His version has but the single rhyme. He remarks, upon the tone of its piety, " as expressive of the feelings of dread, and almost despair, with which the Christians of the middle ages — taught to look on Christ as Jehovah, rather than the merciful Mediator, through whose atoning blood and all-sufficient merits the sinner is reconciled to his Maker — looked forward to the awful consummation of all things." We cannot but dissent, in some measure, from this judgment. Our Lord's own picture of the judgment, in the Gos- pel of Matthew, is equally stern and terrific i and the Hymn does not, as

84 APPENDIX.

much as most offices of the Romish Church, overlook the grace of Christ as the sinner's only plea.

I In allusion probably to its antique massiveness and majesty, Lisco quotes the title given by some to the Dies Irae, " a Hymn of Giants," (p. 87.) Considering the character, however, which the Anakim of Holy Writ, and the Titans of classic mythology, have borne for piety, the appellation seems infelicitously chosen. That name might, it appears to us, be more fitly given to the parodies of this great hymn, in which sacred themes, and the celestial imagery of Revelation, have been plundered by human passion, for the purposes of passing controversy and political satire. To parodies, in his own tongue, of this class, by Ed. Duller, J. H. Voss, and E. Ortlepp, Lisco refers, (D. /., p. 139 ; St. M., p. 55.) From his work it appears, also, that the example of putting to such baser uses holy things had been long before set by the clergy of the Roman Church. He quotes (I). /., pp. 110, &c.) from the German writings of Leibnitz, a Latin parody given by that, great scholar, as the work of some Catholic priest about the year 1700. This zealous parodist, from the union of the French and Spanish crowns in the Bourbon family, hoped for the downfall of the Protestant Holland, the conversion of England, and, in consequence, the subversion of Lutheranism and Calvinism throughout Europe. Of Spain's future victories in the fens of the Netherlands, he sings :

Quantus tremor est futurus, Dum Philippics est venturus, Has paludes aggressurus i ***** Hie Rex ergo cum sedebit, Vera fides refulgebit, Nil Calvino remanebit.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, Quern Patronum rogaturus, Cum nee Anglus sit securus ?

The great monarch of France he thus apostrophizes, in allusion to the lilies on his armorial shield.

Magne Rector liliorum. Amor, timor populorum, Parce terris Batavorum. * * *

To the anticipated defeat of the " bald-headed " William of Orange, the political hope of the Protestant interest in Europe, and to the restoration of James II., the abdicated king, and of his son the Pretender, that, in their recovered British dominions, they might plant a triumphant Romanism, he thus dedicates his two closing stanzas.

Confutatis Caloi brutis, Patre, nato, restitutio, Redde mihi spem salutis !

Oro supplex et acclinis Calvinismus fiat cinis, Lacrymarum ut sit finis !

The attempt thus to hurl the thunderbolts of Providence, and to predict the glories in reserve for the Catholic Church, proved a wretched failure. Never in the century since, has the cause of Rome been, in contrast with that of the Reformation, possessed of as muck even of comparative strength, as when the parodist prophesied : far less has she increased in resources and influence to the extent his auguries promised ; and the Stuart dynasty, in-, stead of the promised restoration, has met its extinction.

APPENDIX. 85

The want of any devout feeling that pervades this parody, whose author certainly wanted not either talent or ingenuity, in singing the future tri- umphs of his church, is most painfully apparent, in his profane distortion of the 14th stanza, to the adulation of Louis XIV.

Preces meae non sunt dignae, Sed, Rex magne, fac benigne, Ne bomborum cremer igne.

Little did the " Grande Monarque," or his flatterers suspect, that his own victories and glories, and those of his family after him, were sowing for their country, and for Europe, the seeds of that stormy retribution, the great French Revolution, in which neither Catholic France, nor Catholic Spain, nor Cath- olic Italy escaped so well as did the Holland and England whose degrada- tion and ruin they had plotted and promised.

But to return from these reckless perversions, a Hymn, such as the Dies Irae, which has wrought so strongly on the graver temperament of the North, was not, although Gothic in its structure, likely to remain without any effect on the quicker feelings of the South. Ancina, at that time a professor of medicine in the University of Turin, was one day hearing mass, when the Dies Irae, as chanted in the service for the dead, so strongly affected him, that he determined to abandon the world. He afterwards became Bishop of Saluzzo ; (Biogr. Diet, of Soc. Diff. Use/. KnowL, "Ancina;"). and in that episcopal charge, St. Francis de Sales declared of him, that he had never known one of more apostolic character. (Lives of the Companions of St. Philip Neri, London, 1849, p. 8.)

A composition that has, with no effort at elaboration or poetic art, so long attracted the admiration of poets like Goethe and Scott, distinguished for their skill in the mere art ; and yet met also the wants and won the sympa- thies of men, who, disregarding poetry, looked mainly to piety of sentiment — a poem that has thus united the suffrages of religion and taste, deserves some study, as a model, in that walk of such difficulty and dignity, the walk of sacred poetry.

The Latin original though made accessible to American readers in Ed- wards and Park's German selections, p. 185; in the Encyclopaedia Amer- icana, (art. Dies Irce) ; and in Isaac Williams' Thoughts in Past Years, (Am. Ed. p. 309,) may be here given, for the benefit of some who may not have at hand either of those works.

I.

Dies irae ! dies ilia ! Solvet saeclum in favilla ; Teste David cum Sibylla.

n.

Quantus tremor est futurus, Q,uando Judex est venturus, Cuncta stricte discussurus,

in. Tuba mirum spargens sonum, Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum.

Mors stupebit et Natura, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura.

APPENDIX.

Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur.

Judex ergo cum sedebit, Quidquid latet apparebit, Nil inultum remanebit.

VII.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? Quern patronum rogaturus, Cum vix Justus sit securusl

VIII.

Rex tremendae majestatis ! Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis.

IX.

Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuae viae : Ne me perdas ilia die.

Quaerens me sedisti lassus ; Redemisti crucem passus ; Tantus labor non sit cassus.

XI.

Juste Judex ultionis, Donum fac remissionis Ante diem rationis.

XII.

Ingemisco tanquam reus ; Culpa rubet vultus meus ; Supplicanti parce, Deus.

XIII.

Qui Mariam absolvisti, Et latronem exaudisti, Mini quoque spem dedisti.

XIV.

Preces meae non sunt dignaa Sed tu bonus fac benigne, Ne perenni cremer igne.

Inter oves locum praesta, Et ab haedis me sequestra, Statuens in parte dextra.

Confutatis mnledictis, Flannnis acribus addictis Vocu me cum bcnedictis.

APPENDIX. 87

XVII.

Oro supplex et acclinis, Cor contritum quasi cinis, Gere curam mei finis.

XVIII.

Lachrymosa dies ilia, Q,ua resurget ex fa villa, Judicandus homo reus : Huic ergo parce, Deus !

The readings of the first stanza at Rome and Paris differ. The former has as the second line, " Cruets expandens vexilla" in allusion to the old Romish tradition that the " Sign of the Son of Man," to be seen in the heavens on his coming to judgment, is the cross. The latter, omitting this line, has for its third line, " Teste David cum Sibylla" a reference to the Sibylline or- acles, whose genuineness as Christian prophecies seems never in the Me- diaeval times to have been questioned, and whose authority Bishop Horsley has sought to revive. (Journee du Chretien, Paris, 1810, pp. 82, 84.) This seems the more ancient, and, to Protestants, is perhaps the less objection- able reading. The closing sentence, " Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem, Amen" is a prayer for the dead ; but not having the rhymes of the rest, we should suppose the words rather a part of the burial service into which the hymn is inlaid, than a portion originally of the hymn itself.

The closest of the English versions of the Dies Irae, that has fallen under the eye of the present writer, is that of the Rev. Richard C. Trench, a cler- gyman of the Established Church in England, author of two admirable volumes, the one on the Miracles and the other on the Parables of our Lord, and editor of " Sacred Latin Poetry,55 which latter work the present writer has failed to see. His rendering does not reach, however, the flowing free- dom or full cadences of the original. It is subjoined.

DIES IR.ZE.

O that day, that day of ire, Told of Prophet, when in fire, Shall a world dissolved expire J

O what terror shall be then, When the Judge shall come again, Strictly searching deeds of men :

When a trump of awful tone, Thro' the caves sepulchral blown, Summons all before the throne.

What amazement shall o5ertake Nature, when the dead shall wake, Answer to the Judge to make.

Open then the book shall lie, All o5erwrit for every eye, With a world's iniquity.

When the Judge his place has ta'en, All things hid shall be made plain, Nothing unavenged remain.

What then, wretched ! shall I speak,

Or what intercession seek,

When the just man's cause is weak 1

88 APPENDIX.

Jesus, Lord, remember, pray, I the cause was of thy way ; Do not lose me on that day.

King of awful majesty,

Who the saved dost freely free ;

Fount of mercy, pity me !

Tired thou satest, seeking me — Crucified, to set me free ; Let such pain not fruitless be.

Terrible Avenger, make

Of thy mercy me partake,

E'er that day of vengeance wake.

As a criminal I groan, Blushing deep my faults 1 own ; Grace be to a suppliant shown.

Thou who Mary didst forgive, And who bad'st the robber live, Hope to me dost also give.

Though my prayer unworthy be, Yet, O set me graciously From the fire eternal free.

Mid thy sheep my place command, From the goats far off to stand ; Set me, Lord, at thy right hand ;

And when them who scorned thee here Thou hast judged to doom severe, Bid me with thy saved draw near.

Lying low before thy throne, Crushed my heart in dust, I groan ; Grace be to a suppliant shown.

Another version, earlier than that of Dr. Coles, which has been the subject of a reference above, is here for the first time published, as adding another to the attempts, in English comparatively few, to preserve the double rhymes of the original.

DIES IRE1.

I.

Day of wrath ! that day dismaying ; — As the seers of old are saying, All the world in ashes laying.

ii. What the fear ! and what the quaking ! When the Judge his way is taking, Strictest search in all things making.

in. When the trump, with blast astounding, Through the tombs of earth resounding, Bids all stand, the throne surrounding.

APPENDIX.

Death and Nature all aghast are, — While the dead rise fastT and faster, Answering to their Judge and Master.

v. Forth is brought the record solemn ; See, o'erwrit in each dread column, With men's deeds, the Doomsday volume.

VI.

Now the Sovran Judge is seated : All, long hid, is loud repeated ; Nought escapes the judgment meted.

VII.

Ah ! what plea shall I be pleading 1

Who for me be interceding,

When the just man help is needing'?

Oh, thou King of awful splendor, Of salvation free the Sender, Grace to me, all gracious, render !

Jesus, Lord, my plea let this be,

Mine the wo that brought from bliss Thee;

On that day, Lord, wilt Thou miss mel

Wearily for me thou sough test ;

On the cross my soul thou boughtest ;

Lose not all for which thou wroughtest !

XI.

Vengeance, Lord, then be thy mission : Now, of sin grant free remission, Ere that day of inquisition.

Low in shame before Thee groaning ; Blushes deep my sin are owning : Hear, O Lord, my suppliant moaning!.

Her of old that sinned forgiving, And the dying thief receiving, Thou, to me too, hope art giving.

In my prayer though sin discerning, Yet, good Lord, in goodness turning, Save me from the endless burning !

'Mid thy sheep be my place given ; Far the goats from me be driven ; At thy right hand fixed in heaven. 13

90 APPENDIX.

XVI.

When the cursed are confounded, With devouring flame surrounded ; With the blest be my name sounded.

XVII.

Bowed and prostrate hear me crying Heart in dust before thee lying : Lord, my end, O be thou nigh in !

Ah that day ! that day of weeping , When, in dust no longer sleeping, Man to God, in guilt is going : — Lord, be} then, thy mercy showing !

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

(Delivered before the Hudson River Baptist Association, June 16, 1835.) " I AM PURE FROM THE B.LOOD OF ALL MEN." — Acts XX. 26.

No writer of the Bible h$s insisted more earnestly than did Paul on the great fact of the Divine sovereignty. He saw the plan of Infinite wisdom perfect in all its parts, and immutable in all its results, stretching away over the whole field of his labors ; reaching over every country, and ex- tending through all ages, the unchanged and unchangeable counsel of God. He rejoiced in it. He rested upon it. Yet it did not at all lower his views of human duty, nor with him did the Divine agency supersede the workings of an inferior and mortal instrumentality. He knew that, with all his counsel, nothing could be but as God ordered it ; and with all his labor, nothing could prosper but as God wrought it. And yet, on the other hand, he saw that the command- ments of God to man were part of his counsels for man, and that one of the modes in which the Most High would work was his sending man to work. While looking at the cause of his Master on the one side, he was therefore seen soaring away, as on the pinions of seraphim, into the regions of fathomless wisdom, and his theme was the election of God, sure and indefeasible. Looking at that same cause under an opposite aspect, he saw the law of God and the duty of man, rising up to cast their shadow as over the whole breadth of the earth. He then felt himself a debtor to all, and intense was his anxiety lest his skirts should bear the blood of any. %

Fathers and brethren, permit one who feels deeply, that in holiness and usefulness, as in the number of years and the weight of experience, he is far surpassed by those whom he addresses — permit him yet, to lead you to the same point of view at which the great Apostle of the Gentiles was often

92 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

found. Like him, let us look abroad upon the field of duty as in the light of eternity. If the superiors of the speaker, you are the inferiors of that Saviour to whose feet he would summon, and in whose name, as brethren, he warns, or as fathers, he entreats you. Forgetting therefore, for the time, our relative position, as the younger and the older ministers of the New Testament, let us gather in one indiscriminate throng around the seat of our common Lord, and hear what He hath said to us by the mouth of his holy apostle. And give to me your prayers that the Spirit of God may so replenish and aid him who speaks, that he may be saved from bearing the blood of the souls that now surround him.

Paul appealed to the Ephesian pastors, as his witnesses, that, in diligence and devotedness, he had escaped the stain of blood-guiltiness. Such stain was possible, or else it was idle to rejoice before God in having avoided a danger that never existed. His words imply that Christian pastors may be guilty of the blood of the souls that perish as under the shadow of their sanctuaries. Now they cannot be guilty where they have not first been responsible. Let us, then, inquire what the Scriptures have said indicating such respon- sibility. And if the fact of ministerial accountability for the souls of their hearers be found written, broadly and vividly, upon the pages of this volume, does it not behoove us, then, to inquire the modes, in which, as pastors and evangelists, ice may incur this tremendous curse, the blood of our people ? And since, in addressing the impenitent, we are wont to imitate Paul, and derive from themes of the most awful character our appeals to the human heart, and " knowing the terrors of the Lord" so to " persuade men," let us in the same spirit school ourselves ; and allow a fel- low-laborer to bring before you, pastors of the fold of Christ, the fearf ulness of the guilt thus incurred — the overwhelm- ing horrors of standing at the foot of the throne, with the blood of souls on the hand and on the head, perjured stew- ards, sentinels false to our trust, and pastors who have destrffyed the flock of our charge.

I. To understand the phrase employed by the apostle, here in his intercourse with the Christian pastors of Ephe- sus, and at an earlier period in his reply to the Jewish blas- phemers of Corinth, it is necessary to refer to the Hebrew Scriptures, from which this form of expression was borrowed.

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 93

By the laws of Moses, the Israelite who reared not a battle- ment upon the roof of his house, brought upon himself the blood of the incautious stranger, who fell and perished in consequence of his neglect. He had not indeed lifted the murderous weapon ; he had not lain in ambush, or drugged the cup of his guest with poison ; nor had he even cherished a revengeful feeling or thought of anger. Besides all this, the stranger himself must have been careless, thus to perish. Yet the absence of any overt act, and even of any thought of crime on the part of the host, and the want of due cau- tion on the part of his guest, did not relieve the former from blood-guiitiness, where he had neglected an enjoined duty. So when the murdered traveller was found on the way-side, felled by an unknown hand, the elders of the nearest city were not exonerated from guilt, and the innocent blood would be laid to the charge of the land, unless, washing their hands over a slaughtered victim, they would pray to God, and solemnly declare that their hands had not shed the blood of the hapless stranger, nor had their eyes seen his fall. Now here was crime which not only was not com- mitted by them, but the commission of which they perhaps could not have prevented by any precaution : yet was the blood upon them unless they thus protested against the deed. It was not then only an overt act of murder which condemned them, but the omission of due care, in providing that it should not occur, or in denouncing it when it had occurred, would also make them chargeable with guilt in the eyes of God. The same principle, and with the same phraseology to convey it, was carried out into the teachings of the prophets. Ezekiel was made a watchman. He was to see the coining vengeance, and lift aloud the note of warning. If he did it not, the man or the people who offended, perished indeed in their iniquity, and wrought out their own ruin ; but the minister of God found upon his head also the blood of the evil-doer thus cut off in his trans- gressions.

The apostle takes up this language and these principles, as being fully applicable to the new dispensation under which he labored. He spoke as a man to whom had been transferred the charge received by the prophet, who of old had seen the visions of God by the river Chebar. It was not the Jews only he had warned, for the Ephesian Church contained the Gentile as well, and from the blood of all

94 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY

men was he free, arid every man had he warned, " testify- ing," as he asserts, " both to Jews and to Greeks." It was not of civil war, of the ruin of Jerusalem, or of temporal death that he warned them ; but as he earnestly appeals to them, " repentance and faith" — repentance and faith — had been the topics of his warning ; among them he had gone " preaching the kingdom of God," and the ministry which he had received, and would discharge to others as he had done it to them, was " to testify of the Gospel of the Grace of God." Grace and the Gospel, then, were not, in his view, inconsistent with this appalling responsibility. If he had unfaithfully executed his apostolical charge, wo was unto him, not only from the tortures of an accusing con- science, but from the added curses of a world betrayed and ruined by his neglect. But when his work had been fear- lessly and fully done, he could turn, as he did to those of his own nation at Corinth, and warn them that their blood was on their own head ; while, shaking his raiment, he de- clared of himself that he was " clear" from the clinging curse of their destruction.

Now it is not merely the number of passages containing any doctrine, that decides its certainty ; for a single asser- tion of the Holy Ghost is as true, as if it were thrice repeat- ed. Had, therefore, the Bible contained nothing further of explicit testimony to this effect, it seems as if in the instances already quoted, we shall find the responsibility of the Chris- tian ministry for the souls of their hearers placed beyond question. But there is other evidence, in the teachings of human reason, as to the extent of our influence over each other, in the language of the Bible with regard to such influ- ence, in the descriptions employed to represent the charac- ter and office of the Christian minister, and in the express testimony of the apostolical epistles, that the pastor owes to God an account of the flock, which he was appointed to fold and to tend.

The Bible, in the words already cited, only recognizes a great truth, of which even unaided reason gives us testimony in part, we mean, the influence of man over man, and his evident accountability for the character of the influence that he is thus shedding over all around him. The world is filled with the countless and interlacing filaments of influ- ence, that spread from each individual over the whole face and frame-work of society. The infant that lies wailing

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 95

and helpless in the arms of his mother, is already wielding an influence felt through the whole household, by his fret- fulness disturbing, or by his serene smiles gladdening that entire home. And as, with added years, his faculties are expanded, and the sphere of his activity widens itself, his influence increases. And every man whom he meets, much more whom he moulds and governs, becomes the more hap- py or the more wretched, the better or the worse, according to the character of his spirit and example. Nor can he strip from himself this influence. If he flee away from the soci- ety of his fellows to dwell alone in the wilderness, he leaves behind him the example of neglected duty, and the memory of disregarded love, to curse the family he has abandoned. Even in the pathless desert he finds his own feet caught in the torn and entangled web of influence, that bound him to society ; and its cords remain wherever he was once known, sending home to the hearts that twined around him, sorrow and pain. Nor can the possessor of it expect it to go down into the grave with him. The sepulchre may have closed in silence over him, and his name may have perished from among men, yet his influence, nameless as it is, and untrace- able by human eye, is floating over the face of society. As in the external and visible world, the fall of a pebble agitates, not perceptibly indeed, yet really, the whole mass of the earth, thus in the world of morals, every act of every spirit is telling upon the whole system of moral beings to which God has bound him. No man leaves the world, in all things, such as he found it. The habits which he was instrumental in forming, may go on from century to century, an heir-loom for good or for evil, doing their work of misery or of happi- ness, blasting or blessing the country that has now lost all record of his memory. In the case of some, this influence is most sensible. Every age beholds and owns their power. Such men have lived. And thus it is, that, although centu- ries have rolled their intervening tide between the age of their birth and our own, and the empires under which they flourished have long since mouldered away from the soil i whence they sprung, and the material frame of the author himself has been trampled down into the undistinguished dust, the writers of classical antiquity are yet living and laboring in our midst. The glorious dreams of Plato are yet floating before the eye of the metaphysician, and the genius of Homer has tinged with its own light the wholei

96 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

firmament of modern invention. Nor, unhappily, is this all. Corruption is yet oozing out, in lessons of profligacy and of atheism, from the pages of an Ovid and a Lucretius, and as from their graves streams forth the undecaying rankness of vice and of falsehood, though the dominion of the world has long since passed from the halls of their Ceesars, and the very language they employed has died away from the lips of the nation. The Church yet feels, throughout all lands, the influence of the thoughts that passed, perhaps in the solitude of midnight, through the bosom of Paul, as he sat in the shadows of his prison, an old and unbefriended man — thoughts which, lifting his manacled hand, he spread in his epistles before the eyes of men, there to remain for ever. They feel yet the effect of the pious meditations of David, when roaming on the hill-side, a humble shepherd lad, of the family piety of Abraham, and of the religious nurture that trained up the infancy of Moses. Every nation is affected at this moment by the moral power that emanated from the despised Noah, as that preacher of righteousness sat among his family, perhaps dejected and faint with un- successful toil, teaching them to call upon God, when all the families of the earth beside had forgotten him. And if the mind, taking its flight from the narrow precinct of these walls, were to wander abroad along the peopled highways, and to the farthest hamlets of our own land, and, passing the seas, to traverse distant realms and barbarous coasts, every man whom its travels met — nay, every being of human mould that has ever trodden this earth in earlier ages, or that is now to be found among its moving myriads, has felt, or is feeling, the influence of the thoughts of a solitary wo- man, who, centuries since, stood debating the claims of con- science and of sin, amid the verdant glories of the yet unfor- feited Paradise. Nor does this influence end with time. The shock of the archangel's trump will not break the line of its power, nor the gulf of eternity swallow up its steady stream. It travels on into the world of spirits. And the influence of the pious or the wicked parent, of the faithful or unfaithful pastor, will be felt through all the bowers of hea- ven, and course its way into all the caverns of hell. The benighted pagan, who has, within the last hour, shuddered on awaking in eternity to the full view of his doings and destiny, will, through the ceaseless lapse of that eternity, curse the moral power of the ancestors, through whose

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 97

neglect of Divine Revelation, he himself was born amid the starless gloom of heathenism.

Influence is, then, mighty and enduring. Now, if, as all will allow who believe in human accountability, man be accountable for his acts, and accountable for his feelings, then is he responsible for his influence ; for his acts and his feelings are the elements which go to make up that influ- ence. And, in proportion to his station and his opportuni- ties, his influence growing, there grows with it a correspond- ing responsibility. And if the ministry occupy an eminent post, and cast abroad a wide influence, as its enemies and its friends alike allege, then the man who fills it stands answerable to his God and his race, as one bound by high and fearful obligations, the cords of which he cannot sever, and the burden of which he may not hope to transfer.

And are not these views taken up and set in a more full and appalling light in the Book of Scripture ? See in what terms it denounces the guilt of exercising an unholy influ- ence. How has the name of Jeroboam been branded with reprobation by that fearful repetition — "he made Israel to sin." He made Israel to sin, not by the application of brute force, not that they ceased to be voluntary agents, (for every one of them continued accountable for his individual share in the national sin,) but by the moral power of his example and authority. It had been the aggravation of their guilt in the degenerate sons of Eli, that through their misconduct, shedding around a disastrous influence, "men abhorred the offering of the Lord," and therefore was their " sin very great." And the charge, which in a far distant day Malachi brought against the corrupted and corrupting priesthood of his own age, was that, whilst their fathers had by a holier influence " turned many to righteousness," they themselves had by their hypocrisy and scandals " caused many to stum- ble at the law." When our Saviour, with an unfaltering hand, tore the mask from the Pharisees, he described them as blind leaders of the blind. Others fell by their arts, or their negligence ; and they drew in the sweeping train of their influence multitudes into ruin, as the dragon of the Apocalyptic vision dragged down in his fall to the earth a third part of the stars of heaven. Of the proselyte whom they made with such zeal, and at such cost of effort, our Lord declared, that they made him twofold more the child of hell than themselves. Not that he was a passive mass of

14

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matter to their plastic touch. But the strong hand of their moral influence left upon him the imprint of a hopeless hypocrisy. He bore about him a conscience which they had aided in searing as with a hot iron, and an understanding ■which they had garrisoned with pride, and walled about with prejudices, to guard it from the very access of truth. It is of the vast range and power of man's moral influence that Christ spoke, when he uttered the ominous words, " Wo

UNTO THE WORLD BECAUSE OF OFFENCES." It is of OUr

rigid accounting to our God for the effects of that influence that he testifies, when declaring, " But wto unto that

MAN BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH."

But in addition to this general doctrine of influence, the Bible uses, in nearly all of its appellations for the office of the Christian ministry, terms which imply personal respon- sibility for the individuals intrusted to, or operated upon, by the Christian teacher. The shepherd answerable for his flock, the steward accountable for his lord's goods, the hus- bandman laboring and receiving wages or blame according to the character of his tillage, the leader by his steps guid- ing the steps of others, the overseer exercising a deputed authority of which he must return an account to his em- ployer, and the ruler controlling others, and responsible for the conduct which such control has produced, are favorite titles with the inspired writers for the Christian pastor and evangelist. Now, do not nearly all of these imply account- ability of a very high order as to the souls of men 1 Would the shepherd be allowed to cast all the blame of his deso- lated fold upon the ravening wolf, or the silly sheep ; or would the steward be permitted to refer all his losses to the dishonesty of thieves or the wastefulness of servants, if he himself had not been careful ?

As if to end all doubt, we find the apostolic epistles ex- plicit in their testimony upon this subject. It is said of ministers by Paul in his letter to the Hebrew believers, that they watch for souls as those that must give account. They hold a fearful stewardship, and it is required in stew- ards that a man be found faithful. As to the extent of moral influence, he himself speaks of it as operating upon all whom the Christian minister met. If not for their salva- tion, then was it for their ruin — a savor of death unto death ; where it healed not, it hardened, and where it could not melt, there it cauterized. And the principle in its broadest

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 99

ground he has adopted in an allusion to ministerial duty, where he bids his beloved associate not to become "par- taker of Other men's sins." There is then a sense in which we may share the sins of others. And so, the death eternal which these sins produce, may be in some sense chargeable to us. As the vigilant pastor sates himself and those that hear him, even thus does the negligent minister destroy not only his own soul, but the souls intrusted to his faithless hands.

J)o not the Scriptures, then, brethren, fully publish the fact of ministerial accountability for the souls of their hear- ers ? The Christian teacher stands not alone, and alone he cannot fall. His every act, his internal and hidden spirit, are telling day by day on three worlds. Heaven has sent forth from its expanded gates angels to minister to his on- ward career, or they have returned thither to rejoice over the sinners converted by his instrumentality. Hell is pour- ing out her hordes to thwart and to seduce, to allure and to alarm. And this earth, the great scene of interest, and the field of conflict for the two worlds of light and of darkness, is benefited or harmed by every step that he takes, as with the censer of intercession in his hands, he rushes forth be- tween the living and the dead : to stay the desolating pesti- lence if he wave that censer aright, looking upward ; and if he loiter and neglect it, then standing but to spread the contagion he was sent to rebuke. Prayer withheld, or prayer offered — labor performed, or labor neglected — faith in vigorous exercise, or faith imprisoned in unrighteousness — a heart glowing with love to Christ, or a heart chilled with worldliness — the Spirit of God grieved, or the Spirit of God obeyed — these make up the history of every wakeful hour in that man's life. And who shall say, that such a man, standing in a relation so close and so momentous to this and other worlds, is not responsible for the character of each hour, and for the workings of that hour upon the eter- nal interests of all that surround him %

But where, then, are the limits of this influence? Is the sinner responsible for nothing? Is the guilt of his impeni- tence and ruin solely his pastor's ? — Not so. There is a sense in which each of us lives for himself, dies for himself, for himself sins, or for himself believes. There is another sense, in which none of us lives for himself, dies for him- self, for himself alone sins, or believes only for himself.

100 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

riing to the first of the- Sic a :::ner is chargeable with his own ruin, nor shall our unfaithful ministration be any plea at the bar o: unconTerted he:. your

onences. God gai ruce and

reason, warnings and invitations. You perish in your own iniquity. But, according to the latter sense, if you hare been left unwarned by friend or teacher, the guilt of that iniquity and of your consequent ruin is in part shared by the Christian teacher who m »u not. His share in the

and the punishment makr nr portion of both the

or the lighter, is :..- union of many accomplices in a

deed of blocl lessens not their individual criminality, but

aggravates i:. But it may still be asked, if sinners

perish at all, is it not always through unfaithfulness on the

part of the Church ? — We believe not, C: ~ vn preach-

- ncere and full as it was, did no: :usa-

The sinner may be warned with perfect fidelity, and

Christian's responsibility be fully satisfied, and yet the sinner perish. If he perish warned of his sin, his blood is on his own head. But if the ministry have not been faithful to declare to him the whole conn d, and that in the

right spirit, it is evident that the C: .cher in some

sense partake- -. and may share the doom of him

whom he thus neglects or :

Nor lei b ever be - up posed, that, by thus stating the sponsibilities and the influence of man, we forget or dispute the great doctrine of the Divine power i: tion. and

the great doctrine of the Divir^ _nty in the putting

forth of that power. It is of the grace of God that any are saved, and the instrumentality and influence of man. apart from that grace, are in themselves idle as the voice of music to the stores. It i _rneratethe man. But

re of God to use in his kingdom human instru- mentality, and human influence. I n the duty of man to put them forth. It is of the grace of God to bless them when put forth. It is of one only of these truths thai are now called to treat, that of human duty, and its connec- tion in the order of the Divine purposes with the salvation of mankind. As the human eye cannot at once behold the two opp of the object it confronts, thus is it diifi-

cult for the mind to bring into one view the two op] aspects that belong to every great doctrine of the Bible, other great truths to which we have alluded stand up

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 101

in the volume of God in impregnable strength. Fully re- ceiving them, it is sufficient now to remark, brethren, as we pass, that human agency cannot trench upon them, or pros- per without them.

II. If such be the far-spreading power and the manifold and fearful responsibilities of our office, fathers and breth- ren, well might the man, who uttered the words before us, years after admonish the Colossian pastor Archippus, that he should take heed to the ministry which he had received of the Lord, that he fulfil it ; and well might he bind upon the conscience of his beloved disciple and coadjutor the in- junction, that he should make full proof of his ministry. And a fittingr termination was it to the announcement of such a truth, that he should proceed, as he did, to admonish the Ephesian pastors that they take heed therefore to them- selves* no less than to all the flock. Wherein have we failed to make this fulfilment and full proof of our mini For it is not the interests of others alone that are concerned : let us look to ourselves, for the responsibilities of our office are entwined with our own well-being for time, and through eternity. We pass, therefore, to inquire the methods, in which we may by remissness have drawn upon our heads the blood of the sinners we may have failed to warn.

Were we to imagine a herald sent forth to the peopled villages of a revolted province with the proclamation of his prince, charged to promise a free pardon to all who might submit, and return to their allegiance, commissioned to de- nounce a sure and overwhelming vengeance against all per- severing" in their mad rebellion, and instructed withal to spread far and wide the royal edict, and to distribute it to every group of villagers he should meet by the way-side, and to every traveller who shared his journeyings. we can readily see in what mode his duties must be discharged, or he remain guilty, to his prince of unfaithfulness, and to the revolter of a murderous treachery. He might suppress the document, and substitute a forgery of his own imagination ; or while disclosing it in part, he might interpolate and abridge, erase, and amend, suppressing one fact and distort- ing another, until the proclamation, as read to the crowds who gathered at his feet, might to their ears bring a mean- ing utterly alien to that which had stirred the heart of the king from whom it emanated. Or, passing to another hamlet, he might there, without marring a syllable of the documeut,

102 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

so dispose of it that few would meet it. Wholly over- looking the general dispersion of it through the homes of the district, he might content himself with affixing the edict on high amid other and ordinary notices, to meet perhaps the gaze of a diligent inquirer, but scarce perceptible to the casual observer ; and go his way, without further effort to bring home to the individuals whom he met their danger and their duty, or inquiring, as he passed, who had read and who had heeded the momentous instrument. And when coming to yet another neighborhood, planted in the bosom of some quiet valley, we might see hirn, not without assidu- ity, gathering together from its shades and from the hills which environed it, the population of the scattered cottages, and delivering to the tumultuous crowd the mandate, alike unmutilated and incorrupt ; but yet his whole statement might be marked with such listlessness, or such levity, and be uttered so heartlessly, or so scornfully, that the con temptuous group around him might at once adjudge him in sincere, and declare the proclamation he bore a forgery of no value. And it would be evident that, in all or in either of these ways, the very intent of the embassy would have been frustrated, and a wrong would have been done to the prince thus unfaithfully served, and to the people thus un- faithfully warned. And in every battle-field which should afterwards be strewed with the slain of the unsuccessful re- volters, and on every scaffold on which others of them should expiate their treason with their blood, he would be to some extent, implicated ; and the blood of the deluded villagers would, alike by their kindred and their ruler, be asked at his hands.

Now the gospel ministry is such a proclamation. The preacher derives his name from the office of the herald, thus publishing to a mingled and busy population the laws or the news of the day. And, in any one of the modes thus indi- cated, the Christian minister may sin, and bring down upon his head the curse of those who have perished through his imbecile and faithless demeanor. In the substance of our message, in the scene and manner of its delivery, and above all, in the spirit that marks its announcement, we may be misleading and hardening the souls we were sent forth to invite again to their God and ours. And such a three-fold fulfilment, as requisite to the Christian ministry, seems inti- mated in Paul's description of his own course : " By

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 103

manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience as in the sight of God." The manifested truth described the substance of his ministry ; its commenda- tion to every man — the manner of his labor, and his appeal to the conscience of the hearer, and his constant sense in his own conscience that God was observing him, indicated the spirit of his ministry.

1. In the substance of our ministrations, we may contract the guilt of blood by delivering error in the stead of truth, and substituting the traditions of men for the testimonies and law of God. Or giving one portion of the truth, we may make it a virtual falsehood, by withholding the truth which in Scripture accompanies and guards it. We may preach human dependence to the subversion of the great truth of human obligation, or we may so insist on human duty and ability, as to mar the glorious truth of the necessity of the Divine influences. We may preach a gospel that crucifies and tramples upon the law, the eternal and immu- table law, that Christ came expressly to magnify : or we may hold up the law till it hides that gospel of which it is but the precursor and the inferior. And even when we bring to the people of our charge the truth symmetrically, and in its fair proportions, we may fail to bring the well- timed truth adapted to the snares, the duties, and the trials of the passing day. We may be combating heresies they never knew, and indoctrinating a church who are already but too proud of their orthodoxy, and too neglectful of their morals ; or we may be preaching practically to those who are yet ignorant of the first motives, the seminal principles of the Divine life — principles which the doctrines of the Bible, and those doctrines only, can minister. And we may utter truths not entirely unseasonable, yet comparatively of less moment, whilst from the sides of our desk, from our pews and our hearths, one and another is sliding into eter- nity, untaught in the great lessons of repentance and faith. ! We may give an undue and disproportionate attention to the necessary, but the minor truths of the Bible, more anxious | to make men partisans than Christians ; whilst " the weight- ier matters" of its testimony are scarce ever felt by our peo- ple, pealing over their heads, as with a voice of mighty thunderings, the shortness of life, the nearness of judgment, the worth of the soul, the value of the atonement, the need of regeneration, and the promises of the wonder-working,

104 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY,

Spirit. And what will be the testimony borne against us by them, as they awake in the light of eternity to a vivid know- ledge of the whole gospel ? Is there not, herein, guilt upon us, my brethren %

2. We may attract the displeasure of our God in our pas- toral character, by overlooking the extent and the minute- ness of the duties owed to the church in the personal deliv- ery and enforcement of truth, or in the scene and mode of our labors. We may dispense the gospel too much in the generalizations of the pulpit, and too little in the special applications of private intercourse. When the apostle vouched his own exemption from the curse of blood, he declared that he had not ceased day and night to warn eve- ry man, and with many tears, and from house to house. Although we would not give to these words the rigid inter- pretation employed by some, yet is it not but too probable, brethren, that we are all deficient in the faithful and earnest visitation of the flock, and that the truth is too little urged home within the bounds of the family ? And is not much of the remissness and worldliness of Christians owing to the want of a more thorough endeavor, to follow home the impressions of the Sabbath by the less formal and more familiar and searching intercourse of the week ? In the world, is not our ministry defective, by resembling too faintly that of the primitive church, in its aggressive char- acter, against the mass of impenitent and unsanctified mind, that never enters our sanctuaries, and which must be sought out and assailed in its own lurking-places ? And if not able ourselves to accomplish the work, need we not in our churches to sustain a distinct class of men who shall thus go forth upon the world, and leave no home, where man is wretched and man is sinful, unvisited by that gospel, which reveals the only remedy of his wretchedness, and the only hope for his guiltiness ? Should not the wonderful success which crowned the faithfulness, in this work, of Baxter at Kidderminster, be resounding in the ears of us all, until we had attempted a similar onset upon the hearths of our own neighborhoods ? And is there not in our churches the guilt of blood, in our failing to maintain the high and severe standard of primitive discipline, delivering the gospel to the world anew in the holy lives of its professed disciples ? Shall not the blood of the covetous, and formal, and sensual, the drunkards, extortioners, and revilers, that lurk in the

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 105

church, suspected or well known, but not warned or cen- sured, cry out against us ? Hardened, as they are, by im- punity, shall not that impunity be loudly pleading against us in the great day of retribution ? We preach the truth ; is it enforced, and doled out anew upon the world, in the discipline of our churches ? Yet again, would not Paul have been guilty, had he, in teaching the Ephesians, forgot- ten the more destitute of other lands ; or had he neglected to inculcate upon the converts at Ephesus their duty in sending the gospel to the lands that were yet unevangelized ? Paul and the Christians whom he now addressed, would not have been clear of the blood of the heathen, had they for- gotten them in their prayers, and confined their labors ex- clusively to the narrow province of their own home. Illyr- icum, and Spain, and Britain, were probably in the heart of the apostle, while his hands were ministering to his own wants at Ephesus. The gospel he preached was for the world ; and he preached it in blood-guiltiness, if he did not regard and teach others to regard it, as going out over the length and breadth of the earth. And although God has blessed the Church and the pastors of the present age, with the spirit of missionary enterprise, is there not yet a defi- ciency ? Are not the garments of the church and her pas- torship yet dripping with the blood of pagan nations, acces- sible but not approached by the word of God ? And here again, is there not guilt, the guilt of blood upon us, my brethren ?

3. But the greatest of the dangers, as we believe, to which those now present are exposed, regards the spirit in which we utter our message. We may deliver the true proclama- tion in hypocrisy, and an angered God withhold from our labors all blessing. Or, by formality and listlessness, we may contrive to throw an aspect of tameness over the most momentous and thrilling of all topics, and the vast realities of eternity may dwindle under our hands into a thrice-told and vapid " old wives' fable." In selfish avarice and ambi- tion, we may be coveting with an evil covetousness to set our house on high, and build up our personal and social interests on the base of God's own church. There may be bitter envying and strife amid the common members of one mystical body, and the fellow-combatants in one strenuous and hard-fought warfare. We may grieve in secret at the fulness of the net which our own hands cast not abroad

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upon the face of the waters, or drew not to the shore. We may enact again the contest rebuked by Christ, and whisper to ourselves, " Who is the greatest?" when in lowliness each should esteem others better than himself. Vain-glory and ostentation may be our companions in the study, and mount with us into the sacred desk ; and while the famished church is weeping, and fiends exult over the world rushing into ruin at our feet, we may be busily employed in endea- voring to carve our paltry names upon the rugged front of Christ's own cross. We may preach ourselves, and not the Master. While bound to seek out acceptable words, we may proceed too far, and harm the sword of the Spirit by gilding and blunting its edge. Self-reliance and self-seek- ing may palsy our spiritual strength ; and we may but beat the air, and labor in vain. While men admire, God may be writing upon us his fearful curse as pronounced by his servant Zechariah : " Wo to the idol shepherd — the sword shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye : his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened." Spiritual vigor and spiritual discernment may depart from us, while bowing in secret at the shrine of van- ity. Or carelessness, and frivolity, and worldliness, may e it out the heart of our strength, and we may lie along in the church, the prostrate and rotting cumberers of the field we should have shaded with o^r foliage, and gladdened with our fruit. How difficult is it, brethren, to guard well our own hearts — to act ever as in the love of Christ — and to preach in sight of the bar of judgment. And even where we may be preserved watching and praying against the evils already indicated, how far may our piety be beneath the high standard commanded by our God, and attainable to us. How little, brethren, is our profiting, compared with that which it might be, did we, like the bride of the Apocalypse, stand before the churches " clothed with the sun" — were there seen upon our example, our prayers, and our preaching, the lustre of a dazzling holiness, derived from intimate communion with God, and sending even into the eyes of the scoffer its vivid and blinding brightness. And shall we not be judged by the possible and attainable standard which was before us ? Look to the wide and deep influence which has been gained by some devoted men in all ages, who, though often of inferior talents, were men mighty in prayer, in faith, and in the Holy Ghost. See

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how the hearts of the world and the church melted at the opening of their lips — how the Spirit of Glory and of God tracked all their steps ; and, turning from the sight, let us ask : — Why are we not all such ? We need a deeper piety, and the guilt of blood is upon us — is it not, brethren ? — be- cause we are not men of deeper piety, men baptized with the Holy Ghost, and testifying to the churches what our own eyes have seen, and our own hands have handled of the word of life.

Are we accused of disparaging our vocation ? Our reply may be in the quaint, but expressive language of Baxter : *' Had our sins been only in Latin, in Latin they might have been rebuked ; but if our transgressions have been wrought before the people, in the tongue, and before the eyes of the people must they be assailed and confessed." We are crying out against the dangers of the church from the rampant infidelity of the age. But, alas, it is not the feathered and barbed shaft of Voltaire, the refined scepti- cism of Hume and Gibbon, or the coarser blasphemies of a Paine, a Taylor, or a Carlisle, that most endanger us. Ra- ther need we fear and deprecate the infidelity of the church, the practical scepticism of the lukewarm pastor, the effect- ive atheism of a worldly, and a time-serving, a vain-glorious, and a selfish ministry. It is not the most specious or the most active of the speculative heresies of the day, that we have cause, brethren, so much to dread, as the heresy of heart found in Christ's own church — the want of a purer love, and a simpler faith, and a more vigorous hope. We cannot afford the time requisite to decide the nicer contro- versies of the day among true brethren, while this, the great controversy of the church with her God, remains undecided. Our sin against the commandment that bids us love our God is as fearful a heresy as any in the list invented and propa- gated by human perverseness. No, brethren, it is not a fitting season for the church to be compounding unguents for the freckled skin of a fancied, or at most, a frivolous heresy ; while the plague of lukewarmness is sweeping her streets, and the bier of spiritual death is passing on its way from door to door of her habitations. We have another and a sterner quarrel to settle. The stain of blood — of the blood of souls, is on the floor of our deserted and untrodden closets — upon our pulpits — upon our communion tables. It is, as the prophet of old witnessed, "not found by secret

108 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

search, but openly, and upon all these." And yet we feel it not, or acknowledging it, we do not aright apprehend and repent of the evil of our ways.

III. Lastly, then, let us, brethren, endeavor to fasten upon our sluggish hearts the sense of the fearful character of the guilt thus incurred. We may learn it by looking to the worth of the soul. Is the life of the body, though so soon to terminate, guarded by all the terrors of earthly law — is the murderer so sternly hunted, and so sorely punished ; and is there no guilt in flinging away, or in aiding others to cast away the life of the soul, its happiness and well-being, not for threescore years only, but for ages multiplied upon ages, and yet making no unit in the fearful sum of its eter- nity ? Is the hand of the lapidary cautious when touching the gem whose very dust is precious ? Is the touch of the surgeon most delicate, but most firm, when probing or sev- ering the organs of our bodily frame : and what shall not be our care who have to do with the soul of man, so deli- cately framed, so easily and irremediably injured — that soul which is to sparkle as a gem on the Mediator's brow through all ages, or to suffer under the venom of unhealed sin in the ever-growing pangs of the second death? The worth of the gospel, neutralized by unfaithfulness in the ministry, that gospel which angels announced with songs of gratula- tion — which was sealed with the blood of a dying God — and which bears the only hope of life for the world, affords another standard by which to test the character of our guilt, if we fail to declare it in its whole counsel. The high claims of the church, narrowed and famished, and degraded by pastoral infidelity, bid us to awake ; for if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. The fearful dishonor brought upon the name of that God, who will be sanctified in all them that come nigh him, may well fill us with dread. And the thought of the wide-spread influence we are to exercise through all time and through eternity, may well cause the stoutest heart to quail. Another argu- ment might be derived from the brevity of the life we waste, and from its singleness. We have but one life — it is soon spent, and suddenly as well as speedily may it be ended. The dying are around us. They fill the seats of our sanc- tuaries. They are at our boards, by the way they meet, and in the house they surround us.* Riches, and fame, earthly lore, and earthly power — what arc they to the dying

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man? How soon will all earthly distinctions fade away from before the eye, as it glazes and settles in the last strug- gle— and mock the grasp of dying agony. We are from eternity. For it we live. Of it we testify. To it we pass. Into that world of waking reality this life of dreams and shadows is fast bearing us. Our kindred are there. The former occupants of our pews are there. Ears that once listened to the voice of our teachings are now filled with the songs of the seraphim, or tingle with the cry of the de- spairing and the lost. Eyes that have gazed into ours, as we have looked down from the pulpit, have already seen the Judge of all the earth.

What yet remains for them, and for us ? — Men of God, I cite you to his bar. Yet a little while, and we stand before the great white throne. The judgment is set. The books are opened. Heaven and earth have passed away before the glance that is transfixing our hearts. The history of every day, the motives of every sermon, the morbid anato- my of the soul, are bared to an assembled universe ; and we with all the dead, stand up to give an account of the deeds done in the body. Who would then take the fearful tiara of the papacy, lined with the curses of its deluded mil- lions ? Who would then wear the earthly honors of the faithless pastor ? " And who shall live when God doeth this ?" exclaimed an able but false-hearted prophet of former times. Who of us shall live when God doeth this, may we, taking up his lament, and prolonging it, say, for who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth ? Blessed be his name, the sentence is not yet pronounced. The books are not yet written out. On the leaf yet uninscribed, and perhaps the last, let us write our weeping penitence. For yet is there hope in Israel con- cerning this thing.

Oh, is it not from such scenes that we turn with deepest sensibility to the Cross of Christ ? Were it not for the fountain opened in the house of David, were we not, breth- ren of the ministry, of all men most miserable ? From his multiplied snares, from his burdensome sins, how delightful for the Christian pastor is it thither to flee, and to plunge in its cleansing and quickening streams. How vivid, when viewed after such contemplations, how vivid in beauty, and how vast the wealth of the promises which assure us the aid of the Spirit, and the workings of that Power by which

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the weak are made strong, and the foolish wise. Upon our Master we will cast ourselves. Often have we provoked him, but never has he spurned us. For the sake of his goodness, and his free and repeated forgiveness of our con- stant transgressions, will we endeavor to preserve our gar- ments henceforth unspotted. Shall we loiter, or trifle, or engage in petty bickerings, or turn aside at the beck of sense or of pleasure ? God helping us, brethren, we will not ; for behind us are heard the steps of the avenger of blood, before us gleam the crown of righteousness and the palm of victory, and the pealing anthems of the blessed are heard in the distance. No, we will quit the plain of worldly strife, of sensual and secular pursuits, and climb the rugged mount of communion and transfiguration. We will relax our grasp of the polluting and perplexing vanities of this life, that we may set our affection on things above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. We will move onward through the people of our charge, as those who shall lead or follow them to the grave, and meet them again in the judgment. We will pass along, intent on this one thing, the glory of God in the salvation of souls. We will be the men of one book, aiming to throw over the literature and the arts of life, over the scenes of business and retire- ment, over man in all stations and under every aspect, its hallowed light. Our eyes have seen there the descending glories of an opened heaven. We have looked downward upon a world sinking into the flaming abyss of hell. We have heard the commandment that we pluck men out of the fiery torrent. Where is our strength ? Conscious of our utter weakness, we will fling ourselves back on Him who was our own deliverer — we will ask the Spirit of God in the name of Christ, and girt in his strength, we will labor, praying to make it, with holy Paul, our dying declaration : I have fought a good fight ; I have finished my course ; 1 have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, shall give me in that day, when the pure in heart and the clean of hands shall see God.

THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY.

(Delivered before the N. Y. Baptist Education Society, August 18, 1835.)

" Making mention of you in my prayers ; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him : the eyes

OF YOUR UNDERSTANDING BEING ENLIGHTENED." — EpheSianS L 16, 17, 18.

Prayer for the descent of the Spirit upon the Church had been among the last employments of Paul's Lord and Master, as He was girding himself for the scenes of Geth- semane and Calvary. Even when the Holy Ghost had come in answer to the requests of our Great Advocate, the inter- cessions of the saints for each other were yet needed to pro- long and to deepen the influences of the Heavenly Visitant. To gain these intercessory supplications of the church be- came then an object of high moment. How earnestly Paul besought for himself, that his disciples and fellow-confessors should remember him in their approaches to the mercy-seat, is apparent on the most cursory reading of his epistles. In the present letter to the Ephesian saints, in each of those which he addressed to the Thessalonian church, in the sec- ond of his epistles to the Corinthians, in those to the churches at Colosse and Philippi, in his private letter to Philemon, and his general one to the Hebrew believers, the same re- quest for their prayers is urged upon various grounds, but in all these eight epistles with marked, and, at times, impor- tunate earnestness.

What he asked of his brethren for himself he was ready in turn to impart for their benefit. He loved prayer, and practised it himself, as he enjoined it upon others, " without ceasing." To the ministry of the word and to prayer he had, like the apostles who were in Christ before him, given himself, as to the one proper employment of his office, and the future business of his life. The evidence of his conver- sion, by which our Lord reassured the suspicious Ananias,

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was, "Behold he prayeth." When with Silas he occupied the dungeons of Philippi, he broke the silence of midnight with the voice of prayer : when parting on a former occa- sion from the elders of this same Ephesian church, and when bidding farewell to the disciples at Tyre, prayer lightened their mutual regrets, and gave voice to their mutual affec- tion. When himself receiving in the temple at Jerusalem the vision of his Lord that sent him to the far Gentiles, and when healing the father of Publius at Malta, his previous preparation had been found in prayer. And to the last days of his life he remained in this exercise, true to the church and to her great Head, even as he was seen entering the skirts of that dark storm, which seized him and bore him upward to his heavenly rest. Amid sorrow and loneliness he breathes neither dejection nor misanthropy ; but we find him assuring his beloved scholar, that without ceasing he had remembrance of him in his prayers night and day. A like touching pledge of Christian affection he had already given to his friend Philemon, to the Ephesian and the Co- lossian churches, as well as to those at Philippi, Thessalo- nica, and Rome, to all of whom he avers a similar mindful- ness of them in his private supplications. Thus it was, that even from the chariot of bloody triumph, which wafted him to his Father's house, there was seen falling the mantle of his example and his prayers, to bless that militant church, in Avhose sorrows and warfare he might no longer share.

And upon whom did the great apostle of the uncircum- cision here invoke the descent of the Holy Ghost, as a spirit of wisdom and revelation ? Not upon those who knew not God, and whose eyes had not yet been opened to discern the glories of the Saviour ; but upon men whom he con- gratulated as " the faithful in Christ Jesus " and " the saints which were at Ephesus." Nor by his prayer for the en- lightening of their understandings did he impeach their society of any peculiar imbecility or ignorance. In their libraries had been found volumes of unhallowed and magical lore, amounting in value to fifty thousand pieces of silver. Their ability to study these implied some general knowledge, and a taste for such researches required some measure of native talent and sagacity ; and it rendered probable also the possession and the mastery of at least some volumes of a sounder literature. Nor was it for a crowd of rude and untaught converts, the ill-fed flock of some incompetent

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shepherd, that he supplicated the heavenly gift ; but for a favored church who had long profited by the ministrations of an apostle, and whom he himself had for the space of three years ceased not to warn night and day with tears — to whom he had given alike private admonition and more public instructions, and who in addition to his personal addresses were now receiving his written counsels. But though thus bred in heathen scholarship, and taught by an apostolical pastorship, and although . thus anxiously and fondly cared for by these the " labors more abundant " of an inspired teacher, they needed still the aids of the Holy Ghost to open the eyes of their understanding. It had not yet become a needless petition to be offered for them, that they might receive the spirit of wisdom ; nor was it an un- timely request on their behalf, that to them might be more largely given the spirit of revelation in the knowledge of Christ. If ever there were a splendid exemplification of the fact that the doctrine of the Divine Influences does not foster indolence, and that, again, human industry does not supersede the necessity of the Spirit's aids and agency, it was here, in a church so ably and so assiduously taught, yet the objects of such impassioned prayer — for whom Paul labored as if he were the only keeper of their souls, and for whom he prayed as if Providence had placed the charge of their souls entirely beyond the reach of his personal efforts. You are convened, fathers and brethren, as the friends of ministerial education. It were needless to labor in proving its necessity to men who have already decided the question in their own minds, and whose presence in these scenes may well be regarded as sufficient warrant for supposing them convinced of its importance. But is it unseasonable to re- mind you, brethren, that more than human agency is needed in the education of the ministry — that the great work of training up the Christian and the Christian pastor is not confided to your faltering hands alone — but that the instruc- tion of the church and of the teachers of the church is to be commenced and consummated by the Holy Ghost, as a superior agency enveloping and making effective your infe- rior instrumentality 1 With all your wise provision for dis- ciplining your younger brethren, ere they go forth bearing the banner of Christ, the trumpet and the sword of the gos- pel, into the field of battle, you will not forget that your interest with the Great Captain of the Lord's Host is yet

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more needed to be exerted in their behalf. For him who speaks, then — for your own churches — for the whole family of our Lord upon earth — and, especially, at the present time, for this school of the prophets, let me beseech you, like the apostle before us, to implore the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Ask the counsellings of Divine Wisdom, and the illumina- tions of the Uncreated Light. And to this end bear with me, in reminding you of the need which the theological student has for your prayers, first, from his present snares, and next, from his future influence, and lastly, in urging upon you your consequent duty to continue instant in your supplications for him.

I. While exposed, in common with yourselves, to all the other temptations that belong to the depravity of his own heart, the character of the evil world around him, and of the Evil One that rules it, and subjected in addition to the pecu liar besetments of his youthful age, let it not be forgotten, that in his very studies, necessary as they may be, there are found perils of formidable character. Many of these will at once suggest themselves. He is in danger of converting the season of leisure and the scenes of retirement here allowed him into the refuge of indolence. Or, if studious and suc- cessful, he may be infected with the pride of learning, and lose the docility of Christ's disciple. Or, forgetting the dis- tinction between knowledge and wisdom, he may crowd the chambers of the soul with the furniture of a useless or frivo- lous learning, until the mind is converted into a magnificent lumber-room, where the great truths of Christian faith and duty have little space left them to live and to work. By unskilfulness in the discipline of the mind, he may walk forth into the scene of strife with this world and its vanities, armed without, but enfeebled within — burdened and crippled by the ill- chosen armor in which he has been pleased to incase himself, and felled to the earth, at the first onset,, by the weight of his own ill-managed lore. Or in studies well- selected and vigorously pursued, he may exert himself to purpose ; but it may be, that all is done from an unholy rivalry, or with regard to earthly lucre or earthly honor. And he may thus go forth into the world, crowned with the chaplet of academic distinction, while from every leaf of that chaplet the mildew of Clod's curse, breathed over his selfish- ness and earthliness, is ("ailing, and blasting the labors of his hands wherever it falls. All the peculiar snares of the

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student's life it were impossible now to discuss : let us but advert to some of the more common, though often unsus- pected, evils that beset him.

1. The first of these to which we would now allude, as one against which he needs to be guarded by your prayers, is that of losing his sympathy with ordinary and uneducated mind. As his own intellect acquires vigor and expansion, he may learn to pass rapidly, and with ease, through trains of reasoning, which are without interest, or which may even be unintelligible, to others who have not been conducted through the same routine of preparation. And forgetting this fact, while pursuing a track of research, which to his own mind teems at every step with objects of interest, and where on every hand breaks out some new and delightful vision, he may be traversing scenes into which no common auditory can follow him, and whilst he hurries on, delighted himself, and confident of delighting others, his hearers may be toiling in perplexity far behind him, wondering at the speed of his course, and bewildered as to the object and end of his journeyings. The art of simplifying his know- ledge needs perpetual study. As in his subjects of thought, so in the language with which he learns to invest his favorite themes, he may unintentionally and insensibly lose sight of the people, and, forgetting their simpler idioms, mid his thoughts naturally fall into terms metaphysical and abstract, with which men in general are little familial, and towards which they may be disposed to show little patience. The same estrangement from the common mind may be gradually imbibed from the spirit of much of the literature with which he becomes conversant. Much of Greek, and nearly all of Roman letters, breathes a proud oblivion or contempt of the commonalty. The scornful sentiment of one of the most celebrated of Latin poets, "hate for the profane rabble," is but too faithfully reflected from the pages of ancient schol- arship. Through a large portion of the literature even of Christian lands, the same feeling, not avowed indeed, yet but too evident, lives and breathes. And by a gradual as- similation to the models of classic beauty, a student may find the spirit of alienation from the popular intellect diffusing itself over his mind and labors, even while preparing to pub- lish abroad that gospel, of which it was once the high boast and the heavenly seal — that it was preached to the poor. .Visiting the lowly and the ignorant, it told them in the

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simplest words, and by the aid of the most familiar imagery, of glories celestial and divine, before which the proudest splendors of pagan morality and the most gorgeous visions of heathen poetry waned and grew pale. Against this tendency to lose his hold upon the common mass of an audience, it is no small part of a wise education to guard. Yet, on the other hand, let it not be forgotten, that no man can long profit or guide the minds of a people, who is not himself in mental power or furniture raised above them.

2. Another of the evil influences which often engross the mind of the scholar devoted to prolonged and solitary study, is the love of fame. Harshly as the accusation may fall on the ears of some, it is but too certain that the mass of litera- ture, even in the lands now most thoroughly evangelized, is idolatrous in its spirit and tendencies. More covert indeed, but not less impious, than the paganism which defiles the monuments of Greek and Roman genius, it is yet but idol- atry, a decent and baptized idolatry. It teaches the student principles of action and a strain of feeling essentially hea- thenish. The love of fame for its own sake is boastfully avowed as the scholar's great incentive : to live in the mem- ories and upon the tongues of other ages, is the guerdon of his toils and sacrifices. As the great motive for action, this is a principle as sternly rebuked in the New Testament, as is that covetousness which bars against its votary the gates of heaven. It is a principle of which our Saviour explicitly testified, in the case of the Pharisees, that because they were guided by it, seeking honor one of another, they could not believe, and therefore could not be saved.

3. Another evil of that literature with which the theologi- cal student must in his studies become more or less intimate, is the blind worship of genius, as an object of admiration for its own sake, and apart from the moral uses to which it is devoted. This is a leprosy that has scarred the whole literature of the present age. Mental power, though em- ployed only to corrupt, to mislead, or to oppress, is deified, with as much reason as men might ascribe divine honors to the whirlwind for its might, or to the volcano for its powers of wide-spread desolation. The resplendent skin and shin- ing crest of the serpent win for him a place in the bosom, though a serpent still ; and the polish and symmetry of the arrow give it value in our eyes, though its point is known to be tipped with deadly venom, and its barbs are yet red

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with the blood of former victims. This should not be so. To him that seeks the welfare of his country, and knows how much her social well-being depends upon the purpose and purity of her popular literature, it is indeed matter of sorrow and of alarm that any moral obliquity and the gross- est and most hideous depravity may win patient and admir- ing listeners, if it only come playing the pander, with the voice of melody, and the garb and air of refinement. This insane idolatry of genius may gradually discolor even the views of the youth who has dedicated himself to minister at the altar of God ; and he who should become the Aaron of the camp may be its Achan. The Babylonish garment and the golden wedge may be secretly pilfered from the spoils devoted by God's just wrath to utter destruction and obliv- ion ; and he who should have shown himself the intercessor and guardian of the church, may prove, like Diotrephes or Ahab, the troubler of Israel. Before the tribunal which awaits us, it is not power, but the rightful use of power ; it is not wealth, but the proper employment of our pittance or our opulence ; it is not talent, but the motives with which and the modes in which talent exerted itself, that shall bring honor to the possessor. Yet a little while, and we are there. But meanwhile, how many myriads may be lost for ever by that irrational admiration of irreligious genius, and that blind love of human applause, which are as the plague-spots of our popular literature.

4. Oppositions of science falsely so called became, even under the eyes of an apostle, an occasion to many of erring from the faith. Akin to the worship of great names in lite- rature, and often found resulting from it, is that presumptu- ous and unprofitable speculation which has at times invaded the schools of the church. Dogmatizing where the Scrip- ture was silent, or running into perplexed refinements where the Scripture held its usual tone of plain and practical good sense, men have introduced error upon error into the church of former ages, and our own may not hope for exemption. They who have arisen to combat the new delusion have often, with the natural infirmity of the human mind, done so by evoking and patronizing some opposite error — the an- tagonist indeed of the first, but equally fatal with it to the true interests of religion. And learning and talent have clustered and glowed around the contending theories, until the whole heavens were illumined by the lustre of two

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contending systems, adverse and opposite in all else, save in this — that both were alike lawless and eccentric meteors, splendid as they were baleful, gazed upon with admiration by the upturned eyes of wondering multitudes, yet proving themselves at last but magnificent heresies and wandering stars to which was reserved the blackness of darkness for- ever. Into the shades of academic retirement such errors may yet find their way. And in the endowments furnished by the piety and liberality of one age, the next may see in- stalled heresies which the original founders of the institution would have indignantly denounced as the foulest blasphe- mies. To preserve alike individuals and institutions from this eating canker of unsound doctrine, creeds will not fully avail, nor any barrier of human invention. Anxious denunciation will not avert or remedy the evil, but only the Spirit of God, sought and won by fervent prayer. Nor can any precautions merely human check the growth of these evils. They are not the proper fruit of Theological Semi- naries, although those schools may at times afford a favora- ble scene for their development. The abolition of every Theological Seminary in the land would not effect the ex- tinction of errors. They would still spring up as the native growth of the unsanctified heart, starting in irrepressible freshness from a root which human skill cannot reach, and which no power merely of earth has ever succeeded in ex- tirpating.

5. But perhaps the chief danger of the youthful student is to be feared, not so much in the infusion of positive error into his doctrinal system, as in his studying the truth merely as an exercise of the understanding, without securing its due influence on the heart. It is possible for us to investigate the gospel — the true and life-giving gospel — merely as a science, and to delude ourselves, and to curse the church with that heartless form of sound knowledge which may be called the Religion of the Intellect. By this we here in- tend, not merely a false system, wrought out by the self- coniidence of an unsanctified intellect, neglecting and amend- ing the Scriptures, a class of errors which the term might well include ; but we intend, at present, by it to describe only that reception of the truth itself which gives it no lodg- ment in the affections, and allows it no control over the life ; which examines the Scriptures but as furnishing a system to be learned and defended, and comes not to them as to oracles

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claiming our obedience — as to promises upholding, and precepts guiding, and penalties guarding the spiritual life of the inquirer himself. Now it is possible for a student to attain in this mode a full and correct knowledge of the great outlines of Christian faith ; while the spirit of the gospel is an utter stranger to his bosom, and of its great mysteries he has no practical experience, and with its informing life he has no communion or sympathy. The distinction which may thus exist between a familiarity with the external forms of any science and its actual mastery, may be illustrated by a reference to the scenes of worldly activity. A man may discern and relish, in a writing which he peruses, the strength of its logic and the ornaments of its rhetoric, and yet all this delight might consist in his mind with an utter indifference, or a hearty distaste, to the object and purport of the writing. His scholarship might give him an intelligent admiration of the vehicle into which the thought had been cast, while his prejudices, or his habits, or his interest, might lead him to look upon the cause which it advocated with an uncom- promising hostility.* Thus, to illustrate our meaning, might we imagine the instrument that severed our people from their dependence upon the mother-country, and asserted our claims to a separate station and an equal rank among the nations of the earth, finding its way on its first promulgation, over mountain and forest, until it lighted down upon some remote hamlet, where it was seized and scanned with an eager curiosity. And among the group, who were gathered to listen to that portentous instrument, might be found the teacher of the neighboring peasantry ; and into his hands, with one consent, that Declaration might be put, that he should read it to the anxious crowd pressing around him. And in scholarship he might be the only one of the number qualified to appreciate the literary merit of that great instru- ment, or the moral daring of the attitude in which it placed our country. And the beauty of its style and the force of its sentiments might extort the man's reluctant applause, and his heart might yield a passing homage to the bold mag- nanimity of the statesmen who had planned and published it ; whilst the whole current of his feelings and wishes placed him in determined and deadly opposition to the cause it represented. And at the side of this man so competent to estimate the document, but withal so set in heart against it, might stand some illiterate ploughman, himself unable to

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read the instrument to which he had listened with a breath- less interest, and still less qualified to descry any literary beauty it might possess. And yet the man's whole soul might be seen kindling with sympathy for its spirit — in his bosom alone it might have met with congenial elements : and while others are staying to praise its sentiments, or to admire its phrases, his patriotism might have borne him homeward, to bid a hurried farewell to the inmates of his home ; and the morrow, while it found his neighbors still busy in pondering the literature of the act, might have dawned upon that unlettered patriot upholding the act itself in the tented field, and prepared to pour out his blood in enforcement of a document, whose words he could not have spelled out to the children he had forsaken. And even such may be the difference between an intimate acquaintance with the literature of the Bible, and an honest, but withal, an un- lettered submission to the Bible as the charter of our own personal hope.

Yet such is the infatuation of mankind on the subject of religion, that a heartless but intelligent admiration of the Scripture literature is often supposed by its possessor to be proof of his advancement in true religion. And the scholar, blinded by vain-glory, may go on flattering himself and astounding his age, with the mass and splendor of his criti- cal acquisitions in illustration of the Scriptures, while he is farther from any real knowledge of its contents than the ignorant slave, whose range of knowledge never extended to the reading of one word in the pages of that volume, but who throws himself back on his couch, cheered in his dying hour, penetrated to the heart, and sanctified, and saved, by the truths of that Bible which was known to him only from the lips of others.

Before overvaluing, as we are too prone to do, the results of biblical criticism, let us remember that a thorough ac- quaintance with the original dialect of an evangelist, and a perfect and most applauded familiarity with the customs of the age and its phrases, and with the scenery and costume of the biblical narrative, if we may so speak, can after all do nothing more, than bring up the possessor of it to a level, in point of intelligence and endowments, as a skilful inter- preter, with the bigoted Pharisee, who had often heard our Saviour himself speak : yet that man, learned as he might be in his own national Scriptures, and with all his perfect

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I

and prompt apprehension as to our Lord's meaning, seeing as he did the Saviour's ideas at once, and without the aid of glossary or grammar, believed not — heard not aright, and in truth knew not the gospel, because of the state of his heart, which made him, having eyes, to see not, and, having ears, to hear not. And even thus, the man who in our own times should pride himself on advantages confessed to be inferior to those of the Hebrew doctor, and who, neglectful of the state of his heart, would forsooth impose upon all oth- ers the interpretation given by his own transcendent schol- arship, may well be reminded, that, with all his science and with all his talent, he may be as ignorant of the principles of Christ's gospel, as was that contented and ignorant Phar- isee ; and before allowing him to take, in grave dignity, his seat as an ermined and stalled doctor in our schools, we call on him to show that he has reached even the attainments of those, whom Paul styled " babes in Christ." Let it not be supposed that we would decry learning, or underrate its value in the study of the Scriptures. We seek now but to bring forward the cautionary truth, that the teachings of the Spirit are yet more necessary — that they are indispensable. Another and varied form in which the same pitiable delu- sion, the mere religion of the intellect, displays itself, is in the pride of orthodoxy. A man may have succeeded in de- vising a correct system of theology, guarded by apposite texts, and fenced around with the authority of great names ; and may deem the post which he now holds to be the very citadel and heart of religious truth : and yet of true piety the man may be utterly destitute. The delusion is found as well in the hearers as in the teachers of the church ; and many, there is cause to fear, content themselves thus with the truth dissevered from the love and the life of the truth. They hold the verity of the Scripture indeed, but it is not the living, and acting, and controlling truth — the laborious, self-denying, and heavenly-minded truth, as it is in Jesus, received by the installation of Christ himself in the heart, as inmate and master of it, and as ruler over the conduct. It is the truth preserved as by Egyptian art, heartless and dis- * embowelled — a varnished and painted mummy, where are the lineaments and the hues of life ; but the warmth, the energy, the soul, are fled ; and the true votary of Christ finds there no fellow-feeling, and to the out-gushings of his sanctified affection " there is no voice, nor any that answer,"

17

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and he goes his way saddened from the voiceless and life- less image of his Master. With such mistaken apprehen- sions of religion, it is possible for us to constitute ourselves the very sentinels of orthodoxy, descrying and denouncing the first stirrings of heresy, as it peeps and mutters from the earth ; while the heart is unhumbled and carnal, our devotion is but a burdensome form, and the world reigns supreme in our affections. And thus may we, proudly standing before the churches, like the scholastic doctors of the dark ages, rejoice in the title of the Mallets of Heresy ; whilst before God we stand ourselves impeached of hetero- doxy as to the first and greatest of the commandments — • practical errorists as to the first principles of the Divine Life.

Into this false form of religion it is but too easy for the heedless student to descend; if he do not, according to the injunction of Jude, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep him- self in the love of God.

Yet let it not be suggested that studies so rife with dan- ger might wisely be omitted. It were easy to show that these evils are the growth of a heart which in any situation will find the occasions of stumbling, and minister to itself sources of temptation in every scene. We might show the evils which beset the duty of pastoral visitation, and how prone the ambassador of Heaven may there be to sink into a mere caterer of frivolous gossip and petty scandal ; — we might show the perils of ministerial activity in behalf of the benevolent enterprises of the day, and how easily the zeal of the pastor thus engaged may sink into a calculating and heartless bustle ; — we might discover danger even in the course of the pastor, who rejoices in the many conversions that attend his ministry, and how the affection of his people may become to him the incitement of vanity, and in them an idolatrous forgetfulness of the God who prepared the in- strument, and gave its whole success — until it would be seen, that every work of good, and even the elevations of heart found in the closet while communing with God, ministered temptation ; and that the man who had been caught up to the third heaven, and seen the visions of God, needed the buffetings of a thorn in the flesh, lest the visions should un- duly exalt him. Yet the peril accompanying those visions did not destroy their value. No, knowledge is to be sought, although it has its snares ; and religion is to be studied, although the student needs to be watchful over his own

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spirit. And how, by the grace of God, scholarship may be combined with piety, has been sufficiently shown in the former ages of the church. In Owen might be seen an in- stance of varied and profound attainments united with the most thorough study of his own heart ; and the man who moved into the field of polemic theology among the most formidable of combatants, with the dust of many libraries upon him, is yet found holding communion in his practical writings with the heart of the unlettered Christian ; and the delighted reader wonders at the vivid and accurate portrait- ure of his own feelings, drawn by one whose literary pur- suits and whose political activity did not trench on his habits of private devotion, or prevent his prayerful examination of his own heart and way. In Baxter we see how familiarity with the most abstruse researches of metaphysical specula- tion may yet consist with eminent devotedness as a pastor and surpassing usefulness — and a style which in his practical writings speaks to the heart of all classes, as with a burning vehemence. Edwards might be quoted as a model of patient and profound investigation — the mighty taskings of a mighty intellect, united with childlike humility, great holiness, and the widest and most enduring usefulness. Of Leighton we might speak as exhibiting the union of classical refinement and a style of admirable clearness and simplicity with an an- gelic elevation and sweetness of sentiment, that seem to throw over his pages the very spirit of the Scriptures. And to Pas- cal we might refer as a sufficient proof, did he stand alone (and, thanks be to God, alone he does not stand), how science, and genius, and literature, may become the meek handmaids of religion ; and how an intellect of the very highest order, and philosophical attainments which, for his age, and under the circumstances of their acquirement, lifted him above most of our race, may be united to a childlike docility and humility, and an earnest and spiritual piety, such as have not often blessed the world apart and disconnected, and which combin- ed, as they were in him, proved that God did indeed make man but a little lower than the angels. And the time would fail to tell the lights of our own era — of Henry Martyn, of our own Carey, and Hall, and Ryland, and Fuller, and of the long and resplendent line of witnesses, whose history shows how mind may be tasked and stored, while it is sanc- tified ; and how the culture of the heart may keep equal pace with that of the intellect.

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No — these examples and a vast cloud of like witnesses admonish us, that the evils already alluded to are not the necessary or inseparable results of knowledge, and that the church needs, and may profit by, the culture of the mind in her pastors, great as may be the dangers attending that cul- ture.

II. From the future influence, it was said, as well as from the present employments of the rising ministry, we might infer the need of prayer in their behalf for the outpourings of the Spirit. How large an amount of moral power is to emanate from the inmates of these walls, eternity alone can make manifest. But much has already been done by this and similar institutions. And as we see the giant strides of our nation in power, and arts, and wealth, and how fast her moral needs are outstripping the preparations for her moral culture, and how rapidly her villages and settlements are outgrowing the largest efforts of the church in their be- half, we have reason to pray that the resources of that church may be increased. We have cause to pray for the men who shall arise to mould and guide the coming age, that they may be of high spiritual endowments, and trained by habits of devotedness and energy for the great and diffi- cult work before them. The young men here taught will bear no limited sway among the pastors of the next genera- tion. If you would have them men like Samuel Pearce, whose holy love shall burn in their memory upon the hearts of the churches, you must have them men who, like Pearce, shall even in the Theological Seminary be marked by eminent prayerfulness. Upon them in part will it de- pend, under God, whether the glorious revivals which have distinguished this favored nation shall go on, until they have overspread and sanctified the land. Upon them, in their station, will be suspended the religious welfare, and neces- sarily therefore the political well-being, in no small degree, of your children — the race that are rising to occupy your homes and your sanctuaries. It will be for them to aid in determining the question, of such fearful importance and now in the course of solution, whether this nation, trained for self-government by moral and religious culture, shall retain unimpaired the liberty it has inherited ; or, whether it shall plunge itself into the most cruel of all slavery, under the deaf and bloody despotism of the mob. Their faithful- ness will uphold and extend, or tbeir treachery embarrass

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I

and break up, the great instrumentalities, the moral ma- chinery, now at work in this nation for the conversion of the world. And while busied in thus caring for distant nations, it will be for them to see to it, that our American Israel, in going forth against the more remote enemies of the Cross, see not, like the men of Ai, as she turns back to her own homes, the flames arising from the face of her own land, overspread and consuming by the fires of superstition or atheism. From within these walls are to go forth a por- tion of the needed missionaries to heathen lands, and of the translators who shall give to the pagan in his own tongue the Book of God. To some of them, as they go forth pub- lishing to all the Bible given for all, to the world the Savi- our who died for the world, and to all flesh the Spirit that is yet to be poured out upon all flesh, it may be reserved to win in the perilous onset the honors of an early grave, and perhaps of a cruel martyrdom. As in the Pentecostal church were seen gathered the representatives of many and distant lands, even thus may soon be assembled within these walls the representatives, by anticipation, of many a heathen tribe — the heralds who shall go forth to regions widely re- mote, casting over the broad earth the one band of the gos- pel, and knitting around all its tribes the ties of a common brotherhood. Certain it is, that the doings and spirit of each one here will have an influence for good or for evil on myriads through eternity. May God by his Spirit forbid, that the influence thus exerted by any one of us should be that of the insincere or the loitering !

III. Lastly, let us for a moment turn your thoughts to the consequent duty of being found earnest in prayer for the rising pastors and evangelists of your churches. To qualify for duties so vast, and to guard against dangers so many and great, what shall avail but the Spirit in its sevenfold energies? And if prayer may win the descent of that Spirit, how evi- dently is it the duty of all to be found offering it! Of the unconverted here shall we ask it. Their cry, alas, is going up with fearful accord and constancy, that God and his Spirit should depart from us ; for they desire not the knowledge of his ways. And your prayer may be heard to your own undoing. Neither for ourselves nor for you let it prevail ; and would that it were no longer offered. But of those here who have hope in Christ, are we not entitled to expect that they will not be found wanting?

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For the sake of the church, then, we beseech not of min- isters alone but of all Christians, their prayers. How great is the power upon her happiness, and honor, and increase, of an enlightened and spiritual ministry. Alas, what pastor shall become such, or continue such, if his brethren sustain not his feeble arms by their own hands outstretched heaven- wards? The charge of barrenness is by the Christians of our own age made to bear too exclusively upon the ministry. Know ye not, brethren, that palsied limbs will send back chilled and sluggish blood to the heart? You would have an efficient ministry — become a praying people. And as you value your own growth in grace, and your own instruc- tion and comfort ; as you desire the conversion of your chil- dren and friends ; as you prize the union, and stability, and prosperity, of your churches, be more faithful in the secret and devout remembrance of your rising pastors and evange- lists. And how lovely and how excellent is a devoted and holy church ! Thin its members as you may — take from it worldly influence, and wealth, and talent — but leave it bright in the lustre of eminent holiness ; and does it not become a home to which the heart of the Christian turns with instinc- tive and growing affection ? How solemn the rites— how full of quiet, unpretending power, the example of such a commu- nity— how close the union, and how celestial the peace of believers thus distinguished ! And who that has seen such a flock " through quiet valleys led," in which the pastor moved as a father or brother in the midst of the united family, and there was the oneness of interest, the ready and guile- less confidence, of some rural homestead, inhabited by a numerous and affectionate household, but has felt that he has seen the image and the earnest of heaven ? Would, brethren, that every church represented in this assembly might become such. But a few indolent wishes, a few fervent prayers, a few passionate vows, will not effect it. Self-denial, faith, love to Christ, forbearance, mutual and persevering prayer can, with the blessing of God, effect it. All these are the fruits of the Spirit, and for that Spirit as descending on the churches of our land, and on their ministry, and on their schools of theology, let us pray diligently and habitually.

Yet another reason for entreating the prayers of the church in behalf of her pastors and guides, is that the honor of Christ is involved in their character. Paul, in alluding to the messengers of the churches, has without hesitation termed

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them w the glory of Christ." The ministers of the gospel, trained or training, are the ambassadors of our Saviour. It is for the honor of the King and his whole kingdom that they be men of Christian skill and integrity — that their embassy be successful, and their persons inviolate of the enemy. They bear the name, they represent the person, and plead the cause of our common Redeemer. For his sake, then, and the love of Christ constraining you, pray for them. The petition offered in secret may sustain the Christian faithfulness, that the flattery presented to your pastor or brother would only wound: the infirmity which your censures have assailed in vain, may be healed by your secret intercessions. And the gain is Christ's. u Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these," he will say, " ye have done it unto me." How delightful would it be to discover, in the great day of revelation and retribution, that your prayers, unknown of men, but marked by your Father who seeth in secret, had given new strength to the servants of the cross, nerved their drooping courage, broken the edge of difficulty, bedimmed the glare of temptation, calmed a throbbing heart, and restored serenity to a troubled bosom. Delightful indeed will it be to find, that in your closet the impulse had been given which sent new force and life into the heart of your pastorship. But far more delight- ful will it be, to learn that Christ had thus been honored — that through this means new glories had been gathered around the brow that is yet to wear the many crowns of earth ; and that, instead of wounding your Master in the house of his friends, you had been honored to crown him in the persons of his ministers.

And how vast the range of blessing your prayers may take ! Who can tell the history or trace the wanderings of yon cloud that sails in light and glory across the sky, or indicate from what source its bosom was filled with the vapors it is yet to shed back upon the earth? Perhaps, though now wandering over the tilled field and the peopled village, its stores were drawn from some shaded fountain in the deep forest, where the eye of man has scarce ever penetrated. In silent obscurity that fountain yielded its pittance, and did its work of preparing to bless the far-off lands that shall yet be glad for it. And even thus it is with the descending Spirit. Little do we know often of the secret origin of the dews of blessing that descend on the churches of God. In

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the recesses of some lowly cottage, in the depths of some humble heart, may be going on the work of pious interces- sion, in answer to which the grace of Heaven descends on us and on our children, on the labors of the wondering and joyful pastor, and on the hearts of the far heathen, until the wilderness and the solitary place are glad for them. The time is to come when from every home, brethren, such prayer shall arise. Let us sustain and swell, in our day, the as- cending volume of supplication that is yet to roll around the globe, and never to fail, until over a world regenerated and purified the morning stars shall again shout for joy, and the earth, emerging from her long and disastrous eclipse of sin and wrath, shall yet again walk the heavens in her unsullied brightness — a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Till then we have no reason, no right, to intermit our supplications ; and it is only when, in the final accomplishment of David's prayer, his greater Son shall have come to reign king over all lands, and to have dominion from sea to sea — it is not until that prayer shall have been made for him continually, and he shall daily have been praised, that the believer remaining on earth will be warranted to adopt to his own lips the touching and triumphant close appended to the supplications of the crowned Singer of Israel : " The

PRAYERS OF DAVID THE SON OF JESSE ARE ENDED.''

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE.

(A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the South Bap. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., July 13, 1845.)

USTAND FAST, THEREFORE, IN THE LIBERTY WHEREWITH CHRIST HATH MADE US FREE, AND BE NOT ENTANGLED AGAIN WITH THE YOKE OF BOND- AGE."—Gal. V. 1.

The Jewish church had been a state of preparation for higher privileges and larger illumination, that were, as yet, beyond them. Paul elsewhere, therefore, speaks of that dis- pensation as being a condition of pupilage, such as the heir undergoes during the season of minority, when, though the heir, he was treated but as a servant, and was kept in sub- jection. The new dispensation ended this, and the burdens and bonds of the old ceremonies were then abrogated, and the people of God were welcomed into the rights and free- dom of adult heirship. But Judaizing teachers wished to undo all this. Paul resented it, and protested against it. He charged the disciples in the Galatian church, to guard with all tenacity, firmness and jealousy, this glorious free- dom which Christ had won for them, and conferred upon them. It was a gift steeped in the atoning blood of their Divine Liberator, a conquest won for them upon the high places of the field in Gethsemane and Golgotha. They were to be meek indeed ; but their meekness was not to show itself in putting their necks passively under a burden, which, as Peter himself, the great apostle of the circumcision, had said, " Neither our fathers nor we were able to bear."* Nor should they, in deference to any teachers, or precedents, or traditions, allow themselves to " be entangled again with the yoke of bondage." The Church of Christ had, by her Sovereign and her Saviour, been made free, and it was but

* Acts xv. 10. 18

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a proof of due fidelity to her Head, and of due gratitude to her Deliverer, that she should remain free. Calvary had bought them, not only exemption from the curse of the law, as a means of justification, but deliverance from the entire ritual of Judaism. We come not, my brethren, into the church of the redeemed, as some Jewish Christians in the first century contended, as proselytes to the Jew, but as dis- ciples to the Nazarene. Our ministers are not the heirs of Aaron, nor our ordinances the mere offshoots of Jewish cere- monies. The Saviour had, indeed, been the trunk and the root of David, in all, even the earliest ages, and in the Pa- triarchal as in the Levitical, and in the Levitical as in the Christian dispensation ; and when the local, national, and transient church of Judaism broke itself off from that stem, like a branch broken off from its parent trunk — we of the new, the Gentile church, were grafted into its place ; but we came to possess privileges it never knew, and to inherit and grasp promises which it had only beheld at a vast distance. The Jewish church had been grafted into Christ, under the restrictions of an infant heirship ; the Christian church are grafted into the same Christ, with the liberties of an adult heirship. Thus the graft was made a new branch, with new twigs shooting from it, and other foliage and other fruit than those that had clothed the broken and fallen branch of the Jewish church.

In a land blest, as is ours, with a freedom of which we are, perhaps, at times unwisely boastful — having seen, but little more than a week since, the anniversary of our nation- al independence celebrated through our broad land by one storm of joy, and living as we do in an age of democratic tendencies, when the rising surges of popular power are swel- ling and dashing around the base of the oldest thrones of the old world ; it seems not unsuitable or unseasonable to think and speak together of Christian liberty, and to remember, amid the tumults, and plans, and fears of our times, how much the Church of Christ has to do in realizing, diffusing and establishing true Freedom. Let us remind others, and recall to our own recollection, how little that much used and much abused, that idolized and blasphemed name, Liberty, is really understood or enjoyed out of the pale of the Church of the Living God.

Let us now consider

I. The nature of true Freedom.

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II. The Church of Christ as the Home of the Free, where alone, Liberty in its highest sense is to be enjoyed.

III. The Church of Christ as the Hope of the Free, whence alone, the ultimate and universal emancipation of the race is to proceed.

When our Saviour spoke of this matter to the Jews, they resented it, and replied with more zeal than truth, that they had never been in bondage to any man.* It was scarce fit- ting language for the men whose national history began with the long and hard servitude to Egypt ; whose fathers had hung their harps on the willows of Babylon during a tedious captivity of seventy years ; who had been peeled and scatter- ed by the tyranny of the princes of the royal family of An- tiochus ; and who were, at the very hour of uttering the boast, licking the dust beneath the kingly feet of Herod, the Idu- mean, and fretting and biting, like prisoned wolves, at the chain of the Roman, unable to break, and yet most loth to bear it. And it is so in our day : men may talk much of freedom that are as yet destitute of its best privileges, and ignorant of its first principles. What, then, is true free- dom 1

I. Freedom is the absence of all restraint. A mere created and dependent being cannot enjoy absolute and unqualified freedom, because his finite and dependent nature necessarily imposes certain restraints which he cannot surmount or escape. Surrounded, again, as we are, by others (our fellow- creatures), who all have their rights and wishes as well as ourselves, our just freedom consists in the absence of all such restraints as are not necessary to prevent our doing wrong to the happiness and rights of others of our fellow- men. The owner of one of these houses is free to make what use he will of his own habitation, that does not render it a nuisance and injury to his neighbors. But because he is free to use his own property at will, he is not free to set it on tire, and thus involve an entire street in the conflagra- tion. The passenger in one of the ships lying at our wharves, is free to occupy his cabin, and, for the time, it is his castle ; but he is not free to scuttle it, and sink his fellow-voyagers along with himself.

Again, we are beings constituted with reason and con- science, and our freedom cannot be called rational freedom,

* John viii. 33.

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if employed in contravention of the dictates of right reason , or in known disregard of truth, which is to be the standard by which reason acts, or in opposition to the warnings of conscience, the monitor within us. We are not as much free to follow error as to follow truth. We are not free to de- fend wrong as well as right. It is putting a violence on our- selves, on the nature within us, to make this perverse use of our freedom. It is rather the ruin of liberty. It is virtually enslaving the soul, to put a force upon right reasor and an enlightened conscience, by resisting their dictates.

Nor is ours a desirable freedom, unless when used to ad- vance the happiness both of ourselves and our neighbors. The madman left to hack away his limbs, or to destroy his own life by plunging from a precipice, or to scatter fire- brands, arrows and death upon others, and say, " Am I not in sport?"* — and the child, left in uncurbed freedom to its own ignorance and waywardness, to glean in our streets and lanes a precocious wickedness — neither of them enjoys a lib- erty that is desirable, because in both cases the freedom is used to ultimate misery instead of happiness. Of a just, ra- tional, and desirable freedom, these are then the limits. To be truly a good, freedom must be guided by truth as its standard, and aim at real happiness as its end. We are not, of right, free either to follow falsehood or to speak it. We are not truly free to work out our own or another's misery and ruin.

Liberty, it appears then, is really a relative thing. It must conform to truth and justice as its rule, and conduce to hap- piness as its end. Where is the standard of the truth that must guide it, and where the source and measure of the hap- piness at which it must aim ? We answer, both are found in God. His will, as that will is intimated in creation around us, as it is developed in the conscience within us, and as it is fully disclosed in the book of revelation before us — this, the law and purpose of our Maker, is the one perfect standard of truth, and therefore the limit of freedom. His favor is the only happiness any of his creatures can know. To seek, to learn, to serve, to see, and to adore Him, is the bliss toward which all nature struggles as its end, the source of its true and abiding felicity. And nought, therefore, is true freedom,

* Prov. xxvi. 18, 19.

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that does not tend thitherward, because no other freedom con- duces to true happiness.

One who had never known the sorrows of vassalage and captivity — in youth free as a shepherd lad, and in age enjoy- ing the independence of an absolute prince, yet made the lib- erty in which he rejoiced, to consist in subjection to God. " And I will walk at liberty," said David ; " for I seek thy precepts."* Instead of fettering him, the laws of Jehovah constituted the freedom of his soul. Elsewhere, therefore, he said, "When thou shalt enlarge my heart, I will run Jie way of thy commandments."! The emancipation of the soul is shown by its making haste in the path of pious obedience.

Wishing to be more than dependent and finite creatures, and aspiring to be as God, our race lost freedom, when they lost also truth and bliss in the fall of Eden. We wished to be free from the Creator, dependence on whom was needful to our existence and enjoyment, just as if a man should wish to make himself free from and independent of his limbs, by amputating them, and were to proclaim his independence of his eyes by plucking them from their sockets. Creation made man dependent on his limbs and eyes, and still more did it make man necessarily, inevitably and eternally depen- dent on his Creator. Aiming at more than he could of right claim, or could by any possibility attain, man lost what he already had. His conscience darkened, his passions inflam- ed, his reason weakened ; he who had scorned to be the child and servant of God became the bondsman of sin and death, the child of wrath, the prey of Satan, and the heir of Hell. Well is it for mankind that their powers do not equal their as- pirations, and that their freedom of action is restrained. Sin has, indeed, made this a bad and sorrowful world. But how much worse, even than it is, had it been, were it not for God's restraints upon our race. The book of history, the record of man's acts, is a dark volume. But the book of man's pur- poses, of his "imaginations, only evil, and that continually" — the pages that will be opened in the day of judgment, the dread volume of conscience, and of the hidden workings of the heart, is a far darker one. Had no God checked, and curbed the race, the world would have been made a mere hell, and human kind would have been long since demonized, Those unhappy sufferers, plagued and possessed by devils in

* Ps. cxix. 45. t Ps. cxix. 32.

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the times of our Saviour, would have been, not as now, ex- ceptions to, but examples of the general rule, as to the char- acter and condition, the tempers and the prospects of our race. Even as it is, the Destroyer and the Father of lies ex- ercises a fearful influence over us. The Scripture represents us as his besotted dupes, led captive of him at his will, danc- ing to the music of our chains, and in maniacal delusion, working out merrily, and with a strong hand and a cheerful heart, our own eternal damnation. Such is human freedom, as the fall left it.

But what Eden lost, Calvary recovered. When the strong man, armed, kept his goods in peace, blessed be the grace and mercy of our God, a stronger than he, the Lord from Heaven, came to disabuse us and to dispossess him ; and to make us free from the tyranny of that fearful trinity, self, earth, and Satan. To know Christ, is to be restored to true liberty and happiness, and hence he said, " The truth shall make you free." He compared his own work of human liberation to the emancipation of a slave by the son and heir. "If the son," he said, " make you free, then are ye free in- deed." The son and not the steward has the right and the power thus to rescue and set at liberty. It was as if he had said to the Jews : Moses, in whom ye trust, was but as a servant in God's house, and could not emancipate from the law ; but I rule that house as son, heir and master.

2. The worldling is not free. Can he, we appeal to your own hearts, in the courts and presence of the heart-searching God — can he, who is tossed to and fro by vain fears, and hopes as vain, the sport of passions he can neither tame nor satisfy — whose conscience is burdened with sin, whose recol- lections are haunted by busy remorse — who sees the vanity of the world at times, and yet knows nothing better to grat- ify the cravings of his heart as it yearns for happiness — who dreads death, and yet knows it to be inevitable — who looks to the judgment, and feels himself unprepared ; can such a man be called free ? No blood of atonement sprinkled over his aching conscience — no smile of fatherly favor from the throne, breaking through the gloom of affliction, and beam- ing over his beclouded and uncertain path — does not all Na- ture and all Providence cry out to him, as of old the avenger to the criminal : " What hast thou to do with peace ?" Look at the vaunting infidel, that boasts of having trampled under his feet the vain terrors of revelation and eternity, and who

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arrogates to himself the lofty title of the free thinker — the man whose thoughts soar to a more than vulgar freedom, and rove with unfettered wing — is he really the freeman he claims to be ? Can he always quench conscience and stifle fear ? Do his blasphemies annul the law, or annihilate the lawgiver and the judge ? Can his delusions fill up the fiery pit, or cause the Heaven he derides and neglects to vanish, as the baseless fabric of a vision 1 No ; he prides himself in a freedom he has not achieved — he has broken, he thinks, the thrall and servitude of conscience and Christ, and an eternal judgment. But it is all the delusion of a drunken in- fatuation— the dream of a sleeping captive, who takes stiong drink when ready to perish, and in the visions of the night, his prison, fetters, and guards are gone ; and he wakes, and behold they are all here again. A fiery gulf envelopes and awakes the sleeper, and ends the dream for ever.

Look at the free-liver, the gay sensualist, the pert trifler, the wretched and misnamed daughter of pleasure : surely these are free ? Not so. They forget God, but it is only for a time, and their misery and their ruin is, that God will not, cannot forget them. Wafted amid all their frivolities continually onward toward a world of retribution, unable to stifle all reflection, and to call up a good hope, they laugh, they shout, they scheme, they build, they plant, and God is not in all their thoughts : but His eye observes them, His hand envelopes their most prolonged and reckless wanderings, and His bar gathers them, compels their submission, and issues their irrevocable and inevitable sentence.

3. Yet man is so constituted that freedom he must desire. Look at the blind quest and gropings of our race after free- dom— liberty or political deliverance for the state, and liberty for the soul or mental emancipation. Political and mental liberation have been the subject of the most earnest aspira- tions, of fierce strugglings, and bloody sacrifices. As be- tween man and man, much may have been gained. Far be it from us to forget or dispute these temporal blessings, in the train of social and spiritual emancipation. But if between man and his God, there are instituted no better and happier relations, what is the ultimate gain to those who must soon quit the world and its governments and schools, to enter another and eternal state, where these governments and schools are not to be transferred ? If, amid our political schemings or our social reforms, we seek not and gain not

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the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free, of what avail are the brief goods of earth, when we miss the enduring blisg of eternity? The science of our times is, indeed, in the hands of some of its cultivators, aiming to go further. It would emancipate us of our fears and responsibilities. It would screw God into the laws of his own material universe, shut him up into a sort of blind and dumb, physical, unalter- able Fate, and make all events and beings but the blind de- velopment of physical, unconscious, unconscientious and irre- sponsible laws of being. Pinioned, thus, as in a vice, God has, on this theory, no freedom to act, apart from these old mate- rial laws. He grows like a tree, and man and history are his bark and leaves. Man has thus no individual futurity, and no accountability to trouble him, But meanwhile, in strip- ping us of our fears, these philosophical emancipators have torn from us our hopes. They have made the grave darker than it was before their philosophy began its teachings, and by annihilating the immortality of the soul, and abolishing Providence, they have given us up to the hard servitude of appetite, license, mortality and despair. Little is there de- sirable in such a freedom as this, that thrusts the race out of the immediate and paternal keeping of God, robs them of a heaven, and assures them only of a quiet and sleepless grave. It is like talking of the blessed freedom of an un- fledged, unfeathered nestling, free to be hurled from the pa- rent nest, free to flutter and fall to the earth — and unable as it is to feed, guide, and defend itself, free there to lie and rot into the undistinguished dust. Give us rather the freedom of the sheltering home where God cherishes us, the free guidance of the outstretched and parental wings fluttering over us, and directing our upward way. Give us back from the yawning abysses of your vain philosophy, our old con- solations,

* * * Our home, Our God, our Heaven, our all.

Your nominal freedom from Providence is but an insult to the intellect and an outrage on the heart.

II. The Church of Christ is the Home of the Free. Here is found the freedom sin has forfeited, and after which governments and schools, revolutions and philosophies, have groped in vain.

Now the Christian Church has been, by many, regarded as

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the very den of spiritual tyranny. But as we have already and early seen, all desirable freedom resolves itself into that which has truth for its standard and happiness for its results. Now that gospel, of which the church is the embodiment, and the guardian, and the channel, is the great truth requisite to meet the wants, solve the doubts, and heal the maladies of our nature. It is this gospel that secures our happiness amid the trials of time, in the terrors of death, and through the long cycles of eternity. But it may be asked, does it not im- pose hard, unnatural restraints ? It gives rather new impul- ses and aspirations, that fight with the corrupt and degrading tendencies of our old and fallen nature. Its restraints are the emancipating struggles of a successful rebellion against old tyranny, the sacrifices of a glorious war of liberation and revolution.

1. The Church of the Redeemer is, be it remembered, of right free, for it is a voluntary association. Christ establish- ed it. He enlists as its members " a people made willing in the day of His power." Men are not born into it by birth in a Christian nation — they are not forced into it by pains and penalties, by the fires of the Auto da Fe, and the rack and dungeon of the Inquisition. They are not born into it by de- scent from a Christian parent, and lineage from a pious household. To them that believe on His name He gives power to become the sons of God. Belief is an untransfera- ble, personal, voluntary act. It is the result of a spiritual change, that turns them from the idols of the world, liberates them from their old fears and tyranny, and makes them grate- ful subjects of their Liberator and Redeemer. To perfect this glorious recovery, they put themselves under His care and guidance as their Ruler. His presence in the Church, and the perpetual influences of the omnipresent and omnipo- tent Spirit, which He promised, as the Comforter and Teach- er of His Church, make up the very life of the Christian Church.

Much has been said of a visible Church on earth, contain- ing the Christians of a nation — or all nations. But in Scrip- ture we find but two uses for the word Church. The one de- scribes the great Invisible Church, comprising all the saints of all dispensations before and since the incarnation, and em- braces the whole sacramental host of God's elect on either side the stream of death — the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. The other, a Visible Church, is described in the

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New Testament as a collection of individual disciples, who come together in one place for the word and ordinances of Christ. Hence the Scriptures do not speak of a national Christian Church of Judea, or of Asia Minor, but of the Churches of Judea, and the seven Churches of Asia. This new and unauthorized notion of a collective visible Church, made up of the several congregations of a land or nation, is the basis on which rests the assumption of the Roman Cath- olic Church. The visible Church of Scripture, and of the earliest fathers, is an independent and single congregation of disciples.

As a voluntary association, some may think that the Church has power to make its own laws, and may be desert- ed at will. But this is not so. He who enters it cheerfully does homage to Christ, as the lawgiver of his Church, who has completed and closed the statute-book of the body he has founded. In professing himself a Christian, he has made a contract to which there are three parties — the Church, him- self, and the Saviour, as head of the Church. As to his power of quitting it, it follows, then, that the congregation he joins cannot at will relinquish him ; for if they could release their own rights over him, they are not entitled to release Christ's rights over his professed and pledged followers. Hence it will be seen, that they err who think that they have a right at any moment to desert the Church — and that the Church ought to permit them to withdraw their names from the Church roll, and sink into the world unquestioned and unrebuked. It is for Christ to release you. Should he, or will he do it ?

2. Let us look again at the adaptation of the Church to promote human happiness. It is a divine invention for the diffusion of truth, the culture of piety, and the increase of the order and enjoyment of the saints. It is not a nation, but something yet more extensive, for it may include the deni- zens of every clime ; and yet far more select, for it takes none by mere national right ; it is not a family, but some- thing more expansive, yet equally tender in its bonds of union. It is not a caste, for it despises none, and rejects none, yet like the caste it preserves amid human mortality, and change, and revolution, a sacred order, not of ministers but of saints, all kings and all priests unto God; it is not a secret society, for it makes no reserve of its doctrines or practices from the world, yet in secret each of its true

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members finds in the communings of his soul with God, the sources of a secret and hidden life from heaven. " Your life is hidden with Christ in God." Incurring none, then, of the drawbacks and defects of the nation, the family, the caste, or the secret society — it unites the advantages of them all.

Those who are spiritually its members by union with Christ and the Holy Ghost, are, indeed, freemen ; they are free from the dominion of sin, free from the curse of the law, free from the bondage of ancient ritual and modern tradition, free from the world, and free from Satan. This liberty is not license, for it is the just, the rational, the durable freedom that, as we have already endeavored to show, is the only one adapted to our na- ture and wants. They are not free from Scripture — the Spirit living in them does not contradict or neutralize his own ear- lier oracles in the written page, because He cannot contradict Himself. They are not free from conscience ; it witnesses for God, but not as of old and in their unregenerate state, to condemn them. Sprinkled now with the appeasing blood of the Mercy-seat, it has peace, and preaches grateful homage, humility, earnest and constant service to the Divine bringer of that peace. They are not free from Christ. They would not wish it more than the patriot would wish to be free from the bonds of the country he loves, as he loves his own life — more than the mother would yearn to be free from the chil- dren whom she cherishes as her own soul. They are not free from the love of the brethren, nor do they desire it ; this brotherly union and alliance is not a restraint or an incum- brance, but like wings to the bird,* instead of burdening, it is an aid to soar, and a help in their heavenward way.

3. It is a state of preparation and training for higher scenes. They are fitting to become at last members of the family of heaven. The employments and services of the earthly church are maturing and meetening them for the in- heritance of the saints in light. The Sabbath, as it comes, bringing its repose from toil, and its respite from eating cares, hushing the din, and stopping the noisy wheels of bu- siness, reminds them of an endless and unbroken Sabbath above. They bring their sorrows to the sanctuary, and to their brethren, and to their Elder Brother, and are consoled. The snare of the tempter is broken. Age is lightened amid its clouds of infirmity, and youth is guided along its steep

* Bernard.

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and slippery way, full of temptations. They look to the time of final emancipation, to be free from the flesh, and from sin and the tempter. In prayer and the word, and the break- ing of bread, and in their alms and efforts, they commune with the saints of all classes and climes, with the churches of other lands. And the brotherhood of the race, and their heirship with angels, come into view as nowhere else, to the saints of God, on God's day, and in God's house.

4. Yet see their freedom, in the relation of these several bands of disciples to their own members, to one another, and to the governments and states of the world. In themselves the several members are all united o the same Christ, and although there are different offices aid diversities of gifts and graces, authority is not tyranny, and subjection is not servi- tude. The Church is not a mere nest of anarchy, nor yet is it a scene of spiritual despotism, where a Diotrephes rules in the pastorate, or an oligarchy in the deaconship crushes pastor and people beneath its iron rod. Amongst their sister churches they are related by sympathies and kind offices, but own no subjection, and acknowledge no dependence, either on cotemporary churches of their own country, or upon the churches of other lands or other times, except as those churches have held the same truth, cling to the same Head, and have imbibed the same spirit. The churches of the con- gregational system acknowledge no ecclesiastical -power in synods, associations, councils, prelates or pontiffs.

They claim to hold directly of the ever-living, Almighty, and omnipresent Spirit, and to lean, without the interposition of chains of succession and lines of spiritual lineage, immedi- ately and for themselves, on the bosom and the heart of the Saviour, who pledged his presence to the end of the world, where two or three are gathered in his name. To all pedi- grees of a spiritual and priestly class claimed by some Chris- tians, therefore, we oppose the permanent presence and in- defeasible priesthood of the great Melchisedec of our profes- sion, without beginning of days or end of years ; and we claim to " come up out of the wilderness" stayed directly on Christ, and " leaning on our beloved." We touch, so to speak, his bare arm as our stay, without the intervention of the envelopes of any favored order, or virtue running through a chain of spiritual conductors. Our graces are not trans- mitted, but taken direct from the Redeemer's own hand. Nothing short of a personal application to Christ, we suppose,

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will avail us in conversion ; and nothing short of the personal presence of Christ will sustain us in the dying hour : and, as churches, we judge nothing short of the personal presence of the Lord can give energy to our preaching, validity to our ordinances, or life to our worship. If we have this, let others find, if they can, something better, holier, older, newer, and vaster. We know it not, and seek it not. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty." Each visible church or sin- gle congregation is a visible section of the great invisible and Catholic church of all ages.

As to our relations to the state, we suppose that a church established by law cannot, in the best sense of the word, be free. Whether it be a republic or monarchy, we suppose the state to have no prerogatives over the church of the redeem- ed. Caesar and Christ have different spheres. Christ paid the tribute-money, during his incarnation, as a citizen of the Roman state, and a subject of Caesar. But it was not for Ccesar to come into the church as a patron or a prince. He could not dictate the Sermon on the Mount. It was not for Pilate to prompt the parables, or for Herod to originate and regulate the miracles of our Saviour, arrange his resurrec- tion, or fix the gifts and time, and scene of the Pentecost and its effusions of the Holy Ghost. And if the worldly ruler could not do these, he has no right as a legislator in the Christian church. The only competent legislator for that church is the potentate so endowed. Hence, while as citi- zens of the state we give, and gladly give tribute to whom tribute is due, and fear to whom fear, and honor to whom honor, when these limits are past we know no man after the flesh. In our own country and denomination, and with our social institutions, the intrusions and usurpations of the world upon the church are most likely to come in the form of vol- untary societies, attempting to control and use the churches for their own purposes, and to break them down, and their ministers also, when they prove refractory under such at- tempted intervention. It is the duty, and the interest of the church so invaded, to stand fast, unmoved by the shock of the onset, unterrified by denunciations, and unbribed by pop- ular interest and favor. Is the voluntary society of man's organization, entitled to prescribe to the voluntary society of Christ's organization ? Wre question it. To us it seems but the old parable of Jotham revived — the thistle, thorny and low, undertaking to rule by fire the cedar in Lebanon. Let

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us as churches root ourselves in the reserved rights of Christ Jesus, and repel all other legislation.

III. Our last division is the province of the church, in diffusing the true freedom of the race. The church of the living God is the Hope of the Free. The true lover of lib- erty wishes it extended to all. The Head of the church has assured to him, from the Father, universal dominion. Far, then, as the sun travels over our earth, we expect one day to see the Sun of Righteousness diffusing his beams and swath- ing the globe with the brightness of his light as with a gar- ment of glory. Wherever the rain falls or the dew gathers, we look one day to behold the early and the latter rain of the Holy Ghost diffusing its showers, and converting the arid wilderness into the garden of the Lord.

1. We look, then, in estimating the future emancipatory influence of the church, to what it has done. Receiving a free gospel, and having been commanded what it had freely received freely to give, it has preached to the poor, the ne- glected, and the destitute. In our times it is preached by the new engine of the press. The Word of God which, as the incarcerated apostle rejoiced in his times to say, "is not bound," has by the press, as the missionary has employed it, been unbound and set loose in strange dialects, till the lan- guages most generally spoken by our race have now all the Bible in versions of their own. And Christians have largely scattered them. From the gospel, as preached by some of its most consistent adherents, has sprung the chief political freedom of our times. Even Hume saw in the Puritans, whose religious and political principles he alike hated, the conservators of English freedom. And American freedom is, in a great measure, the harvest, sprung from seed sown by the Puritan and Pilgrim Fathers of New England. As to intellectual emancipation in the form of education, the best common school systems of the old and new world have been formed and matured by the Protestantism of the several countries, where such schools are found. Most of our col- leges are traceable to the Church of Christ. The American Revolution triumphed, because a pure religious faith had prepared the way, by training a people disposed and capaci- tated for freedom. The first French Revolution failed, be- cause it had no such basis to rest upon ; and the second French Revolution, that of our own times, failing to find permanency on an infidel basis, is seeking a religious support,

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by reviving and patronizing the once decaying Romanism of France.

Such are the forms of freedom, the freedom of literature, government, and education, man most desires and exults in ; and for all how much has the church done. But there is a higher style of emancipation. The souls freed and saved, and ushered into heaven — these more glorious trophies of the gospel — who can calculate or follow, as, free from the chains of sin and Satan, and from the low dungeons of earth, the Liberator and Redeemer has led them in, to the rest, the triumphs, the harpings, and the endless freedom of the heav- enly world ?

2. But from what the church has done, let us look, in estimating its prospective power, to what it would do. It seeks the universal illumination, and emancipation, and evan- gelization of the race. Its prayer is, Thy kingdom come ; and the Messiah's kingdom is but another name for the lib- erty wherewith Christ maketh free. It would banish war and bondage, and intemperance, and ignorance, and oppres- sion— all that can degrade, all that can exasperate, divide, or brutify the race. The truth it would universally diffuse ; and freedom, as we have seen, leans on truth. Happiness it does not believe in as being rightfully a matter of monopoly. " Freely ye have received, freely give," is the motto of all its spiritual enjoyments. Grace is their name, as coming from Divine benignity — Grace, as commiserating all human misery. Its blessedness is enhanced by being diffused. Each new heir of heavenly joy fills the courts of the upper world with new melody, and awakens a new anthem from the seraphim and cherubim that circle the throne of light. A religion thus vast and expansive in its hopes, and plans, and prayers, is the religion likely to attempt what the race needs.

3. But does it accomplish what it attempts ? This brings us to our last remark. We have seen what the church has done, and what she would fain do. Let us now inquire, in conclusion, what she can do ? She can do what nothing else can.

(1.) The freedom of the gospel, we observe, in the first place is necessary ; for it alone has the power to make other and inferior forms of freedom possible. When the Church of Christ would go forth to evangelize the savage in the last cen- tury, philosophy stepped between the relief and the wretch- edness, parting the barbarian and his benefactor, to tell the

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Missionary that he could not evangelize until the savage had been first civilized ; and that civilization must always precede the gospel. The Missionary thus rebuked, was not repelled. He went on. The result has shown the folly of this inter- meddling and braggart philosophy. Instead of the gospel re- quiring civilization as a pioneer, it was civilization that could not go on till the gospel had prepared its way. It was the gospel that had made civilization possible. By awakening a soul within him, and revealing a heaven and *~ell before him, the savage was aroused to discern other and inferior wants, and civil culture travelled in the train of Christian truth — and where the Bible, and the Missionary, and the Sunday School, had gone, the common school, constitutional law, art and domestic comfort travelled after. But a similar feeling, unhappily, prevails as to other social ameliorations. It is said to the gospel and the church, " Stand back until educa- tion, until a better system of relief for the poor, enfranchise- ment for the slave, and democratic insurrections, prepare your way." Our reply is, " Let the world stand back for the church, and the church sta?id fast in the vanguard, where it has a right to be." It is the Bible and the church, and the Spirit of God, that must make most of these social ameliora- tions possible. Here, as elsewhere, the policy of the nation, as Christ has made it the policy of the individual, is to seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added* Get a man or a nation converted, and all else needful will come in its time. But an irreligious and godless nation cannot be permanently free, cultivated, order- ly, or happy.

There are blessings of the highest worth, which religion can give to the world as no other influence can give them : and yet the Church of Christ cannot bestow them directly without swerving from her appointed course, and endanger- ing her own purity. She blesses the world with national wealth and household comfort, but it is indirectly by the in- dustry and thrift she teaches. If she sought to accumulate wealth, in her corporate character, or made riches a term of her membership, she would become the slave of Mammon, and laying up her treasures on earth, be, on the instant, dis- owned of Christ. She gives the world political emancipa- tion ; but it is indirectly, for if she directly mingled herself up with the work of organizing one form of government, and subverting another, she would be false to her supreme

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allegiance to Christ, by making his kingdom tributary to the republics and potentates of this world. She is to advance in the world the cause of illumination and universal education. But this, too, is done indirectly. If she did it directly, and converted her pulpit into a mere desk of philosophy, and made admission into her membership and ministry dependent upon a certain amount of literary culture, she would not only wrong the Holy Ghost, but retard ultimately, and in the most important quarters, the very work of spiritual enfranchise- ment for the race, that she would be scheming to aid. It is the genius of her system, the law of her organization, to push God's claims first, and let man's rights follow ; to aim at heaven, and bless earth by the way ; to fasten one hand on those skies where her King is throned, and her own crown is reserved, whilst from the other she flings around as inferior gifts, the earthly and indirect benefits of her influence, just as a king, on the day of his coronation, scatters among the crowd on his way gifts of price, but his own eye is on the diadem and the throne.

(2.) The Church of God is needed again, for it alone can make other freedom valuable. Leave the heart under the bondage of selfishness and depravity, and the science and the freedom of earth cannot wash the Ethiop white, or make any change of circumstances heal the private and social miseries of the times. There may be political freedom, and art, and knowledge, where there is no piety found, but amid them all, man will groan, like Solomon, exclaiming, amid his wealth, while his heart ached under the royal purple, and his head throbbed under the kingly diadem : " Vanity of vanities and vexation of spirit." With a conscience that cannot be calmed, and passions that cannot be subdued — with the foot in the grave, and the hand stretching forth into an unknown eternity, and groping in uncertainty to find some clue to life and hope beyond the tomb — can man be blest until the church of the living God has reached, disenthralled, enlight- ened, and gladdened him % What is political equality to a dying sinner, and what your own Declaration of Indepen- dence to a soul, that, burdened with its sins, and ignorant of the Cross of Christ, asks in dismay, " How can man be just with God ?" " If a man die shall he live again ?" No ; the church must make all other and earthly blessings worth hav- ing. The blood of Calvary must drop into the cup of worldly freedom, or that freedom even is a bitter draught.

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(3.) Lastly, we say, the Bible and the Church, and the Spirit of God only, can give enduring freedom. Intelligent and observing statesmen have begun to see that bad men may rebel, but cannot be free. There are certain blessings, that, if given, cannot be kept, unless there be a certain state of preparation for them, a good soil in which they may be planted. Solomon's vines, the fruit whereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver, would not thrive if planted on the sea-shore, and flooded by the salt tide. So freedom, to endure, must have its substratum of moral culture to sustain it, and its showers of Divine grace to develop it, or else it takes no permanent root, and brings forth no perfect fruit. Establish to-day universal equality and universal suffrage, an agrarian division of property, and universal education ; and men's weakness, their difference of years, inequality of strength, and talents, and influence, would re-establish dis- cord and inequality to-morrow. Self-government is the basis of all abiding liberal governments, and who, but the Chris- tian, has learned to govern himself in truth ? Brotherly love is the only intelligible and practical form of social equality ; and a pure Christianity has the secret of this. Christianity is the true citizenship of the world ; and universal peace, and the free exchange by all lands and tribes of their several pe- culiar goods and gifts, are possible only as all are grouped around, and united by the Cross of a common Redeemer, and the hope of a common heaven.

1. We live, my brethren, in eventful times. If ever the cry needed to go forth, distinctly and repeatedly, over all the battalions of the sacramental host, " Stand fast in your lib- erty as Christ gave it," it is in our times. There are theo- ries many of social change, and nostrums many of social relief, that undervalue the church, decry the ministry, and slight the paramount claims of the Bible. But regeneration and personal conversion are the only remedy for man's great misery. The church is God's organization, for the true dis- enthralment of the world. Betray it not, improve it not, by the admixture of human arts and inventions. Surrender it riot to the philosopher ; nor let the statesman subsidize it. If, as some think, the death-grapple of truth and error is not far oil', it is the church, simple, spiritual, and divine, the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Ghost, that is to be the invinci- ble and infrangible battalion, the Immortal Legion, in the im- pending conflict. Out of it, we see her coming, "Fair as the

THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 147

sun, clear as the moon, and terrible as an army with ban- ners." In the strifes and storms of the times the ship of the state may labor and break. Unduly lengthened, some fear, that the Union may part amidships. But the ship of the church cannot founder. Her Lord, the Almighty One, is embarked in her.

2. The grand, the vital question^* all remains. Am I free ? It is not whether I be a proressor of religion. But have I felt the power of the gospel to subdue sin, cancel guilt, and breathe peace ? Does it give me filial freedom be- fore God, and fraternal freedom before man ?

" He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves beside."

If the slave of Satan, how little can I, the prayerless and the God-hating, and the God-forsaken, be an available bar- rier to my country against the tide of evil influences that would flood her. I need God's freedom to give and sustain effectually the human and social liberty I prize.

Am I freed by the grace of Christ Jesus, then am I free to pray — to enter with holy boldness and a filial frankness into the most holy place. The Bible charges the wicked with enlarging their desires as hell. Surely, it is the strength and honor of the Christian to enlarge his desires as heaven — • to ask according to the breadth of the promises, and the greatness of the great King, at whose feet he is a petitioner. " He that spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things ?" Thus encouraged, seek blessings for the race, for your coun- try, your city and yourself, in God's order ; salvation the greatest first, and all else the lesser benefits in its train. " Seek first the kingdom of God," and then expect that, ul- timately, under its emancipating, enlightening, and peaceful influences, the earth will become the suburbs of heaven. The knowledge and freedom of the upper world will drop down upon this lower world ; and man will breathe even in time the spirit of the freedom of eternity, and anticipate the joys of that city, described by the same apostle in this same epistle, as the Jerusalem which is from above, which is free , " which is the mother of us all."*

* Gal. iv. 26.

THE STRONG STi^F AND THE BEAUTIFUL HOD.

(A Discourse preached in the Amity St. Bap. Church, April 12, 1840, on occasion of the death of TIMOTHY R. GREEN, ESQ.)

C( HOW IS THE STRONG STAFF BROKEN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD !"

Jer. xlviii. 17.

These words were first spoken of Moab. But the imagery they contain is used in Scripture to describe the benefactors as well as the oppressors of mankind. The staff is the em- blem of power, whether employed in kindness or in tyranny, to support or to crush. The rod, shooting out of the earth with its buds clustering thickly upon it, seems the image that nature would instinctively select as the fitting emblem of promise and hope. The surrounding nations, in the fall of Moab, saw with astonishment that sceptre of power on which they had long looked with awe, shattered, and the rod of beauty cut down. And still, in his Providence, God calls us to look with mournful surprise upon those on whom many leaned, and from whom much was hoped — the young, the beloved, and the useful, laid low in the dust. We had counted upon their long life, we had deemed them too much needed to the best interests of the world and the church, to be early removed — we had expected their influence to ex- tend and strengthen itself with the slow lapse of time, and when we allowed ourselves to think of their death, we put far off the evil day, and thought of them only as going down to the grave in a good old age, laden with blessings and full of honors and usefulness. But, ere we are aware, their course is ended, in the full flush of their strength and of our own hopes. Their sun goes down while it is yet noon.

The dispensation to which our remarks at this time will have reference, seems a mysterious one. We mourn, but it is in submission. We are not forbidden to weep, for Christ himself wept at the grave of his friend. But we are forbidden to sorrow as those who are without hope, and our

THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 149

mourning must be without murmuring. The event is one that has saddened many hearts, and blighted the richest promises of general usefulness to society, and the fairest prospects of domestic happiness. We see a Christian widely known, and as generally beloved, crowned with blossoming hopes and clustering fruits, struck down into the dust, in the strength of his years. We see, on the other hand, thousands spared to old age, who seem to nourish in flaunting, peren- nial barrenness, from whom society receives no good, and who are the mere cumberers of the earth. Such scenes are strange, yet they are not new. They were seen by the prophets in their times, they drew tears from the eyes of de- vout men in the days of the apostles. The Church of Christ in the earliest ages must have wondered to see James, one of the brothers whom Christ had hailed as the Sons of Thun- der, falling in the very commencement of his career, while they beheld Simon the Sorcerer remaining to be the curse and snare of thousands. The devout men who carried Ste- phen to his burial and made great lamentation over him, must have had their sorrow mixed with no little perplexity, when they looked at the bruised corpse of the zealous and youthful evangelist, and, thinking of his untimely fate, turned to Annas, the high-priest. They must have found their faith tried as they asked, why the youthful preacher fell and the hoary -headed persecutor was allowed to survive ? Yet God did it. He ruled then and He rules now. This was their consolation, and it must be ours. We would remem- ber this, and be comforted. And may th,e God of all wis- dom and of all consolation touch the lips of the speaker and the heart of each hearer, as, standing beside this open grave, we ask in reverence —

I. The purposes of our Heavenly Father in such bereave- ments.

II. The duties to which we are at such seasons called.

I. There is much that we know not now, and that can never be known in this world ; but this we know assuredly, that God does not willingly grieve or afflict us. Reluc- tantly does he wound us, and only because it is indispensable to our sanctification, and our sanctification is indispensable to our happiness.

1. And one great and known purpose of our Heavenly Father in such overwhelming bereavements is, to teach us that we should not misplace our trust. Man from his

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weakness must necessarily have, without and beyond himself, objects on which to rely and confide. But it is his misery and his sin, that he forgets the true object of trust, and leans for support on helpers that must fail him in the hour of trial. Men confiding in their fellow-mortals, are but like vines, entwined around each other, and which thence lie rotting on the earth, when they should rather with their tendrils climb the sides of the Rock of Ages. We expect, all of us, from earth what earth cannot give. We lean on the reed — it is shattered in our grasp and pierces the hand that clasped it. The disappointments and perplexities of earth are embittered by our expecting constancy and permanent aid and lasting sympathy from man — from man, the mortal, the being of yesterday, whom to-morrow hides in the tomb — from man, the fickle, whose purposes change, often and greatly, even in the course of his brief life — from man, the feeble, whose power is limited even where his kindness may continue un- abated. This dislocation of our faith, this misplaced trust, is the mystery of the world's ruin. What but this misplaced reliance is it that makes up the false religions of the world ? One idolizes his own reason, and therefore pours contempt on the Creative intellect, because it rises to a height which his tiny glasses cannot bring within their sweep, or sinks into depths which his scanty lines and plummets cannot fathom. Another trusts in tradition because he dares not trust in the unguarded Scripture. Antichrist himself builds his fearful system on this simple basis — a transfer of confi- dence from Christ J:o the Church — from the Redeemer to the redeemed — from the Sinless to the sinful — from the Infalli- ble to the fallible — from God to man. Instead of finding the One only Saviour, men are taught to go in quest of the one only Church. The Church rather than the Christ, is to ensure their salvation, and protect them from all possibility of error. The superstitious and the sceptical, the idolater and the Atheist all agree, widely as their paths may after- wards diverge, in leaving the way of Truth at this one point - — they trust in " the creature more than in the Creator." And doing this, they inherit the curse of the God they for- sake ; for " cursed is the man that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.*" And what is the process of the sinner's conversion

* J cr. xvii. 5.

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 151

but the retracing of his course back to this fatal step, and returning at this point to the way of truth, and making the transfer of his confidence back again from self and earth to one Saviour and God ? The turning point of our eternal destiny is found in the object on which we rely. Faith and unbelief are the poles on which the eternal world revolves. Yet, even when God has brought us to renounce alt earthly confidences, and to make Him, the High God, our Refuge and our Portion, the heart is continually prone to relapse. The Church of God is but too ready to prize unduly the helpers of her faith whom God has raised up ;' and to guard us from the consequences of an error so fatal, the Holy One of Israel breaks the rods in whose beauty we delighted, and causes the props on which we have leaned to crumble be- neath us. And this misplaced confidence in earthly friends is found but too compatible with a neglect rightly to employ the blessings we so value. The king of Israel could neglect that prophet in his life-time, over whose death-bed he cried in passionate despair, " My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof." He could weep over the expiring prophet, as if in his death the God of Israel had perished, and the fall of that one man had thrown to the earth all the bulwarks of the land ; and yet he had disre- garded that holy seer of the Lord in the days of his health and strength, and given little heed to his instructions. Thus it is, that we contrive at once to undervalue the blessing, as to any actual use made of it ; and to overvalue it, in our expectations of the advantages it is to ensure us.

2. Another great and avowed design of our Heavenly Father in such dispensations, is, to convince us of our sins, and sever us from them. The misplaced confidence already shown to be so habitually our feeling, is itself a sin ; but it is not the only sin thus visited. All transgression requires some mark of the displeasure of the God against whose law it offends, and the beauty, harmony and happiness of whose universe it mars. Sin, the act of man and his invention, has caused all the misery that darkens our world. The hand that plucked from the tree in Eden the forbidden fruit, aided, by that act, in tearing up every goodly plant of hope and every scion of promise and enjoyment, over whose fall man- kind have since wept. Each bereavement that makes our homes desolate and puts out the light of our tabernacles, and that clothes our sanctuaries with mourning — each funeral

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threading its slow way through our busy streets, and each sandy ridge in our crowded church-yards, eloquently reminds us of sin. It was through that gate of sin, which man's own rash hand forced open, that the Avenger Death entered the world, and Eden became a place of graves, and the Paradise of God, once redolent with undying beauty and glittering in perennial life, became what the sin of Israel in the wilder- ness made the scene of their enjoyments to them, a Kibroth Hattaavah. It is thus that God checks not only our per- sonal but our social transgressions. Paul declares that many amongst the Corinthian believers slept the sleep of death, because of the sins that infested that branch of the Christian Church. And we, my dear friends, as a Church, have doubtless deserved at God's hands this sore and bitter be- reavement. Let us feel it, and ask wherefore God has so heavily afflicted us? Let us "be zealous and repent." With a holy indignation let us examine ourselves for the traitor sins that have provoked this chastisement, and, if God's purpose be answered in thus divorcing us from our idols, even this calamity shall work for our good.

3. A further end that the Providence of God seems to pursue in such visitations, is the teaching us His own inde- pendence of the instruments He employs. It seems to us unaccountable, that after having endowed with every gift and grace thpse whom He has raised up to be the benefactors of their age, He should scatter and dissipate His own gifts and hide the treasures He has thus accumulated, as a dark and unused hoard, in the grave. After having chosen his servants, conducted the process of their education, and quali- fied them by trials and lessons and privileges for the work in which death surprised them, He interrupts them often at the very season when they seem most useful, and when their continuance has appeared indispensable to the interests of the family gathered around them, or the churches with whom they walked. We wonder that a Martyn, a Summerfield and a Pearce are but shown to the churches, and then with- drawn. Now, if we do not so far sin, as to put our trust in these our friends, but our confidence is really in God alone, we may yet limit too much the Holy One of Israel. We may suppose that He is able to bless us only through certain favorite channels. To show his own independence, and that " He will send by whom He will send," God may sum- mon hence his most useful servants by what seems an

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 153

untimely call, that, in the language of Paul, " the excellency of the power might be seen to be of God, and not of men." The Sovereign of the Universe must not appear even to re- semble those earthly monarchs whose aggrandizement is owing more to the skill of their statesmen and the conduct of their generals, than to their own policy or prowess. It was in part, perhaps, for such reasons, that, in bringing the chosen tribes to the Land of Promise, God determined to bury their leaders in the way. Had these entered Canaan at the head of the tribes, Israel might have thought that their God could bless them only through the instrumentality of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam ; nor had they then asked or received their Joshuas and their Deborahs, the Samuel and the David that adorned their later annals. And how skill- fully does God contrive to show his independence of all his instruments. He withdraws, one by one, each individual thread in the warp and in the woof of human society. It is removed, and its place supplied by another, and yet the whole web remains unbroken. Amid perpetual change, the scheme of human society and the plan of the Divine govern- ment moves on in unbroken continuity.

4. And even were we able to trace to no other purpose the origin of the affliction that has bowed us in the dust, we know that there is one errand it was undoubtedly intended to accom- plish. It came to remind us of the Sovereignty of God. This is a truth which even the most pious are apt to forget. We fail to remember that God is the Great Proprietor of the Universe, and that we ourselves, and our friends, our health and life, and all that we have, and all that we are, belong to Him, as the possessions which He may arrange and remove at his pleasure. We do not wish to be called to account by a stranger for the use of what is our own, and we can ex- claim at such intermeddling, " Is it not mine own? Is thine eye evil because I am good?" And should not God be allowed the same right ? And there are dispensations of Providence, the great errand of which seems to be, to leave on our hearts the impression, " God giveth no account of any of his mat- ters."* We wonder and we suffer ; but we feel, that although " clouds and darkness are round about Him, yet righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. "f " His path is in the great waters, "| and we cannot trace it.

* Job xxxiii. 13. t Psalm xcvii. 2. t Psalm lxxvii. 19.

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But though in those waters our earthly hopes be wrecked — « though the son, the brother and the friend may be buried in their abysses — though " deep calleth unto deep," and all " his waves and his billows go over us," we know assuredly, that He who moves amid that storm is Just, and the foot- steps which we cannot follow are those of a Father, moving in a right way towards his own glorious purpose. And this lesson itself, were it the only one, is worth all it costs. To know that God rules, that He is supreme, is, to every mind which feels aright, consolation under any trial, and a reply to all murmurings. Each bereavement is but the act of One who gave all that we now lose, and who is but resuming his own boon. If He try our faith as he did that of Abraham, by asking our Isaacs, let us remember that He takes but to restore — that the " brother " whom we lose " shall rise again at the resurrection in the last day " — and above all, let us reflect, that the God who asks such sacrifices from us, has made a greater sacrifice for us, when He gave his own Son, a sacrifice for a world of sinners. When the Isaac of the Heavenly Father was bound, there was no angel crying from heaven to avert the descending knife, no ram caught in the thickets became a substitute for that costly victim. And having so loved us as to give His own Son to become the propitiation for our sins, may we not freely surrender to his disposal each lesser good?

5. But it is not His mere power that He would have us remember. We may discern traces in such dispensations also of His wise and watchful benevolence. There are per- haps designs of the richest mercy to the surviving Israel of God, in making, at times, the removal of a Christian from earth most unexpected ; — sudden as may be the shock thus produced, and wide as may be the chasm created by the be- reavement. It is adding to the happiness of Heaven, which has long comprised the larger portion of the Church Univer- sal, and it is, by adding to the attractions of that, " the Gen- eral Assembly and Church of the first-born " above, exciting the upward aspirations, lessening the temptations, and loos- ening the bonds of the Church yet militant upon earta. " I go," said the Saviour, when about to quit the earth — "I go to prepare a place for you." His creative word could have framed in the highest heavens all that was needed, whilst He himself should have remained still on the earth. Scenes of surpassing magnificence and beauty would have

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 155

started into existence at his bare command ; nor was His personal return to heaven needed, to lay the foundations of the New Jerusalem, and to set up its gates of pearl. But the Church of Christ was at death to pass within the vail into an untried state, and its very obscurity clothed it with an awful and repulsive aspect. The assurance that a Friend of infinite tenderness and equal power, ever living and ever faithful, was already there, would disperse much of this dread. And amid all their uncertainty as to the scenes and employments of the heavenly world, they thus knew some- thing of its society. The fact that Christ was there was enough to make it a better land, inviting to the heart, meet- ing their largest hopes, and quelling all their fears. But He has yet other modes of rendering Heaven less an object of apprehension and more one of desire. Each one of those known to us whom He has removed thither becomes a new incentive to seek that blessed city, and a new evidence of its spiritual opulence. When we have known a departed Christian merely from his biography, or by his written labors, he becomes often so endeared to us, and we so interested in his character, that the thought of meeting him and pursuing the acquaintance thus formed with him adds new lustre to our conception of the heavenly state. We close the memoirs of a Halyburton, a Martyn, or a Payson, or the burning pages of a Baxter or a Leighton, and feel as if we had lost a per- sonal friend, when the grave closes upon their earthly ca- reer, and we long to see their history resumed, and to behold their character yet more fully and beauteously developed in the state beyond the grave. But if converse with a man's works and memoirs makes him thus ours, and we wish to trace and regain our lost friend in his removal to other spheres of existence, much more must we feel this for the brother with whom we have taken sweet counsel, and with whom we have gone up to the house of God in company, whose voice has led in our devotions, who has aided us by advice and kindness, and made our hearts glad by the ten- derness and sympathy of friendship. The loss of such a Christian friend and kinsman is a wise provision of the Elder Brother to prepare the heavenly home for the travellers that yet linger on their way through the wilderness. It makes heaven more attractive and more familiar, and every such death is adding to the spiritual furniture of the Father's house of many mansions, enriching it with inmates whose2

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fellowship we would fain regain, and whose example comes to us recommended by affection and hallowed by death. And may we not say without irreverence, that each one thus departing uses to us the language of his dying Redeem- er; "1 go to prepare a place for you ?" The tendencies of earth and sense are most strong to make the visible and the invisible world too distant from each other, cutting off all sympathy by the impassable barriers of the tomb. But by such removals God makes our affections bridge the chasm, and fling to the earth all intervening barriers. Our bonds of attachment and confidence grow over the yawning gulf, and shoot onward into the unseen and eternal world. We feel that, divided as we may be, the church is yet one ; and that the stream of death destroys not the unity of the Israel of Gocl. The bands that are yet occupying the nearer shores, and the larger and happier host that have passed over the swellings of Jordan and are now set down in the city of endless rest, are really one. One banner — one Captain — one inheritance prove their indivisibility. And every friend who has reached the farther shore becomes a helper of our faith, not only in the example left behind, by his earthly career, but also in the incentive supplied by that higher and more lasting career of existence on which he has now entered, and in which he is looking for us to share.

And the more sudden the removal, the less that the be- reavement has been expected, the more closely does God seem to bring into visible union the two divisions of His sacramental host. When the Christian dies after a lingering illness that had long been regarded as fatal, or sinks slowly into the grave beneath the burden of old age, we feel as if "the space between the state of the righteous in this world and that of their disembodied brethren were more like a vast and immeasurable interval. It seems as if the long period of their sickness and declining age was needed to carry them over the wide chasm intervening between the world of active life here on earth, and the world of rest there. But when death snatches them from our sides with the heat of the day yet moistening their brows, and the burden of the day yet bowing their shoulders, and they are hurried at once into that world of repose, the separation between the world of the senses and the world of spirits seems, as it actually is, most slight. We feel that our daily steps take hold upon eter- nity, and that the earthly church should at every moment be

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 157

ready to migrate to the fellowship of the church above. Viewed under its ordinary aspects, the waters of death to- wards which our feet are tending seem a dark ocean, stretching away into the shoreless distance. But the loss of the young and vigorous, smitten down at our sides in the midst of their tasks, narrows the stream. The eye glances across to the farther shores, and we seem to catch glimpses of the unut- terable glories, and to hear the harpings of the innumerable company of harpers before the throne. We know that he who has disappeared from our view has made his entrance into that assembly, and our thoughts are carried, in his rapid transit, with unwonted ease to the new scenes he inhabits ; and the heart of the survivor almost forgets to bleed, when thus wafted suddenly into that land where the hand of an Almighty Father staunches not only the wounds but even the tears of his suffering people. Were every death linger- ing and long expected, the heavenly world would seem more distant than it actually is. But the sudden translation of the believer makes us feel its nearness. We think no more of the change as Ihe voyage of many weary days ; but feel how easily the Redeemer may accomplish the promise to bring the soul this day to be with him in Paradise.

II. Such are some of the lessons that the God of Provi- dence would have us learn ; let us remember also the duties to which we are, amid such scenes, specially called. These are submission, improvement and confidence in God.

1. In the light cast by the word of God upon these His dispensations, we are to exercise submission. He does not call us to apathy. He expressly warns us against despising the chastening of the Lord, and to display a frigid insensi- bility were to despise and to defy His chastenings. But yet we are not to faint when rebuked of Him. We are, in our weeping, assured that Christ himself can sympathize, and that the Ruler of the universe has not forgotten that He was once the Man of Sorrows. But we may not in selfish grief refuse to be comforted. Remembering. our many mercies, blessing God that what we have lost was so rich a blessing, and was so long continued to us, counting up our transgres- sions, and feeling how little proportion the severest chas- tisement has yet borne to our unworthiness, we shall see that submission is our evident duty. But while the intellect and the conscience may yield their prompt acquiescence to the dealings of our God, the affections may again and again

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renew the contest. It was thus with Job. When the trials that were appointed him came fast and heavily, he at first charged not God foolishly, accepted the chastisement, and justified the chastiser, and both in his language and his conduct under the first onset of his calamities " he sinned not." But although his judgment was thus convinced, his feelings soon rebelled. He rashly challenged God to ap- pear in controversy with him and justify His severe dispen- sations. Yet at last, through the influences of the Spirit, the murmurer was silenced and the mourner comforted ; and the apostle, when alluding to that remarkable history, be- seeches us to remember " the end of the Lord," and that He was proved by the issue even of those severe and multiplied afflictions, "very pitiful and of tender mercy."

'2. Another duty which God demands from all who share in scenes of mourning like the present, is our personal im- provement, and that we profit by the example of those who have " died in the Lord." The testimony given by our friend was the eloquent testimony of a life of Christian con- sistency. I feel that, in attempting to sketch the character of a beloved friend, I may be suspected of overcharging the picture. But I would remember that the place I here occupy is that of the minister of Christ's gospel, and that not the partial eulogy of man, but the truth in its severe simplicity is all that is permitted by the Master to whom I stand or fall. We know, too, that our departed brother would have rejected all praise that placed him before others in any other light than that in which he had long rejoiced to stand before God, as a penitent sinner saved by grace. But that grace was in him so winningly manifested — there was in him so much to love, and so much to admire, that it seems due to the glory • of the grace of God which made him what he was, that he be not left to sink unnoticed into the grave. The unexpected removal of his father, who embarked from a southern port in a vessel from which no tidings were ever received, left him, as the eldest son of his widowed mother, to be from an early age the hope of the family. He was often told by his surviving parent, at this early age, how much depended on his bearing and conduct. We have more than once heard him alluding to this, and describing the strong influence it had exercised on his feelings and character. He felt that there were required of him forethought and considerateness more than are generally found at his years. The natural

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 159

sobriety of his temperament, and his innate dignity of de- meanor, became in consequence more strongly developed, perhaps, than they would otherwise have been. His classi- cal studies were pursued under the direction of Daniel H. Barnes, that most enthusiastic and successful teacher, whose respect and esteem he secured in a remarkable degree, and of whose delicate kindness he always preserved a grateful remembrance. His collegiate course he completed with honor in Columbia College. On leaving it he selected for his profession that which had been also the employment of his father, the law. He had been but little more than a year engaged in its study when his attention was drawn to the subject of religion. He had thought of the gospel as some- thing which befitted rather the other sex, but which would be inimical to that manliness of character which from an early period it had been his ambition to cultivate. The work of that most patient and profound reasoner, Butler, on the Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion, taught him that in neglecting Christianity, he had been contemning what he had not understood. In the study of the scriptures, and in earnest and secret prayer, he was brought, as he trusted, out of the darkness of nature into the glorious light of the gospel, and was made to rejoice in the hope of the children of God. Some difficulty made in the Baptist Church to which he first offered himself for membership, because of the sentiments which he held as to the atonement of Christ being made for the whole world, prevented his union there. His views of religious truth were those generally called Calvin- istic, although he did* not, with many who would claim ex- clusively that designation, regard the sacrifice of Christ as being in its original provision made only for those who are finally saved by its effects. A delay of some months, if not years intervened, during which he studied the Scriptures, and the views of several evangelical denominations.

Shortly before or after the completion of his legal studies, in the years of opening manhood, he made a public profes- sion of religion in connexion with the Oliver Street Baptist Church in this city. In the formation of the Amity Street Church, an offset from that, he took an early and active part. How great his usefulness to us as a people, the value of his counsels, influence, and example, and of his personal labors in the Sabbath School, of which from its establishment lie was the beloved and indefatigable Superintendent, I need

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not say to those who already know it so well, and feel so deeply the loss we have endured by his removal.

In his professional career and in his influence on society he seemed marked for distinction and great usefulness. Averse from principle and the habitual dignity of his charac- ter to all that chicanery which has more generally than justly been ascribed to the members of the bar, he won universal respect and*confidence. Well read in his profession, known to a very extended circle of acquaintances, and universally esteemed, the blended dignity and courtesy of his manners, his assiduous devotion to business, and his strong, sound intellect, seemed to promise him the honors and emoluments of his profession in liberal measure. His attention to his legal studies did not cramp his mind, or lead him to shun all other reading. With great refinement of taste and delicacy of feeling, and a judgment of remarkable maturity and ripe- ness, there was an unvarying propriety that ran through his actions. The same traits made him an adviser of great value. Imagination, though richly stored with classic and beautiful imagery, was not with him an active faculty. His judgment had too overbearing a preponderance to allow to the fancy its full scope. Hence, though he could clothe any sentiment with appropriate and graceful illustrations, they were rather the acquisitions won by reading than the play of his own imagination. His intellect was eminently a practical one, and he showed great skill in seizing on two or three of the strong points of any question, and placing these in a clear light, he left the lesser details comparatively to care for them- selves. Yet, though practical, his mind was not like that of many practical men, narrowed and distorted by looking merely at a few obvious and common facts entirely apart from their principles, thus neglecting those general truths which must ultimately sway the course of every mind pos- sessed of any power. He rose invariably and of choice to the contemplation of principles, but in the application of them he allowed quite as invariably for the actual state of things in the world around him. In temper he displayed the greatest calmness and sweetness, and united happily great frankness of bearing with much caution. The reserve some- times imputed to his manners was rather the result of his signal prudence, and of a refined taste that shrunk alike from display on his own part and coarseness on the part of others, than of any coldness of feeling, i'or in the free intercourse

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 161

of friendship none ever bore a warmer, kinder heart. In the retirement of home, how considerate, how amiable, how estimable and exemplary he was, they only can tell aright, who feel that in the brother, the son and the husband, they have been bereaved of one whose loss can never be replaced. A more devoted son no widowed mother ever leaned upon in the hour of trial, and the testimony of all who have ob- served him nearly, and most the testimony of those " the light of whose tabernacle " God " has put out " in this be- reavement, would prove how few have ever been so richly endowed with those qualities that shed around the little world of home the serene, unbroken sunshine of cheerfulness and affection.

But it is chiefly with his religious character that we have here to do. And religion in him was a principle so con- stantly influencing his course, suffused over his whole cha- racter, no where gathered in unseemly blotches, but shedding every where the hues and bloom of spiritual life, that it must have attracted the notice of all who have known him. No man dreaded or disliked more all appearance of ostentation, or the least semblance of cant. His was a practical religion, uniform, steady and noiseless as the light of day. His busi- ness habits, and the peculiar ripeness of judgment already mentioned, made him in the boards of the Amer. Bible Soci- ety, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union, an adviser greatly valued and relied upon. Of the Young Men's Bible Society of this city he had been an efficient member for nearly the whole period of his Chris- tian profession, and he was at the time of his death its Presi- dent. When leading in the prayers of the conference room, there was a devout and subdued earnestness that gave to his prayers a peculiar character, and compelled all to feel when he conducted their supplications, that he was entering into the presence of a God whom he adored whilst he loved. Reverence and humility seemed breathing in the tones of his voice, while his language was tinged with that rich, an- tique simplicity of which our English Bible is so beautiful a specimen. Alas, that we shall hear that voice no more ! In the concerns of this church how discriminating a mind he ever showed, and with how steady a hand he held the balance in which he weighed and conciliated opposing opinions, many here have remarked with admiration, and they will long remember with deep regret the irretrievable loss we have

162 THE STRONG STAFF

endured in his departure. Though from conviction and study he preferred the denomination to which he belonged, his feelings were eminently catholic. He showed it in all his intercourse with Christians known by other names. It was manifest in his reading. He could relish true piety, whether found in its seraphic fire in the Lectures of Leigh- ton, or in the prayers, tinged with superstition as they are, of Bishop Andrews, in the memoirs of Halyburton, a book which he prized highly for its close anatomy of the heart, in the history of that most devout and able body of men, the Port Royalists, or in the story of the missionary toils of some of the earlier and purer Jesuits. The refinement and polish of his manners, his intelligence and cheerfulness, won him the respect even of the worldly, without betraying him into any sacrifice of principle, or unworthy concealment of his Christian character.

Such he was ; and we had hoped for many years to have rejoiced in his light and been strengthened by his counsel. But God saw fit to order otherwise. A derangement of the digestive system, under which he had long labored, became more severe in the autumn of last year. His whole consti- tution seemed greatly enfeebled. But neither his friends nor himself apprehended danger. At the commencement of the present year he suddenly determined on a voyage to the South, hoping for benefit chiefly from the voyage, and most confidently expecting to return to his professional en- gagements and to his friends here after the lapse of some four weeks. The voyage instead of alleviating seemed to exas- perate his disorder, and left him among his friends at the South so greatly exhausted that he was compelled to aban- don all thoughts of an immediate return. The friends to whose home he was most kindly and tenderly welcomed, feared far more as to the issue of his disorder than he him- self had yet learned to do. Anticipations of possible danger did probably pass across his mind, but these seem to have been brief and at long intervals. Yet many circumstances combine to show that the retirement of the sick-room was employed in the review of his life and the close scrutiny of his heart. Members of his family from New York, alarmed and distressed at the unexpected tidings of his growing weakness, set out to join him at the South. She who is now his afflicted widow, and his sister, were permitted to reach him a week or more before his death. Two other

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 163

members of the family arrived but four days before the clos- ing scene. Yet to the last they and he could not but cling to the hope of recovery, persuaded as were his physicians that there was no disorder other than a derangement of the digestive system, and that the chief danger was from the ex- treme feebleness produced by his inability to receive nourish- ment. To Mrs. Green, before she was willing to admit those anticipations of his probable departure to which he some- times adverted, he remarked that he had been looking at the character of God, and it appeared awfully pure and holy, " and that was right ;" he looked then at himself, and he was unholy, and the contrast distressed him. Though his course had been in the eyes of his friends one of singular consis- tency, and his character as a disciple of Christ had been pre- served in the eyes of the world unblemished, he yet said in the course of another conversation, " that the world had doubtless seen much in him to disapprove, but they had not seen his deep and secret repentings." Language of this kind from one whose course had been marked by such beau- tiful moral symmetry, showed how deep and spiritual were his views of religion. And although from an anxiety to avoid distressing his friends, and the expectation he himself habitually cherished of being permitted at least to return to his home in this city, he did not constantly speak of death as being near, there were yet times when his language showed that he was looking forward to it as an event that was not improbable, and that might not be very remote. But still, with all this, the last summons came suddenly. Being asked on the last day of his life, when scarce able to speak, if he found the Saviour near, and if he could in his strength enter eternity, he replied with a voice so low as to be well nigh inaudible, " He is here." The expression still more faintly uttered some little time after, " I am dying" was the last intelligible language that was gathered from his lips. But when he had lost the power of speech, he was still sen- sible, and as the promises of Scripture were recited in his hearing, and he was asked if he found his mind peaceful and calm in the prospect of the change before him, to signify it by closing and then opening his eyes, he was seen, as they who stood by the death-bed were watching him with intent anxiety, to close and open them, and then closing them a second time to open them again, while he fixed on his wife a look of unspeakable benignity. His lips were seen moving

164 THE STRONG STAFF

as if in prayer, and his eyes were cast heavenward. Life went out gradually, and it was difficult to fix the time of his dismission. His death-bed was peace. There were no rap- tures. The state of his body, attenuated as it was and en- feebled to the utmost, exercised its usual influence on his mind. But there was, amid all, peace. He had said, ten days before, to Mrs. Green at a time when she was unprepared to believe his danger so imminent, and when he himself at times cherished strong hopes of recovery, that the 16th of March was his birth-day, and it might prove the day of his death. And such it was — the day of his emancipation from earth, and his birth-day, we humbly trust, into the glory and bliss of the heavenly world.

He received from the unwearied kindness of the relatives at whose residence he expired, most assiduous and devoted attentions. He enjoyed the visits and conversations of pious friends from the vicinity, and amongst others of the Rev. Mr. McGill, a Presbyterian clergyman, who also officiated at his funeral services. Several of his family were permitted to reach his dying couch. Yet with all these alleviations, and they were many and merciful, it seemed a melancholy comment on the uncertainty of all human calculations, that he who went to pay the visit of a fortnight, remained to die, away from home, and far from some of his nearest kindred. It seemed mysterious that one so beloved and so useful, so needful to the general interests of religion amongst us, and so indispensable to the family who leaned on him in confiding affection, should be removed so unexpectedly. Yet we know that it was ordered by Infinite kindness and unerring wis- dom. We trust that our departed brother knew this, and that he found the sentiment which he quoted to a pious vis- itor in the last days of his life, the habitual language of his heart : " I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High."

We think of what he was, and we think of what he prom- ised yet to become ; and it seems difficult to acquiesce in the dispensation. Yet He who has done it, loved him more truly and tenderly than we could ever do. He made him what he was upon earth, and has now, we doubt not, made him a far happier and holier being in the world of light than he was or could ever become upon our dark earth. Let us not then mourn him selfishly in wishing that our gain might be se- cured by his loss — restoring him to earth by depriving him

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 165

of heaven ; — let us not mourn him sullenly, in chiding with the Father who gave and who has taken him ; but let us mourn him meekly and wisely, by treading in his steps, and following him even as he followed Christ, and thus hastening forward to the reunions of Heaven by a growing meetness for its employments. Were he here again he would see much doubtless to be amended in his own course — he would perhaps discern, high and consistent as was his career, how worldly ambition had yet dimmed at times the clear vision of his faith ; and the interests of time usurped more than their share of thought and labor, in comparison w,th the in- terests of eternity. Let us mourn him, by living not only as he lived, but as he would live were his career to be again commenced.

Especially is the example of such a man valuable in this day of . contest and agitation. Calm and reflecting, with a coolness of judgment that ever guided the movements of a warm heart, he was not to be swept away at the mercy of every current. His actions, the result of principle, rather than of blind impulse, had a serene steadiness. You knew where to find him. He had not to wait until he could com- pile his creed from the huzzas of the multitude. In the calm light of conscience and truth he studied his duty, and in the broad day-light he did it.

3. It is the voice of each bereavement like the present that we cease from man and put our trust in the Lord Jehovah, in whom is everlasting strength.

The young men here present see in the character of our departed brother the effects of such a faith. They are taught by a noble example how much a young man may accomplish, how strong the confidence and how profound the respect that may be won even for that age which is generally looked upon rather for exertion than counsel, for glowing impulses, than for the lights of wisdom and meditation. And how rich is the legacy bequeathed by such a Christian to his fatherless child and his mourning relatives, compared with the legacy many a young man leaves, of a tarnished name and wasted powers and a lost life. His was not a lost life. Many of his plans were left incomplete, and his plough was checked by death, and stood still in the middle of the furrow, but it was rightly aimed, and well had it been driven, and he looked not back.

This bereaved Church are called to confide in God. Our

166 THE STRONG STAFF

lamented brother was one of the colony originally constitut- ing this Church ; and in all the counsels, labors and sacri- fices necessary to its establishment, he has borne an active part. He was greatly and deservedly beloved. In the Sabbath School he united, in a singular degree, the power of securing the respect, with that of conciliating the affections of the children. He was absent from us. We hoped for his return. We hear of his death. Others of our number have been cut down in the promise and strength of opening manhood. Let us as a people turn to Him that has siLitten us, and by the united and augmented efforts of many aim to supply the loss of one — but that one so variously endowed and so greatly useful. And although we may scarce in the usual course of God's providence expect to see again his like, for it is not the ordinary dealing of God to bestow two such men upon a church in one generation, yet trusting Him and serving Him, He will not fail us. Let us emulate his piety, not intermittent and occasional flashes, but a broad, serene and steady light. And if his loss but bring nearer to us the eternity he has entered, and the Saviour and the Spirit, to whose influences he owed all, even this bereave- ment shall be for our good.

To the bereaved family where should I find language to address myself or arguments for consolation, could I not bid them also trust in God? How wide a chasm has one death occasioned, from the mother who has seen the son that was for years her stay, suddenly removed, to the child yet un- conscious of the vast loss he has endured, and the widow whose brimming cup of happiness God has dashed to the earth. If I sought to point you to earthly topics of consola- tion, how mean and petty would these worldly consolations seem. But in the remembrance that he whom you have lost is now, we have good and joyful hope, with God — in the hope given to so many of you, that you are journeying to the same city of habitation, and that death is the gate of a blissful and endless reunion to those who " die in the Lord" — there are thoughts that may brighten even such a scene. When a pious visitor asked our dying friend for what he should pray, his answer was, " Sanctification." And if this be your prayer for yourselves, and for those who as yet know not the God of your friend and brother — if we all that loved and lament him could but be persuaded to bury in his grave all worldliness and indifference, how glorious and

AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 167

salutary the fruits that would spring even from this bitter be- reavement. And although Nature will, even in the heirs of promise, murmur at a trial like the present, yet, the anchor of the promise, my beloved friends, has not torn itself loose even amid this storm ; and this, even this calamity shall work together for good to them that love God and that trust Him. The ark may be tossed, but through all the wild and sicken- ing commotion it shall swing, heavily indeed, but safely, its way towards the haven of rest. We see, in every death, God's truth as executing his threats pronounced in Eden. Let the fulfillment of the curse teach us that the same truth is pledged to the accomplishment of the promise.

To the Sabbath school teacher I would say, Trust more entirely in God. Remember how sudden may be your transfer from the class and the teachers' meeting to the pre- sence of the Judge and the scenes of your rest. You leave the school-room, perhaps, as it was left by your beloved superintendent, all unconscious that your eye is casting its last glance on the walls, and your feet crossing the threshold never to return. Oh, the light that such events let in upon old and familiar truths ! How, by the grave of one thus smitten down in the strength of manhood, do we see the true purpose of life, the worth of the soul, the majesty of the gospel, the glories of a Saviour, and the tremendous import of that word— Eternity.

To us all it remains, as the one duty, the first and the last of each of our fallen race, to renounce our trust in the crea- ture for a simple and grateful trust in the Creator. It is affecting to observe how they who have tried Him most closely have attested his unshaken stability. David and Moses, both men of large experience in the most active and diversified scenes of life, are found in their last hours extol- ling God under this one aspect — the Rock. They had found man as treacherous as he is feeble, and earth full of change, and uncertainty, and instability. The one had heard his own followers speak of stoning him at Ziklag ; and the other had caught the shoutings of idolatry from the tribes, chosen, and led, and fed by miracles, at the foot of the burning Si- nai ; and even his meekness had given way on hearing the contentions of the people at Meribah. The one had felt the murmurings of Miriam, and borne the envy of Korah. The other had encountered the enmity of Saul, the malice of Doeg, the craft of Ahithophel, the treachery of Absalom,

168 THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD.

and the cursings of Shimei. Pleasure, and wealth, and honor had offered their aid to ensure happiness, and to estab- lish security : but from them all these men returned, declar- ing that God is the Rock. Prove Him, then, ye sinners. For He stands, amid all the changes of the world, the Endless and the Immutable One. The strong sceptre which His hand grasps is not shattered, and the Rod of the Stem of Jesse is yet to rule all nations, and to fill the world with its fruit. There was an hour when it was grasped and splintered in the fierce onset of hell. That was the hour and power of darkness. But, buried in the earth, that Rod blossomed from the dust, and sprung up, a Shoot of Hope for all the earth — the Plant of Renown and of Life to all the nations. Believe in Him, and your reliance shall never fail. Neglect Him, and not all the prosperity He may permit, or that earth can bestow, will be to you other than a bruised reed. The time is com- ing when it shall fail you — when even pious friends, and godly parents, and Bibles, and sanctuaries shall not save you. How wretched, then, will be your lot compared with that of the man, who, looking round on the dark valley, can also look upward and say, " I will fear no evil, Thy rod and Thy staff they shall comfort me." Grasping that staff, the parting spirit can say to an avenging law, an opening grave and a flaming hell, "He is here" — He, the Propitiation, the Redeemer and the Resurrection. And if enabled to say this truly of ourselves, we have the pledge of Christ's presence wherever we wander. If called to take the wings of the morning, and to travel to the furthest shores of the universe ; if, tempting an untried way, we pass through scenes the most perilous, this shall remove all loneliness and ensure all hap- piness, that everywhere the sinless spirit can say still, " He is Acre," reposing securely in His Omnipresence, and resting content in His All-sufficiency.

THE JESUITS, AS A MISSIONARY ORDER *

The missionary spirit contributed to the discovery of our continent. " The man who gave to Castile and Leon a New World," was full of high religious aspirations. With much of the superstition, Columbus had more than the piety of his age. He regarded himself as commissioned by a higher than any earthly court, in the great enterprise which he pur- sued with such calm constancy. On reaching the shores he had long sought, his first act was to kneel in devout thanks- giving. If his chroniclers have truly reported his prayer, he blessed the God who had deigned to use his humble ser- vice in preparing the way that his own sacred name might be preached in this new portion of his universe. And in his last will, he charges it upon his son to maintain divines who should be employed in striving to make Christians of the natives, declaring this a work in which " no expense should be thought too great.''9

Little knew Columbus of the trains of religious influence that came in the wake of his great discovery. In those weary days and nights of anxiety and watchfulness, when his soli- tary courage buffeted, single-handed, the mutinous remon- strances of his companions — when, with such difficulty, he kept the prow of his vessel turned still toward the West — if he understood little the peculiar aspect of the shores he was fast nearing, he knew quite as little of the mysterious instru- mentality, already provided in the Old World, to grasp and shape the New Continent as it emerged from its concealment of ages in the recesses of ocean. Had he been asked, on

* This article was originally prepared as an address before the Society of Missionary Inquiry in Brown University, before whom it was delivered at their anniversary on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1839. A separate pub- lication was intended, in pursuance of the request of the Society. Various causes have prevented its receiving the additions and changes it was once the writer's wish to have made, and have delayed its appearance to the present time.— Note in Christian Review, Boston, 1841, p. 165,

23

170 THE JESUITS,

that morning of triumph when his eyes first beheld, green, bright and fragrant, the shores of the new-found world, who would be the instruments of its conversion to the true God, how blindly would he have answered ! For its religious in- structors, he would have looked to the universities of the Spain that had patronized him, or of the England or the France that had neglected him ; or he would have turned his eyes to his own native Italy. But we, to whose gaze have been revealed those leaves in the volume of Providence that no mortal eye had then read, have learned to look elsewhere for the religious guides already training for the new-found hemisphere. Standing in fancy by the side of the great Genoese navigator, we look back over the intervening waste of waters to the Old World. But our eyes turn not to the points that attract his gaze. Ours wander in quest of Eise- nach, a petty town in Western Germany. In the band of school-boys that go from door to door through its streets, singing their hymns, and looking for their dole of daily bread, we catch sight of the full, ruddy face of a lad now some nine years old. Those cheerful features bear the mingling im- press of broad humor, vigorous sense, good-nature the most genial, and a will somewhat of the sternest. The youth is the son of an humble miner. His father has sent him hither, some three years ago, that the boy may be taught Latin, and receive such help as poor scholars in Germany thought it no shame to ask. That lad is Martin Luther ; a name soon to ring through either hemisphere, the antagonist of the papacy, the translator of the Scriptures, and the instrument of a spiritual revolution, that is to impress its own character, not on Northern Europe only, but also on the larger half of that continent, of whose discovery that school-boy will soon be told, as he bends over his grammar or bounds through the play-ground. And here have we found one of the master- spirits, that is to fix the religious destiny of the New World. We look yet again for the rival mind, that is to contest with Luther's the honor of fashioning American character and history. Our next glance is at Spain, that country from whose ports had been fitted out the little armament that is riding on the sea before us. But it is not to its brilliant court, or to its universities, then famous throughout Europe, that we look for this other mind, that is to aid in casting the spiritual horoscope of our continent. On the northern shores oi the country, in the province of Biscay, and under the

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 171

shadow of the Pyrenees, stands an old baronial castle, ten- anted by a Spanish gentleman of ancient and noble lineage. In the family of eleven children that gladdens his hearth, the youngest born, the Benjamin of the household, is now a child of some two years old. That tottering infant, as he grows up to manhood, will at first mistake his destiny. Smitten with the chivalrous spirit, that hangs as an atmos- phere of romance over the Spain of that age, he will become a courtly knight, delighting in feats of arms, and not free from the soldier's vices. But his ultimate history will be of far different cast. Wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, his shattered limb will confine him to a couch, where his waking hours will be spent in reading the legends of saints, and from that couch of pain he will rise an altered man. For this prattling child is Ignatius Loyola. This baby hand is yet to pen the " Spiritual Exercises," that far-famed volume, which still remains the manual of the Jesuit order, the book that has swayed so many a strong intellect for this life and the next, and shaken some minds even to insanity. He is to become the founder of a religious fraternity, who shall be the Janizaries of the Romish church, its stoutest champions against the Reformation, and its most daring emissaries around the globe. Neither Luther nor Loyola ever visited our shores, yet no two of the contemporary minds of Eu- rope so signally controlled the religious history of this con- tinent ; and both were in their boyhood, the one at a Ger- man grammar-school, the other romping in the nursery of an old Spanish castle, when Columbus planted his foot on the shores of St. Salvador.

The institution, which Loyola created, early wrapped itself about the history of our country ; fathers of the Jesuit order having, both in the northern and southern portions of the continent, borne a large share in the work of discovery and civilization. Had the efforts of France been but crowned with answering success, this body of men had given their own religious hue to our territory. Seven years before Plymouth Rock received the disembarking colonists from the May-Flower, and twenty-three before Rhode Island had its first European settlers, " France and the Roman religion had established themselves in Maine. "* Still sooner, Jesu- its were in Nova Scotia, and in 1625, Jesuit missionaries

i. , - , i 1

* Bancroft, vol. I., p. 28.

172 THE JESUITS,

were laboring on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The early governors of New France were zealous patrons of such mis- sions, and that Champlain, whose name is yet borne by one of our lakes, declared that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the conquest of an empire, and that the object of a Christian king, in extending his dominion over an idola- trous country, should be only to subdue its inhabitants to the sway of Jesus Christ.* Not on the course of the St. Lawrence only, but in the remote depths of our wilderness, and on the shores of our great western lakes, the Jesuits had early planted their missions and gathered their converts from the Huron, the Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Illinois, and other tribes of Indians.

It has been the boast of the order, that Providence made the birth of their own Ignatius Loyola to coincide so nearly with that of Luther, by the same arrangement of divine be- nevolence that is said ever to provide the antidote in the vicinity of the poison. Their writers are also accustomed to say, that in bringing so closely together the rise of their founder and the discoveries of Columbus, God had evidently pointed their way to those missionary labors upon our con- tinent, in which they engaged so early and successfully. f Well may the Protestant, and especially the citizen of these United States, bless in his turn that fatherly care of divine Providence, which neither allowed the era of American col- onization to be hastened, nor that of the Reformation to be deferred. Had these events been differently arranged — had Spanish blood and not English flowed in the veins of our first settlers — or had the May-Flower borne to our shores the foundations of a Catholic colony, and had our own Roger Williams been a Jesuit missionary — or had the schemes of French conquest, that would have made Canada but the starting-point of North American empire, been successful, how different had been the annals, not of this State alone, but of the whole country, and in truth of our entire race. America had wanted her Washington. The impulse of mod- ern revolutions had remained yet to be given, the name of Lexington had continued still a common and unhonored sound, and the dial of the world had been put back far more than the ten degrees, by which at the prayer of Hezekiah the sun went down on the dial of Ahaz.

* Carncs, p. 3G8. t Charlevoix, Histoire dc Paraguay.

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 173

The Jesuits, as a missionary order, furnish then a theme in which we have a national interest ; and the subject may well employ for a passing hour the thoughts of an assembly of American Christians. Odious as the society justly became for its acts and its crimes, it had its purer era, when its emissaries were men, not only of singular talent, but of burning zeal, and in some cases even of true piety. If it has had its Escobars, it has also been honored by its Xa- viers, its Riccis, and its Nobregas. Nor is it just, in de- nouncing its shameless casuistry, its mendacious miracles, its remorseless ambition, and its crooked policy, to overlook the usefulness, or deny the virtues that have adorned some among the sons of Loyola. Its eight hundred martyrs prove that its zeal has been of no ordinary kind. Man is but too prone to pour over the checkered good and evil of human character the sweeping flood of indiscriminate praise, or cen- sure as unmitigated. So does not the Judge of all the earth. His tribunal metes out a more exact sentence. And, in his Scriptures, with what impartiality does he detect some good thing to be found towards the Lord God, even in the house of Jeroboam, the corrupter of Israel. Dark as was the depravity of Ahab, " who sold himself to work wicked- ness," inspiration draws no veil over the brief interval of light in his history, that shot, like a moment of unnatural sunshine, across the depth of midnight darkness. And Christ himself, the chiefest missionary of the church, taught his disciples to learn wisdom from the policy of the fraudu- lent steward, and the fears of the unjust judge. Truth, then, may well afford to be just even to error, and to glean even from such fields lessons of wisdom. No missionary undertakings have embodied a greater array of talent, been arranged with more masterly skill, displayed more illustri- ous proofs of courage and of patience, or wielded a wider influence, than those of the Society of Loyola. Baxter con- fessed that their labors moved him to emulation, and the Protestant Leibnitz, the scholar, the jurist, and the philoso- pher, the rival of Newton, has been their fervent eulogist.

The character of Loyola, the founder, was deeply im- pressed on this order. On deserting the military life, he had spent a year in the most revolting austerities, and during this period composed his celebrated treatise. His attention now became turned to the salvation of his neighbor ; before, it had been engrossed by care for his own soul. To profit

174 THE JESUITS,

others, he must relinquish the squalid dress and some of the austere penances of his former course, and he felt also that he must remedy the defects of a neglected education. Now in the prime of manhood, he set himself down, nothing daunted or ashamed, among children, to learn his Latin grammar. His progress was slow and painful. At the Uni- versity of Paris he gathered around him his first associates. Their early design was a mission to Palestine. War frus- trated this. They offered themselves for the service of the supreme pontiff, at their own charge, in whatever part of the world he might command. This offer won the reluctant consent of the Romish see to their establishment in 1540. They were thus missionaries from their first constitution. Long a soldier, Loyola had felt both the need of discipline and its power. Reminiscences of his military course appear in the whole structure, as in the very title, of his Spiritual Exercises. It seems, from the description given of it, to be but the drill-book of a spiritual regiment. The treatise is said to represent the world as divided into two hosts, the one arrayed under the banners of Christ, and the other up- lifting the standard of Satan ; and, inviting the reader to enlist with his Redeemer, furnishes marks by which he may judge of the work appointed him, and rules for its accom- plishment. Obedience, incessant and implicit, such as is elsewhere scarce found out of a camp, was Loyola's favor- ite lesson. It was in his order the subject of a special vow. They swore it to the pope and to their superior, called their general, who was elected for life, and clothed with absolute power. Ignatius was accustomed to term such obedience the most sublime of virtues, the daughter of humility, and the nurse of charity, a guide that never wandered, and the mark that was to distinguish his order from all others. Ex- acting it most rigidly from others, he displayed it himself, in an implicit deference to his physicians and his confessor ; while to the Roman pontiff so profound was his submission, that he was accustomed to say, at the command of the pope he would embark on a mission for any shore in a vessel without rudder, or sails, or mast, or stores. When the ob- jection was made, that such conduct would be inconsistent with ordinary prudence, his reply was, that prudence was the virtue of the ruler, not of the ruled. His last will, as ho termed it, was but an unfinished homily on obedience. Yet in all this, the object of Ignatius does not seem to

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 175

have been consciously, his own personal aggrandizement. Wealth, fame, and even power he seems to have sought less than usefulness. The first year of his religious course had been one of stormy fanaticism ; the rest of his career breathed a high, sustained enthusiasm. He dreaded, as he often said, worldly prosperity for his order, excluded its members from episcopal preferment, and by earnest remonstrances pre- vented the elevation of two of his early associates, Lainez and Borgia, to the cardinalate. He spent much time in prayer, and laid more stress than many Roman religionists on the prayer of the heart, while Thomas a Kempis was his favorite book of devotion. Simple and severe in his own personal habits, his labors never remitted. Lodging in hos- pitals, tending their sick, catechizing children, seeking the restoration of the profligate, wherever he went, he gave him- self to the toils of benevolence.

Seeing that the emergencies of the time required not the retired life — the contemplative one, as it was called, of the monastic orders — he desired for his institute a life of active. piety. The three great duties of the order from the begin- ning were announced, as being the education of youth, con- troversy with heretics, and the conversion of the heathen. They were to be men of the world, and not of the cloister. Hence he procured them exemption from the chants and choral services customary with many Romish fraternities. " They do not sing," said the enemies of the Jesuits, "birds of prey never do." Yet to maintain their devotional feel- ings, there were many provisions. One especially was, that, for a space of eight days in each year, every member of the order should make " a retreat," as it was called, retiring from the world, and devoting himself to the study of his heart and way, by the help of the Spiritual Exercises. With the zeal of Loyola was mingled much knowledge of the world. With the merchant he spoke of traffic, and with the scholar of books, that he might attract both to religion ; en- tering, as he described it, at their door, that he might leave at his own. What in him, however, seems to have been little more than skilful courtesy not inconsistent with real principle, became, in the latter members of the order, a sup- ple and lithe pliability, alike unprincipled and selfish.

To exercise and perfect their great principle of obedience, the rules of the society were most skilfully framed. Their colleges gave them facilities for the selection of the most,

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brilliant talents. A long novitiate and varied trials preceded admission to the full privileges of the order. Every one on entering it was required to make a full manifestation, as it was termed, of his conscience, giving the minutest and most private details of his past history and feelings. This was repeated each half year. Each member was constituted a spy upon his fellow. Regular reports of every incident of moment, and of the character and deportment of each mem- ber, were made to the provincial, and from the provincial were transmitted to the general at Rome, to be transcribed into the archives of the order. From the will of this gene- ral there lay no appeal ; complaint was sin, and resistance ruin. In the whole society, there was but one will, but one conscience, and it was in the bosom of the general. So true a despotism Tiberius never attempted, and Machiavelli him- self could not have imagined. Superstition only could have made men its willing subjects. The individual being was lost in one vast machine, all the parts of which were intelli- gent to observe, the eyes of one soul, and strong to obey, the hands of one will. Limited at first to sixty members, but soon left without such restriction, the order increased in sixty years from ten to 10,000 members, and in 1710 the Jesuits numbered about 20,000 in their wide-spread associa- tion. These, scattered through all countries, men of the finest talents and most finished education, wearing every garb, and speaking every language, formed a body that could outwatch Argus with his hundred eyes, and outwork Briareus with his hundred hands. It is readily seen what tremendous energies such a system wielded. In every other combination of human effort, much of power is lost, not only by the resistance to be overcome in the world without, but by the discord and internal weakness of the combined parties within themselves, and the lumbering weight of the machinery upon which the motive power acts. The steeds may be the fiery coursers of the sun, with power flaming from every nostril, but where is the mortal hand that can rein the whole into one path, and bring the might of all their sinews to draw in one onward track ? It was not so in this institution. Here, as in the chariot of the prophet's vision, all was instinct witli one will ; " the spirit of the living crea- tures was in the wheels ; when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them, when those stood, these stood ; when the living creatures were lifted up, the wheels were

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 177

lifted up over against them, and their rings were full of eyes round about, and they were so high that they were dread- ful. " One soul swayed the vast mass ; and every eog and pin in the machinery consented with its whole power to every movement of the one central conscience. The world never had seen so perfect a despotism ; yet never was any government so ardently loved by its earlier members. " If I forget thee, O Society of Jesus," exclaimed Xavier in India, " may my right hand forget its cunning."

The man, who thus spoke, is their greatest name ; and he would not have felt this affection, had the order been originally as corrupt as it afterwards became. Gladly, did our limits permit, would we dwell on his history. A man of higher talent than Loyola, a ripe scholar, and of that commanding courage which nothing could daunt, there were also in him a fervent piety, and boundless self-sacrificing benevolence, that all the errors of his faith could not obscure. On the Malabar coast, in the kingdom of Iravancore, where he gave baptism to 10,000 in one month with his own hand, in the Moluccas, and in Ceylon, he labored in perils immi- nent, and amid great privations and difficulties, but never without fruit. His chief triumphs were, however, in Japan. Having seen the principles of his religion spreading rapidly through that empire, he longed next to enter China. With the assurance that it was at the risk of his life, he bargained but to be put ashore on its inhospitable coast. They who were to have done this failed him ; and in sight of the em- pire which he was not allowed to enter, on the small rocky island of Sancian, he breathed his last. Dying thus, with his last and greatest enterprise unachieved, he yet laid his body thus as on the counterscarp, leaving to the ranks be- hind, a name and example that never lost their rallying power, until these ramparts of heathenism were scaled, and China too was entered and won. In Japan, the order fol- lowed up his plans, until their converts had reached the number of 200,000. The Jesuit fathers who succeeded in forcing the barriers of China — Ricci, Scholl, and Verbiest — were men distinguished in science and talent. The manu- scripts left by some of them are said to show too — written evidently but for their own use — that they were men of piety. Of some of them at least, Milne, and Morrison, and other Protestant missionaries have thought highly, as men of real devotedness and mistaken piety. At one time, there

24

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seemed reason to expect that the Celestial Empire was to become Christian, the empress herself having joined the Christian Church, the emperor being known as their patron, and Jesuit fathers filling the highest posts at court, and dis- playing their varied attainments as geographers, legislators, philosophers and astronomers, and even as cannon-founders. The same indefatigable community were busily assailing the Fetichism of Africa on the west and east, and its Moham- medanism on the north. They had their missionary enter- prises at Congo and Loango, at Tripoli and Morocco, and Monomotapa and Mozambique. In Abyssinia, after frequent repulses, they acquired at one time the ascendency, and a Jesuit was made the patriarch of the national church ; but his innovations and inquisitorial cruelties soon wrought the indignant expulsion of the religion they were intended to establish. In Egypt, too, their laborers were early found ; and in Asia, besides the points already enumerated, they toiled in India and Persia. In Syria and Thibet, the sons of Loyola were lifting the banners of the Romish church.

On our own shores, their missionaries, as we have already seen, were found at an early day. They followed the red man to his haunts, paddled with him the rude canoe, reared beside his their hut, and displayed a patient and winning- sweetness, that disarmed his ferocity. The tribes beside our great inland seas claimed more than a century ago, the care of the Jesuit fathers. Sault de St. Marie and Mackinaw were sites of their missions ; and yet beyond these places there were points where the wandering son of Loyola reared his wooden crucifix, and built his bark chapel, in regions that even in our own late day the westward wave of emigra- tion has not yet reached. To other parts of North America the same fraternity had expanded their establishments. In the peninsula of California, they gathered villages of con- verted Indians that still exist, although in a declining state and under the charge since of other religious orders. In Mexico, also, they labored for the conversion of the Abori- gines. In the southern portion of our continent were, how- ever, the scenes of their greatest toils and their most glori- ous triumphs. They labored in Peru and in Chili. Far more repulsive was the field chosen, however, by those of the Jesuit fathers who, like Ortega and Nobregas, labored among the cannibals of Brazil. Tribes, with whom the flesh of their captives was the choicest of dainties, and whose older

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 179

women bore to the battle-field the vessels in which the horrid banquet of victory was to be prepared, were compel- led at length to yield to the dauntless zeal of the intrepid missionary ; and, relinquishing their cannibalism, learned gentleness and piety. But their most splendid honors were won in the neighboring country of Paraguay. They found its wide plains traversed by numerous but divided hordes, ignorant of the simplest arts, impatient of restraint, and prompt to deeds of blood. Gathering at first but some fifty families, they reared at last a community which was esti- mated at one time to number 300,000 souls. The Indian was instructed in agriculture and the handicraft arts, in music, and even in painting. Villages, or Reductions, as they were called, rose rapidly, where an Arcadian purity of manners reigned through communities of thousands, who had but recently been roving, lawless savages. They labor- ed for a common stock, and subsisted on the common stores. Never, probably, has the experiment of a community of pos- sessions been so long tried, and so successfully, as it was there. Yet, beneficent as was the Jesuit rule over these their subjects, it was so absolute, that their converts might be said never to have outgrown the state of nonage. Theirs was a filial servitude.

In all these their missions, the order displayed an indomi- table energy, and a spirit of most adventurous enterprise. As dauntless as they were versatile, and as unwearied as they were dauntless, the door closed against them was undermined, if it could not be opened, and stormed where it could not be undermined. Martyrdom for them had no terrors. Did the news return to their colleges in Europe of a missionary falling riddled by the arrows of the Brazilian savage, at the foot of the crucifix he had planted, or of scores sent into the depths of ocean by heretic captors, the names of the fallen were inserted on the rubrics of Jesuit martyrs ; and not the students only, but the professors of their institutions rushed to fill the ranks that had been thus thinned. And, turning from their fields of missionary en- terprise in the far East, and in the remotest West, to what they had accomplished in Europe, there was much at this time to stir the Jesuit to self-gratulation. Their science, and address, and renunciation of ecclesiastical preferment had made members of their order confessors to some of the most powerful monarchs. In controversy, they had given

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to the Romish church Bellarmine, the ablest of her defend- ers, and, though a Jesuit, perhaps also the most candid of Romish controversialists. To the French pulpit they had furnished Bourdaloue, among its great names no weaker luminary, and perhaps its first reasoner. Their divines, ora- tors, poets, historians and critics were well nigh numberless, the order claiming to have produced more distinguished scholars than all the other Romish communities together. In education, they had been the benefactors of the world. Their institutions are proposed by Bacon as the best of models, and Mackintosh has pronounced the strides made by the society in the work of instruction the greatest ever wit- nessed. But in missions was the beginning of their strength, and the excellency of their glory. The character of Xavier gave to the cause of evangelization an impulse such as it had not received for seven centuries ; and to this day, his church looks in vain for one, who, to his dauntless zeal and his un- tiring patience, has united the splendor of his talents, and his wide influence, that went overrunning a nation like some great conflagration. Through all these fields of labor they continued to diffuse one spirit, not spent by toil, and not diminished by distance from the centre of power. From the man, who sat in a gilded confessional with a monarch for his penitent, amid the splendid luxury of Versailles or Ma- drid, to him who in a wigwam of bark shared the rude fare of the Canadian Indian, sleeping on the skin won in the chase, and lighted by the blazing pine-knot, one soul pos- sessed the entire body. From East to West, from North to South, the sons of Ignatius were pursuing one object through a thousand mazy channels. The motto and device in one of their earlier histories was well illustrated in their conduct. That device was a mirror, and the superscription was " Om- nia omnibus," All things to all men. But what in Paul was Christian courtesy, leaning on inflexible principle ; and what in Loyola himself was probably wisdom, but slightly tinged with unwarrantable policy, became, in some of his disciples, the laxest casuistry, chameleon-like, shifting its hues to every varying shade of interest or fashion.

There was much in the nature of Romanism itself to make the work of proselytism easy and rapid. The priest went forth a solitary man, with no ties to any spot, with few incumbrances, moving freely and at little cost through wide districts. The rites that he celebrated took the senses of

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 181

the rude barbarian as by storm. The music, the incense, the gorgeous robe, the golden vessels, the picture, the statue, and the crucifix were to the savage most imposing. Again, no change of heart was requisite to baptism. No long fami- liarity with Scripture preceded entrance to the church. The creed, the catechism,* and a few prayers and hymns were to be translated, and a nation was supplied with its religious literature. Submission to external rites, and a blind defer- ence to priestly authority, threw open the doors of the church as to the rushing feet of a nation. They who entered it, found it was not the holy of holies they had reached. We do not mean to say, that there was no holy fruit in their religion. We would only speak of the low form of Chris- tian character they had proposed for their converts. Yet we believe the morals of their disciples were generally higher than those of the converts gained by other orders ; and the constancy, with which such multitudes in their Japanese churches endured the most appalling forms of martyrdom, allows us to hope, that under much of superstition and much of ignorance, there was also something of love to Christ.

Yet from this height of success, and influence, and honors they were doomed to fall, and for a time the world seemed to shake with their far-resounding ruin. In Japan, their 200,000 converts, exciting, justly or unjustly, apprehension, of political intrigue in the mind of a native prince, who was consolidating the kingdoms of Japan into one empire, they were exterminated by one of the fiercest persecutions that Christianity has ever experienced. Multitudes perished in prison ; some were buried in ditches, others, immersed in freezing water, died a death of lingering agony ; some were crucified, others were beheaded ; and large numbers were thrown into one of the volcanic craters of the country, while the crosses of the Jesuit pastors studded the edges of the fearful cavity into which their flocks were hurried. That country has been thenceforward sealed against the gospel more closely than any other heathen land on the earth. It was, perhaps, one instance of those fearful retributions, that, in the language of Bacon, are occasionally written by the hand of Nemesis along the highway of nations, in characters which he that runneth may read, that the Japanese were

* Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, furnishes a curious specimen of one of t the Jesuit catechisms, used among our American Indians.

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instigated, in this extinction of the Jesuit churches, by the Dutch, a people who had never forgotten the butcheries of the ferocious Alva, and thus requited on the rising Romanism of the East the wrongs that religion had wrought them in the West. In China, contentions with other Romish orders thwarted their labors ; their political power was soon lost, and their converts were driven intc concealment. But though denounced by edicts of the empire, and on pain of death ex- pelled from its territories, they have never ceased laboring there, and the Catholic Christians at this hour secreted in the bosom of that nation, are calculated by Medhurst at 200,000. In Paraguay and in California, their settlements have been transferred to the charge of other orders, and themselves were exiled, as was also the case in the Philip- pine Islands. Their expulsion from the fields in South Amer- ica, watered so freely with the wealth, and talents, and best blood of the order, grew out of their disgrace in Europe. In France, they had denounced and suppressed Jansenism ; but received in their conflict with that body of most able and holy men, the Port Royalists, a death ful arrow they could never extricate. We need not say we allude to the Provin- cial Letters of Pascal, a work whose mingling powers of wit, and argument, and eloquence, well nigh unrivalled apart, and in their union unequalled, fixed the ultimate fate of the Je- suit order. They stood up, too. in the same country, in the days of their own intellectual decrepitude, to wrestle against the young scepticism of the Regency and of the days of Louis XV. Voltaire, and Diderot, and D'Holbach, and Hel- vetius, men educated in their own colleges, overwhelmed their old teachers with sarcasm, and irony, and wit, the more burning in its severity often, because it was the language of truth. To every state they had made themselves odious by intermingling themselves with political affairs. In their own church they found the bitterest enemies, in the worldly who envied their power, and in the zealous, who detested their lax casuistry and their erroneous doctrine. By principles, which if not their own invention, were at least their favorite implements, they explained away all obligation ; and some of their doctors seemed scarce to have left faith on the earth, or justice in the heavens. In short, they threw conscience into the alembic, and drew from the retort a mixture, like the aqua Tofana of Italian poisons, clear as the water that streams from the rock, but to drink of which was lingering, inevitable

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 183

death. This laxity of moral teaching was felt to be the more inexcusable, in a body who had constituted themselves the jealous guardians of what they called orthodoxy in doc- trine : " a sort of men," as said the Abbe Boileau, brother of the poet, "who set themselves to lengthen the creed, and abridge the commandments." Casuistry became in their hands, as Bayle has well called it, "the art of cavilling with God." But men, even the vilest, cannot long respect those who pander to their corruptions, and the order soon fell un- der the ban of the human race. Their principles in morals, too, reacted upon themselves. Like the French poisoner, who perished by the fall of his mask, inhaling unexpectedly the fumes of the poison he was compounding for others, the order could not retain its old zeal, and the life of its early fanaticism, while propagating such sentiments. Some, even, of the Jesuit missionaries to heathenism were, it is said, in secret, infidels. At Rome itself, they had become tools more convenient than reputable. None had done more than they to uphold the staggering power of that see ; and no less than ninety bulls issued from under the Fisherman's Ring had attested the esteem in which the Vatican held them, and its resolution to defend them against their embittered foes. But its power now failed. Catholic France, and Portugal, and Spain, were resolutely bent on the ruin of the order. The arts, both of policy and force, they had so long practised, were now turned against them. With a secresy they had never surpassed in their own movements, the measures were concerted for their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. Driven from their colleges and possessions, blackened in character, and destitute, and many of them aged, they were hurled on the charities of a world they had not propitiated by their former conduct. Never slow, in the day of their power, to use the arm of the civil government for the purpose of persecution, they now felt its weight upon themselves. They had instigated in France the bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew, it is said, and had most certainly shared largely in the perfidy, the frauds, and the revolting dragoonades that procured and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantz. The recompense long accumulating now descended. Reluc- tantly, but necessarily, the Roman court itself withdrew in terror from these its stanchest servants, and pronounced with faltering lips, the dissolution of the order.

They had forgotten, in their abuse of power, and talent.

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and influence, that there was on high One mightier tha *11 the mighty of earth, whom they had subsidized, or flatt* id, or corrupted. Providence, an element upon which in 4 teir latter days they had forgotten to calculate, was now me' ting them at every turn. If they had lost sight of it, never had it lost sight of them. It used no confessors, and they could not guide it ; nor did it wait in its movements for the shuf- fling of the pieces on the checker-boards of earthly cabinets, which Jesuitism watched so narrowly. But when its fulness of times was come, it called, and every stormy passion of human nature rushed at its bidding, eager to do the work of retribution ; while, unpitied, Jesuitism stood to bear, in its loneliness, the meeting vengeance of earth and heaven.

Never had Romanism progeny that bore more periectly its own image, or embodied its grand principles so faitlifully as did the Jesuit system. The principle of the order was but a reduction to its simplest essence of that one master idea of the Romish creed — implict faith — unlimited obedience. These are, in justice, due only to a Being of infinite truth, and underived, and unending sovereignty. Nothing less able or less wise, nothing short of the divine wisdom, that cannot mistake, and that will not deceive, is entitled to demand such subjection and confidence. It is the great sin of the Romish apostasy, its npwrov ipsvSos, that it has here arrogated the prero- gative of the Godhead, and in the seat of God given itself out as God over the human conscience and heart. This it is that constitutes the Antichrist, the rival usurping the rights of the Christ. For that Saviour, who created and ransomed the soul, whose eye pervades its depths with a searching omniscience, and whose hand encompasses it in all its wan- derings with an ever-present almightiness, is entitled to the absolute rule and dominion of that soul. Romanism has, however, demanded this power. For faith in Christ, as the one condition of salvation, it has substituted faith in the church. Jesuitism, with its wonted sagacity, saw, that in this claim lay the strength of the Romish system. It rose up to preach the doctrine to a world whom the Reformation was fast alienating. It rose up to exemplify the obedience, in its own unreserved, unquestioning submission to its own general, and through him to the Romish see. But while they thus acquired power, they were also sowing the seeds of de- cay. By this implicit obedience, the individual merged his personal rights and his spiritual existence in the society.

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The mass had a conscience ; but the members had not. But while they formed thus obedient societies, because there was no individuality of opinion or will, there was as much of in- trinsic weakness, as there was of quiet in the body. Remove the head, and the life had departed from an entire commu- nity. They destroyed, also, by this same process the higher order of talents, which act only in a state of comparative freedom. Splendid as were their scholars in every walk, yet, as Mackintosh has remarked, through two centuries of power and fame, they gave to Europe no genius to be named with Racine and Pascal, men who sprung from the Port Royalists, in the career, both far more brief and far more stormy, of that persecuted community.

In this, his distinctive trait of character, the Jesuit stood as the moral antipodes of the Puritan. In the latter, the Re- formation presented its principle, the right of private judg- ment, as displayed in its barest, broadest shape. While, in the Jesuit, the man was nought, and the community was every thing, with the Puritan, on the contrary, the society was comparatively nothing, and the individual all. With him religion was, in its highest privileges, and its profoundest mysteries, a personal matter. He studied his Bible for him- self; to aid in turning its pages and loosening its seal, God the Son, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, stooped over him as he read ; and to reveal its inner lessons, God the Spirit whispered in his heart, and brooded over the depths of his soul. He profited by the prayers and teachings of his pastor, gave liberally for his support, and received reverently at his hands the sacramental symbols ; but he believed even this his beloved guide, companion and friend, but a fellow-ser- vant, whose help could not supersede his own private studies, and his individual faith. He valued his fellow-Christians, communed with them, prayed with them, shared with them his last loaf, and falling into their ranks, raised with them the battle-cry, " The sword of the Lord and of Gideon !" But, away from pastor and from fellow-Christian, the Puritan turned in the trying hour to his God. It was the genius of this system to develop the individual ; and in every emergen- cy, to throw him in the last resort upon the lonely commu- nings of his own soul with its Creator. It taught him to make religion, in the affecting language of one of the later Platonists, " the flight of one alone to the only One."# To the

* Qvyrj fjiovov rrpos Top Moj/oy.

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place of audience the petitioner went by no deputy ; but the individual man was brought to confront for himself the one Mediator, and to hear for himself the response of Heaven to the prayer of faith. When mind was thus thrown upon its individual responsibility, and came forth from its solitary meditations to the place of conference and action, there was frequent dissonance in- opinion ; and a collision in action, of- ten more apparent than real, threatened at times to rend the social bonds, to break up all concert, and to destroy all power. Yet conscientious men were not likely to differ widely or long. And, on the other hand, take from such a community its spiritual guides, and how soon were they re- placed. Persecute them, and how indomitable was their faith. Scatter them, and how rapidly were they propagated. Jesuitism gathered more numerous and united societies ; but they were societies of men without consciences and without a will, whose judgments and souls were under the lock of the confessional, or were carried about under the frock of their Jesuit pastor. Kind he might be and faithful, but did death remove him, or persecution exile the shepherd and disperse the flock, they had no rallying power. Like the seeds from which the industrious ant has removed the germinating principle, the largest hoard, when scattered, brought no har- vest.

It were a curious employment, to trace the unwitting adoption, at times in our own land, of this great principle of Romanism, of which the Jesuit order was the embodiment and incarnation, as if it were one of the radical truths of de- mocracy— we mean, the principle of the absorption of the individual conscience into that of the mass. It is to some au essential law of democracy, that the many have unlimited power over the will and conscience of the [ew. Yet it would require little of time or of labor to show, how fatal is stich a principle to the rights of conscience, and the interests of truth. God made man apart. Apart he is regenerated. Apart he dies. Apart he is judged. To each of us his Maker gave a conscience, but to none of us did he assign a conscience-keeper. Man was not made for society, but so- ciety was made for man. Back of its first institution, lie some of his inalienable rights, and his first and most sacred duties. Communities of men, then, cannot receive, and should not ask, any transfer of conscience. Between a man's own spirit and his God, neither king, nor kaysar, nor

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 181

congress, synod, nor pontiff, voluntary societies, nor compul- sory societies, if such there be, may lay sceptre or crosier, edict or vote. The thing is a grand impertinence. When per- sonal duty is involved, to his own Master the man stands or falls. We mean not these remarks for those duties which man owes to society, and where their laws may rightfully control and punish him. We speak of the far wider field over which some would extend those laws, and where they do not justly come, where a man walks accountable to his God only, and where, if human legislation follow him, it is usurpation upon the rights of man, and impiety against his Maker. We know how irksome to many is all noise of dis- sent and all free expression of private judgment. To remedy and reform all this dangerous independence, this ominous revolt against parental care, was the high attempt of Jesuit- ism. Let those, who envy to that society their fame and their late, tread in their steps, breaking down the individual man to build up the man social.

Another remarkable feature in the Jesuit order, illustrated in the history of all their missions, was their fatal principle of accommodation — one in the use of which they alternatety triumphed and fell. The gospel is to be presented with no needless offence given to the prejudices and habits of the heathen, but the gospel itself is never to be mutilated or dis- guised ; nor is the ministry ever to stoop to compliances in themselves sinful. The Jesuit mistook or forgot this. From a very early period, the order were famed for the art with which they studied to accommodate themselves and their . religion to the tastes of the nation they would evangelize. Iiicei, on entering China, found the bonzes, the priests of the nation ; and to secure respect, himself and his associates adopted the habits and dress of the bonzes. But a short ac- quaintance with the empire taught him, that the whole class of the priesthood was in China a despised one, and that he had been only attracting gratuitous odium in assuming their garb. He therefore relinquished it again, to take that of the men of letters. In India, some of their number adopted the Braminical dress, and others conformed to the disgusting habits of the Fakeer and the Yogee, the hermits and peni- tents of the Mohammedan and Hindoo superstition. Swartz met a catholic missionary, arrayed in the style of the Pagan priests, wearing their yellow robe, and having like them a drum beaten before him. It would seem upon such principles

188 THE JESUITS,

of action, as if their next step ought to have been the creation of a Christian Juggernaut ; or to have arranged the Christian suttee, where the widow might burn according to the forms of the Romish breviary ; or to have organized a band of Romanist Thugs, strangling in the name of the vir- gin, as did their Hindoo brethren for the honor of Kalee. In South America, one of the zealous Jesuit fathers, finding that the Payernes, as the sorcerers and priests of the tribe were called, were accustomed to dance and sing in giving their religious instructions, put his preachments into metre, and copied the movements of these Pagan priests, that he might win the savage by the forms to which he had been accus- tomed. In China, again, they found the worship of deceased ancestors generally prevailing. Failing to supplant the prac- tice, they proceeded to legitimate it. They even allowed worship to be paid to Confucius, the atheistical philosopher of China, provided their converts would, in offering the wor- ship, conceal upon the altar a crucifix to which their homage should be secretly directed. Finding the adoration of a cru- cified Saviour unpopular among that self-sufficient people, they are accused by their own Romanist brethren of having suppressed in their teachings the mystery of the cross, and preached Christ glorified, but not Christ in his humiliation, his agony and his death. A more arrogant act than this the wisdom of this world has seldom perpetrated, when it has undertaken to modify and adorn the gospel of the crucified Nazarene.

But to Robert de Nobilibus, the nephew of Bellarmine, and the near kinsman of one of the pontiffs, a man of distin- guished talent and zeal, laboring in India, it was reserved to exhibit one of the worst instances of this fatal spirit. Find- ing the Bramins in possession of the spiritual power, he pub- lished abroad that the Bramins of Rome were the kindred, but the seniors and the superiors of those of India. Enmity may have charged him falsely, in declaring that he forged deeds, in which a direct descent was claimed for these West- ern Bramins from Brama himself, the chief god of Hindoo idolatry ; but it is certain, that in this or some other mode he made the new faith so popular, that twelve, or as some ac- counts state, seventy of the Indian Bramins became his coadjutors ; and after his death, with the collusion of the Portu- guese priests, the new sect went on still triumphing. But even the Romish see repudiated such conversions as these ;

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 189

ond a bull from the Vatican extinguished the new commu- nion. To this same able but treacherous laborer belongs the fame of another kindred achievement. He composed in the language of the country a treatise in favor of Christianity. The work had the title of the Ezour Vedam. It was intended to sap the scepticism of the East ; but so covertly, though with much ability, did it undertake the task, that having been translated and reaching France, where it fell into the hands of Voltaire, he pounced upon it as an ancient Braminical treatise, full of Oriental wisdom, and proving that Christian- ity had borrowed its chief doctrines from Eastern sources. Thus, while laboring to destroy unbelief in India, he became in the next century instrumental in aiding its progress in Europe. The Jesuit, caught in his own snare, was made from his grave to lend weapons to the scoffer; while the arch-mocker, the patriarch of French infidelity, entangled in the toils of that wilful credulity which has distinguished so many eminent unbelievers, quoted the work of modern Je- suitism as an undoubted monument of ancient Braminism. Thus are the wise taken in their own craftiness, when in their self-confidence they undertake either to patronize or to impugn the gospel of the Nazarene.

We need scarcely to name another defect of the Jesuit mis- sions, which must have occurred to all — their fatal neglect of the. Scriptures. Even Xavier translated into Japanese but the creed, the Lord's prayer, and a brief catechism, and after- wards a Life of the Saviour compliled from the Gospels. The Lives of the Saints afterwards appeared in that lan- guage. In the tongue of China the Jesuits acquired such proficiency as to become voluminous authors, writing, it is said, hundreds of books; but although they translated the ponderous Sum of Theology of Thomas Aquinas into Chi- nese, the Scriptures seem to have been thought a needless or dangerous book, and a compend of the gospel history was, we believe, their chief work in the form of scriptural transla- tion. With no religious light but that emanating from the altar and pulpit, their churches were, when persecution veil- ed these, left in thick darkness. The Jesuits, anxious to shut up their converts into a safe and orthodox submission, seem to have preferred this fearful risk, to the peril of leaving the lively oracles to beam forth their living brightness upon the minds of their people. Hence the Catholics, linger- ing still in the Celestial Empire, and their Indian neophytes

190 THE JESUITS,

in Paraguay and California, have probably never known, scarce even by name, those Scriptures which are the right- ful heritage of every Christian. Nor, for their own use, even,did their missionaries prize the Bible aright. Does the Jesuit father appear in the midst of a savage tribe to harangue them on his religion ; or is he dragged by them a daunt- less victim to the stake ; the one volume, that is seen sus- pended from his neck, is not the Bible, but his breviary. In all this, the Jesuit was but acting with other Romanists. That church has assumed the fearful responsibility of shut- ting out the sunlight of divine revelation ; undertaking, in its stead, to supply the reflected light, the moonbeams of tradi- tion— a gentler brightness, under which no eye will be daz- zled, by which no mind will be quickened into too rapid a vegetation — a dubious gloom, favorable alike to wonder, to fear, to slumber, and to fraud. But as the sun will shine, so the Scriptures live on. They who preach the truth, but give not the Bible, withhold from their own teachings the most authoritative sanction. Those, on the contrary, whose doc- trine is a doctrine of falsehood, contravening and supersed- ing the Scriptures, must yet one day meet that light they would have obscured, and find themselves and all then- doings tried by the standard they would have fain displaced.

The Jesuit order has been recently revived. Restored in our own times to existence by that see for which they con- tended so valiantly and effectively, it remains to be seen how far they will resume their ancient fields, and with what measure of their first zeal and success. Were they to throw themselves into the current of the age with the sinewy vigor and lithe pliability of former times, they may yet prove most formidable. Their power of attaching the heart is, by all who have closely observed them, confessed to be great. But the age is one far different from that in which they began their career, more impracticable, less liable to monopoly, and less patient of control.

The men of a purer faith may well emulate their fearless heroism, their courtesy, their patience and industry. Amid the snows of Canada and on the fir-clad shores of our west- ern lakes, along the wilds where Orellana

"rolls his world of waters to the sea,"

on the burning margin of Africa, in the sultry Hindostan, amid the millions of China and Japan, the fathers of the

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 191

order of Loyola shrunk not from pain, or toil, or want, or death itself. When the plague wasted, and thousands were falling before it, in the deep pestilential holds of the galley where their Christian charge were held in bonds by their Turkish captors ; or in the heathen land when persecution had unleashed all its emissaries of terror and death, the Jesuit missionary was seen manifesting a serene courage, his stanch- est accusers might well envy. Had the order but fixed the cross in the heart, where they reared the crucifix in the market-place, had they given the Scriptures where they scat- tered legends, and labored for Christ as assiduously and boldly as they bled for the delusions of Antichrist, the whole history of the world had been altered. But had they done all this, the work of evangelizing the world would not have been left to become as it is, the blessed privilege of our own age. The failures of others, their corruptions and their deficien- cies, are part of the heritage of instruction that time has been accumulating for the benefit of the modern laborer, like the brass and iron of vanquished Syria, which David pro- vided for the temple that was to be reared by the hand of his son, the favored Solomon.

The institution, on whose history we have dwelt, shows what a few resolute hearts may accomplish. When Ignatius with his first companions bound themselves, by a midnight vow, at Montmartre, near Paris, on the 15th of August, 1534, some three centuries ago, to renounce the world for the pur- pose of preaching the gospel, wherever the supreme pontiff might send them, the engagement, thus ratified in darkness and secrecy beside the slumbering capital of France, was one most momentous to the interests of our entire race. That company of seven poor students, with but zeal, talent, arid stout hearts, and a burning enthusiasm, formed then a bond far more important to the after history of mankind than most of the leagues made by kings at the head of embattled squadrons. We doubt if Talleyrand ever schemed, or Na- poleon, in his highest flights of victory, ever dictated so sig- nificant an act. In its moral sublimity, the act far transcend- ed that of Cortez and Pizarro receiving the mass in a Spanish church, upon their engagement to set out for the subversion of an American empire. In the shadows of that subterranean chapel, where these first Jesuits thus bound themselves, fancy sees Africa, and Asia, and our own America, watching intently a transaction, that was to affect so deeply their subsequent

192 THE JESUITS,

history. It remains for those rejoicing in the principles of the Reformation, to bring the devotedness and intre- pidity of the Jesuit to bear upon their own purer system, in the missionary field. With the incorruptible word of our God for our chosen weapon, victories impossible to them may become easy to us ; and what was but too often a for- gotten motto, on the surface of Jesuitism, may become a principle at the heart of the Protestant missionary, "All for the greater glory of God."*

In the missionary toils, that are to aid in ushering in this day, do we expect too much from the youthful scholars of our country? Are not its colleges already sheltering those who are destined to become the heralds of Christianity to the far heathen ? On this theme, we would quote yet again from one on whose own history we should gladly have lingered longer, Francis Xavier. From one of his missions in Cochin China, this apostolic man wrote to the university of the Sor- bonne, then the focus of theological science to Catholic Europe, in language much of which we doubt not a Carey or a Martyn would not have hesitated to adopt. " I have often thought to run over all the universities of Europe, and espe- cially that of Paris, and to cry aloud to those who abound more in learning than in charity, O, how many souls are lost to heaven through your neglect ! Many would be moved. They would say, Behold me in readiness, O Lord ! How much more happily would these learned men then live — with how much more assurance die. Millions of idolaters might be easily converted, if there were more preachers who would sincerely mind the interests of Jesus Christ and not their own."

The letter was read, admired and copied. We may sup- pose there were those who applauded and transcribed that letter, but failed to obey its summons ; to whose dying pillow that appeal came back, and sounded through the depths of the soul as the voice of neglected duty. May no such regrets disturb the hour of our dismission. May a life, instinct with zeal for God and love to man, and crowded with effort, make death, whether it come late or soon, the welcome discharge of a laborer found toiling at his post. And, my young breth- ren in Christ, permit a stranger to hope, that among the honors of your Alma Mater, and especially of this missionary

* "Adnuijorcm Dei gloriam" the motto of Loyola.

AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 193

association gathered amongst her sons, it may yet be record- ed, that hence went forth men, who, on the stock of a purer faith, grafted the zeal of Francis Xavier, and, emulating his virtues, won a success more durable, because the means they employed were more scriptural — men, who, sitting at the Master's feet, and reflecting his image, and breathing his spirit, were recognized, by an admiring world and an ex- ulting church, as those who had been much with Christ and learned of him, and who belonged on earth, and would as- suredly, through all eternity, continue to belong, of a truth, and in the highest sense of the words, to " The Society of Jesus,"

2G

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER.

Among the names which it is good to repeat, we know of none more inspiriting, as an example of ministerial devo- tedness, than that of Richard Baxter. Known to the mass of society, in every land where the English tongue is spoken, as the author of two of the most useful volumes in the religious literature of that language, rich as that literature is, he deserves to be remembered by the youthful pastor as a signal example of ministerial fidelity, and power, and suc- cess, even had he never written the Call to the Unconverted, or that gem of devout genius, the Saints' Everlasting Rest. And, bequeathing, as he did, not only the lustre of a brilliant example, but the rules of his own ministerial career, in his treatise, " The Reformed Pastor," he has acquired a title to be among those first named, whenever the eyes of the rising ministry are directed to the earlier worthies of the church.

There is much in the character of the age to which he be- longed to make it deserving of profound study. Seasons of revolution, by affording the requisite emergencies, and open- ing a freer path to talent, are fertile in great men. His was an era of revolution, alike in the political and in the moral elements of society. The English throne was overturned, to be replaced by a republic, itself followed by the Protectorate, which gave place to a restoration of the Stuarts, soon to be expelled by the revolution of 1688. In science, the methods of Bacon, now first practically applied, were working momen- tous changes. It was the age in which flourished his great disciple, Boyle, and in which were trained up Newton and Locke, who attempted, with such splendid power, to carry out the principles of Bacon into the world of matter and the world of mind. Then, too, it was that Milton gave to the literature of England his great epic, yet standing in unap- proached and unapproachable grandeur.

To the inhabitants of this country it must ever seem a

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 195

momentous era, as being the age in English history, out of which the creative hand of Divine Providence took the mass with which he formed the elements of American freedom, and in which lay the germs of our religious, political, and social character. The England of those times was the Eden in which were formed the Adam and Eve of the New Eng- land colonies. And as matter, not of self-gratulation, but of devout gratitude, it deserves to be remembered, that the national mind in our ancestral land was never of such sinewy manliness, so deeply penetrated by conscientious feeling, and so thoroughly suffused with scriptural knowledge, so racy and so pure, as in this, the era of our birth as a people.

To the Christian scholar, the period is one teeming with interest. In the church, no less than the world, it was an era of remarkable men, and yet more remarkable events. In the interval, stretching from the reign of the First to that of the Second James, there appeared some of the strongest and holi- est minds of the modern church. Never before or since, it is probable, was the Bible so thoroughly and devoutly studied by the British nation, as during that time. The effect was seen in the talent, and principle, and prowess of the states- men, the scholars, the divines, the preachers, and the heroes that then adorned " the sea-girt isle." In biblical science, it was then that Walton elaborated his Polyglott, and Lightfoot accumulated his stores of rabbinical lore, and then, that flourished Castell and Pocock. Usher, and Selden, and Gataker, and Gale, and Pool, the giants of the schools, were in the pulpits, aided by other laborers, whose writings and preachings have scarce been surpassed in power over the conscience and the heart.

In the bounds of the English Establishment, a memorable revolution was undergone, not less entire or wondrous, and more lasting, than that which tore up the foundations, and for a time altered the whole frame-work of the national government. The accession of James I. had found the British church divided between two parties. On the one side was the body of the high-churchmen, of whom Laud became the head, the friends of arbitrary power, sticklers for order ; in doctrine, the patrons of Arminianism, lovers of ceremony, pomp and tradition, laying the utmost stress upon Episcopal ordination, and carrying to its farthest limits the Episcopal power, and accused, not without specious grounds, of a strong leaning to Romanism. With them were the court and the

196 I<IFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER.

star-chamber. On the opposite side stood the Puritans, Calvinists in doctrine, of the most austere morals, and the most exemplary pastors, and the most popular preachers of the country ; many of them friendly to ministerial parity, but all more strenuous for piety of heart, than any external con- formity to the rites of the church ; and, finally, the dauntless advocates of political freedom, to whom Hume traces its origin in the English Constitution. With these were the body of the Parliament, the hearts of the people, and the grace of God. In the days of the Commonwealth, the leaders of the high-church party lost all power. Laud, their chief, perished on the scaffold, and Episcopacy itself was abrogated. The Puritans, those of them at least who favored ministerial parity, were now in prosperity ; but shared it with many new communities, that, scattered by persecution and driven into close retirement during the days of the star-chamber, now burst into notice, and won rapidly bOvh numbers and power. The Restoration drove the mass of the Puritans, with these other sects, into nonconformity ; exiling from the Establishment a body of men as able and pious as it has ever possessed. But the national establishment was thus relieved of one party, only to receive another of far different character. The high-churchmen, of Laud's spirit, triumphed for a time in the court of the restored Stuarts ; but their in- tolerance, and bigotry, and general inferiority of character, soon yielded to the superior talents and reputation of a body that sprung up in the bosom of the church during the Com- monwealth, the latitudinarian divines, ae they were com- monly called. The growth of scepticism led them to study the outworks of Christian evidence. Against infidelity and popery they did good service in the cause of truth. Their dread of enthusiasm made them frigid, and their mastery of the ancient philosophy made them profound. Their doc- trines were generally Arminian. Their notions of church power were less rigid than those of the rival party, and they were also more tolerant of difference in opinion. But in their preaching they laid the whole stress, well nigh, of their efforts upon morals, to the neglect of doctrine ; and in the- ology, they attributed to human reason a strength and au- thority, which gradually opened the way to the invasion of the gravest heresies. Of generally purer character than their opponents, they were also abler preachers. But while valua- ble as moral treatises, their sermons were most defective ;

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 197

for the peculiar doctrines and spirit of the gospel were evaporated. Such were the low-churchmen of this time. The revolution under William threw many of the high- church party into the ranks of the nonjurors, from their at- tachment to the Stuart family, and lost them their posts in the church ; while it left those who remained still in the na- tional Establishment, a weaker and a discredited party. The latitudinarian divines gradually rose to an undisputed ascen- dency, and gave to the whole of the church their principles, until Whitefield and Wesley found the nation, under their in- fluence, and their preaching of a morality well nigh dissev- ered from the gospel of the cross, rocked into insensibility, drenched with spiritual lethargy, and threatened by a wide- spreading profligacy and the rapid growth of infidelity. Thus it was that, with articles and formularies remaining entirely unchanged, the English Establishment, in the com- mencement of Baxter's day, was divided between the high- churchmen and the Puritans. At the close of his stormy career, he saw it still divided ; but the combatants were now the high-churchmen and their latitudinarian brethren. At the first of his course, the church had been rent between order and piety ; at the last, the controversy was between order and morality. For, excellent as were many of the latitudinarian divines — their Burnets, and their Tillotsons, and their Cudworths — they all resorted too often to the teachings of the Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the Mr. Legality, and that " pretty young man, his son," Mr. Civility, who have become known to us in Bunyan's matchless allegory. The low-churchman of the first period was then a very dif- ferent being from the low-churchman of the second. The former quoted the Scriptures, and clung to the Reformers, and leaned on their own articles and liturgy ; the latter gave to reason undue honor, and relied too blindly on the aid of philosophy. The revolution thus accomplished in the church is of interest on many accounts. It proves how little power may exist in the boasted uniformity of an Establishment and its unchangeable formularies. It is a study of interest, too, in our days, because the Oxford theology, now so deeply agitating the Christians of England, is but a re-appearance of those high-church principles that culminated under Laud, Parker, and Sancroft, but waning before the superior bright- ness of the rival school, had seemed, for almost an entire century, lost from the heavens, and vanished not to return.

198 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER*

There were other revolutions in this age of change, of more genial influence on the cause of freedom and human happiness. The most important of these was the discovery and enunciation of that great truth, the right of religious freedom. Religious toleration, promulgated, and to a cer- tain extent practised, under the republic and under Crom- well, cruelly restricted under the Stuarts, was finally estab- lished by the revolution of 1688. In preparing the way for this momentous change, it is the glory of our own denom- ination of Christians to have labored most efficiently. They contended for what was then deemed a portentous heresy. Featly himself, a man of piety, but of bitter zeal, and an inveterate opponent of our body, published that the Baptists were laboring for the utmost freedom of the press, and for unlimited toleration — "damnable doctrines," as he termed them, for which he would have them " exterminated from the kingdom."

To the Baptist, then, the age of Baxter is a memorable one. The period of the Commonwealth and the Protector- ate was the season in which our distinguishing sentiments, heretofore the hidden treasures of a few solitary confessors, became the property of the people. Through weary years they had been held by a few in deep retirement, and at the peril of their lives ; now they began rapidly working their way and openly into the masses of society. The army that won for Cromwell his "crowning mercies," as he called those splendid victories which assured the power of the Par- liament, became deeply tinged with our views of Christian faith and order. They were not, as military bodies have so often been, a band of mercenary hirelings, the sweepings of society, gleaned from the ale-house and the kennel, or snatched from the jail and due to the gallows ; but they were composed chiefly of substantial yeomanry, men who entered the ranks from principle rather than for gain, and whose chief motive for enlistment was, that they believed the impending contest one for religious truth and for the national liberties — a war in the strictest sense pro arts et focis. Clarendon himself allows their superiority, in mor- als and character, to the royalist forces. In this army the officers were many of them accustomed to preach ; and both commanders and privates were continually busied in search- ing the Scriptures, in prayers, and in Christian conference. The result of the biblicai studies and free communings of

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 199

these intrepid, high-principled men, was, that they became, a large portion of them, Baptists. As to their character, the splendid eulogy they won from Milton may counterbal- ance the coarse caricatures of poets and novelists, who saw them less closely, and disliked their piety too strongly, to judge dispassionately their merits.

Major General Harrison, one of their most distinguished leaders, was a Baptist. He was long the bosom friend of Cromwell ; and became alienated from him only on discov- ering that the Protector sought triumph, not so much for principle as for his own personal aggrandizement. Favor- able to liberty, and inaccessible to flattering promises of power, he became the object of suspicion to Cromwell, ivho again and again threw him into prison. On the return of the Stuarts, his share in the death of Charles I., among whose judges he had sat, brought him to the scaffold ; where his gallant bearing and pious triumph formed a close not un- suitable to the career he had run. Others of the king's judges, and of the eminent officers of the army, belonged to the same communion. Some of these sympathized only, it is true, with their views of freedom, and seem not to have embraced their religious sentiments. Among this class was Ludlow, a major-general under Cromwell, an ardent republican, and who, being of the regicides, sought a refuge, where he ended his days, in Switzerland. He was accounted the head, at one time, of the Baptist party in Ireland. Such was their interest, that Baxter complains, that many of the soldiers in that king- dom became Baptists, as the way to preferment. (Orme, I., 135.) The chancellor of Ireland under Cromwell was also of our body ; Lilburne, one of Cromwell's colonels, and bro- ther of the restless and impracticable John Lilburne, was also of their number. Overton, the friend of Milton, whom Crom- well in 1651 left second in command in Scotland, was also ranked as acting with them, as also Okey and Alured. Col. Mason, the governor of Jersey, belonged to the Baptists, and still others of Cromwell's officers. Penn, one of the admirals of the English navy, but now better known as the father of the celebrated Quaker, was a Baptist. Indeed, in Cromwell's own family their influence was formidable ; and Fleetwood, one of his generals and his son-in-law, was accused of leaning too much to their interests as a political party.* The English

* To their influence as a political party, too, Baxter explicitly attributes that event which caused shuddering on every throne of Europe, the execu-

200 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER.

matron, whose memoirs form one of the most delightful narra- tives of that stirring time, and who in her own character pre- sented one of the loveliest specimens of Christian womanhood, Lucy Hutchinson, a name of love and admiration wherever known, became a Baptist. She did so, together with her husband, one of the judges of Charles I. and the governor of Nottingham Castle for the Parliament, from the perusal of the Scriptures. Of no inferior rank in society, for Hutchin- son was a kinsman of the Byrons of Nevvstead, the family whence sprung the celebrated poet, their talents, and patriot- ism, and Christian graces, and domestic virtues, throw round that pair the lustre of a higher nobility than heralds can con- fer, and a dignity, compared with which the splendor of royalty and the trappings of victory are poor indeed.

The ministry of our denomination comprised, too, men of high character ; some, unhappily, but too much busied in the political strifes of the age, but others whose learning and ta- lent were brought to bear more exclusively on their appropri- ate work. Tombes, the antagonist of Baxter, Bampfield, Gosnold, Knolles, Denne and Jessey, all Baptist preachers, had held priestly orders in the English established church ; Gosnold being one of the most popular ministers in London, witli a congregation of 3000 ; and Jessey, a Christian whose acquirements and talents, piety and liberality, won him general respect. Kiffin, a merchant whose wealth and the excellence of his private character had given him influence among the princely traders of London, and introduced him to the court of the Stuarts, was pastor of a Baptist church in that city. Cox, another of our ministers at this time, is said by Baxter to have been the son of a bishop ; and Collins, another pastor among us, had in his youth been a pupil of Busby. De Veil, a convert from Judaism, who had, both with the Romish church of France, and in the Episcopal church of England, been regarded with much respect, and, in the former, been applauded by no less a man than the eloquent and powerful Bossuet, became a Baptist preacher, and closed his life and labors in the bosom of our communion. Dell, a chaplain of Lord Fairfax, and who was, until the restoration, head of one of the colleges in the university of Cambridge, was also a Baptist minister. Although they deemed literature no

tion of Charles I., the monarch whom he loved. To them he also traces tho invasion of Scotland; in short, the chief events which hurried on the sub- version of monarchy and the establishment of a republic.

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 201

indispensable preparation for the ministry (nor did the church of the first centuries), the Baptists under Cromwell and the Stuarts, were not destitute of educated men. Out of the bounds of England, Vavasor Powell, the Baptist, was evan- gelizing Wales with a fearlessness and activity that have won him, at times, the title of its apostle ; and on our own shores, Roger Williams, another Baptist, was founding Rhode Isl- and, giving of the great doctrine gf.religious liberty a visible type. Our sentiments were also winning deference from minds that were not converted to our views. Milton, with a heresy ever to be deprecated and lamented, had adopted most fully our principles of baptism. Jeremy Taylor, a name of kindred genius, in a work which he intended but as the apol- ogy of toleration, stated so strongly the arguments for our dis- tinguishing views, that it cost himself and the divines of his party much labor to counteract the influence of the reasonings : while Barlow, afterwards also a bishop, and celebrated for his share in the liberation of Bunyan, addressed to Tombes a let- ter strongly in favor of our peculiarities. Such progress in reputation and influence was not observed without jealousy. Baxter laments that those who, at first, were but a few in the city and the army, had within two or three years grown into a multitude (Works, xx., 297) ; and asserts that they had so far got into power as to seek for dominion, and to expect, many of them, that the baptized saints should judge the world, and the millennium come. And Baillie, a commissioner from Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, a man of strong sense, and the ardor of whose piety cannot be questioned, though he was a bitter sectarian, complained that the Baptists were growing more rapidly than any sect in the land ; while Lightfoot's diary of the proceedings of the same Assembly proves that similar complaints were brought before that venerable body.

Some would naturally, as in the history of the early Chris^ tians, be attracted to a rising sect, who were themselves unprincipled men. Lord Howard, the betrayer of the patriot Russell, was said to have been, in one period of his shifting and reckless course, a Baptist preacher. Another, whose exact character it is difficult to ascertain, perverting, as roy- alist prejudices did, even his name for the purposes of ridicule, Barebones, the speaker of Cromwell's parliament, is said to have been a Baptist preacher in London. Others, again, of the body were tinged with extravagances ; some joined with

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other Christians of the time in the confident expectation of what they termed the Fifth Monarchy, Christ's personal reign on the earth. In the changes of the day, and they were many and wondrous, they saw the tokens of Christ's speedy approach to found a universal empire, following in the train of the four great monarchies of the prophet's vision. It is to the credit of Bunyan, that he discerned and denounced the error. Then, as in all ages of the church, it was but too common for the interpreters of prophecy to become prophets. Others, again, were moved from their steadfastness by Qua- kerism, which then commenced its course ; while others adopted the views of the Seekers, a party who denied the existence of any pure and true church, and were waiting its establishment yet to come. In this last class of religionists was the younger Sir Henry Vane, the illustrious patriot and statesman so beautifully panegyrized in a sonnet of Milton, and from his talents dreaded alike by Cromwell and the Stu- arts, and the friend of Roger Williams. The founder of Rhode Island seems himself, in later life, to have imbibed similar views.

Yet with all these mingling disadvantages, and they are but such heresies and scandals as marked the earliest and purest times of Christianity, that era in our history is one to which we may well turn with devout gratitude, and bless God for our fathers. In literature, it is honor enough that our sentiments were held by the two men who displayed, beyond all comparison, the most creative genius in that age of English literature, Milton and Bunyan. In the cause of religious and political freedom, it was the lot of our commu- nity to labor, none the less effectively because they did it obscurely, with Keach, doomed to the pillory, or, like De- laune, perishing in the dungeon. The opinions, as to religi- ous freedom, then professed by our churches, were not only denounced by statesmen as rebellion, but by grave divines as the most fearful heresy. Through evil and through good report they persevered, until what had clothed them with obloquy became, in the hands of later scholars and more prac- tised writers, as Locke, a badge of honor and a diadem of glory. Nor should it be forgotten, that these views were not with them, as with some others, professed in the time of persecution, and virtually retracted when power had been won. Such was, alas, the course of names no less illustrious than StilJinglleet and Taylor. But the day of prosperity and

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political influence was, with our churches, the day for their most earnest dissemination. Their share, in shoring up the falling liberties of England, and in infusing new vigor and liberality into the constitution of that country, is not yet generally acknowledged. It is scarce even known. The dominant party in the church and the state, at the restoration, became the historians ; and " when the man, and not the lion, was thus the painter," it was easy to foretell with what party all the virtues, all the talents, and all the triumphs, would be found. When our principles shall have won their way to more general acceptance, the share of Baptists in the achievements of that day will be disinterred, like many other forgotten truths, from the ruins of history. Then it will, we believe, be found, that while dross, such as has alloyed the purest churches in the best ages, may have been found in some of our denomination, yet the body was com- posed of pure and scriptural Christians, who contended manfully, some with bitter sufferings, for the rights of con- science, and the truth as it is in Jesus : that to them English liberty owes a debt it has never acknowledged ; and that amongst them Christian freedom found its earliest and some of its stanchest, its most consistent, and its most disinterested champions. Had they continued ascending the heights of political influence, it had been perhaps disastrous to their spiritual interests ; for when did the disciples of Christ long enjoy power or prosperity, without some deterioration of their graces? He who, as we maybe allowed to hope, loved them with an everlasting love, and watched over their wel- fare with a sleepless care, threw them back, in the subse- quent convulsions of the age, into the obscure and lowly stations of life, because in such scenes he had himself de- lighted to walk, and in these retired paths it has ever been his wont to lead his flock.

We may have seemed to wander far from our topic ; but the digression may be forgiven, as illustrating the circum- stances of Baxter's time, and the influences to which he wTith others was subjected ; the conflicting tides along which he floated, or which he strenuously buffeted ; while showing also why to the Baptist his age must be ever full of interest. Let us pass to consider the man himself.

Born in the year 1615, of a father who was a respectable freeholder, Baxter found in the piety of home some counter- poise to the profanity of the neighborhood, and the negligence

204 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER.

and dissoluteness that infested even the pulpits of the sur- rounding district. Although he showed much of serious- ness in early life, reproving the sins of other children, ho did not believe himself converted until attaining the age of fifteen ; when books, to which he elsewhere declares he owes the chief advantages of his life, fixed his impressions. The work of a Jesuit, revised by a Puritan, was the first of these treatises ; and the writings also of Sibbes greatly ben- efited him. His early education was irregular ; and, though afterwards prepared for the university, he never entered it, owing his chief attainments to the resolute application of later years. Like his contemporary, Bunyan, he met, in his opening course as a Christian, one of the severest of trials, in the apostacy of an intimate friend, who sank back into irreligion, and became an open mocker of that piety he had once seemed to exemplify. Just at the date of his conver- sion, he was offered an introduction at court ; but soon for- sook an atmosphere little congenial to his feelings. Failing health and the expectation of early death, gave to all the studies in which he now plunged a practical tendency. It is the snare, even of the best conducted and best guarded forms of theological education, that the scholar may insen- sibly learn to fix his mind but on the theory of religion, and, losing its spirit, forfeit its blessings. The man who sees the grave at his feet is less likely thus to err. Death in near view gave to Baxter a conscientiousness in the selection of his themes of study, and a devout earnestness in their med- itation. Redemption and judgment were not mere theories to a man who looked soon to swell the harpings of the ran- somed, or the howlings of the lost. From the age of twen- ty-one to twenty-three, he hardly expected to survive a single year. Still, anxious to employ the little fragment of time that might remain, he entered the ministry, receiving Episcopal ordination. It was afterwards his regret, that he had not duly studied the question of Episcopacy. His first labors were at Dudley, where, for a year, he was also the schoolmaster, and where his studies began to incline him to Nonconformity. New oaths, imposed on the clergy to re- press the spirit of Puritanism, yet more revolted him. At Bridgnorth he labored with applause, but without fruit, among a people already hardened by a faithful ministry, that had not profited them. He soon became, however, lecturer and curate at Kidderminster, with a people rude and ignorant ;

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but whom he preferred, from a resolution he had made never to settle with a people whose conscience had been once hardened under an awakening ministry. In this field he labored at first but two years, when the civil war broke out, and the more disorderly of his hearers, incensed against him for his faithfulness, made his stay at Kidderminster dangerous ; for, from the basest slanders, they proceeded actually to attempt his life. Thus driven from a station which was yet to become memorable as the parish of Baxter, he labored for two years in Coventry, receiving but a bare sup- port. Here he disputed strenuously against the Baptists, then making proselytes. Cox, his antagonist, and whom Baxter describes as no contemptible scholar, and as the son of a bishop, was thrown into prison, though not with the will of Baxter. The result of this unhappy appeal to that royal syllogism, the argument from compulsion, was the planting of a Baptist church at Coventry, which has continued to our times. Baxter now consulted with his brethren in the min- istry as to his entering the army, there to counteract the sectarian influence that was rapidly triumphing. His zeal, and piety, and popular eloquence, and powers of disputation, seem to have made him already eminent. By the advice of his friends, he became a chaplain in the regiment of Col. Whalley, a kinsman of Cromwell, one of the judges on the trial of the king, and the same whose flight to our country, and concealment here, forms one of the most romantic inci- dents in the early history of New England. Cromwell, who knew Baxter's dislike to his views of general toleration, now looked coolly on the man whom he had once admired, and had invited in earlier years to become the chaplain of his own regiment. At the close of the war, Baxter returned again to his beloved Kidderminster, where he remained now about fourteen years ; and, by a series of pastoral labors of surpassing faithfulness, made the connection between his own name and the parish an inseparable one in the memory of the church. Such may be the mighty effects of a few years in the career of a zealous pastor ; for the whole term spent by Baxter in this, the vineyard of his affections, com- prised little more than a fifth of his lifetime. His memory is yet most fragrant there, after the lapse of more than a century ; and the fruits of his influence are said to be yet traceable. He had found the spot a moral waste. He toil- ed, prayed, wept, gave and endured, until the wilderness

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blossomed as the garden of the Lord. Profanity and irreli- gion possessed it at his first entrance. In the civil wars, how- ever, the same brutish herd that had driven their pastor from his post, nearly all perished ; and, on his restoration to his parish, these former obstacles were found to have disap- peared. He had at first found scarce a family in an entire street, who were accustomed to the regular worship of God in the home. Ere he left, there were many streets in which not one family was without its altar ; and the passing stran- ger heard the chorus of prayer and praise swelling on either hand, as he walked past the threshold. In a parish of eight hundred families, numbering four thousand souls, his com- municants became in number six hundred; of whom thee wrere, he declared, scarce twelve, of whose conversion he had not good hope. Incessant and systematic visitation, and the catechetical instruction of every family, whatever their ages, were united to much earnest preaching. His labors were amazing. He gave himself to the ministry of the word, to prayer, and to fasting. In addition, Baxter ministered freely to the wants of the poor among his flock from his own substance ; while of his small stipend, through his lenity in exacting his legal dues, not one half ever reached his hands. He educated, too, poorer children ; and some, having been thus brought by him through the university, entered for themselves upon the ministry. All this was not enough to satisfy his heart of fire and occupy his iron diligence. For the space of five or six years he was the physician of his flock, not to eke out by its revenues a scanty stipend, but from mere kindness ; for his advice and aid were alike with- out charge. When he looked round upon his congregation, he saw in the greater part those who had owed health, and many of them life, to his assistance. This could not but endear him to the most insensible. He was, amid all this, a writer ; and of each of his smaller works, gave one copy to every family of his charge ; while each poor household, unable themselves to obtain it, he supplied with a Bible. Nor did he limit his labors to these bounds. He preached with the neighboring ministers in surrounding districts : and> as an author, he became famous through the land ; while his example of pastoral fidelity and success excited many to admire, and some to imitate, his methods. Such was Rich- ard Baxter amid his people ; and, had his infirmities been both more, and more aggravated than they were, devotedness

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so rare must win from every member of the true church, whatever his name among men, an earnest and emphatic blessing. God grant to every evangelical community many in his likeness.

During the Protectorate, Baxter never disguised his ad- herence to the royal family ; preached against Cromwell ; and, when once admitted to an interview with the man whose very name made Mazarine to turn pale, and whose power awed all Europe, Baxter told the Protector, with his usual intrepidity, that the people of England believed their ancient monarchy a blessing ; nor did they know what they had done to forfeit its advantages. When the Restoration was now concerted, Baxter was selected to preach before the Parliament, when preparing for the act. Upon the return of Charles II., he was appointed a chaplain to the king, and was offered a mitre in the establishment, if he would con- form. But the Episcopal crozier and stall had no tempta- tion to such a spirit. He asked but for the privilege of re- turning to his beloved Kidderminster ; and when this was denied, sued for permission to labor there without a stipend. But it was in vain ; and this man, whose loyalty had been so eminent, was permitted to preach but twice or thrice to these, his attached and beloved flock. Returning now to London, he continued to preach as he obtained opportu- nity. On St. Bartholomew's day, the decree of stern ex- clusion drove from the communion of the Established Church two thousand of her worthiest and ablest ministers.

Their altars they forego, their homes they quit,

Fields which they loved and paths they daily trod,

And cast the future upon Providence. Wordsworth.

Among these confessors, Baxter, the man who had re- jected a bishopric for conscience' sake, was found abandon- ing, what he prized far more highly, the liberty of preaching the gospel. Removed to London, he still continued to publish his message as a Christian minister, amid continual risks and vexations, watched by informers, and accused of sedition. Five times in fifteen years thrown into prison, his goods distrained, and driven from one residence to another, amid weakness, and pain, and persecution, Baxter toiled on, From his books, of which he says in language of simple pathos, there was little" he valued more upon earth, he was separated. Compelled first to conceal, and afterwards to sell

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them, he describes himself as being for twelve years driven more than one hundred miles from his library. He seemed to regret it, even when drawing near the end, to use his own words, " of that life that needeth books." The times in which he lived were full of gloomy omens. A dissolute court, where the royal mistresses rioted in scenes of the most aggravated profusion and profligacy ; a king who, while sworn to guard the liberties of Britain, was receiving the pay of France, and while presiding at the head of a Protestant establishment, was, in truth, long since united to the Romish church ; a divided cabinet, and a persecuting hierarchy, and a most debauched nobility, were not the only evils that sadden- ed the heart of the Christian patriot. The judgments of God, signal and wide spread, had fallen on the chief city of the empire ; and plague and fire seemed commissioned to punish what could not be reformed. When a measure of liberty was given, Baxter procured a meeting-house ; but was again sued, fined and cast into prison. In the reign of James II., he was selected as a great Nonconformist leader, to become the more eminent victim, and an example of terror to the land. His Notes on the New Testament were searched for passages to which a seditious tendency might be imputed. Bitter might well be the language in which he there occa- sionally spoke of Christian dignitaries, thus restricting from their beloved work men, their equals in talent, and often far their superiors in piety and usefulness. He was brought before the inhuman Jeffreys, one of the most brutal judges that ever disgraced the English bench, even in that day of judicial corruption ; a man of coarse strength of mind, the vigorous and unscrupulous tool of tyranny. Threatened and maligned with the coarsest virulence, he was sentenced to a heavy fine ; the infuriated Jeffreys regretting only that it was not in his power to hang him. Baxter now spent about two years in prison; but amid sickness and pain, and the gather- ing evils of age, Baxter was a laborer still, and still cheerful. " What could I desire more of God," said he to a friend, " than having served him to my utmost, now to suffer for him?" A change in the measures of the court, opened his prison doors. He lived to see the revolution, and survived that day of deliverance to the Nonconformist churches three years ; having reached, through sufferings, perils and toils, the age of seventy-six.

Amid the anguish of complicated disorders, his death-bed

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was a scene of serene triumph. When asked in his latter days, as his strength waned and the hour of his dismission drew nigh, how he found himself, his usual reply was, " almost well." He had lived the theme of many tongues: min- gled admiration, contempt, hate, reverence and affection, were lavished upon him. But multitudes, even of other communions, acknowledged his rare worth. Hale, the bright- est name in the records of the English Themis, was his friend, scarce refraining from tears when told of his imprisonment ; and bequeathing to him a legacy, trivial in amount, but valu- able, as the expression of esteem and love, from such a man. Usher, the most learned and pious prelate of his age, it was, that urged Baxter to write the Call to the Unconverted. "Wilkins, also of the Episcopal bench, declared that had Baxter lived in primitive times, he would have been a father of the church ; and that it was glory enough for one age to have produced such a man. Boyle, the devoutest, as he was among the greatest of English philosophers, said of him, that he was better fitted than any man of that age to be a casuist ; for he feared no man's displeasure, and sought no man's preferment. And Barrow, whose own powers as a reasoner and prejudices as a churchman give double force to his testimony, declared of him that his practical writings were never mended, and his controversial ones seldom con- futed.

It will be seen that his life was no long dream of lettered ease, spent amid the quiet of a settled home, and all the aids of academic retirement. His was a troubled course ; and, in the agitations of a changeful time, when the foundations of many generations were upheaved by the rising tide of revolution, when every day bore the news of recent, or the omen of coming change, busiest among the busy, Baxter seemed the sworn foe of repose ; and, in the spirit of old Arnauld, the great champion of Jansenism, to have ex- claimed, " Shall we not have all eternity to rest in?" Ac- tive by constitution, connected with the political parties in power, sometimes their adviser, more often their victim, Baxter was yet, with these entangling engagements about him, the diligent student and the faithful pastor. He was, too, a most voluminous writer. His practical writings alone fill twenty volumes. Were his controversial and miscella- neous productions added, the collection would extend to sixty goodly octavos. Many a minister, we fear, lives and

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dies without reading as many pages as Baxter wrote, As a casuist, he was among the most renowned of the age. For seven years he had stood in doubt of his own salvation (xxiii., p. 1, and xvii., p. 276) ; and his anxious scrutiny of his heart and way, had qualified him to guide others. His Christian Directory remains yet, a work of great value, enter- ing into religious duties with a minuteness of detail, a fulness of illustration, and a niceness of discrimination, that leave the reader astonished at the copious resources of his mind. As a controversialist, his pen had both power and weight; and, into all the leading questions of the age, he brought a strength of logic, and a scholastic acuteness, that made him to the most doughty of polemics no contemptible foe. Yet withal he was earnest for conciliation among Christians, anxious to find a middle way for contending theologians, and to effect a union among jarring sects ; declaring often that he would as freely be a martyr for charity, as for any article in the creed. He attempted poetry, not that he sought fame, or had studied harmony ; but because he loved the songs of the sanctuary, declaring that he knew no better image of heaven, than a whole congregation heartily singing the praises of God ; because, too, he loved God with an ardent affection, and his feelings found natural vent in verse more pious than poetical. Two of his lines have, however, gained a currency, they are likely never to lose. They are those in which he describes himself,

"Preaching as if I ne'er should preach again, And as a dying man to dying men."

Blessed the pulpit where this motto shines : to the world it will be as an echo of Mount Sinai ; .to the church, a tower on the heights of Mount Zion.

But the chief distinction of Baxter in authorship is as a practical writer. His topics were themes of universal con- cernment, such as he advises the youthful minister to select for his sermons ; themes drawn from the creed, the com- mandments, and the Lord's prayer ; or, as he happily ex- pressed it, the things to be believed, to be done, and to be desired. Such are the subjects that must " come home to men's business and bosoms." Some of these compositions stand yet unrivalled for energy and urgency. The writer hurls himself against the heart of the reader with the force and directness of a battering-ram. Yet some were written

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under circumstances that would have sentenced others to helpless inactivity, and been pleaded as reasons sufficient for drawling out a life without effort or purpose. The Saints' Everlasting Rest was the work of the last months in his military career ; with the noise of camps yet in his ears, separated from all his books, his health apparently fast failing, and eternity rising before him. But if ordinary helps were wanting, other and higher aid was not withheld. The church has few volumes written like that, as on the very summit of the delectable mountains, where the eye could trace the outlines of the New Jerusalem, and the ear already caught the thunder of the harpings of its many harpers. Fame or protit was not the object of his authorship. His course shows the sincerity of a declaration prefixed to one of his sermons, that he would rather see his books carried in ped- lars' packs to the fairs and markets of the country, than standing on the shelves of the rich man's library.

As a preacher and pastor, it is scarcely possible for the youthful pastor to select a higher model in the modern church. His published works caused Doddridge to call him the Demosthenes of the English pulpit. There is much in his writings to redeem the epithet from extravagance, whether we look to the vigorous simplicity of style, their burning logic, set on fire by strong passion, his sustained enthusiasm, or the tremendous iterations of his earnestness in dealing with the heart. Before Cromwell or the national parliament, the judges at their circuit, or the simple tradesman of his own Kidderminster, he seemed alike raised above all fear of man; elevated by the responsibility of his office and the view of his final audit at the bar of Christ, to a point, where the voice of fame died away on the ear, and the gauds and toys of earth showed in their native littleness. He was not only in request as a preacher, but as a disputant, holding public conferences with our own denomination, with the Quakers, and with bishops of the Establishment. But it is as a pastor, that the lesson of his life has its chief value. He brought his parish into a regular system of visitation ; himself and his assistant visiting fourteen families previously desig- nated, in each week, and devoting, every week, two entire days to the employment. Prolonged conversation with each individual, and the catechetical instruction of the whole fa- mily, were the exercises in which the time was spent. He counted his visitations greater labor, than his preparations

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for the pulpit. Their effects were remarkable. To the young he showed special care. It was a favorite sentiment with him, that, were Christian parents but faithful to their duties, preaching would remain no longer the chief instrument of conversion. He saw the benefits of toil bestowed upon children, in its reaction upon the parents. Some of his older parishioners, long incorrigible and insensible, were hopefully converted at the age, in some cases, even of eighty, in consequence of beholding the effects of piety in their chil- dren and grandchildren. In the Reformed Pastor he has urged the duties of the ministry with such power, that some theological instructors have recommended a yearly perusal of the work to every one occupying or expecting to fill the ministerial office.

Another memorable feature in his history is the manner in which he threw his mind into various channels without dissi- pating its strength. The peculiar circumstances of our age seem often to require this of pastors. Many and dissimilar em- ployments must be mingled. Was it that his devotion gave tone and tension to his mind, such as no other discipline than that of the closet could have supplied, and that, basking on the loftiest heights of divine meditation, he came down to the strifes and toils of the plain beneath with a strength which could be obtained only in this near approach to the throne, or in whatever mode we account for it, his name stands high among the few, who, in varied fields, have in most been eminent, and in none contemptible. Now engaged in pre- paring for the nursery the " Mother's Catechism," or putting on the shelf of the cottager the " Poor Man's Family Book," he was seen anon issuing some ponderous tome of theology or polemics, where the acuteness of a schoolman was sustain- ed with no despicable stores of knowledge, and no vulgar eloquence. He blended qualities of mind and heart often deemed incompatible, because so seldom found in union. With much metaphysical subtlety, he used the simplest and most popular language, and retained his power of holding an audience spell-bound by appeals of stirring vigor and familiar illustrations. Bunyan, coming up from the shop, and the highway, and the market-place, into the pulpit, could not preach more plainly, or draw to his aid illustrations more apt or homely. Public spirit in him was united with personal watchfulness ; and his continual labors for others had not relaxed his attention to his own heart and way. The life of

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the statesman, the traveller, and the merchant, is sometimes thought to excuse, from its peculiar embarrassments, a lower standard of holiness in the Christian who occupies such a place in society. But Baxter's cares, and correspondence, and labors, might have wearied many a merchant, and seemed too intricate for a cabinet minister, while oft he found himself with no certain dwelling-place, travelling perforce now to regain health, and now to escape persecution; yet the retirement of the closet and the culture of the heart seem never neglected. He was like Daniel, who, with the cares of an empire resting on his shoulders, was still, in his cham- ber, the man greatly beloved of Heaven; and, like Nehemiah, when amid the luxury and pomp and honor of his station, his eye saw through the gilded lattices of Shushan, not the tufted palm, or the splendid pillar, or the fragrant garden, but one object still arose, dark and distant before his eye, the blackened walls of the distant Jerusalem.

It enhances yet more the value of his example and its singularity, that all these were the doings of an invalid. He belonged to that class from which some would expect little of energy or achievement, whose conversation is in some cases only of still recurring ailments, and their care is still some new remedy for the old disease. Scarce could this class produce, from their most extreme cases, one whose bodily disorders were so numerous, distressing and long continued, as the complicated maladies that had met in the shattered tabernacle which housed the spirit of Baxter. Like his illustrious contemporary, when remembering his blind- ness, he

" Bates not a jot of heart or hope, but still Bears up and steers right onward." — Milton.

Entering the ministry with what would now be termed the symptoms of a confirmed consumption, Baxter battled right manfully his way through languor and pain, until he had passed the usual bound of threescore years and ten, allotted to our stay on the earth. When others would have quitted the field to occupy the hospital, and when many would have dwin- dled away into shivering and selfish valetudinarians, the im- pulse of high conscientiousness and sustaining faith carried this man on, to the last, an efficient laborer. And while, with Paul, he knew what it was to be "in deaths oft," with the apostle, also, could he claim to be " in labors more abundant, '^

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He had his errors. Many he detected, and, like Augustine i in all candor, retracted. Others he knew not until he reach- ed that land where all the followers of Christ will have so much to learn, as well as so much to enjoy. Among the imperfections of this excellent man, some may be palliated as the result of natural temperament or bodily weakness. Of ardent and irritable character, his vehemence became at times undue severity. His prejudices were strong, and his feelings perhaps often tinged with bitterness from the nuste- rity of his life and his frequent sicknesses. With great metaphysical acuteness he refined and distinguished, until truth was perplexed, and error found shelter under heaps of ingenious distinctions. He confessed that he had an early and strong love of controversy, which he sought to restrain. But, even in his attempts to end, he sometimes created dis- putes, and added but a new term to the watchwords of theo- logical strife already too numerous. His middle path became but the means of exciting new contentions, or forming one more sect. Thus Baxterianism, as others have called it, or the system by which he would harmonize the Calvinist and the Arminian, became, in his own and the subsequent gene- ration, but the occasion of a new and embittered controversy. Hence he complained, late in life, that he had been making his bare hand a wedge to part the gnarly oaks of controversy, and the result was, where he would have separated contend- ing parties, they closed upon the hand of the peace-maker ; united in endeavoring to crush it, if disunited in all else. Writing rapidly and on every theme, his expressions could not always have been duly weighed, and often clashed apparently with each other. This was a charge of his ene- mies, and was wittily urged against him by L'Estrange, who compiled what he supposed contradictions from Baxter's numerous books, and entitled the work, "The Casuist un- cased, or a dialogue betwixt Richard and Baxter, with a moderator between for quietness' sake." He was also accused of egotism ; and his great contemporary, Owen, has broadly charged him with this fault. But it seems rather the childlike openness of a mind that thought aloud, and knew no disguises, than the fruit of conceit. A graver fault was his dislike of toleration. It was, however, the fault of his age and his sect ; for the Presbyterian body to which he belonged, with all their excellences, and they were many and rare, were, as a denomination, the zealous opponents of religious

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freedom, and incurred for this, as for other causes, the indig- nant satire of the muse of Milton.

In this and other questions, nothing is more common, yet nothing more unjust, than to try the men of former ages by the light of our own times. But the men of that day rea- soned thus. Every man is bound to use his influence in the extension of religion. He is not the less bound to do so, because he wears a crown. In what way could a king pat- ronize, but by paying, its ministry, and guarding its creed. They read, too, in the Scriptures that kings were to be the nursing-fathers of the church ; and seeing, in the Jewish dispensation, that God had united the civil and religious polity of his own people, Scripture and reason seemed to unite in requiring that the state should become the patron of the church. In addition, the practice of ages was with the advocates of these views. Where were the people, Christian or heathen, in whom the civil government and the priesthood did not recognize a mutual dependence, each on the other, and lend alternate aid ? They who forget how deeply these prejudices were imbedded in the minds of mankind, and who condemn the intolerance of the Puritans without mercy, act unjustly ; and if Baptists, are unjust also to the merit of their own fathers, whose honor, received from God, it was to discover a truth long forgotten, and on its reappearance universally suspected ; and one too, not at first sight so ob- vious, but that much might be plausibly urged against it.

On the other hand, some few among the Baptists of the continent and England early held that all magistracy was sinful ; that no Christian could accept it. They argued from the declaration of him who said, " My kingdom is not of this world ;" and especially they relied on a perverse inter- pretation of that Scripture still so often misunderstood — like some parts of the ocean, beautifully clear, yet unfathomably deep — the Sermon on the Mount. These arrived at a true result, that religion was not to be the creature of the state ; but it was by a most erroneous process. The argument was that all states and governments were unlawful. As civil government was itself sin, Christ could not accept Belial as a coadjutor, nor the church the aid of the civil power. This was liberty, blundered upon by the gropings of falsehood. Others of the Baptists saw the truth, that civil magistracy was an ordinance of God, not only allowable, but necessary and most righteous, if justly administered. But they saw,

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also, that the Saviour's rule differed from that of earthly princes in its subjects and in its laws ; in short, in its entire genius. They declared that to blend the two was tyranny against man, and it was treason against God. When this bold truth burst to light from the lowly walks of society, its effect was most startling. Like other truths, it carried to many minds its own evidence. But others saw in it the seed of all license, the subversion of all morality, the setting up in the state of a government without God, and in the church the desertion of truth to perish, an unregarded stranger in the streets. Their very piety made them the more strenuous in opposition ; and the more they dreaded and abhorred the heresies to which they supposed it would give universal currency, the more did they labor, and argue, and pray against an unlimited toleration. We may see, their error, and yet respect, and even revere their motives. Of this character was the holy man who gives occasion to these remarks. Seeing the Baptists in an error, as he deemed it, and especially zealous in breaking an inlet for all errors, he did perhaps, in some of his works, intemperately excite the magistrate against them. But, in later years, we rejoice to believe, that further acquaintance with some of their excel- lent leaders had weakened his prejudices; and, towards the close of his course, he was in favor of a very restricted tol- eration for all evangelical sects, in which he would now in- clude even the Baptists. It was not, however, until he en- tered heaven, that he understood that great truth — to him so hard, to us so simple — that Christ, the potentate of the universe, cannot be the stipendiary of any earthly kingling ; and that the state, which assumes to patronize Christianity, corrupts it.

It were an interesting task to remember and compare some of the guiding spirits of the age in which he lived, with Bax- ter. He brought not the rich erudition of many of his coe- vals to the study of the Bible. He could not boast the powers of Chillingworth as a reasoner ; he did not emulate, and perhaps from conscience would not have used, the gor- geous imagery of Jeremy Taylor. Owen was a sounder theologian, and Howe had more both of the sublime and the profound in his writings. Yet in how many points did all these men stand far behind the pastor of Kidderminster ! In style, Barrow was not more nervous than he, nor was Tillotson more clear on any practical theme, Milton probably

LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 217

disliked his stern Presbyterianism ; and he had probably as little taste as the mass of the nation in that age for the mag- nificence of Milton's epic. He would have turned in prefer- ence to his own favorite George Herbert, with quaintnesses innumerable, but withal, a deep, heart-felt piety, that would have commended to Baxter the verses of a bell-man. With the saintly Leighton he seems not to have met : their paths did not cross, until both had terminated in heaven. Of Bunyan we have met no mention in his writings , nor does the honest pastor of Bedford, in any of his works, refer to Richard Baxter. Both served God zealously and with every faculty. Both contended earnestly for a union among Christians, more desirable than practicable, and sought it by methods that were unwise. Both were confessors for truth in the dungeon ; and, had persecution led them to the stake, neither would have faltered before the terrors of a fiery martyrdom. In the union of strong reasoning powers with an active imagination, the tinker of Elstow more nearly ap- proached Baxter than might at first have seemed probable. And in Bunyan 's sermons, there is a force of homely illus- tration, a mastery of the vernacular English, and a terrific closeness and pungency in dealing with the sinner's con- science, as well as a high standard of Christian morality urged upon the professed disciple, reminding any reader of Baxter's best works. Baxter might have learned to advantage from his humble contemporary to insist more than he did on the doctrines of grace, as the only ground of the sinner's hope, and the grand motives to a Christian practice. Both have met in heaven, and rejoice we doubt not, continually in the multitudes whom their labors that survived them have already drawn, and are each day attracting thither, to swell the train of the ransomed, and the glories of the Redeemer.

Contrasted with the greatness of this world, how does the character of Baxter rise and tower in surpassing majesty, whether we consider the purity of his motives, or the high excellence of his private life, the nature of the influence he exerts, the labors accomplished by him, or the sufferings by which he was perfected. Voltaire, born the year after Bax- ter's death, resembled him in the quenchless fervor of his spirit, his promptitude and his stirring restlessness, the ver- satility of his powers, and their continuous exercise through a long life. But when the effects produced on the human character, and on the happiness of the individual, and the

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218 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER.

family, and the nation, by the philosopher of Ferney, and the Kidderminster pastor, are brought into view together, how is the lustre of infidel genius rebuked ! The gigantic sceptic dwindles and wilts before the holiness that inspired the genius of Baxter, like Satan, when touched by the spear of Ithuriel, cowering in deformity and shame. To sneer, to chatter, and to mock, were the favorite employments of the one, flinging filth and breathing venom on every side. The other was, indeed, imperfect ; but still it is seen, that the mind which was in him was the mind that was in Christ : and beneficence, and truth, and purity, piety toward God, and justice and mercy toward mankind, streamed from his heart, his lips, and his eyes, over a world that was not wor- thy of him.

Imagination might ask, what would have been the cho- sen pursuits of such a spirit as Baxter's, had his lot been cast in our times, and his home been fixed upon these western shores. Would he have given his life to the heathen ? He loved them. And while Owen, his gifted compeer, thought it not the duty of the church to undertake missions to the heathen without some new call from heaven, Baxter judged more rightly, that the only impediment was the want of the requisite love and faith in the church. When silenced in England, he declared that years and the difficulties of a new language only prevented him from going to preach Christ to idolaters. We may well suppose, that, in whatever field he had been fixed, he would have thrown the whole weight of his energy into the missionary enterprise. In the labors of the Tract and Bible Society, he had within his parochial limits anticipated the schemes of our day. But with the widening facilities now afforded for the work, how efficient might he have been, and how effective a writer of tracts was Baxter qualified to become. And had he enjoyed the light of those truths, now the common heritage of the age, but, then, hidden from some of the ablest and best of mankind — had he known the powers of an emancipated church — had he understood the sanctity of conscience, how much of misspent labor might have been preserved for wiser nses. But here as elsewhere, God, who would not have the fathers perfect without us, had reserved for us some better thing. Rich is our inheritance. And did Richard Baxter see as we do, a country opening before him, not a narrow and rock-bound isle, but a massy continent, soon to be belted

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by our republic — did he behold what our eyes witness, the railroad and the canal, shooting their lines of electrical com- munication across the face of our broad territory — did he see steam yoking itself to the chariot, and urging the vessel with a speed that leaves the wildest hopes of early projectors lagging far behind — and did he see our language, his own nervous and masculine English, spreading itself not only through Britain and America, but to their colonies and con- nections on every shore, would he not have deemed these redoubled opportunities of influence a call to yet redoubled zeal ? Yet more, had he seen travel and history bringing every day new testimonies to swell the growing mass of prophesies accomplished, and to heighten and strengthen the walls of Christian evidence — did he hear from the southern seas, then unknown, the cry of nations turning from the idols of their fathers, would not even his zeal have received a new impulse, and the trumpet at his lips have blown a blast waxing yet louder and louder ? Whatever was his duty, is not the less ours. The contemplation of such an example reproves us all. But the Master's promised presence and the inexhaustible graces of that Spirit which has been the Teacher of the church, and her teachers in all ages, these may well stimulate to the loftiest aims, and revive the falter- ing hopes of the faintest heart. Let us not then, in beholding the graces that have adorned the former servants of our common Lord, be ready to deem all emulation impossible. In regarding the character and achievements of Baxter, we may not hope to possess his singular talents ; but all may imitate his holiness, his zeal, his resolute patience, his dili- gence, and his flaming charity. And if ever the standard seem too elevated, and our eyes are dazzled as we look at its tall summit, bright with heaven's own light, let us remem- ber, that even this does not reach the full height of our privileges and our obligations. For it was no disputable authority that spake, and in no dubious language, when the Lawgiver and the Redeemer proclaimed it as the rule of his household, "Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

"And he said unto them. Let us go into the next towns, that 1 may preach there also .* for therefore came i forth. — mark i. 38.

It is ever delightful to the Christian, that he can trace, in the way along which he journeys, the footsteps of his Sa- viour preceding him. The labors, the sorrows and the joys of his course all become hallowed, when it is seen that the Master has first partaken of them. The cup of affliction is less distasteful to the believer, because our Lord has himself drunk of its bitterness, and left on the brim a lingering fra- grance. In prayer, he approaches to God with greater con- fidence, because he names as his intercessor one who him- self prayed while upon earth, with strong crying and tears, watched all night in supplication on the lone mountain side, and bowed to pray, beneath the olives of Gethsemane, with the bloody dews of anguish on his brow. And the preaching of the word derives its highest glory from the fact, that He who descended into the world to become its ransom, was himself a minister of that Gospel he commissioned others to preach. In the words before us we have Christ's own testi- mony, that the very purpose of his coming was to preach from town to town of his native land. Jesus Christ was, therefore, a Home Missionary. To this end, blessed Savi- our, "earnest thou forth." To thy servants, who have at this time for the like purpose gathered themselves together, wilt thou not then give thy presence and favor, Head of thy Church as thou art, Master of all her assemblies, and the only effectual teacher of all her pastors and evangelists?

Aid me, my brethren, with your prayers, while from these words I would commend to your notice the resemblance

BETWEEN YOUR OWN LABORS, AND THE PERSONAL MINIS- TRY of your Lord and Saviour as performed in the

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field of Home Missions ; and while I urge the conse- quent DUTY OF THE CHURCH TO CONTINUE AND ABOUND IN THE LIKE GOOD WORK.

I. The title of Missionary denotes, as you know, one sent forth, and especially belongs to one whose errand it is to propagate religion. You need not to be reminded how often Christ announced to his hostile countrymen the fact, that he was sent from God, to declare the Father, from whose bosom he came forth, whom no man had seen or could see. The title of apostles, by which he saw it meet to designate his twelve chosen disciples, is, as you are aware, but the render- ing into Greek of the same idea, which, borrowing the word from the language of the Romans, we express by the term missionary ; and the Saviour himself is by Paul described as the great Apostle of our profession, or in other words, the chiefest Missionary of the Church. Now the field cf his labor and his missionary character may assume different as- pects, according to the point of view from which our obser- vations are made. If we look to the original Godhead of the messenger, and to the glory which he had with the Father before the foundation of the world, his mission was a distant one. To bring the glad message to our earth from the far Heavens, he emptied himself of glory, became a voluntary exile from the society of the pure and the blessed, and taking on him the nature of sinful man,became the sharer of his mis- eries, and the perpetual witness of his iniquities. In this sense it was to a foreign shore that he came, and to an alien race that he ministered ; and thus considered, his labors more nearly resemble those of the foreign missionary. But if we confine our regard to the mere humanity of our Lord, his missionary toils assume another aspect. His personal minis- try was far more limited and national in its character, than was his message. Although in his relation to our race of every kindred and of all lands, he is the second Adam, and the nature which he took upon him was that common to our whole kind, he was yet born in the land of promise, under the law given to Moses, and within the range of the covenant made with Abraham. By these bounds his personal ministry was for the most part limited.

It might have been otherwise. The same indwelling Deity, that enabled him at an early age to confound the doc- tors of his nation, beneath the shadow of their own proud temple, might have been displayed, had he chosen it, at a

222 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY,

still earlier year of his life ; and the holy child might have preached the gospel to that heathenish Egypt, in which his infancy sought refuge. The Being, before whose eye, in the wilderness of temptation, were brought all the kingdoms of this world, with all the glory of them, might, had he so willed it, have traversed all those kingdoms in his own personal ministry. Clothing himself, had he chosen it, with those same miraculous gifts which he reserved for his kingly ascen- sion, then to be showered down on his Pentecostal Church, he might have visited land after land, declaring to every tribe of mankind, in their own dialect, the truths he came to re- veal. He might have been the first to carry the gospel to imperial Rome, and hunting the hoary profligate and dissem- bler Tiberius to his guilty retreat at Capreae, he might have reasoned before the crowned ruler of the world, of righteous- ness, temperance, and judgment to come, until he too, like an inferior ruler in after times, had trembled on his throne. He might have anticipated the labors of his servant Paul, by bearing the news of the unknown God, and the resurrection, to the philosophers of Athens. To the Roman people he might have declared himself as that great Deliverer, of whom their Virgil had already sung ; and the sages of Greece might have been compelled to own in him that Heavenly Teacher for whom their Socrates had longed. And the nations of the East now intently looking for the advent of a king, whose dominion should be a universal one, might have learned from our Lord's own lips, the spiritual and eternal nature of that kingdom they justly but blindly expected. And thus having filled the whole world with the echo of his fame, as a preacher of repentance and of faith, he might have returned to Jerusalem, out of which her prophets might not perish, there to consummate the atoning sacrifice of which he had testified.

We say, Jesus Christ might thus have carried abroad the word of salvation to many nations. Instead, however, of doing this, he confined himself in his personal instructions to the bounds of Palestine, one visit to the coast of Tyre and Sidon excepted, and even of this it is most probable that he taught in that region only the Jews there scattered. In his occasional retirement from the violence of his enemies, he neither wandered to Arabia and its roving hordes of the race of Ishmael, on the south ; nor did he travel into the country of that powerful people, whose territories skirted Judea on

CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 223

the east, the Edomites, who were the kindred of Israel, as being the posterity of Esau. When the appeals of distress were made to him by those of another race, he himself drew attention to this restriction as being laid upon his own minis- try, declaring that he was not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel — was not sent, or in other language, his commission as a missionary preacher, went no further. To their relief he confined well nigh all his miracles. With the devotedness of a true patriot, he labored for the good of his own, although his own received him not. And to the end he persevered in this course. In the last week of his mortal career, when to his divine prescience the awful scenes of the betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, and the crucifixion were already present, as a vivid reality — when, seated with his dis- ciples on the sides of Olivet, he looked, with them, upon the city with its battlements and turrets, its long drawn terraces, and its gorgeous temple, spread out on the opposite heights, •but saw what their eyes could not see, and heard what their ears could not hear — when, in the garden that lay at his feet, his prophetic eye already discerned the bloody agony soon to bedew it, and viewed in the palaces of Herod and Pilate rising before him, all the scenes of ignominy and tor- ture he was soon there to encounter — when along the streets, now sending up but the hum of cheerful industrjr, his pro- phetic ear even now heard resounding the yells of the multi- tude, as they rushed from the place of judgment to the hill of Golgotha — even with these sights and sounds around him, from the thought of his own overwhelming baptism of an- guish, he could turn aside to weep over favored but guilty Jerusalem, with as ardent an affection as had ever filled the heart of a Hebrew, when his eye caught the first glance of its turrets on his yearly pilgrimage, and he hailed it in inspired song, as the city of the great King, seated on the sides of the north, beautiful for situation, and the joy of the whole earth. And after he had wrought out the great work of redemption, and gave his apostles, before his ascension, charge to bear his gospel among all nations, however remote, and however bar- barous, he yet added the restriction, that their labor should begin at Jerusalem.

We are ready to admit that all this was needed for the accomplishment of the prophecies that went before concern- ing him. But Christ had, it should be remembered, the ordering of those very prophecies, for his was the Spirit that

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prompted them. To refer this restriction of the field of Christ's labors to prophecy, is then only to make his plan of Home Missions a few centuries the older, and leave it still the work of his mind. Into the purposes which may have guided the Saviour in thus acting, we would not here enter. Whatever his intent, in thus narrowing the field of his toils as a preacher, the fact is evident that to the land of Canaan, or the bounds of his native country, his ministerial labors were confined, and Jesus Christ, while upon earth, was a Home Missionary. Now a work which occupied the greatest of preachers, can never be unimportant, and a plan of benev- olent effort, which marked the first ages of the Church, and was commended by the example of its great Head, can never become obsolete.

Nor is this, beloved brethren, the onV point of contact between the ministerial labors of Christ, and the work in which you are engaged. We have seen how far resemblance to him may be claimed by your society in the scene of your labors. Bear with me, while I proceed to consider the com- mission under which he acted, the message he bore, the manner in which he published it, and the mode in which his labors were sustained.

2. Of the commission under which he labored, it may in- deed be said, that it was peculiar to himself, and may be claimed by none others, that he spoke by his own authority. It was the natural result of his Deity as the equal Son of the Eternal Father. The scribe and the pharisee quailed before the self-sustained dignity of his teachings. Thus your Mis- sionaries may not teach. They may promulgate only the things His word contains, and in no other name than his are they to speak, or is the Church to receive their testimony. But in this respect they may claim to act under the same commission with Christ, that they are embraced within its ample provision of gifts and blessings to the Church. As the Father hath sent me, said he to his disciples, so send I you. To them thus sent he promised his own perpetual presence and aid. Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Again in the mission of the Saviour, he inherited, as a qualification for its varied tasks, the Spirit with- out measure, and with him is its inexhaustible residue. Now of this Spirit, in its due and needed measure, he has vouch- safed to communicate to the Church and its teachers. To communicate it to his apostles, he employed forms on which

CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 225

the Church dared never venture, and which well betokened his own self-derived and incommunicable right, as God, to dispense it. The apostles were wont, by the imposition of hands, an act ever accompanied with prayer, to confer the gifts of the Spirit, acknowledging thus that to* God they looked up for the blessing. He, on the contrary, breathed on the twelve, as if to show its native and perpetual in-dwell- ing within him, and in a brief sentence, which, were he not God, would be condensed and inspissated blasphemy, said : " Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Although not thus given, you believe that the same Spirit yet remains to teach and bless the Church. Did not that Spirit, as you trust, first endow them, your Missionaries would not have been accepted. Did he not attend them, and work with them, they could not be prospered. May it not then without irreverence be claimed, that the men sustained by your alms in the mission field, go forth under the same commission with Christ ; since he him- self construed that commission as including the subordinate laborers of all times, whom he should raise up — since he has himself promised his personal aid and presence with these to the end of time — since the Spirit that first endowed, and that yet prospers them, is all his own — and is one with that Spirit by which he himself was anointed for his great work, under the commission by him received of the Father 1 3. As to the message which he bore, its great burden was repentance and faith, as ushered into the kingdom of God. He taught this truth by his herald and forerunner John, and continually reiterated it in his own ministry. He veiled it in his parables — he mingled it with his miracles of mercy — he spoke it in the ears of his favored apostles-— he published it on the house-top to the indiscriminate multitude. On the mountain side, or sitting in the ship, in the way as he walked, or leaning in weariness on the brink of the well, in the home of his poorer disciples, or the banqueting chambers of some richer host, still this was his theme. And what other dare your missionaries substitute ? Varied as may be the garb into which it is thrown, man's corruption and condem- nation, the need of repentance and faith, that faith in Christ as a King, and a Redeemer as well — are not these the top- ics still applicable and never trite, of which the Church shall not have exhausted the glories, or fathomed the mysteries, ages after the world shall have been consumed, and all its tribes shall have been adjudged to heaven or to hell for ever?

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Your laborers then in the far West are yet carrying abroad the same gospel which Christ bore in weariness to the city of Samaria, and scattered along the shores of the lake Gen- nesareth, and published as he walked the streets of Jerusa- lem, or stood and cried in the thronged courts of the temple. 4. But in the manner, too, in which he published his mes- sage, it was said that our Lord had shown himself the great exemplar of the Home Missionary. In this single feature, had he manifested no other claim to a divine mission, our Lord proved himself endowed with superhuman wisdom. We refer to the means he selected for propagating his reli- gion amongst mankind. There had lived in the Gentile world men of high intellectual endowments, who had dis- cerned the ignorance and corruption of their age, and aspired to become its reformers. But although some were deified for their fancied success, futile had been their endeavors ; and most cumbrous yet most imbecile the instrumentalities, upon which they had chosen to rely. Some had been legis- lators, bequeathing to their fellow-citizens new forms of gov- ernment ; others, warriors appealing to brute force, and im- posing by the strong hand of power their improvements upon the feebler race whom they had subdued ; others resorted to what they deemed allowable and pious frauds, forging proph ecies, inventing mysteries, and bribing oracles ; others phi losophized, and yet others employed the elegant arts to soften and to better the human character. But none of them knew aright the might of the Leviathan they affected to curb and tame. Man, though disguised by civilization, and adorned by science and art, was still the same selfish and godless savage at heart, that he had ever been. Mutually wronged and wronging, the race was yet, as Paul too truly described them, hateful and hating one another. Of the depth of cor- ruption into which alike the Jew who boasted of a law he would not keep, and the Gentile, whom he scorned, were sunk at the time of Christ's coming, Paul has told us in lan- guage of fearful significancy. How dreadfully the history of the world filled up the gloomy outlines that master-hand had drawn in the opening of his epistle to the Romans, I need not say to you. And yet all this went on, in spite of efforts the most earnest, the most varied, and the most costly, to check, or at least to conceal the evil. But it was only to varnish putridity, and to gild over decay, that these earthly reformers came. Of ever profiting the vast mass of the

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people, the most intelligent of these sages despaired. They had no hope except for the wise and the lettered portion of soci- ety. To these they spoke in veiled and guarded language. For these, their select hearers able to bear it, they had an internal or esoteric doctrine. To the multitude they held out doctrines often utterly the opposite of these their private teachings ; and the poor and the ignorant they looked upon as an inferior kind, like the "brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed;" to be entrapped by error, and given over to unpitied ruin. As the larger portion of mankind will ever be found in the classes of neglected and restricted education, to despair of the poor and of the many, was virtually to de- spair of the well-being of the race.*

Another obstacle, which these reformers felt themselves incompetent to assail, was found in the false but received religions. To change the religion of a whole nation, when once established, was deemed an impossibility. Plato, among the wisest of Grecian schemers, makes it an axiom in his celebrated treatise of a republic, " that nothing ought to be changed by the legislator in the religion which he finds al- ready established ; and that a man must have lost his under- standing to think of such a project." \ Yet not to change the religion of one nation only, but of all nations, is Jesus Christ come. Look at the varied forms of error that met him, all obstinate by the force of ancient and inherited pre- judices, and by the violence of the passions they indulged and sanctified, and made venerable in the eyes of the people by the lapse of time. In his own nation he encountered truth tenaciously held, but held perversely and partially, and in all unrighteousness. In the lettered classes of the Roman

* A similar feeling with regard to the multitude, the reader may remember, has marked many of the reformers of modern times, who have claimed to re- lease the world from the dominion of Christianity. The private correspond- ence of the patriarch of French infidelity — whom his disciples were accus- tomed to hail, in language borrowed from that Bible at which they scoffed, as their " Father of the Faithful" — contains the following passage. It is in a letter to his fellow-laborer D'Alembert, and when congratulating his friend on the progress of their principles : " Let us bless this happy revolution, that has within the last fifteen or twenty years taken place in the minds of all respectable people (tous les honnetes gens). It has outrun my hopes. As to the rabble, I meddle not with them ; tJie rabble they will always remain. I am at pains to cultivate my garden, but yet it will have its toads ; they should not however prevent my nightingales from singing" Lettres de M. de Voltaire et de M. d'Alembert, 211.

t Warburton's Divine Legation, Book iii. § 6.

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empire, he saw a band of learned and acute triflers, addicted to a heartless and endless scepticism, or of debauched error- ists, in whose mind atheism and profligacy, in drunken alli- ance, leaned each upon the other. The mass of the nation were the corrupt votaries of paganism, in its most corrupt forms ; sensual and sanguinary, they had become enervated by luxury, and yet were ravening for blood. Equally fierce and cruel, if not alike sensual, were the superstitions of the savage hordes whom they held in check, or retained in their pay on the borders of the empire. In the East were the worshippers of fire. Arabia, and Persia, and India, and Scythia, and Egypt, all had their national idols. The in- quiry had been made by Jeremiah six centuries before, " Pass over the isles of Chittim and see ; and send unto Kedar and consider diligently and see if there be such a thing. Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods ?" And the inquiry, made as if to challenge an instance of its occur- rence, had remained unanswered. Yet the reputed son of a carpenter, a man of Nazareth, the most despised city of the Jews, the most despised of nations, rises up to make the attempt. And what are his resources ? Is he patronized by kings ? Is he levying armies, and equipping fleets, or is he compiling new codes of law, or dispatching ambassadors and forming treaties ? None of all these things. But perhaps he has won to his party the sophists of Greece, and the schol- ars of Athens, the learned, and acute, and eloquent disciples of Epicurus, and Zeno, and Plato, are retained in his inter- ests, and are disseminating his peculiar sentiments? — Not so. The wisdom of this world he has counted foolishness, and his doctrine teaches that the most labored result of human intelligence has been confirmed ignorance, as to the first and most obvious of all truths — that the wise have failed to spell out the handwriting and superscription of a Creator, though found upon all his works — and the world by wisdom knew not God. But he has converted, perhaps, the Sanhe- drim, and the Rabbies of Israel ; the lights of the law and the oracles of the people are with him? No, he has de- nounced them with fearless severity, and they are plotting his death. But Herod is in his favor, and Pilate is his friend? No, Herod is seeking to see him, in vain, dreading in him the resurrection of the Baptist he had slain ; and Pilate is neither concerned nor able to give him protection from the fury of his own nation. But the Reformer moves on,

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nothing daunted. Unlike all others who despised the people, or despaired of them, he addresses himself to the poor and the ignorant. It is the mass of the nation he hopes first to reach. But what are his arts of persuasion with the people ? Does he hold out the lure of wealth, or earthly honors, or pleasure ? Is he slipping the leash of law and order from the passions of the multitude, and cheering them on to the prey that is before them in the possessions of the wealthy ? He honestly assures his auditory that they must expect to lose all in fol- lowing him, that his poorest followers must become yet poorer, and that his disciples are doomed men, bearing their own crosses on their way to death. He writes no books. He forms no plots. He meddles not with political strife ; nor interferes with religious sects, but to denounce them all, end to turn their combined enmity on his single and unshel- tered head. And the weapon by which he is to foil all his enemies, and to subdue the world to the obedience of the faith, is — hear it, O heavens, and be astonished, O earth! — the foolishness of preaching — the plain tale of man to his fellow-men concerning God and his Christ. By the preach- ing of the word, and especially to the poor, Christ is come to change the face of society. Jesus Christ was, indeed, the discoverer of these two great truths, that all reformations must begin with the lower classes, and that preaching is the grand instrument of changing the opinions of a nation. The latter had indeed been used in the older dispensation, but its applicability to such a scheme as that of the world's conver- sion, had never been suspected. Yet how well established are both now become. The man, who in endeavoring to heat a mass of water, should build his fire above the fluid, would in physics be but as absurdly employed, as the man who in morals looks to the highest points of a corrupt society as the first to be reformed. As in the heated liquid, the lower stratum when warmed passes upward, and gives place to another still cold, which is in its turn penetrated with heat, and then displaced by the descending of yet another ; so in the moral world, the only efficient reforms are the reforms that begin at the lower portion of society, and work upward. It was so in the first preaching of the gospel. It was so in the English Reformation. It was so in the religious influence that followed the labors of Wesley and Whitefield. And Jesus Christ first discovered and first applied this great but simple principle, that to the poor the gospel should be

230 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

preached. Again let us consider the character of the instru- mentality he selected. It was the cheapest of all implements. And where the many were to be reached by many laborers, and the poor by the poor, its cheapness was a matter of no little moment. A book would be worn out, ere it had taught a thousand readers, or travelled a hundred miles. The liv- ing teacher might go on from land to land, and instruct myr- iads after myriads. If the book were unskilfully composed, its errors must remain unchanged. If addressed to one class originally, one class only it continued to the end to interest. The living evangelist varied his message and form of address, as varying circumstances required, and appealed in different modes to the differing habits of the regions and classes through which he passed. The book might meet many who knew not how to read, but all might hear the living voice. The book could not solicit the careless to hear, or pursue the wanderer who fled from reproof. The living teacher sought his auditory in the retreats whither they betook themselves. The book was a cold and unimpassioned abstraction. The preacher was a living, breathing thing, appealing to all the sympathies of man's nature. His countenance, his gestures, his tones, all sought and won him the attention of men. And it was left for Jesus- Christ to discover that this was the great instrumentality for correcting the popular faith of a nation, as being the cheapest, and as having the widest range of influence, the utmost variety in its applicability, and the greatest power and life in its appeals. We speak consider- ately when we say, that the institution of preaching as the great means of national illumination and conversion, is not one of the least among the evidences of the Saviour's super- human wisdom, and consequently another argument for his divine mission.

Now while the stationary pastor, in the more abundantly supplied districts of a Christian land, may claim to labor in this our Lord's appointed mode, the preaching of the word, may you not assume, that to the Home Missionary belongs eminently the honor of preaching to the poor, and of caring for the neglected and destitute, the class to whom Christ himself chiefly addressed his gospel, and in its being addressed to whom, he bade the anxious Baptist and his disciples re- cognize one of the many proofs of his Messiahship ? The laborer in the field of Home Missions is applying therefore the favorite instrumentality of his Lord in his Lord's favorite.

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mode. And upon this instrumentality, it is your instruction to them that they chiefly rely. And while they may scatter the tract, and gather the Sabbath school, and use every other means that may aid man in the knowledge of his God, their main business, and your great charge to them given, is that ** as ye go, preach."

5. We have seen that in the manner of publishing his message, our Lord was not unlike the laborers whom you employ. Let us lastly observe the comparison you may in- stitute with the ministry of our Lord, in the similar means adopted for the support of the laborer. Christ did not, then, like the established priesthood of Israel, find himself sustained by the tithes of the land. No State furnished from her rev- enues the endowments of his mission, or taxed her subjects to secure through his means their spiritual good. The free contributions of those whom he instructed, enlightened and saved, were the only revenues to wThich he looked. And these, you will observe, were given not to sustain him in his labors for the donors, so much as to aid him in journeying omvard to benefit others. The frugal meal and the shelter- ing roof were the reward that poverty gave for words such as never man spake. Salvation came to the house he visited, and when he parted, his blessing was left with its inmates. But in addition, he seems to have received, from time to time, of the free-will offerings, which, from their abundance or their penury, his disciples contributed, to meet the wants of the morrow, when he should have reached a distant hamlet, and be discoursing to a new auditory. These contributions one of the apostles bore, and dispensed to meet the necessities of that wayfaring company. Pious women followed him min- istering of their substance.

Now it is to such resources that your enterprise looks. You have not been subsidized from the national treasury. Nor have your missionaries been empowered, or been willing, to sit them down at the receipt of custom, collecting from the traffic of the land a stinted tithe, in acknowledgment of the temporal blessings with which the gospel has enriched every walk of society. To the free gratuities of Christians, them- selves benefited by the gospel, and anxious to spread before others the word that God has made the power of salvation to their own souls — to their spontaneous alms, gathered unequally and rather according to the willingness of the heart, than the fullness of the hands, you have been compelled to

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look as your only treasures. And though the store has o en seemed well nigh spent, ever wasting, it has been ever re- newing itself, like the widow's cruse, still as it was emptied, still by the goodness of Providence mysteriously replenished. And the relief thus given has resembled that which sustained our Lord's own personal ministry, in the fact, that it was not the giver's own benefit that was immediately sought. The Christian supports at home his pastor to preach to himself and to his children, but he supports the Home Missionary to preach to his destitute neighbors. It was in this way that the disciples of our Saviour sustained their master, not ex- pecting it as the condition of their gratuities, that he should continue day after day to bless with his lengthened stay their own hamlets and households, but that he might journey on- ward from village to village, and city to city of their native land.

The Redeemer, then, in his own personal efforts as an evangelist, gave himself to the very work in which your Society is toiling, the supply of the religious destitutions of your own land. And ere we pass, let it be remembered, that upon principles unlike the timorous and stealthy policy, which his church in the days of persecution adopted, of choosing rather as the scene of her labors, the retired valley, and the remote and safe wilderness, Christ, as we see in the words of our text,* and in the whole record of the gospels, sought to plant his word, though in the face of fiercer oppo- sition and surer and greater risk, in the towns and cities of the land. He bade his disciples, in times of persecution in one city, to flee indeed, but it was only to another city ; and their ministry he at the same time describes, as a going over the cities of Israel. He chose these as the scenes of labor, for his work was with men, and men were there to be found in the greatest number. He did so, because his hours were few, and there the greatest effects might be wrought in the shortest time. He did so, because his gospel was the remedy of human depravity and misery, and in the crowded dwellings of man, his depravity assumes its most aggravated forms, and

* See also Luke iv. 43. How rigidly the early preachers adhered to our Lord's plan in the dissemination of the gospel, appears from the fact, that the inhabitants of the cities in the Roman empire had become nominally Chris- tian, while the rural population remained yet plunged in idolatry, and the word Pagan, or villager Qmganus) became synonymous with heathen.

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his sufferings are most intense and distressing. He did so, because these are the points of radiation, around which the character of the whole nation crystalizes and becomes fixed, and in ancient as in modern times, the impress of the metrop- olis is to some extent seen upon the most distant and rude of the rural population. Ever then may it be the prayer and the policy of this Society, acting upon the like principles, to plant its missionaries in the towns and cities of our land, till they be fully supplied with the preaching of the gospel.

Yet let it not be supposed, that we would exalt the impor- tance of Home Missions at the expense of the foreign field. We believe the latter, if a division and a choice were admis- sible, (which they are not,) we should believe the latter, the more needful work of the church. It was indeed one of the characteristics of the superiority of the new over the older dispensations, that it looked beyond all the former boundaries of national prejudice and selfishness, and taught men that the field of benevolence is the world. Our Saviour himself, during his own more restricted ministry, alluded to these designs of mercy for the Gentile. In his discourses at Naz- areth he called his hearers to observe, that the Gentile widow of Zarephath had been honored by entertaining a prophet of God, when the many widows of Israel were passed by, and that the leprous nobleman of heathenish Syria had been miraculously healed, while the many lepers of Israel were left unrelieved. This was a theme the Jews could least of all things endure. They thrust the Saviour from their city, and would have killed him, just as in succeeding years, their countrymen at Jerusalem heard Paul patiently, until he mentioned a divine mission to the Gentiles, when they ex- claimed, Away with him, he is not fit to live. Christ from the beginning contemplated foreign missions as the field of his church ; but his own was a Home Mission. And while the church, from his teachings, and the example of his apos- tles, learns to regard Foreign Missions as her chief care, she cannot sever it from the work of Home Missions. They are indissolubly united, and each needs the other — the farther and the nearer sides of the same great net ; the fishers of men are needed alike, to bear the one into the bosom of the deep, and to guard the other along the edge of the shore. The true interests of each are necessarily advanced by the growth of the other.

II. We have seen our Lord himself devoting the years of 31

234 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. #

his personal ministry to the preaching of the gospel through- out his own country. With such a sanction of your endeav- ors, what motives are needed to impel you ? His example to guide, His presence to uphold, and His Spirit to prosper you — if the Lord be thus for you in the splendor of his ex- ample, for you in his promises, and for you in his wonder- working Spirit, who can be against you? Whether we look to the advantages which our nation presents for such labor, or to its peculiar necessities, to our duty as Christians, or our interests as men loving their country, to the general ob- ligations of the church, or our own personal and special privileges and responsibilities, — on every hand are teeming incitements to energy and liberality, to perseverance and courageous devotedness.

1. Do we speak of the advantages, which our wide-spread land presents for labor of this kind ? We cannot forget, that here are none of the impediments of an adverse government, and an alien nation suspicious of your missionaries as foreign emissaries — impediments with which the laborer abroad must ever contend. From the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, and yet onward to the coasts of the Pacific, a broad and goodly land is open or opening before you, — not the land of stran- gers, but your own native soil, blest with free institutions, and a government springing from and accountable to the people. Its free institutions invite the free and glad labors of the Missionary. The national appetite for knowledge, and the many endowments and appliances for the diffusion of knowledge, promise you aid, in bringing before the na- tional intellect the only knowledge that is of unmingled truth and immutable value. The land is inhabited by a people, not divided and isolated, as are the possessors of equal spaces of territory in the old world, by the varieties of dialect and languages, which make man seem as a barbarian to his neigh- bor, separated from him but by a river, or a range of moun- tains. The language of your forefathers, the language in which your household bibles are written, is that which its cities, and its hamlet, and its farm-houses alike acknowledge — which its colonists are carrying into the depths of the forest, and the seeds of which its adventurous mariners are scatter- ing along every shore smitten by their keels. To make yet more plain your duties, and to render the wise and beneficent purposes of his Providence yet more easy of translation to

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the reason and the conscience of this people, God has made their country the point of attraction to the oppressed or the needy of other lands, and the eyes of many and distant nations are fixed upon you. Our Heavenly Father has made us a na- tional epistle to other lands. See that you read a full and impressive comment to all lands, of the power of Christian principle, and of the expansive and self-sustaining energies of the gospel, when left unfettered by national endowments, and secular alliances. The evangelical character of our land is to tell upon the plans and destinies of other nations. See to it, that the men, who quote your democracy and your enter- prise, your energy and your increase, be compelled by glar- ing evidence, which they may not dispute, and cannot conceal, to add, that for your freedom and all its better fruits, you are indebted to the religion of the Saviour borne throughout the length and breadth of your land. And last among the advan- tages with which God has endowed you, and bound you, as it were, to this work, let me name the amount of uneducated or perverted mind, which He is daily quarrying from the mines of European superstition, and from the place where Satan's seat is, and casting down upon our shores to be in- serted into the rising walls of your republic. At home it was comparatively beyond your reach. The jealousy of priestly and of kingly rule guarded it from your approach. God has brought it disencumbered to your shores. Will you meet it with the gospel? — will you follow it to its western homes with the Missionary ? Your prayers have ascended to God in behalf of those perishing in the darkness of false religion in other lands. Your prayers have been answered, as God is wont to answer even his own people, in the mode and the hour they were perhaps least prepared to expect the boon ; and while your souls thought only of the subjects of your petitions, as dwellers on a foreign shore, He has in his wondrous working made them already the denizens of your own land, and the crowds, to whom you had hoped to send the Foreign Missionary, have already besieged your doors to ask the easier, and the cheaper, care of your Home Mis- sions. Their souls are evidently as valuable here, as they would have been if sought out by your messengers on their native soil, and there won to the faith of Christ. You know not, but that, although transplanted to this soil, they may still retain a hold so strong on the affections, and an influence so controlling on the character and destinies of the kindred

236 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

and countrymen they have left behind, that converted here by the labors of your Home Missions, they may become the allies, or the channels, or themselves the chosen instruments of your Foreign Missions to the lands whence they came. It was thus in the declining ages of the Roman empire, that the hordes of Paganism, disgorged from their own native seats upon the imperial territories, became themselves chris- tianized by the nation they had invaded, and evangelized the paternal tribes they had quitted. Let us, then, regard the emigrants around us, not as invaders, but as the exiles of a country, of which they or their children may yet become the evangelists. Let us count wisely and gratefully the number of the deathless spirits, who have thus been ushered, under the most favorable circumstances, into our borders. Many of them have been the nurslings of a corrupt or careless hierarchy ; and torn from the breasts of European error, they are now committed by the hand of Providence to the foster- ing care of your Sabbath Schools, and Bible classes, and the pioneer churches planted and watered by the care of your Missionaries.

2. As to the advantages, so to the necessities of our case we need ever to look. We may not forget, or hold negligently the civil privileges, the envied but the fragile inheritance which our fathers have bequeathed us. The strangers day by day wafted to your shores become your fellow sovereigns. They choose with you the law-makers. They interpret and modify, sustain or subvert your Constitution. If not con- verted, under God, by you to the faith, they will with the characteristic energy of evil, sacrifice your dearest earthly interests to their passions, their superstitions and their crimes. Your written constitutions, your declarations of right and of national independence, your books of statute law and of pre- cedent, contain in themselves no inherent principle of vitality. They operate and have life, but in proportion as that life is infused into them by the feelings and conscience of the nation. The reign of violence has passed ; men talk now of the reign of written constitutions. But parchment and paper cannot give freedom, or uphold it when given. Ours is a govern- ment of public opinion, and each day the channels, by which that public opinion may act upon the laws, tribunals and treaties of the nation, seem shortening and widening, turning each day a fuller and more direct and more rapid stream upon the ostensible rulers, and the written laws of the nation. la

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the formation of this sovereign principle of opinion, your new- found fellow-citizens wish to share, and cannot but share, even did they not wish it. If not educated and sanctified, they will only lower and dilute the tone of public morals, already, alas, too evidently declining ; and a vitiated public opinion will send its reeking corruption into your senate- chambers, your halls of justice, your schools, your ware- houses, and your homes, until licentiousness, and profaneness, and violence, like the curse of Egypt, be found a croaking and slimy plague infesting the whole land. Nor may we hide from ourselves the fact, that unfriendly influences of the most seductive character are busy — that the work of natural corruption is not left to its own natural course, but supersti- tions, which have in other lands and ages held the widest sway, are assiduously engaged in the work of education and proselytism amongst us ;

" And bold with joy, Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight,) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, Cries out, 'r Where is it?"*

And yet amid these dangers, that self-gratulation " which goeth before a fall " as surely in a nation as in the individual, is so evident, as to be imputed to us as a national foible. Privileges, singular and great, we indeed have ; but the only light in which it is safe to view them, is that of the corre- sponding obligations they impose. Signal mercies, if misused, must provoke judgments as signal ; and American Christians, if unfaithful to their high trust, will be made examples of God's sore indignation. And among the difficulties of our situation, felt not indeed except by the church, let us remem- ber the demands of the Foreign Mission field, each day in- creasing. To meet these, the Home Mission enterprise must be sustained by the churches at home, until made by its in- fluence united, intelligent and devoted, they become the camp and armory, from which shall be sent forth yet other and more numerous levies of conscripts for the foreign service of the Church of Christ.

3. The motives which urge you to the work, in view of these considerations, will naturally suggest themselves to all,

* Coleridge.

238 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

and are alike varied and powerful. Self-interest and the love of kindred furnish them. The more aged among us cannot but desire to transmit to the coming generations, unimpaired, the immunities and blessings they received themselves from those who went before. To the young men of our churches, we might speak of the peculiar interest which, as the future inheritors of the land, they have, to escape the evils of igno- rance and irreligion, and to avert, if it may. be, the storm that will descend on the quiet graves of their fathers, but which they still surviving must buffet for themselves, or be swept before its violence. We might appeal to your love of man as such, or to your love of country, and ask on these grounds your alms and your prayers in this good work. But if the Roman patriot could say of the paramount force and en- grossing character of that high motive — love to our coun- try : — " Dear are the charities of home ; dear are parents, and dear are our children ; but our one country, yet dearer, combines all the charities of us all ;" — I would speak to you, brethren, of a higher love, blending with and absorbing as well this as all minor charities. As lovers of your country I might urge, and as lovers of your kind I might require you ; but by a love which sanctifies, and itself surpasses all others, I beseech you ; as the lovers of Christ, or rather let me say as the beloved of Christ, whom he has loved to the death, has ransomed and is sanctifying ; give to this work your prompt aid, your prayers and your efforts. And while some give of their substance, and some add their counsel, and all their prayers, are there not yet others here, who are girding themselves to a costlier offering, and' who are prepared to become themselves a whole burnt-offering upon the altars of the church, and as a living sacrifice to spend and be spent, in the personal labor of bearing the gospel to the destitute ? In the consuming flames of divine charity, our Lord be- came himself a willing victim, and the zeal of his Father's house devoured him. To reach and rescue you, he shrunk from no sacrifice. Requite him by love intense and absorb- ing, like that love which it reflects. And to those here, who are themselves honored by their personal engagements as the missionary preachers of the church, let me say: Brethren, remember in your most painful sacrifices, in the most distress- ing repulses that your efforts may encounter, you can never know the peculiar agony of soul which our Lord Jesus Christ, as a Home Missionary, endured. Among the most affecting

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pages in the history of David Brainerd, is the journal of that Sabbath which he spent amid the idolatrous revellings of the heathen, who had refused to listen to his teachings. Desti- tute of all Christian society, he had retired to the forest, and there in desolate loneliness sat him down with his Bible in his hand, while at a little distance, they yelled and danced in honor of their demons. Even that devoted man sunk in the trial, and describes the absence of all sympathy and Christian society, as making this the most burdensome Sab- bath he had ever known. Now this loneliness, which for the time crushed even the spirit of a Brainerd, was felt by our Lord, as none else could feel it. There was no heart even among his disciples, with whom he could have true and entire communion. Omniscient, he read perpetually the evil in the breasts of all that surrounded him. All was naked and opened to him. The ambition, the jealousy, the distrust, and the avarice of his own apostles, the malignant hatred to God and all goodness that filled the souls of the impenitent around him, were necessarily and ever present to his view. And he himself was all purity, entirely and intensely abhor- ring evil in its slightest stains. This healthful and sensitive purity was condemned to be continually jostled by our de- pravity, and how harshly, in the rude collision, must it have been rasped by the hard, dry scurf of our moral leprosy. His was indeed a peculiar solitariness, as he moved a sinless one among sinners. The anguish of this loneliness, this daily death, endured by our Master, we may never know. But of these the sacrifices of his love we do well often to think, that our own may be rekindled.

There are those here, who giving of their substance and their cares to the good wrork, withhold their own hearts. The yoke of Christ, which is easy, their necks do not yet wear ; and his burden, which is light, they refuse to assume. Dwelling in cities each one of whose moving multitudes lives, moves, and has his being in God — or the tillers of fields which He only has blessed with fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness — in the enjoyment of a plenty, a freedom and a peace which Christ's providence gave — in the daily hearing of his commands, and with his sacrifice for sin hourly before your view, you yield him no love, and act as if you owed him no allegiance. The Giver is shut out from the heart by barriers which his own gifts have been employed to form. O, remember that a land which sends

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forth the gospel to other lands, a community that sustain the missionary to labor amid their own and foreign destitution, as they are the most favored, so they may be also the most guilty of all lands and of all communities. Remember the curse of Jerusalem, and the plagues, of the nation whose hills had been traversed by a Saviour's feet, and the field of whose home missions a Saviour's own tears and blood had watered. Christ's word and Spirit have come nigh you — your own kindred and friends are found in his church. And God grant that the Redeemer who has thus taught in your streets, and wrought wonders even in your own homes and households, stand not up in the last day, an incensed and inflexible Judge, to condemn you for that gospel which you have sent U* others but rejected for yourselves.

THE PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.

The Christian Library, 45 vols., 400 pages each. — The Evangelical Family Library, 15 volumes. — The Youth's Christian Library, 40 volumes.

The American Tract Society has been for years a familiar and cherished name with our churches. But many, even of intelligent Christians, have probably scarce made themselves conversant with its varied publications, or considered duly the influence it was likely to wield over the religious litera- ture of our own and other lands. They have thought, per- haps, of the Institution as furnishing a few excellent Tracts, in the form of loose pamphlets, and suppose these, with some children's books, to constitute the entire sum of its issues ; while in truth, the Society, noiselessly following the beckon- ing of Divine Providence, has been led to undertake the publication of volumes, and to furnish Libraries for Christian churches, schools, and households. These heedless observ- ers have thought of it mostly in connection with a few favorite Tracts written in our own vernacular language, while, in fact, the Society has come to be engaged in the circulation of books and Tracts in more tongues than the richest Polyglott comprises, and is extending its operations through lands more numerous and remote than any one pro- bably of the most widely-travelled of its readers has ever traversed. The moral and intellectual character of the relig- ious literature thus widely diffused deserves some thoughts.*

The various publications of the Society in our own land,

* It was made recently the subject of examination. At a special meeting of the Society and its friends, convened in the city of New York a few months since, several subjects were presented for consideration, as bearing on the character, plans, and duties of the Society. Amongst these was " The evan- gelical character of the Publications of the Society, and their adaptation to the wants of the present generation of mankind, at home and abroad." Upon the subject so assigned to the writer, the following remarks were prepared.

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if we include its issues of every form and size, from the handbill and the broad-sheet, up to the bound volume, already number one thousand. In foreign lands it aids in issuing nearly twice that number, written in some one hundred of the different languages and dialects of the earth. Amongst ourselves, in the seventeen years of its existence, it has al- ready, by sale or gift, scattered broadcast over the whole face of the land, in our churches and Sabbath-schools, through our towns and villages, among the neglected, in the lanes of our large cities, where misery retires to die, and vice to shelter itself from the eye of day ; and amidst the destitute, sparsely sprinkled over our wide frontiers, where the min- istry has scarce followed, and the church can scarce gather the scattered inhabitants, some two millions of books and some sixty millions of Tracts. This is no ordinary influence. It must find its way into nearly every vein and artery of the body politic. Whether it be of a pure and healthful charac- ter, is an inquiry of grave moment to the churches who sus- tain this enterprise, and to the country, which receives this literature. If baneful, it is a grievous wrong to the commu- nity ; if merely inert and useless, it is a fraud committed upon the benevolence of the churches.

I. Whether these publications deserve the confidence of Christians, may be ascertained by the answer which is given to one question : Do they preach Jesus Christ and him crucified? He must be the theme of every successful ministry, whether preaching from the pulpit or through the press. The blessing of God's Spirit is promised only to the exaltation of the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. 44 1, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." When Paul describes the peculiarities of his own successful minis- try— a ministry that shook the nations — a ministry that car- ried the blazing torch of its testimony from Illyricum to Spain, he compresses these into a very brief space. He was determined to know nothing but Christ Jesus and him cru- cified. In Christ he found the motive which stimulated all his fervid and untiring activity, and the model upon which was moulded every excellence of his character. " To me to live is Christ." Only so far as the issues of this Society cherish this same principle does it ask, and only so far can it deserve from the churches of our Lord Jesus Christ that cordial support and that large extension of its labors which it solicits at the hands of the religious community.

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And not only is it necessary to the success of such ministry of the press, that it should make the crucified Saviour the great theme of its teachings ; it should also present this theme, as far as possible, in a scriptural manner. By this we mean, not a mere iteration of the words of sacred writ, but that the mind of the writer should be so imbued with the spirit of the Scripture, and so possessed by its doctrines, and so haunted by its imagery and illustrations, as to present, natu- rally and earnestly, the great truths of the scheme of salva- tion, in that proportion and with those accompaniments which are found in the inspired volume. His thoughts must all be habited, as far as it may be, in the garb, and breathe the spirit of that only book to which we can ascribe unmingled truth.

That the works of the American Tract Society are thus evangelical in their character, would seem scarce needing proof, since none, as far as we know, have yet questioned it. Amid the fierce and imbittered controversies, from which the church has never been exempt — and certainly not in our own times — we know not that any, among the several bodies of Christians generally recognized as evangelical, have arisen to impugn in this respect the character of the Society's issues. This has not been because these books have been secretly circulated. They have been found every where, dropped in the highway and lodged in the pastor's study, distributed in the nursery, the rail-car, the steamboat, and the stage-coach, as well as exposed on the shelves of the bookstore, and they have challenged the investigation of all into whose hands they have come. Denominations of Christians, divided from each other by varying views as to the discipline and polity of the church of Christ, and even holding opposite sentiments as to some of the more important doctrines of the Gospel, have yet agreed in recognizing in these publications the great paramount truths of that Gospel, and have co-operated long, liberally, and harmoniously, in their distribution and use.

The names of the authors whose volumes are found in friendly juxtaposition, standing side by side on the shelves of the libraries the Society has provided for the Christian household and school, seem to furnish another strong pledge to the same effect. Doddridge, Baxter, Edwards, Owen, Flavel and Bunyan, are names that seem to belong less to any one division of the Christian host than to the whole

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family of Christ. They are the current coin of the church, which have passed so freely from hand to hand, that the minuter superscription of the sects to which they may have belonged, the denominational imprint seems to have been worn away in the wide, unquestioned circulation they have received. And they have been acknowledged by evangeli- cal believers, wherever the English language and literature have gone, as faithful and most powerful preachers of the Gospel of Christ. They , have received higher attestation even than that of having their "praise" thus "in all the churches." The Head of the church has not withholden his benediction and imprint. The influence of his Spirit has long and largely rested on the written labors of these his servants ; and, while the authors themselves have been in the grave, their works are yet following them in lengthening and widening trains of usefulness. Multitudes have been converted, and thousands of others have traced to these books their own growth in Christian holiness. Some of these writers were, while upon the earth,' not inactive or unsuc- cessful as preachers with the living voice ; yet it may be questioned whether all the seals of their living ministry would equal the tithe of the seals which God has continued to set to their posthumous ministry in the volumes they have bequeathed to the world and the church.

II. But how far are they adapted to the wants of the present generation of mankind? We know that in the varying tastes and habits of society, and its ever-shifting cur- rents of feeling, new channels of thought are scooped out, and new forms of expression become popular ; and the writer whose compositions present not these forms and move not in these channels, may find himself deserted as obsolete. His works are consigned to the unmolested and dusty shelves of the antiquarian, while other and fresher rivals grasp the sceptre of popularity and usefulness that has passed from his hands. New conditions of society and new institutions also, may require another style of address and another train of in- struction than those which, once indeed, were most salutary and seasonable, but are so no longer. If other classes of litera- ture become antiquated, and the old give place to the new, may it not be so with religious literature ; may it not be so with much of the literature from which the American Tract Society is seeking to supply the Christians of the present age?

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1. What, then, are the wants of the present age? Re- ligion, it should be remembered, if true, must be in its great principles unchangeable, and the same in all eras of the world's history.

"Can length of years on God himself exact, And make that fiction which was once a fact."

A revelation, from its source and the nature of its contents, possesses, therefore, a fixedness and constancy that can be* long to no science of merely human origin. The Bible stands apart from all the literature of man's devising, as a book never to be superseded — susceptible of no amendment, and never to be made obsolete whilst the world stands. The book of the world's Creator and the world's Governor, the record of the world's history and the world's duty, the world's sin and the world's salvation, it will endure while that world lasts, and continue to claim its present authority long as that government over the present world may continue. Religious works, therefore, the more profoundly they are imbued with the spirit of the Bible, will the more nearly partake of its in- destructibility. Hence the Confessions of Augustine, written so many centuries ago, are not yet an obsolete book, nor can be while the human heart and the Christian religion continue the same that they now are. In their religious literature, the church and the world in the nineteenth century must, therefore, in most respects, have the same wants as the church and the world in earlier ages.

It will be allowed, however, that there are certain pecu- liarities in the history and character of an age that may make one form of address and one style of discussion much more useful and reasonable in its religious literature than another. Has our country at this period any such peculiar wants ? We might refer to many circumstances in its government and its people, their pursuits and their character, which dis- . tinguish, and, as it were, individualize our land and our age. But to sum them all in one word, we suppose the main dis- tinction and boast of our people is, that they are a practical race. Others theorize ; they act. Visionary reforms and schemes of society, that might in other regions be nursed for centuries in the brains of philosophers, and be deemed prac- ticable only because they have never been reduced to prac- tice, if they find proselytes amongst us, are soon brought to the test of actual experiment ; their admirers here act upon

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the theories, which, elsewhere, are but reasoned upon, and the system exploding in the trial, refutes itself. Our coun- trymen, the colonists of a wide and fertile territory, the mariners whose keels vex every shore, and whose sails whiten the remotest seas, inherit the solid sense, the sober judgment, the energy, daring, and perseverance of the Anglo- Saxon race ; and their political institutions and the broad territory yet to be subdued and peopled, here give full scope to these traits of character. We are as yet, though a nation of readers, not a nation of students ; but much more a nation of seamen, farmers and traders. Our very studies are prac- tical ; and the cast of character which distinguished the Ro- man from the Greek mind, and which made the former the masters of the world — the practical character of the mind and its pursuits — belongs, in all climes and on every shore, to the Saxon race. If we, as a nation, have in this era of our history specific wants, we want, then, a practical litera- ture in religion, as in other branches of knowledge — a relig- ious literature, adapted with practical wisdom to the peculiar duties and snares, the prevalent errors, and the popular insti- tutions of our time. Has this Society furnished such ?

That portion of its publications which are of American origin, and which its exertions have been the means of call- ing out, or of diffusing more widely where they already existed, all its books that are of recent and domestic origin, may be supposed naturally to possess some tolerable degree of adap- tation to our own national wants, the prevailing sins and follies of the times, and the peculiar responsibilities and priv- ileges of Christian churches in the United States, in the nineteenth century. The writers are of us, and wrote for us ; and we may suppose that these productions at least are not wanting in such adaptation. Their currency and their usefulness, the souls which, by the blessing of God, they have converted, and their influence on the faith, zeal, and purity of the churches, afford evidence of the same kind. Of the 430 pamphlet Tracts in the English language, issued by the Society, more than one half are of American origin. It was not so in the earlier years of the Society's history. Of the first one hundred Tracts on the lists of this Society, more than two-thirds were republications from works of British Christians, of the richest character, indeed, but they were Ihe siftings of a rich religious literature more than two cen- turies old. Of the last one hundred of these 430 Tracts, on

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the other hand, more than three-fourths were by American Christians. We have not pursued the investigation into the bound volumes of the Society ; but we suppose that there a similar result would be reached, although the proportion of American authorship is not yet as large, perhaps, as in the pamphlet Tracts. Here also it is increasing, however, and one-third of the volumes may be regarded as of domestic origin. It would be found, we suppose, that the Societ)^ in the brief period of seventeen years, has done much to create a national religious literature.

To effect any literary changes, seventeen years, it should be remembered, is a very brief period. As far, then, as adaptedness to the special wants of this country can be de- cided by the domestic or foreign authorship ofits publications, it would appear that the Society has, with great rapidity, exerted a most perceptible and powerful influence on the writers and readers of our churches. It has elicited and dif- fused a literature that is emphatically for us, inasmuch as it is from ourselves. The intelligent Christian can never wish to see his denomination or his country confining its sympa- thies and its studies to the literature of the sect itself, or of that one country, thus shut up in the narrow circle of its own writers. Christianity is free, genial, and philanthropic — it loves the race. Christianity is the only true citizenship of the world, and it hails the writings and the history of all lands and all kindreds, when imbued with the spirit of the com- mon Saviour. But yet there may be certain evident advan- tages in having, for some purposes and within certain limits, a denominational and also a national literature in our churches. For this object of a national literature the American Tract Society may claim to have done much, and to have done it well. They have furnished a body of Tracts, popular in style, pungent and faithful, pithy, brief, and striking, that are singularly adapted to the moral wants of our community, and many of which, from their high excellence, would bear transplantation into the literature of almost any other Chris- tian country.

2. As to the adaptedness for usefulness amongst our churches and people of those volumes and Tracts which the Society has derived from the rich Christian literature of Great Britain, it may be deserving of remark, that the more distinguished of these works are derived mainly from three memorable eras in the religious history of that country.

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The first of these was the age of the Puritans and Non- conformists. Into the merits of their controversy with the Established Church of England it is no part of our design here to enter. They were, by the admission of the candid in every party, men of powerful intellect and ardent piety, whose principles had been tried and strengthened in the fierce collisions of their age, and whose character received, in con- sequence, an energy it might else have wanted. The meas- ures of government, that threw the Non-conformists out of their pulpits, were fitted to produce an admirable class of writings, such as the church has not often enjoyed. Many of these devout men, mighty in the Scriptures and incessant in prayer, had they been left to the quiet discharge of their pastoral duties, would have kept the noiseless tenor of their way, and the world would probably have heard little or naught of their authorship. Preaching would have absorbed their minds, and consumed all their strength. The mere preacher has little leisure, and often little fitness to be a suc- cessful writer. Thus the published remains of Whitefield are of little value, compared with the writings of many men far his inferiors in the pulpit and in its immediate results of usefulness. Had, then, the edicts and policy of the Stuarts left the Non-conformist fathers to their own chosen course, they would, many of them, have died and bequeathed no literary remains ; or those remains would have been com- paratively meagre and jejune, from the want of leisure in a life of active and unremitted pastoral toil. But, on the other hand, had the rich and varied writings of that class of men, who, from the prison or beside its very gate, sent out their treatises to their peeled and scattered churches, been com- posed by mere students, men of the lamp and the closet, they would have been deficient in their popular style, their ear- nestness, and their apt familiar illustrations. None but pas- tors, acquainted with the people and familiar with the popular modes of communicating religious truth, could thus have informed the deepest truths of theology and morals with a racy vivacity, and surrounded them with such simple and every-day imagery.

Thus, only men who had been bred pastors could have written some of these works. And, on the other hand, had they continued pastors, they could not have written them for want of leisure, inclination, and even perhaps mental power. But when the prison and the pillory shut them in,

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and the pulpit had shut them out, these resolute and holy men resorted to the only channel left them for communicating with the hearts and consciences of men. It was the press. Had Baxter been a mere student and not a pastor, he would probably have made all his writings thorny, abstruse, and sterile, as the works of those schoolmen whose writings he seems so fondly to have loved and studied so closely. And, in that case, where had been the usefulness of the Saints' Rest and the Call to the Unconverted ? Had he continued always a pastor, he would have preached much more to the men of the 17th century ; but it is very questionable whether he would have preached as well or as much to the men of the 19th century as he now does. Here, then, is a class of writers in whose history God seems to have made special provision that they should be trained to become effective as the practical writers of the church, bringing to the experience of the pastor all the leisure of the scholar, and grafting upon the meditations of the study all the unction, the simplicity, and the popular tact of the pulpit.

In addition to these peculiar preparations for general use- fulness, the writings of the Puritans and Non-conformists come to us, as Americans, commended by considerations of singular force. The fathers of New England were of that class of men. The Adam and Eve of those regions were fashioned of Puritan clay ; and many of our peculiar institu- tions and our distinctive traits of national character may be traced, through that New England ancestry, to the character of the Puritans of England. We have a hereditary right in their works and memory. Their writings are moulded by peculiar influences, that have yet left their traces upon our mental idiosyncrasy as a people. Connected as then the Puritans of the mother country were with our progenitors by every tie of piety and blood, their voice comes upon the ears of American Christians like a testimony from the graves of those revered forefathers, who planted upon our rugged northern shores the germs of our freedom, our knowledge and our arts, while seeking only in the desert a refuge from persecution, and freedom to worship God ; but who left, where they sought merely a shelter, the foundations of a new empire, stretching its territories already from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and shedding the influence of its commerce and its freedom over either continent.

The second of these eras, which have contributed to the 33

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Christian literature of this Society, is that of the great revi- val of religion, under the labors of Whitefield and the Wesleys in England, and the elder Edwards and the Ten- nants in our own country. It was a great religious move- ment, awakening from lethargy and recalling from perilous errors a portion of the English establishment, infusing a new life of piety into the English dissenters, as in our country it supplied the destitute and awakened the formal from Georgia to New Hampshire. It was an era, both here and in the parent country, of bitter controversy. The truths, recalled from their long concealment and urged with new zeal, were to be defended from the press, as well as from the pulpit or the open field, where so many of those preachers delivered their testimony. To this day it is that we owe the works of Doddridge and Edwards, that work of Venn which the Society has very recently republished, and the memoir of Edwards' disciple and friend, the glowing, suffering David Brainerd. In the necessities of that time we see, though to a less ex- tent, a combination of the same causes which made the Non- conformists' writings what they were. The preacher was grafted on the student. Had not Edwards had the experience of those glorious revivals God permitted him to witness and to record, he could, perhaps, still have written the work "On the Religious Affections ;" but it would have been a very different book. Without the resources of his rich pastoral experience it might have been as profound as the immortal Analogy of Butler, and as little fitted as that work to be gen- erally popular with the great mass of readers.

The third of these memorable eras may be designated as the era of modern Christian enterprise. We know no fitter epithet to describe its varied activity, and its aggressive action on the ignorance of nominal Christendom and the wide wastes of heathenism. It began shortly after the breaking out of the French Revolution. It was an age when God seemed for a time to allow a new " hour and power of dark- ness" akin to that which brooded over the world when its Redeemer was about to suffer. Then boiled up from the lower deeps of the human heart floods of corruption, that, in ordinary ages, slumber on, dark and unseen, in their quiet concealment. Then steamed up, as it were from the nether- most abysses of hell, strange and hideous errors, that gen- erally avoid the light of day, and the world was aghast at the open appearance of atheism, and the rejection by a great

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nation, as in mass, of their old ancestral faith. But, as if to illustrate his own government of the universe, then, to meet this revolt, rose up, from quarters the most distant, and some of them the most obscure, designs for good and enterprises of benevolence, of which the world had long seen no parallel. The Foreign Missions of the Christian church, the Sabbath- school, the Tract Society itself, and the Bible Society, burst up, as in quick succession, and ere the carnival of the pit was ended, and while Satan seemed yet triumphing in his antici- pated conquest of the world to impiety, the Christian faith received a fresh impulse, and the cause of the Saviour as- sumed an aggressive energy it has never since lost. To this period belonged Buchanan and Pearce. In this period Wil- berforce published that View of Religion in the higher classes, which was, in the judgment of the commentator Scott, the noblest protest in favor of the Gospel made for centuries — a book that consoled and delighted that eminent statesman Burke on his dying bed, and that gave to the church of Christ the lamented and beloved author of that immortal Tract "The Dairyman's Daughter," Legh Richmond. Pelted by Parr with learned Greek, and assailed by the Socinian Bel- sham, it went on unimpeded, and did its work. Its influence was most decisive, under God, in aiding the great work of reform, the effects of which are visible in the middle and higher classes of England. Then, too, wrote and labored Hannah More, and to the same period may be added Henry Martyn.

All these three were periods of conflict. In the first and in the third, political contentions were intermingled with religious controversies. Wars and rumors of wars exaspe- rated the fierce collisions between rival sects, or the strife that was waged between Christianity and those who cast off all fear, and mocked to his face their Maker and Judge. The second was indeed exclusively a period of religious controversy; but the points at issue were so momentous, and the zeal exhibited so ardent, that England and America were filled with the noise of inquiry and dispute, as the Gos- pel went on winning new and glorious triumphs amid fierce opposition. There was, as in the apostolic history, a wide door opened, and there were also " many opposers," and both Whitefield and Wesley were more than once, in Christian Britain, on the eve of a summary and ferocious martyrdom.

All these three eras were then eras of moral revolution*

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It is a familiar fact that revolutions produce great characters. Their great emergencies awaken feeling and develop talent. Some mighty crisis paralyzes the weaker crowd, and sum- mons forth the master-spirit who can meet its demands, and reveals thus to the world his merits and his powers. And it is also true, that, although the highest works of science do not issue from such times, the most stirring and popular books are often the progeny of such an age of turmoil and conflict. These orgasms of feeling, that shoot through the whole frame of a nation, may bring out much that is crude and extravagant, but they also lead to exertions of more than wonted power, and results of more than vulgar splendor. The best efforts of the best writers are sometimes traceable to the excitement of some such stirring era. Pascal's Pro- vincial Letters, in which wit, argument, and eloquence are so splendidly blended, and, leaning on each other, group themselves around the cross of Christ, could not have been produced in the holiday leisure of some peaceful era. It needed the fierce controversies in which Jansenism lay bleed- ing under the feet of triumphant Jesuitism, and struggling as for its life, while it testified, as from the dust, in behalf of many of the great truths of the Gospel — it needed, we say, such a conflict and such a peril to draw out a production so impassioned and so powerful even from the mighty heart and the massive intellect of a Pascal.

There are works that seemingly can exist only as the birth of the throes and death-pangs of some great era of change and moral renovation. Such were the three eras to which we have alluded, and their character was imprinted on many of the works they produced, and which this Society reprints and disseminates. No other age, no lighter emergency could have called forth such intellectual strength and such depth of feeling, and made the volumes so well fitted as they are to tell upon the heart of an entire nation. Works then written have the energy of the conflict, and breathe for ever its strong passions. Their words are often battles. Had Bunyan never inhabited a dungeon, we question whether the Pilgrim's Progress would have had its beautiful pictures of the land of Beulah, a land of freedom, light, and beauty, and we doubt whether that allegory had ever existed. Had Bax- ter never been an army chaplain, who must talk strong truths in plain terms, we question whether his works would have had all their passionate energy and their strong simplicity.

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With regard, therefore, to those portions of the Society's publications which proceed from American authors, their origin is some evidence in favor of their adaptedness to our peculiar wants. With regard to all those works of British origin that came from either of the great eras upon which we have remarked, we have in favor of their influence not only the character of the writers, but the character of the age in which they wrote and did battle for the truth of God as they believed it.

Taking now the literature of the Society, as prepared for this country in mass, we find in it evidently a variety and fulness of subjects that would seem to meet the varied de- mands of the church and the nation. For missionary litera- ture, it has the memoirs of Brainerd, Buchanan, Schwartz, Henry Martyn, and Harriet Winslow. Does a pastor seek to train his flock to higher devotedness, where could be found a better manual than Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, writ- ten, as it would seem, under the golden sky of the Delectable Mountains, and in full sight of the Celestial City ? Where better companions than the biographies of Leighton, and Payson and Pearce, and J. Brainerd Taylor? Against infi- delity we have Bogue — the work that was read, and with some considerable impressions of mind, by Napoleon, in his last days — and Morison, and Keith, and the treatises of Leslie and Watson, while others, on the same subject of Christian evidences, commend themselves as the works of writers who were themselves recovered from infidelity, as the writings of Lyttelton, West, Jenyns, and our countryman Nelson. There is provision for every age : for the child, the Society has furnished the touching biographies of Nathan Dickerman, John Mooney Mead, and Mary Lothrop, with the juvenile works of Gallaudet, and some of those by the Abbotts. For those who love profound thought it has Foster, and for the lovers of brilliant imagination and glowing eloquence, the German Krummacher. Of the Non-conformists and of the contemporaries of Edwards, we have already spoken. Few writers of our time have caught so successfully, on some pages, the spirit of Baxter as J. G. Pike, three of whose works the Society republishes. As models of usefulness in the various walks of life, and in either sex, we have the bi- ographies of Normand Smith, the example of the Christian tradesman ; and of Harlan Page, the private church-member laboring for souls ; of Kiipin, of Hannah Hobbie, and of

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Caroline Hyde. The child just tottering from its cradle is met by the Society with the half-cent Scripture Alphabet ; while, for the last stages of human life, they have Burder's Sermons to the Aged, printed in type that suits it to the dimmer eyes of old age. Furnished at every variety of price, and in every form and size, as are the Tracts of the Society, the Christian traveller who would scatter the seed of truth as he journeys, and the Christian father who would furnish his children with a library of devout and wise authors ; the Christian minister who would train himself and others to higher devotedness and usefulness ; the Christian mother desiring aid to order her useful charge aright, and the young disciple requiring a guide to the formation of a character of intelligence and consistent piety — all find their wants met. Against Romanism and intemperance the Society have fur- nished a quiver of polished arrows in their bound volumes of Tracts on each subject, in addition to the separate volume of Beecher on the one, and of the lamented Nevins on the other. They have Mason's Spiritual Treasury for the family altar and the closet ; and for the pilgrim gathering up his feet into his couch to die, they have the Dying Thoughts of Baxter. They leave behind, after the funeral ceremony has been performed, the Manual of Christian Consolation, by Flavel the Non-conformist, and Cecil the Churchman. They instruct the active Christian with Cotton Mather's " Essays to do Good," the book that won the praise and aided to form the usefulness of our own Franklin. They assail the covet- ous and hard-handed professor with the burning energy and eloquence of Harris' Mammon. But the time fails to review separately all the varied themes of their publications and the varied channels through which they are prepared to pour the same great lesson of Christ the only Saviour, the Sovereign and the Pattern of his people.

3. But what evidence have we that these volumes are fit- ted for the present generation of men in other lands ? Many, then, of this class of publications are written by mis- sionaries abroad, conversant with the field they till, and anxiously and prayerfully addressing themselves to its wants. In Burmah and Siam, in India and in China, the Society is thus assailing the favorite idols and delusions of the heathen, in the manner which men who have given their lives to the work deem most suitable. The Society is thus, at the same time, proclaiming the Gospel before the car of Juggernaut

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and around the Areopagus where Paul preached ; and many of their Tracts have already been blessed, to the conversion of the readers, and to shake, in the minds of thousands be- sides, the old traditional idolatry received from their fore- fathers.

Others of these compositions are translations of works written in England or America, and many of them are in the number of the Society's English publications. It may, to some minds, seem very doubtful that any work, prepared originally for the Christians of Great Britain, 01 our own land, can, by any possibility, be intelligible or useful to hea- then nations trained under different influences and strangers to our modes of thought and expression.

But it should be remembered, that the good effects of some of these translations have been put beyond doubt by the tes- timony of missionaries as to the interest they have excited, and even by the conversion of some of the heathen. One of the works of Baxter — we believe it was his Call — was translated in his lifetime by our own Eliot for the use of his Indian converts ; and a youth, the son of one of their chiefs, continued reading the work with tears on his death-bed. The pastor who talked to the carpet-weavers of Kiddermin- ster could, it seems, speak as well to the savage hunters and fishermen of Natick and of Martha's Vineyard. The Dairy- man's Daughter was early translated into Russian by a prin- cess of that country, and has been acceptable and useful. The freeborn English maiden that lived and died amid the delightful scenery of the Isle of Wight has told her tale effectively to the serfs and amid the snows of Russia. Ful- ler's Great Question Answered, another of the Society's Tracts, was crowned with striking success in a Danish ver- sion, and it was found that the pastor of the inland English village of Kettering was still a powerful preacher in the new garb and tongue that had been given him for the inhabitants of Copenhagen. Others have gone yet further. We name the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan as an illustration, because none of the religious works of Europe has been so widely translated. In English, the Society has printed it not only in the ordinary style, but in the raised and tangible charac- ters used by the blind. Little did the tinker of Elstow ever dream that his matchless allegory should ever be translated into the tongue of the false prophet Mahomet. Yet it has appeared in Arabic ; and Joseph Wolff, in his travels in Ye-

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men, distributed copies of the version in that ancient and widely-spoken language. In seven at least, if not in more, of the dialects of India, it has made its appearance ; in the Oriya, the Tamul, the Hindustani or Urdu, the Mahrathi, the Malay, the Bengali, and very recently in the Burman.

Fears, at the time when an Indian translation was first proposed, that its European ideas and imagery would be un- intelligible to the native of the East, led a popular female writer to prepare in its stead her pilgrim of India, with its Hindoo phrases and metaphors. But the original Pilgrim has been permitted now to speak, and he has spoken not in vain. The number of the London Evangelical Magazine for the present month, (Oct. 1842,) contains the memoir of Daniel, a Hindoo convert, written by himself. From this it appears that the work of Bunyan was a powerful instrument in his conversion : " At this period a gentleman put into my hand a book called the Pilgrim's Progress, which I read. Partly by reading this book, and partly by the remembrance of all the labor which had been expended on me at Coimba- toor, I began to feel that the Christian religion was the only true religion, and that Christ was the only sinless Saviour." This was, probably, the Tamul version.

A translation was made by the British missionaries into the Malagasy language, for the use of the Christian con- verts whom God granted to their labors in the island of Mad- agascar. Of the hold which the volume took upon their hearts, we may judge from the language of the letters ad- dressed by some of these converts to their missionary pastors when expelled from the island : " We are impressed and delighted when we read the Pilgrim's Progress." And at a still later day, when the storm of persecution beat yet more heavily upon them, and some were executed for the profes- sion of their faith, it is said that while awaiting death they felt inexpressible peace and joy, and said one to another, " Now are we in the situation of Christian and Faithful, when they were led to the city of Vanity Fair." A Euro- pean book, thus quoted by African martyrs when about to die, must be of singular merit.

The same book has been translated into Finnish, for the use of the region verging on Lapland, and printed in Dutch, for the use of the missions in South Africa. A version has been made into Hawaiian at the Sandwich Islands ; and one

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 257

in Tahitian, for the Society Islands, though we do not know that the latter has as yet been published.

A book which could thus interest the fur-clad peasantry of the frozen North in their smoky huts, and the tawny Caffre or Hottentot in the midst of his sandy, sunburnt plains ; which delights in the cabins of our own West and in the far Hindustan, must have some elements that fit it for use every where. The nature of man is one in all climes. Conscience may be drugged and mutilated, but its entire extirpation seems impossible, and it lives under the pressure of error and amid torpor, to witness for truth, and right, and God, in quarters where our unbelief and fear would expect to find it, if not utterly wanting, at least utterly inert. The same heart beats under the tattooed skin of the New Zealander as under the grease and ochre with which the Tambookie of South Africa delights to adorn his person, under the silks of the Chinaman and the furs of the Laplander. It has every where the same depravity, that no grade of civilization or refinement can so adorn as to lift beyond the need of the renewing gospel, and that no brutalism can so degrade as to put below the reach of the same efficacious remedy. Religion, it should be re- membered again, is not mere abstract speculation ; it is also emotion. With the heart man believeth. Now science and literature, strictly so called, may be an affair of certain civ- ilized nations, and of them only ; but poetry and passion are of all lands and of all kindreds of the earth. And how largely do these enter into the structure of the Gospel, of the book revealing that Gospel, and of all Christian writings modelled upon that Bible. There are, it must be allowed, in the pro- duction of Banyan's genius, excellences and peculiarities that do not exist to an equal extent in many of the other publications of the Society, adapting it to interest mankind in every grade of civilization and under all the varieties of custom and taste that culture or neglect, error or truth may have produced. Yet it will, in all probability, be found, when the trial shall have been made by competent transla- tors, that many other of the favorite books of British and American Christians are fitted to become nearly as much the favorites of the converts whom the grace of God shall gather in the ancient East, or in the islands of the sea.

Our hope, that much of the literature of European or American origin may thus become at once available for the spiritual wants of the converts from heathenism, rests not on

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258 THE PUBLICATIONS OF

the peculiar talent of the works so much as on their subject and structure. Their theme is Jesus Christ, the character and the history devised by infinite wisdom, with the express intention of winning its way to the sympathies of man, under all the varieties of complexion, caste, language, laws and lit- erature. This theme has proved its power to exorcise super- stitions the most foul and inveterate, and to raise from the deepest and most hopeless degradation. Pervaded and sat- urated as so many of the Society's works are with this sub^ ject, we have confidence that the divine grandeur of the theme will, to some extent, compensate for the defects of the human authorship. The idols of all lands shall totter from their shrines, and yet be broken before its might ; and we look for the shattering of all by the faithful and full presentation of this truth, Christ and him crucified — a truth that is to be the great iconoclast principle of the age ; for it is God's own device, and carries with it God's own promise and the irresistible energy of his benediction.

We have reason, again, to expect the adaptation of much of the religious literature of our own country and Britain to the wants of the foreign missionary, from its close assimila- tion to the character of the Scripture. This is a book carry- ing one of the evidences of its divine origin upon it, in its power of interesting all grades of society and all ages of mankind. Far as any religious writer becomes penetrated by its spirit, and transfuses, as many of the Society's authors have done, its imagery and train of thought into his own compositions, so far he prepares them for acceptableness and favor among every tribe of mankind. If the Scriptures look with special favor on any class of our race, it is on the East- ern portion of the world. The Bible is an Oriental book, as far as it is the book of any one region or race. It would have been, in style and imagery, a very different volume had the Anglo-Saxon race been left to prepare it. And as far as it should have partaken of their marked peculiarities it would have been less fitted for one great errand it has in this age to accomplish. The missions of our times are pouring back from the favored West and from the tents of Japheth the light of salvation on the long-neglected habitations of Shem, its original scats, and upon the millions of the East. It is some advantage, then, that we go to them with a book that, if it favor any class, is more Eastern than Western in char- acter ; and that we carry with the Bible a biblical literature

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 259

that, from the book on which it has been founded, has, in many of its specimens, caught a tinge of similar feelings, and imagery, and style.

In that body of religious literature whose evangelical and practical character we have thus imperfectly examined, the Society have done much. But it would be doing them and their objects gross injustice to suppose that they present it as a complete body of religious reading for all the wants of the age. Its publications may have some inequality of merit. What collection is otherwise ? The lingering and fltiul charities of the churches may forbid their enlarging it as they desire, and as the wants of our own and foreign lands require. The Non-conformist literature has many volumes they would gladly add to their existing collection. There are two other great eras of religious conflict and effort, from the literature of which the London Tract Society has drawn largely, and this institution as yet not at all. We allude to the era of the stormy infancy of the Scottish National Church, and the works of its Rutherford, its Guthrie, its Binning, its Andrew Gray, and its Durham. The other greater and earlier era is that of the English Reformation. Of the works of the English reformers our British brethren have published sev- eral volumes. As to the present availableness of this latter literature, we are aware that there is division of opinion ; but its history would be valuable, if not its remains.

Nor is the American Tract Society to be judged as if it had completed its own designs, or finished its mission as respects a native religious literature. Its power to elicit works drawn up with peculiar reference to our position and habits as a people, has as yet been shown but in a small de- gree. The churches of this country are capable of much more, and need much more ; and if duly sustained, the So- ciety may proceed in this work to a point far beyond the limit of its present attainments. Will the churches afford this aid ? Here, at least, they will have — if they choose, by prayer, and effort, and liberality, to secure it — they will have a literature all that they can wish, as to its national adaptation.

And if our country and others that have been long favored with the serene and pure light of the Gospel, are yet to know days of dark and stormy controversy with error ; if over the once peaceful encampments of our churches is spreading the hum that betokens an approaching combat ; if, as some fear, we are entering, in our times, upon a stern

260 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY.

and close conflict with Romanism or with scepticism, or with both ; or are to stand up for our national morals and national existence against the floods of a frivolous and profligate lit- erature, that now drowns the minds of our youth as beneath a rushing deluge of inanity, and filth, and venom, we have| little fear as to the result. We cannot distrust the powers and the triumphs of Scripture, the safety and ultimate vic- tories of the Church. In the God of the Bible and the Head of the Church, we need not fear to place the most unques- tioning and imperturbable confidence. He who gave the Bible will guard the gift ; and he who built will watch, as with a wall of fire, around the city of his own chosen Jeru- salem. And, from all the past history of the Church, we augur that out of this or any other conflict that maybe await- ing us in the interval between our times and the final glory of Christ's kingdom, there may grow some of the richest productions of that literature which the Church is yet to enjoy ; a literature as yet unwritten, and which this institu- tion, we trust, will, with others, aid in educing, diffusing, and perpetuating. Some of the richest legacies which sanctified genius has ever bequeathed to the Christian church, are like that more cherished portion which the dying patriarch gave to his favorite son, his Joseph : " One portion above thy brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow ;" the spoils plucked as out of the very teeth of the destroyer, the trophies of a late and hard-won victory.

INCREASE OP FAITH NECESSARY TO THE SUC- CESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS.

"But having hope, when your faith is increased, that we

bhall be enlarged by you according to our rule abundantly, to preach the gospel in the regions beyond you." — 2 coi*. x. 15, 16.

The language of the Apostle evidently implies a gentle reprehension of the Corinthian church. The poverty and imbecility of their faith embarrassed him in his ardent aspi- rations after more extended usefulness. He was anxious to enter upon a new field, and to proclaim the Gospel through- out other and more destitute regions. But he must await in prayerful hope the increase of their faith, and at their hands expect an enlargement. This enlargement might be, on their part, an advancement and confirmation in Christian doctrine, which should permit him to transfer the charge of these, his children in the faith, into the hands of less skilful pastors ; or a rapid growth in Christian holiness, which should justify the Apostle in presenting them as his epistle, to be seen and read of all men, attesting alike the power of the Gospel, and the reality of his mission. Or he might desire the vindication of his own apostolical character, which had been cruelly assailed in their midst, and ask the transmission of his name, with its well-won honors, to the neighboring heathen. Or it had been, perhaps, his hope, from their lib- erality and wealth, to have received aid in his missionary journeyings ; or he had anticipated from their position in a great commercial metropolis, assistance in their sending the Gospel to other havens and cities of the empire. Whether he expected from their increased and matured faith, any one, or the union of all these advantages, and whatever be the decision as to the mode in which enlargement was sought by him, one fact stands forth on the face of these words, mani- fest and unquestionable. He was now fettered in his plans of benevolence, and it was from the Corinthian disciples that

262 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

he expected his release. Either from their confirmation in the truths he preached, or in the holiness he enjoined and exemplified ; or from their assertion of his just honors as an apostle ; from the bestowment of their free alms, or the em- ployment of their mercantile influence, he hoped to obtain the removal of the restraint from himself, and to secure for their pagan neighbors blessings untold and priceless. The ful- filment of his hope depended upon their progress to higher attainments in faith. There is involved, then, in these words of an inspired and most successful missionary, a principle which we would now endeavor to bring before you, that

The missionaries of the church require at her hands, for the extension and success of their efforts, an increase of faith.

Looking to the divisions and scandals he had so sternly rebuked, and to the peculiar temptations of the infant church, which had been gathered amid the luxury, gayety, and profli- gacy of the licentious Corinth, we might have expected, from one versed as was Paul in the weakness of our nature, and in the wiles of its great adversary, that he would have chosen to specify, instead of the one evil of unbelief, other and nu- merous impediments to his success. And using the term here employed by him, as we too often do, to describe a knowledge merely speculative and theoretical, we should have supposed that in a community indoctrinated by the per- sonal labors of an apostle, as well as in the churches of our own age and land, the deficiencies of Christians were to be sought, rather in their works of obedience, than in the amount of their faith. Yet such was not the fact then. Such is not the root of the evil now. It is in faith that we are wanting. The elder and parent grace is maimed and infirm, and the whole family and sisterhood of the Christian virtues languish as she decays, and can be reanimated only by her restoration. Having considered, therefore,

I. The nature and importance of true faith,

II. The intimate connexion between its higher de- grees AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH Will

naturally follow and prepare us to examine,

III. The defective faith of our own churches, as

INTERPOSING A HINDERANCE TO THE TRIUMPHS OF THE GOS- PEL OVER HEATHENISM.

And may the Father of lights, by His own Spirit of illu- mination and power, unfold to the mind, and impress upon

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 263

the heart, the humbling but the salutary truth contained in these words.

I. The importance of faith may be discerned from the dignity and rank assigned it throughout the New Testament. In the commencement and at the close of our Saviour's min- istry ; in his own private conference with the anxious, but irresolute Nicodemus, and in the public message with which his apostles were charged, as he sent them forth to the evan- gelization of the world, it is alike represented as the only mode — the one condition of salvation. He that exercises it is not condemned, while he that believeth not shall be damned. To this principle is ascribed our immunity from the terrors of the law, for we are justified by faith. As a shield, it re- pels the fiery darts of temptation that come from the great adversary of God and man ; while within, it purifies the heart, working by love ; and, in our contest with the ungodly precepts and example of our fellow-men, " this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." The long and glorious list of its strifes and its trophies, contained in the closing portion of the Epistle to the Hebrews, commences with the announcement that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ; and is terminated with the triumphant recapitulation that all these, the worthies of the earlier dispensations, obtained their good report through the same simple, but mighty principle — that of faith.

And although the world are accustomed to dispute the necessity of this principle, when exercised respecting the realities of a world as yet hidden and invisible, they are per- petually employing it with regard to the visible but transient scenery of the present life. Compelled to give their faith to testimony as to those things which might be seen, and often giving it even where they might substitute personal observa- tion for faith in the evidence of others ; they refuse to extend it to those objects which, from their very nature, cannot be- come the subjects of immediate vision and examination. Yielding credence to the testimony of their fellow-mortals, though the witnesses are alike fallible and perfidious, they refuse it to the revelation of their God. Preferring to give it where it is often not required, (did they choose to employ their own natural faculties,) they withhold it where it is inevitably necessary. All the commerce of this world is predicated on the faith which man puts in the skill, integrity, and diligence of his fellow-man ; and a writing, of which he

264 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

never saw the author, shall be to him a sufficient warrant for transmitting, far beyond his own sight and control, his whole property. By the exercise of a just and sober faith in the testimony brought into her halls, the national jurisprudence administers to our citizens the redress of their wrongs, and the punishment of their crimes. The learning dispensed in our colleges is, by the mass of minds, received without per- sonal examination, upon the credit given to the ability and honesty of previous investigators. And all education, whether in the most recondite science, or in the most humble and handicraft art, proceeds upon the faith which the pupil is required to exercise in the superior skill of his instructor, and in the value of the knowledge his teacher is preparing to communicate.

It is only by the confidence they have learned to place in the narratives of the traveller, that the majority of society know the nature and extent of the country, of which they are themselves the inhabitants ; or that they can form any idea of the great and magnificent cities, the goodly prospects, and the splendid wonders that adorn some foreign and unseen coast. And with regard to the facts which we have thus gathered, we feel no suspicion, but use them as the current coin of the mind, both in our private meditations and our social intercourse, without fear as to their genuineness and validity. Even the sceptic, loud and boisterous in his rejec- tion of all faith, as being an invasion of the province, and but a usurpation upon the rights of human reason, is most rigid and constant in exacting from his trembling child an obedi- ence to his will, and a subjection to his opinions, which can rest only upon the faith, the tacit but implicit faith, which he requires his family to exercise in his superior wisdom and larger experience.

And if it be objected, that the faith of the gospel diffeis widely from that which we so readily and commonly render, in that it brings to our minds deep and difficult mysteries, we answer that it would be less evidently the work of God, if it did not come, contradicting the first and rasher conclusions of human ignorance. It would be a departure from the an- alogy which exists among all the works of our God, did it only reveal what man had previously conjectured, and were Faith employed merely to endorse and register, in silent ac- quiescence, the rescripts which had been prepared for her by human reason. And even in the sciences of this world,

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 265

narrow and near as is the field of their labors, there are the same inscrutable yet inevitable difficulties, of which the scep- tic complains in religion. We expect it of a cultivated and advanced science, that it should assail and overturn many opinions, which to the first glance of ignorant presumption seem indisputable truths. Contradicting the first and incom- plete testimony of our senses and the general impressions of mankind, Geography comes back from her voyages of dis- covery with the annunciation that the earth is not an extended plain, but one vast sphere. And though the eye sees no motion, and the foot feels no unsteadiness, and no Jarring is perceived within or around us, Astronomy comes back to the inquirer with the startling assurance, that, notwithstanding all these seeming evidences to the contrary, the earth on which he reposes is ceaselessly and most rapidly whirling along its trackless path in the heavens ; and that, moment by moment, he is borne along through the fields of space with a fearful and inconceivable velocity. And when, from further wanderings, but on better testimony — when from a higher and stranger world, but with fuller evidence and with more indubitable tokens of her veracity, Faith comes back, bringing assurances that tally not in all things with our pre- conceived conjectures, shall she be chidden and blasphemed for the difficulties that arise from our own ignorance ? Without the mysteries of. the Gospel, revelation would be unlike all the other provinces of human knowledge, and the domains of Faith would be dissimilar from all the rest of the handi- work of God.

But although the importance of faith is thus apparent from the rank assigned it in the scriptures, and from its necessity even in the petty concernments of this present life, we shall learn to appreciate true belief yet more highly, when we see mankind, by a heedless but perpetual infatuation, allowing themselves in errors the most absurd and dangerous, with regard to its character and claims. By some it is confounded with a blind and irrational credulity, although evangelical faith is based only on evidence the most satisfactory and suf- ficient ; and although the book of God, when demanding our credence, proffers to the inquirer testimony, not merely abun- dant, but overwhelming, as to the nature of its authorship. It is as adverse to the character of scriptural faith to believe without a divine warrant, upon authority that is merely tra- ditionary and human, as to refuse the assent of the soul where

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266 L INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

God has spoken. True Faith is not more allied to supersti- tion than she is to scepticism ; and, determined as he is to believe all that God has testified, the Christian, wherever the oracle is silent, suspends his decision, and anxiously ex- cludes from his creed all the inventions of man, whether they come from the school, the synod, or the council.

Others delight to speak of faith in the religion of our Lord, as if it were but an opinion, and the religion it embraces but a hypothesis, of little practical moment or influence : while on the contrary, the faith of the Gospel is as rigid and exper- imental in its character as the strictest science of the schools. It makes no arbitrary assumptions, rests on no disputed axi- oms, but, upon the foundation of facts of the most impressive and varied character, it builds up, patiently and surely, its doctrines and its precepts ; invites the most searching scrutiny into the testimonials which it adduces ; and having by them established its first principles, gives not only for its funda- mental axioms, but for its every inference, and for each sub- sequent deduction, the word of a God. As well might we call arithmetic or history a mere theory, as to apply that title to the religion which is embraced by our faith. Do the self- satisfied philosophers of this world tell us of the necessity of facts ? We answer, the incarnation, the personal character, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Saviour, are facts most fully proved, and standing alone, would be in themselves sufficient to prove the divinity of the revelation that is en- twined about them, and of which they constitute the central supports, the chief and favorite theme. And every convert, ransomed by the power of this faith from the tyranny of evil habits, affords in himself a new fact, augmenting the mass of her evidences, and swelling her far-spreading and splendid "cloud of witnesses."

Nor are those men safer or wiser than the undisguised scoffer, who, professing to receive the religion of the Bible, flatter themselves that a mere assent of the understanding to the historical portions of the record, constitutes that faith which shall justify at the bar, and admit them to the heaven of Jehovah. The Bible is to be regarded as a whole, and as such is to be received and obeyed. The Gospel is a code of laws, no less than a volume of annals. It has not only narratives, but precepts, and asks the consent of the whole man, and his entire soul, to its undivided and unmutihited Contents. And as that man could not maintain his arrogant

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 267

pretensions, who should claim the honors of devoted patriotism merely because he had studied intently the annals of his country's history, whilst he was trampling upon her laws, and imprinting every leaf of her statute-book with the hoof of swinish indulgence, thus must the man fail of sustaining his claim to the character of Christ's disciple, who, professing to credit and revere his record, treads down into the mire his laws, and has but the faith of historical assent for the narra- tive, without the faith of love for the precepts, and the faith of affectionate conformity for the character of the Saviour. The Bible contains not only the story of our creation, ruin, and recovery, but it includes as well the indictment of our crimes, and the proclamation of our pardon ; and there is no tjue reception of the history, unless there be also, personally, the humble confession of the imputed guiltiness, and the grateful pleading of the proffered discharge.

Equally erroneous, and chargeable with a kindred folly, is the man, who, passing beyond the vain figment of a faith merely historical, professes to receive the whole system of revelation, in its doctrinal, no less than its narrative portions, and triumphing in the orthodoxy of his tenets, seems anxious to shelter himself from the practical influence of faith, by pleading the freeness of the salvation it brings. The whole necessity of salvation grew out of the practical depravity of man's nature, and the whole errand of the Bible was but the restoration of practical holiness. For this end prophets and apostles wrote ; for this it was that a Saviour descended and bled — rose, and reigns, to furnish, to bestow, and to fulfil that Bible. And until this effect be wrought, nothing is gained ; and if this be refused, the very object and intention of the religion is rejected. It is surely vain toil to implant in the mind a faith, the vital germ of which is carefully removed, a dead root, which shall never send forth the springing leaf, or bear the ripened fruit.

An error now popular, and not less fatal, is one which the sceptic has borrowed from the armory and champions of the truth. It consists in a perversion of the great scriptural truth, that it is God who worketh in us to will and to do, and that all our thoughts are under his control. Using the theological labors of Edwards for a purpose, which that holy and master mind never intended, the advocates of this dangerous error contend that our belief is beyond our control, that faith is not voluntary, and unbelief is therefore not criminal : forgetting,

268 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

that, though a gift of God, faith is withal an act or habit of the human mind ; that, like every other virtue, it is on the one hand, a boon of heaven, and on the other, the exercise of unfettered human agency — that it is the natural result of evidence duly and impartially considered, and that no man can be guiltless who wilfully turns away from the contempla- tion of that evidence. The religion of God asks but a ver- dict according to the weight of proof which she brings. To prevent the admission of that evidence, or wilfully to pro- nounce a decision against its weighty and sufficient testimony, would not be deemed guiltless in any cause that should be brought before an earthly tribunal ; nor shall it be held a venial offence at the bar, and by the laws of an insulted Deity.

From the errors which human perverseness has invented to obscure the character of faith, we turn to review its true nature and office. It is most simple, as much so as the con- fidence of a prattling child in his father's kindness and wis- dom ; yet at the same time as expansive in its views, as the loftiest science that ever tasked the powers of a created intel- lect. It is but a hearty assent to the whole testimony of God — a submission of the entire soul, not of the intellect only, but also of the affections and the imagination, to the testimony of God ; whether that testimony be employed in prescribing a duty, or in establishing a privilege. It is the acknowledgment of human ignorance, united with the pro- fession of confidence in Divine wisdom, and of subjection to Divine authority. Making no reservations, prescribing no terms of limitation, claiming no power of revoking or abridg- ing its grant, it is a surrender of the intelligent spirit to the word of God as its rule and its stay ; in conformity to it as the one standard of human conduct, and in dependence upon it as the only fitting nutriment of the spiritual life. It thus restores again the communication which at the fall was sev-j ered. In his temptation Satan persuaded our parents to discredit the testimony of God ; and the consequent inter- ruption of faith was the hewing away of that channel, through which they had heretofore received from their God know- ledge, truth, and love. The human mind became at once an exhausted and rifted reservoir, " a broken cistern," into which no longer welled the outgushing streams from " the Foun- tain of living waters." By faith the communion is restored, and man is again the dependent and pupil of his God.

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 269

It is his natural and rightful state, not for this life only, but forever. The apostle, when enumerating the graces that abide, has spoken of faith as if it too continued. Indeed, the very nature of a created and limited intelligence, involves the necessity of continued faith. Long as we are not omnipres- ent, and cannot perceive with our own eyes what is every where transacted — long as we are not omniscient, and there are portions of knowledge, which we have not yet acquired — ■ long as man is not invested with the attributes of the Deity, so long must we depend upon His testimony for the truth of that which He has seen and we have not seen ; so long must \ve learn from Him the nature of that which He has known, but which we may know only from his words. The perfec- tion of the heavenly world does not imply illimitable know- ledge, either as to the present or the future ; and as to all those portions of God's ways, which thus remain concealed from our personal examination, the spirits of just men made perfect will, with their first-born brethren, the angels that have kept their original estate, remain the pensioners of faith, dependent upon the declarations of God for continual instruction.

And how glorious are the objects which faith brings into the mind of man, even during his sojourn here. He learns from her the secret of his own misery and guiltinesss, and its remedy. He is told of a law condemning irrevocably for the first offence, yet now fully satisfied for his hourly infraction of its precepts — a Saviour divine to redeem and human to compassionate — a salvation not of his own procurement — ■ the Spirit of God descended to be his teacher and consoler — troubles sanctified — snares broken — and an eternity of purity and blessedness made his certain inheritance ; and are not these truths of surpassing splendor and inestimable worth ? They enter into the soul, not so much destroying as be-dwarf- ing its former ideas, and the original furniture of the mind, which it has obtained from the knowledge and literature of this world. Faith has suddenly widened the mental horizon, letting in the vision of realities before present, but hitherto unseen. Or rather, as has been beautifully said, it is the floating into view of another and a lovelier world, with its glories and its harmony drowning the din and beclouding the splendor of these terrestrial scenes.

The believer judges by a new standard ; sees by a new and heaven-descended light ; and lo, in the change, " all things

270 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

have become new." And though the men of this world may question and deride the renovation, because the man's earthly condition, and the powers of his mind remain apparently the same ; it is evident to those who will reason, that the man is essentially renewed ; for his views, his feelings, his hopes and fears, his prospects and his purposes, his conduct and language, have undergone a marked and strange modification. True it is, the man's garb is still coarse, and his person un- gainly, and his mind is not graced with the refinements and adornments of education ; but the change is as yet merely initial. Death and the resurrection shall consummate it. And even already the internal process is to his own mind alike evident and delightful ; and with tears of gratitude he receives it as the earnest of that thorough renovation, which shall transform him, body, soul, and spirit, into the likeness of his Lord. Thus might we imagine an aged and lonely cottager, musing at nightfall in his desolate home upon the partner of his bosom, now tenanting the grave, and his chil- dren, who have long since wandered from his hearth to a distant land, and are there regardless or ignorant of the sor- rows with which his declining years are darkened. And as he cowers over his scanty fire, the unbidden tear will fall, and his heart is full of the bitterness of despair. But enter with the unexpected tidings that his children live ; that, prospered and wealthy, they are yet affectionate ; that their hearts still yearn towards their early home and the parent who holds it; that they are even now on their way to soothe and gladden his few remaining days : and although you have made no immediate change in the man's lot — although the hovel is yet dark and cold, and the embers emit but the same dull and saddening light ; the whole scene is changed to his eyes, and instead of its former desolateness, it has become radiant with the lustre of his new-found happiness. A new element is poured into his mind, and the faith of your message has changed his whole soul. Is there no reality, no enjoyment in this translation from despondency to hope, from comfort- less and unpitied helplessness to the glad expectation of at- tached and watchful children? Yes; let his lot remain long but what it had been, he feels, and you cannot but feel, that the credence given to your tidings has renewed his youth within him, and thrown a new coloring over the whole scene of squalid poverty that surrounds him. And, if you deny not the reality of the happiness because of the absence or

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 271

present delay of any outward change, should you dispute the reality of the believer's peace, because as yet he is but the ex- pectant heir, and not the joyous possessor, of a heavenly mansion ?

Of a principle thus efficient and delightful, what shall secure the preservation and increase ? Divine truth is its aliment, and the Holy Spirit its author and upholder. In the lan- guage of scripture it will be observed that the term faith, (as in the instance of the exhortation to contend earnestly for it, as it was once delivered to the saints,) is employed not only in the sense above given, but also to describe a system of doctrines ; but it is as the food of that spiritual principle which we have endeavored to describe. And as the principle of life, and the mode or means by which it is sustained, may be, and, in common speech, often are confounded ; so is the same word used in the New Testament to signify both the truth received, and the temper or habit of mind receiving it. But the two dissimilar ideas are not to be blended ; nor are we to suppose that the form of sound doctrine will necessarily insure a living faith in the heart. The experiment, often and anxiously repeated, has ever failed. Creeds and confessions have been adjusted and balanced with the utmost nicety of discrimination, and with the greatest precision of language. But in the church at Geneva, planted and watered by the cares of Calvin and Beza, and in the English Presbyterians, the descendants of the holy non-conformists, it has been but too fully proved, that correct symbols of faith may be inher- ited from a pious ancestry and for a time be retained with great reverence, but without any portion of the indwelling spirit which once framed and pervaded them. Indeed, in the history of Protestant Germany, it has been found that the fallen and corrupted fragments of a traditionary " form of sound words," have been most prolific in the production of heresies, alike strange and revolting. The fat and heavy soil of an inert and " dead orthodoxy," was to that national church the hot-bed of scepticism, nurturing errors of the rankest growth, and the most deadly nature. The stubble, which had well sustained the former and the proper harvest, but served to enrich the field for an after-growth of weeds the most nox- ious and luxuriant. However useful in its place, (and, pro- perly employed, its usefulness is great,) the most correct and scriptural creed is but the outward and inanimate portraiture of an inward and living faith ; and it is as idle to expect that

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confessions and symbols, alone and unaided, should create faith, as to imagine that a definition of honesty and benevo- lence, rigid and accurate, should of itself be sufficient to re- form the inmates of our prisons.

" Leviathan is not so tamed."

It is not with such weapons that the enemy is to be van- quished, or a living faith perpetuated from age to age. The affections, no less than the intellect, must be reached and won. The continual interposition of the Holy Spirit, the renewed and personal application of truth to the human con- science, are requisite to attain the end. And it is only from a personal faith, in all her members, thus produced — thus fostered — and continually increasing, that the church can expect prosperity. It is thus that she is to be prepared for conflict with her internal foes, and for the subjugation of new territories to the obedience of the cross. From a faith thus established and made general, what may not be hoped — what conquest shall seem too arduous, and what peril too fearful ?

We have seen the dignity of faith and its simplicity ; the errors which misrepresent and assail it ; its nature ; the mag- nificence of its effects ; its necessity and eternity ; and the mode of its preservation. It remains now to examine,

II. The intimate connection existing between this

FAITH AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH.

Having observed that this principle is the source of know- ledge, and the parent of motives and feelings to the Christian, it is at once evident that the largeness or the narrowness of the knowledge thus gained, the weakness or the strength of the feelings thus excited, and of the motives which are in this mode implanted, will constantly affect the character of all the Christian's doings, but especially those which depend most upon faith for their inception and completion — his doings in behalf of his impenitent fellow-men. \

Upon the enterprises of the church, it is immediately ap- parent, whether the faith of the believers who compose that body is in a state of feebleness and declension, or of energy and growth, lie who looks much to the parting command- ment of his Lord for the universal proclamation of his truth, and much to the repeated assurance of his Lord that his truth shall prove itself mighty, and his word not return void, will be prepared to hope and to attempt much, in obedience to the

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 273

commandment and in inheritance of the promise. He, on the contrary, who sees eternity but indistinctly, seldom and afar, and whose faith takes but short and occasional flights into the enduring world of realities that surrounds us, will be prone to exhibit in his plans timidity and despondency, in his efforts remissness and apathy. And if we look to the period when the limits of the church were most rapidly and widely extended, it will be found not the era when the world- ly power, the learning and the wealth of the church were at their highest elevation, but in the age when, though lacking all these, by the energy of an overmastering faith, she rose superior to every impediment, and destitute of all earthly aid and encouragement, dared to hope in God. Wise in His wisdom, and strong in His might, she devised her plans of conquest upon the broad and magnificent basis of the Sa- viour's promises, and then, in humility, diligence, and simple devotion, called upon the Saviour's faithfulness to accomplish the plans His own word had warranted, and His own Spirit incited. And in most of the great revivals of faith and god- liness in the modern church, it will be discovered that the rising flood of religious feeling has opened anew, or found and followed the already open channel of missionary enter- prise. The revival of religion granted to the early labors of the Puritan fathers in New England, saw also the rise of Eliot and the Mayhews, the first evangelists of our Indians. The energetic faith of Wesley sought for its first field a mission to the savages of our southern coast. The era of Edwards, when the faith and love of the church received so wide and mighty an excitement, was also the era of Brainerd, his friend and disciple, a missionary of the rarest endowments. The revival of faith in Protestant Germany under Francke, Spener, and the Pietists, founded the Orphan House at Halle, and saw go forth from its walls Swartz and others, his associates, to labor amid the heathenism of India. The accession of strength to the faith of the Moravian brethren, by the labors of Zinzendorf, soon found an outlet in missionary enterprises of apostolical simplicity and successfulness. The established church of England, in her recent return to the faith of her early founders, has also been aroused to the cause of missions, and already rejoices in the record of her Heber, her Bu- chanan, and her Martyn. And in our own division of the Christian host, the energetic labors of the elder Hall, Fuller, and the vouuger Ryland, to restore to the faith of our churches

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its proper and practical character, were soon followed by the establishment of those missions, which have given, as we trust, an impulse to the energies of the church that shall go on, with greater extension and deepening intensity, until the time of the Messiah's second advent.

The same increased faith which excites the enterprise, serves withal to multiply the resources of the church for the successful development and prosecution of the plans she has formed. Consecration to God of our hearts and our sub- stance will produce a liberality which would, to a lukewarm age, seem fanatical and extravagant. Living as in the con- stant view of the last judgment ; estranged from the world, and thus exempted from the various and costly sacrifices it requires to fashion, to pride, and to luxury ; the conscien- tious frugality of the church would enable the poorest and the richest members to unite in habitual contribution. A. simple- hearted faith would banish also from the confines of the church that pretended spirituality which anxiously excludes religion from the scenes of business, and shuts her out from all inter- ference with pecuniary matters, under the pretext of guard- ing her sanctity, but in truth for the protection of a hidden covetousness. In the better and happier era of her history it is found that religion is a familiar and every-day guest, visiting not the chamber of social or secret prayer and the sanctuary only, but passing through all the scenes of human industry, and shedding over every occupation her mild and hallowing influence. Systematic contribution to every form of religious benevolence, will then be regarded as a necessary mark of true piety. But the chief treasures of the church are not her stores of silver and gold, but her living members, with their spiritual endowments of varied character and grades. And how greatly would a revival of primitive faith draw upon these her spiritual resources, for the supply of the perishing heathen. The missionary cause would not be considered as making well nigh its exclusive appeal to min- isters of the church ; but the merchant, the artisan, and the farmer, each anxious to give himself to the Lord's service, would present not a stinted tithe of his earnings, but himself, his personal labors, and his life, as an offering to the great work of evangelizing the heathen.

How evident and vast the increase of missionary power given to the church, in the influence of a purer and simpler faith upon her doctrines. We have viewed incidentally the

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 275

errors that usurp the name of Christian faith. When these should have been outgrown and superseded by a true and hearty acceptance of God's whole testimony, how immense the amount of moral power thrown into benevolent action. Again, even where true faith exists, it is now embarrassed in its operations by its union with more or less of error. Every admixture of human tradition, and each addition of extrane- ous and irrelevant authority, has served but to disfigure and weaken the truth it was intended to adorn. When these cumbrous appendages shall be relinquished, and the oracles of truth shall be consulted more habitually in prayer for the teachings of the Spirit, what may not be hoped from the blessing of that God who is jealous for the honor of His own word ? What may not be hoped from the temper and edge of the sword of the Spirit, when it shall have been disencum- bered of the scabbard, that has so long served only to conceal and corrode its brightness 1

The transition is a natural one from the doctrines of the Gospel to the motives which they suggest and sustain. And much aid will have been won for urging onward the cause of the Saviour in heathen lands, when a higher standard of faith shall have trained up the church in greater simplicity of pur- pose, and in pure and single-hearted desire for the glory of God. How much effort is now lost to the world and the church, because polluted by motives which God cannot deign to bless. When this transparency of purpose shall become prevalent, how strong and general the tendency towards a cordial union of all Christians in the common cause. How much of the time and strength of brethren is now wasted upon unbrotherly divisions. Bigotry and partizanship are dividing those who should never have been sundered. And how much useful and needed power is now withholden, because its possessors are at present unwilling to bestow it, accompanied, as it would be, with an exposure of their personal inferiority. The talent being but one, they deem it but Christian modesty to enwrap and inter it. A faith which shall purge the heart of these base and earth-born feelings, and make the motives of action necessarily more powerful, as they were more sim- ple and pure, would evidently strengthen the aggressive energies of the church for her inroads upon the dominions of spiritual darkness.

The force of pious example in the Christian church, as influencing the world, is yet but scantily developed. But

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when there should prevail a general union amongst the disci- ples of our Lord, one of the most common topics of reproach, employed by the world, would be taken away. Affecting, also, as an increase of faith would do, the personal character of each member in the various divisions of the Christian church, what would be the influence of the resplendent and consistent holiness thus cherished, upon the families and de- pendents, the neighbors and friends of Christians ! And this influence would be felt, not merely inviting their co-op- eration in the missionary alms of the church, but attracting and awakening them to inquiry and repentance, and drawing them into the same bonds of tender and heavenly brother- hood. How much of the reasoning and zeal and energy of the church is now wasted, because counteracted by the luke- warm remissness or the undisguised scandals exhibited in multitudes wearing the Christian name. And when a vigor- ous and wholesome faith should purify our churches ; when the unhealthy and diseased portions should be seen sloughing away under the searching influence of Christian discipline, and the faithfulness of an evangelical ministry ; and the church should shine forth in the healthful beauty and symme- try of holiness ; what would be the boldness of her advocates, the power of her appeals, and the confusion of her enemies ! And all these would be felt immediately in the fields of mis- sionary labor ; the Christian mariner, the Christian merchant, and the Christian traveller, would strengthen by a holy ex- ample, in the sight of the heathen, the hands of the Christian missionary.

But the most important advantage thus gained, for the cause of our Lord in unevangelized lands, would be the en- larged channel for the communication of the Divine Influ- ences. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Great faith delights, as a weak and narrow faith dishonors and grieves Him. And when the thousands of Israel shall go up with the ardent though humble expectation of receiving an answer to their prayers, whilst the supplications of primitive faith should again ascend, who shall say that the wonders of the early church may not return ; and men, in the spirit and power of the early believers, rise up to become the heralds of salvation to the most distant and most brutified tribes of mankind ? Assuredly those who shall honor Him by a child- like dependence, would be honored of Him. Then, as the early and the latter rain descended, and when the " fountains

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 277

of the great deep" of moral power now unemployed, should be broken up from beneath in a wrestling church, and " the windows of heaven " be opened from above by a favoring God ; how rapidly would the waters of salvation rise and swell and diffuse themselves, till the knowledge of the Lord should cover the earth,

" And like a sea of glory, It spread from pole to pole."

III. From this review of the possible and legitimate fruits of Christian faith, let us turn to its actual results in our midst, that we may learn the deficiencies in our faith which

RETARD THE TRIUMPHS OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH OVER ITS ANTAGONIST ERRORS.

We are accustomed to look abroad to the mass of evil with which the Christian missionary must contend in heathen lands, and to suppose that here are the chief obstacles to his success. The language of the text and the previous consid- erations brought before you, would lead to the conclusion that this is not the truth. Not in the gorgeous temples, and the costly images, and all the imposing pageantry of idolatry, by which he is environed ; not in the wiles and violence of an organized and interested priesthood ; not in the deep hold which a false religion has taken upon the arts, and customs, and literature, and every institution, political and social, of the nation ; not in any of these, nor in all of them united, is the most formidable resistance to his labors to be found. The stress of battle is in a remoter and unobserved portion of the field. His foes and his hinderances are rather to be sought in the land he has left, and in the very bosom of the church which has commissioned and dispatched him. It is because their faith is not increased adequately to sustain him, that his heart languishes, and his soul is faint within him ; and while he calls upon the obstinate and besotted pagan before him to repent of his unbelief, he sends back over the intervening ocean, to the churches of his native land, an appeal not less earnest and yet more touching, that they too repent of the poverty and pettiness of their faith, and that they enlarge him in his labors according to the apostolic rule, and upon the primitive model.

The existence of such deficiencies in our faith is painfully evident, in the inadequacy of the views which that faith min- isters, of the external fruits which it produces, and of the^

273 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY

internal spirit which it breathes ; or in its influence upon the intellect, the conduct and the affections.

1. The views with which their faith furnishes the majority of those attached to our churches, are then singularly inade- quate with regard to the miseries of the world. Of the fear- ful condition of the vast mass of our race, the hundreds of millions ignorant or neglectful of the Gospel, we think little and inquire still less, Of temporal suffering — of the anguish which ignorance, vice, and unrestrained passion are working merely for this life, how immense is the amount ; for gross darkness covers the nations, and the dark places of the earth are necessarily and ever full of the habitations of cruelty. How fatal is the influence upon human happiness, even for the few days of our earthly career, of vice, not merely legal- ized, but sanctified and deified in the national idols, as we find it under every form of paganism. But what is even this, compared to the hopeless and unending woe into which death shall hurl the tribes of heathenism. And yet those, who thus, whilst groaning under present misery, work out fiercer suf- ferings for eternity, are our brethren, like us fallen and vicious, but like us, immortal and accountable. Of this fearful wretch- edness our perception is indistinct and transient. We have no deep and abiding conviction of the evil of sin, and the necessary misery of its captives.

There is equal deficiency in our views of the 'promises of Scripture. How large a portion of prophecy is given to the glories of the Messiah's kingdom ! They occupy a promi- nent room and large space in the brief form of supplication given by our Saviour to his disciples. Redolent as these promises are of the most delightful hopes, how seldom do we remember, and how faintly plead them ; though the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of God's Son, the Gentiles shall be his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth are his assured possession.

Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, Receive yet one, the crown of all the earth, Thou who alone art worthy ! — The very spirit of the world is tired Of its own taunting question, asked so long, "Where is the promise of your Lord's approach 7" Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, Receive yet one, as radiant as the rest, Due to thy last and most effectual work, Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 279

Nor are our views more just and complete as to our own obligations and vows. Although our entrance upon the course of Christian profession was by devoting ourselves to the service of the Lord, and having given ourselves to Him, we gave ourselves into the church by His will ; has not the dedication been forgotten, or practically revoked by too many of our number? The lights of the earth — we are shedding around but a dim, flickering, and uncertain lustre. The salt of the world — who has perceived in us the savor of Christian vitality 1

But especially do our views assume the appearance of meagre insufficiency, in the estimate they afford of the pecu- liar opportunities of the age for Christian usefulness. "Ye hypocrites," exclaimed our Lord, iS can ye not discern the signs of the times?" Are the larger number of Christians at all awake to the fact, that the signs of our times call upon the believers of the nineteenth century for unprecedented exertions? The advance of popular freedom and general education, the unrestrained commercial intercourse of nations, the wide-spread peace now enjoyed, the improved speed and lessened expense of travelling, the newly-developed powers of the press, the powers each day more apparent of voluntary associations, the extensive and daily extending use of the language we have inherited from England,* and which is now becoming intelligible in the chief maritime ports of the world • — all require at the hands of American Christians no ordinary exertions. The daily enlargements of the mission field, and the success of truth's first onset upon the powers of darkness, are summoning us most impressively to action. The institu- tions of Hindooism, of such vaunted antiquity, and rooted in the veneration of ages, seem already tottering to their over- throw, ere the generation is gone from the earth that first sapped their base. The barrier which long closed the vast empire of China is now found to be but the brittle seal of an imperial edict, unsustained by the national feelings. The word of God, as recently translated and published in lan- guages never before taught the name of Jehovah, is calling for the living preacher to scatter and to interpret it. Amid ail these omens of good and incentives to diligence, are we found awake to the fact, or conscious of the majesty and splendor of the scenes now opening ? On the contrary, is not the church protracting her slumbers, while the whole heaven above her is reddening with the dawn of that day,

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which shall usher in her restoration and the redemption of all the earth ?

But the most afflictive defect in our views, is the slight and irreverent estimate we form of our Divine Ally. The King of kings is our intercessor, the Omniscient Spirit is our teacher ; and we are invited to counsel with Divine Wisdom, and to stay ourselves on the arm of Creative Power. Yet how do we narrow down the magnificence of the Divine promises, and compress the hopes, large and grand, offered by the gospel, into some petty and pitiful request, that, as we imagine, bespeaks Christian humility, but in truth displays contemptuous unbelief. What ! when God is for us, is it not most guilty to hesitate and linger in minor and facile enter- prises ? What would have been thought of him whose mem- ory we are wont to hail as the Father of his country, if, when joined by the fleets and army of our foreign ally, he had gathered the combined host to the siege of some petty bar- rack, garrisoned by a few disbanded invalids ? The great- ness of the God we serve, demands on our part a large and manly, a far-sighted and far-reaching faith.

2. The same odious discrepancy between its privileges and doings, its powers and its results, is seen in the external fruits of our faith,, or its influence upon the conduct. In the prayers of the church, as offered in her solemn assemblies, is there the due and earnest remembrance of the missionary laborer, who has, like Jonathan and his armor-bearer, clam- bered up into the high places of heathenism, and finds him- self alone in the very midst of the enemy? In the Monthly Concert, that touching union which brings the Christians of every hue, and language, and kindred, into one assembly, and blends their hearts in the utterance of one petition, is the meeting maintained with that general and devout attendance demanded by the beauty of its conception and the grandeur of its object? Of the alms of the church — how pitiful the amount compared with the free and glad sacrifices made on the altars of dissipation and intemperance, in games of chance, in fashionable equipages, furniture, and dress, in the support of the theatre, the race-course, and the lottery, in the ex- travagance of our tables, and the sumptuousness of our homes. Of that which is given, how much is the niggardly parings of a plentiful income. We have begun by devoting to God the choicest of the herd and the firstlings of the flock ; and have finished by laying on His altars but the offals of the

TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 281

victim. In our labors and our sacrifices for the cause of God, how rarely is found the noble disinterestedness, or the hum- ble and retiring generosity that distinguished the faith of the primitive times. But, above all, is there not need of a wide and deep renovation throughout the mass of our churches, ere the standard of personal holiness can be deemed at all comparable with that which sprung from faith, as apostles preached it, and as its first confessors received it ?

3. The internal spirit which it breathes, was spoken of as betraying a deficiency in the faith of modern belie /ers. If love to man be the second great commandment of the Scrip- tures, is it sufficiently awakened within us, and in proportion to the dignity which revelation has thus assigned it ? But in love to God, in anxiety for continued communion with Him, and deepening conformity to His image, in desire for the honor of His name, are we not verily guilty of a fearful de- ficiency, and needs not our faith immediate renovation and increase ? Have we that intense fear and abhorrence of sin which a lively faith ever displays ? The confidence of the faitaful anciently inspired them with a holy and dauntless courage, as they faced and rebuked the world. Is ours thus operative ? Theirs was a humility, which, springing from conscious weakness, clung the more closely to God, and amid the largest success, resigned to Him the undivided glory ; is our faith thus lowly in its spirit and tendency ? The voice of inspiration has said, "If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his." Is the faith, in the possession of which we exult, thus attended and verified ? Have we been fashioned into his likeness and imbibed his temper? Is ours the life of cross-bearing and watchfulness and prayerfulness ? if not, is it a life of discipleship to Christ? — is it the race of faith, swift, direct, and onward ? and shall it win at last the crown of the triumphant believer ?

Church of the living God, is there not utterly a fault amongst us in this matter? And until our faith increase, can we hope that, according to the rule of Paul's apostolic labors, the destitute Gentiles should be evangelized? Is not an en- largement now demanded and now due in the labors, prayers, and alms that go to sustain the cause of Christian missions \ and what but the renovation of faith shall work that enlarge- ment? Let us not contrast our sacrifices and zeal merely with those of the Master whose name we bear, and whom we have avouched as our Great Exemplar : let us but measure

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282 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY.

our endeavors, in their number, and in the prudence, liberal- ity, and perseverance that mark them, with the efforts and spirit of the men of this world, who are without hope and without God. Yielding up the comforts of home and the society of friends, forswearing ease, periling character, lav- ishing life, and venturing even upon eternal ruin, as they do, the walks of this world's business and of this world's pleas- ures are strewed with the voluntary and costly sacrifices of time, property, comfort, life, and salvation. But we, with a soul to save, a heaven to lose or win, a Christ to publish, and a God to serve — how shamefully calm are we found, and timid and half-hearted ! And this, while the world is rushing into ruin, and bearing on its swollen and rapid stream our friends, our neighbors, and our children ; — while the earth which God has promised to bless, (and that by human instru- mentality,) lies as yet, prostrate and groaning, under the curse poured out through all her coasts. The time is coming, and prophecy has foretold it, when in every land there shall be offered to God a pure offering — when, from the closet and the sanctuary, from the hill-top, the field, and the forest-side, where the children of God shall, like Isaac, walk forth at eventide to meditate, the voice of pious supplication shall ascend in one continuous stream ; until our globe, as it rolls along its orbit, shall seem but a censer revolving in the hand of the Great High Priest, and pouring out at every aperture a cloud, dense and rich, of incense, fragrant and grateful to God. But, as yet, the ascending cloud is one of far other kind. Its skirts are dark with sullen gloom, and its bosom is charged with indignation and vengeance. Wailing and blasphemy, oppression and outrage, pollution and falsehood, have swollen and blackened it ; and with it, a cry goes up, like that from the cities of the plain, piercing the ear of God. Day unto day uttereth speech of human wretchedness, and night unto night showeth knowledge of human wickedness. What has our faith, my brethren, done for its relief? What will be the fruits of our belief in the alms and the prayers now demanded ; what its share in the services of this assem- bly ? Shall we not exclaim, reviewing the greatness of the task, on the one hand, and, on the other, the greatness of the guilt which has neglected it, as did the apostles, whilst their Lord was enjoining a duty alike necessary and difficult, "Lord, increase our faith?"

THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED.

"i marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of christ unto another grospel : which is not ano- ther ; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the Gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any OTrfER Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto

YOU, LET HIM BE ACCURSED. As WE SAID BEFORE, SO SAY I NOW AGAIN, If ANY MAN PREACH ANY OTHER GOSPEL UNTO YOU THAN THAT YE HAVE RE- CEIVE^, let him be accursed." — Galatians i. 6-9.

How full are these words of force and solemnity. Let us fix the mind on them until we feel their significancy. Is it a profane blasphemer, who opens his mouth only to pour forth execrations, who has " clothed himself with cursing as with a garment," and whose malignant feelings towards his fellow- man assume the awful form of an appeal to heaven ? No ; it is one who delighted rather in blessing ; and who, cruelly as he was hated by his own nation, requited their enmity only with the most earnest wishes for their salvation, though he were himself accursed to obtain it. Is it the hot haste of a good man speaking unadvisedly, and rather according to the infirmity of the man than the sobriety of the saint ? The very form into which it is cast, and the calm, firm repetition of its tremendous denunciations, stamps it as the language of deliberation. Far from being an outburst of human passion, the language is that of one full of the Holy Ghost, of one selected and sent forth by Christ to be an authoritative teach- er of the churches — an inspired apostle. They are not the words of human infirmity, but the utterances of a holy God and a true — his unerring and " lively oracles." May, then, that Spirit which spoke in Paul hearken in us. The truth here taught us, if awful, is yet a salutary and timely one. We learn,

284 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED.

I. That it is possible to ascertain what the true Gospel is ;

II. That the Gospel is unchangeable ;

III. And that they who pervert it are accursed.

1. It is possible to acquire certainty as to the true nature of the Gospel. Paul's language throughout the epistle implies this. It would have been most unreasonable and most cruel thus to denounce those whose doubts as to the real purport of the Gospel were unavoidable and excusable. He makes no exceptions for ignorance, and prejudice, and heedlessness. He needed to make none. He had creden- tials, such as none of their false teachers brought, that Christ had sent him to preach the Gospel. Miracles, prophecies, and the moral results of his preaching, proclaimed him one commissioned of God. As to the doctrines he had taught, they could be left in no doubt. He assumes that the dis- tinction between his own gospel and that of the rival teach- ers was palpable on the most cursory examination ; and that his rudest hearers were competent to perceive the differ- ence between the opposing doctrines, and were bound to make the requisite discrimination. He had spoken clearly and without reserve ; consistently and without variation. He had in Galatia, as every where else, taught that men were sinners and could not be saved by their own good deeds; but that Christ " gave himself for us,"* and hav- ing died as the sacrifice, arose as the High Priest ; and that, repenting and believing, men might be justified freely in his righteousness, and accepted through his mediation. He had taught that by nature all inherited and deserved the wrath of God ; but that through Jesus the Holy Spirit was given, producing a change of heart. He had taught that the fruit of the Spirit thus given would be necessarily holiness of life in each true convert. Christ, the crucified Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, the great renewer and enlightener of the world, were the theme of his familiar converse, his ministrations and his writings. There was no want of certainty, then, as to what he had taught, and what they should believe.

2. But we find men, often excusing themselves for having spent a whole lifetime in a state of spiritual irresolution, or what is rather indifference to all religion, sheltering them- selves under the plea, that amid contending systems and warring pulpits they cannot ascertain what the Gospel really

* Gulatians i. 4.

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is. Some, calling themselves Christian teachers, assure them that there is no hell, but that death is to every man the gate of heaven. Others contend that Christ had no in- herent deity, and made no propitiatory sacrifice. He was but a wise and good teacher, and if men are saved, it is not by his atonement or by any other substitute sacrificed in their stead. Others, again, teach that Christ did indeed die for our salvation, but that it is our own meritorious conduct and character that entitle us to his salvation, or in other words, we are saved by our own righteousness. Amid the teachers who thus stand contending with each other, and contradicting the testimony of the great body of Christians in all ages, these irresolute men profess to be at a loss what sentiments to receive. And sometimes they wish that they had lived in the primitive ages of the church, and could have heard the Gospel from the lips of the apostles themselves.

Let such remember, then, that in the apostles' times they would have been subjected to the same perplexity of which they complain in our own. Let them remember, also, that they would then have found relief only from the same sources to which they are directed now. If they are distressed by the many and contradictory teachings of human guides, the Galatians were exposed to the same trial. While the apos- tles yet lived, the churches they had themselves planted and instructed were visited by those who taught another Gospel. Paul had taught a righteousness by faith in Christ that mag- nified the cross. These false teachers taught a righteousness that was of the law, making void the cross of Christ. In what way were the Galatians to know the truth ? The apos- tle was not always with them. They had his teachings treasured in their memory, and as recorded in his epistles. They had the teachings of other apostles, and of uninspired teachers known to accord in their doctrines with the inspired and authoritative guides of the church. And they had the Scriptures of the Old Testament. But above all these they had unimpeded access to God, and the Spirit of God was their counsellor. Under what process of teaching, and in what type of doctrine had they received this Spirit ? In that teaching and doctrine let them persevere. That Spirit, sought in prayer, would explain the Scriptures, and guide rightly and safely. If we are in the providence of God brought into similar conflicts from the opposing dogmas of men, we have the same resort in the Scriptures, and the

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like refuge in the Spirit of God. The volume gives no uncertain response ; the Holy Ghost is no tardy or inefficient instructor.

3. Now is it not most irrational — we appeal, my fellow- immortals, to your own consciences — is it not most irration- al to stun and weary your ears with the din of human controversies, while you make no appeal to the original authorities ? Are you sincerely in quest of truth ? Had you been told of an estate bequeathed you by some distant friend, and one informant spoke of it as small in amount, and another described it as being of great value, and you found yourself involved in a whirlwind of contradictory state- ments ; would you compare and collate the rumors on every side, and form your opinion from them, or appeal at once to the written will and the surrogate ? If you were told that your home was in flames, would you go around questioning those who had left the scene as to its origin, and extent, and ravages ; or would you not rather cast aside all other en- gagements, and rush to the rescue of your property and your family, to see with your own eyes, and toil with your own hands ? And are salvation, and the soul, and heaven worth so little that they do not require the like personal investigation, the like decisive appeal to the ultimate authori- ties?

Prophets and apostles, and the Lord of apostles and the Master of the prophets, hold in this case but one language. They refer you to the record. " To the law and to the tes- timony," cried the prophets ; if your teachings — if your teachers speak not according to these, it is because " there is no truth in them." " Search the Scriptures," is the com- mand of Christ ; " which are able to make you wise unto salvation," respond the glorious company of the apostles. Do you complain of dulness and weakness of mind? they reply, " If any man lack wisdom let him ask of God, who giveth liberally, and who upbraideth not ;" and a louder and sweeter voice than theirs is heard, continuing the strain — • " The Spirit shall lead unto all truth ;" — while the prophets, catching and re-echoing the invitation thus addressed to weak and erring man, exclaim, " The wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein."

Until the Scriptures, therefore, are abrogated, and until the Spirit of God has abdicated his office as teacher of the church, you cannot be at a loss, if disposed, in a candid and

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docile spirit, to learn what are the real doctrines of the Gospel. If a man will not ask that Spirit, indeed, he may have the ablest of human teachings, and bring to the book an intellect of angelic power, and yet the result be but error and darkness. But if he will come in the name of Jesus, imploring the Spirit, idiocy itself shall not prevent his learn- ing the way of salvation. If he refuses thus to come, and will not study the book of God in God's own appointed way, he is not entitled to complain of uncertainty as to his reli- gious opinions, much less to dogmatize in his scepticism. Let us, then, in this matter be honest to our own souls, for death is on his way : a judge is even now at the door, who will not stoop to answer our cavillings ; and wretched theit will be the fate of that man, who, with the open Bible before him, and the hovering dove of the Spirit above him, has neglected the one and repelled the other.

Make but the experiment in the temper of a little child, and a certainty, sure and unshaken as the everlasting hills, shall possess your souls, while truth darts in upon the dark- ened mind, and in the light of God you see light — the uncreated, undeclining glory of God, in the face of his Son. Then shall you know that Gospel which Paul preached, and whose promises he is now inheriting.

II. But again, the religion of which we may thus obtain a certain knowledge is unchangeable in its character. We hear men, sometimes, in forgetfulness of this character of Christianity, exclaiming, " Shall science and art go on, from day to day altering their forms and extending their bounda- ries, and religion alone receive and admit no improvement?" If they mean that the language of the Bible may be better understood, and that new researches of the antiquarian and traveller, and new fulfilments of prophecy, may throw new and yet increasing light on the pages of the sacred volume — if they mean only, that in days of higher devotedness, such as the church is yet to see, there may be a more thorough mastery of the doctrines and a more resplendent exhibition of the morals of Christianity — this no Christian denies ; but that the facts of Christianity can be modified, its morality be amended, or its doctrines altered, is impossible. Those who suppose it, forget that the Gospel is not a discovery but a revelation.

2. The Gospel is not a discovery but a revelation. By a discovery we mean what man's intellect has found out by

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its own efforts : by a revelation, what God's intellect has communicated to man's intellect, and what, if not thus aided, man could not have discovered for himself. The one is the fruit of man's labor, the other the gift of God's grace. Now, what man's intellect has discovered, man's intellect may investigate more thoroughly and understand more perfectly. But what man has learned only from God's disclosures, he can of course understand no further than he finds it on the face of those disclosures. He cannot go up to the original truths themselves upon which God drew, and thus improve on the Divine communications. Some of the disclosures thus made are, from the very necessity of our nature, or from a wise regard to our present interests and duties, im- perfect revelations, leaving portions of the subject shrouded in darkness. These imperfect revelations are called myste- ries. With the limits set by the Divine mind to his revela- tions, our investigations must terminate : the attempt to pass beyond these is not only temerity, it is folly and ruin. The adventurer dashes himself to his own destruction against the impassable barriers of the human intellect.

When Columbus found our continent, it was a discovery. Where one man had gone, other men might follow, and inquire more fully, and learn more correctly than did the original discoverer, and thus our knowledge of America may be destined to receive daily improvements. But when Paul was rapt into the third heaven, and saw and heard what it was unlawful to utter, it was a revelation. No mortal foot could follow him, to pursue and improve his account. Now, had it been permitted Paul to describe in writing the celes- tial glories thus unveiled to him, those who wished to un- derstand the nature of that upper world would have but one course left for them to pursue. They must investigate Paul's character for veracity, and the evidences he adduced that the Most High had conferred on him so transcendant a favor as to be permitted to become a visitant there. When they had settled these questions, all that their philosophy could do would be but to explain Paul's language as they found it in his descriptions. They could not hope for fur- ther knowledge of the world described, unless God should choose to make a fresh revelation to another Paul. No tel- escope could read what his vision had left unread — no crea- ted wing could bear the student up the pathless skies to investigate what Paul had left untold : no stretch of human

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sagacity could add to the record as the apostle left it. With the first discoverer of our western world it was different : his account sent back to Europe could be continually amend- ed and enlarged ; and the school-boy of our times may know more of the new world than did the sagacious navigator who first conjectured and then established its existence.

III. Now, the Gospel is strictly a revelation. It tells us of a world which we can enter for ourselves only by dying : it tells us of the nature and will of our God what none but he could tell, and of which we can know only as much as he has chosen to tell. As the human intellect did not dis- cover the Gospel, so no advancement of the human intellect can amend or alter it : but we have heard and read of men who have dared to say, " Christ came to set up a dispensa- tion ; it is now past ; it has done service in its day, but its day is now gone by. The Gospel needed by our refined and scientific times must be a new dispensation." We shudder at the profanity, of the spirit that can vent itself in language of such impious arrogance ; for no man may claim to come with a new dispensation, unless he comes heralded by such prophecies as ushered Christ's way, and attended by such miracles as marked the whole course of the Re- deemer. We say to the sophists and dreamers who talk thus madly of the perfectibility of human nature, and its need of a new and amended Gospel, " Produce your wit- nesses ; let the winds obey your bidding, and the waves become the fixed and stable pavement of your feet ; give eyes to the blind, and call the dead from their tombs ; speak, as Christ spoke, the words of Divine wisdom ; and read, as did he, the secrets of the heart. Die as Christ died, with the earth heaving beneath, and the heavens darkened above, to attest their sympathy with, and their subjection to, the mighty sufferer. And having done this, you have but half done your mission : show the niche in ancient prophecy reserved for your coming. When Jesus appeared, he came in the train of a long procession of prophets, who had before witnessed of his coming, and carried the line of their testi- mony, in unbroken continuity, from Eden up to Calvary. He did, indeed, supersede a former dispensation ; but that very dispensation had predicted its own departure and de- scribed Christ's advent. Does the present dispensation, that of Christ's Gospel, speak of itself as being thus transient and temporary ? No, it claims to endure till yon sun shall

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have forsaken his station : the Gospel is an everlasting Gos- pel. Does Moses or does Christ foretell your new Gospel ? The Bible has else no room for it. Yes, they do foretell it ; but it is in the language of Enoch ; it is the Gospel which the seventh from Adam foretold — the Gospel s of hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against the Lord,' and of which the Lord 'when he cometh with ten thousand of his saints,' shall 'convince the ungodly' "* Mad were the builders of Babel, when they would raise the tower, whose foot was on the earth, up to the heavens ; but they who would, by human discoveries, build up a new and better Gospel, are the builders yet more insane of a Babel yet more impious.

IV. But it will be urged that there have been men cf very considerable austerity of morals, and of high pretensions to wisdom, who have taught a gospel very different from Paul's. "Were it not uncharitable to condemn them ? We will not undertake, for ourselves, to answer this question. To their own Master they stand or fall ; but if their Master have spoken, in his own oracles, in reply to this question, we must not suppress or condemn the response that has been given. By his Spirit, then, in his servant Paul, he has replied, and his language is, " But though we, or an

ANGEL FROM HEAVEN, PREACH ANY OTHER GOSPEL UNTO YOU THAN THAT WHICH WE HAVE PREACHED UNTO YOU,

let him be accursed." We are taught in the Scriptures, by men's moral fruits, to judge whether they are true disci- ples of the true doctrine ; but we are not allowed, merely by their fruits, to judge of their doctrine itself. We must bring this to the test of the Scriptures as well ; and, if re- jected by this test, whatever the comparative excellence of deportment in the teachers, they and their doctrine are dis- allowed. The apostle puts the case, in favor of a false teacher, into the most authoritative form, surrounding him with the highest splendor of moral character and the most plausible show of a heavenly mission. He imagines his own appearance as the promulgator of a new Gospel. Should the convert whom Christ's glory smote down on the highway to Damascus — he who had been in labors more abundant, and in deaths oft, whose were miraculous tongues and miraculous works — should he bring to the Galatian

* Jude 14, 15.

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"church " another gospel," they were to turn from it and from its teacher without hesitation. He proceeds further : as if to put the decision into the strongest possible form, he imagines a teacher, possessing not merely the imperfect sanctity of erring man, but one invested with the holiness of an angel from heaven. His words do not describe Satan corning up out of the pit, and disguised as an angel of light ; but he conceives an event yet more dazzling in its seduc- tions, yet more perplexing and ensnaring to the mind of the learner. Should an angel from heaven, one yet recent from those glorious courts, and with the brightness of its moral splendor and its " beauty of holiness" still clinging about him, venture to sin, and commence his fall by preaching to our race another gospel, let him be accursed.

V. Paul did not think lightly of those benign and blessed spirits that are ministering to the heirs of salvation. They had often appeared to the apostles, and interposed effectually in their behalf. Paul knew their might and wisdom ; he admired and emulated their holiness, their zealous obedience, their untiring diligence ; but, in comparison with Christ and his truth, Paul loved not even angels. One of these beings had appeared to Peter, sleeping in the inner prison and chained between two soldiers, and rousing him, had led him forth through guards and barriers to liberty. When Paul was himself on ship-board, sailing towards Rome, an angel of God appeared to him, promising him the preservation of his own life and the lives of all his companions ; and the promise was kept : but had Peter's deliverer, on their way after passing through " the iron gate that led into the city," commanded him to preach another gospel than Christ's, Peter would have rebuked his deliverer, and used to the tempter the rebuke he had once received himself from his Master, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Had the minister- ing Spirit who cheered Paul on his voyage stayed to preach to Paul's fellow-voyagers another gospel, Paul would have denounced the new system as a doctrine of devils : for no angel appearing from heaven could bring for his revelation the force of evidence we have for Christ's revelation, in its countless miracles, its accomplished prophecies, and the moral renovations wrought by its influence. And no angel has been promised those full influences of the Holy Spirit that were assured to the apostles for the benefit of the church. Were it possible, then, for one of these holy beings to fall

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away and become a preacher of heresy, great as might have been his splendor and wisdom, and his former holiness, Paul, the sinner — Paul, the forgiven persecutor, would have with- stood and cursed him. The apostle was but a frail man ; his body, like ours, a tabernacle of clay, crushed before the moth ; yet, in all his weakness, had he met an angel of the highest rank in heaven, one of those " that excel in strength," returning from a mission like that to Sennacherib's camp, his right hand yet red with the blood of a hundred thousand warriors, and had that angel sought to turn the apostle from the truth as it was in Jesus, Paul would not have feared to denounce him in the name of their common Lord, and dust and ashes would have confounded the archangel.

What cause have we for gratitude that angels have not endeavored thus to subvert our faith. They have, on the contrary, given their constant attestation and subjection to Christ. They with songs announced his birth to the shep- herds of Bethlehem. They ministered to him in the wilder- ness of temptation, and in the sorer agony of Gethsemane. Had he but summoned them, twelve legions had flown to his side ; they guarded his tomb, and when it was visited by the weeping disciples, they testified his resurrection. When he ascended on high, they attended him ; and when he shall return to judgment, they will troop around him. Mean- while the mighty angel seen by John flying through heaven, was not seen denying, but publishing the everlasting Gospel; and such is their attachment to our Lord, that every sinner believing in him has angels to rejoice in his conversion, and angels to minister to his onward course, to guard his depart- ing spirit and to reclaim his deserted clay from the sepulchre. Their testimony, then, is ever for Christ : they enforce the witness of apostles, and by all their demeanor they bid man do what they have themselves done at the bidding of the Father — worship the Son ; for, " when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, Let all the angels of God worship him."* Rejecting that adoration when prof- fered to themselves, they cheerfully yield it to the Redeemer. He, then, that substitutes another Gospel for that of Paul, cannot plead angelic patronage or instruction. They adore where he blasphemes.

If true at all, then the Gospel is unmingled and immutable

* Heb. i. 6.

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truth : no events can occur, no evidence be adduced, author- izing us to modify that system which was given of God, and which God guards, and that, like its Divine author, claims a perfection that admits neither amendment nor decay, the one unchangeable Gospel " which is not another."

VI. Those perverting the Gospel are accursed, not be- cause fallible man has willed it, but God the Holy Ghost has pronounced the curse ; and who may annuL or dispute it? The fearful doom is not unmerited. Whatever the external recommendations of any such system, or of its advocates, did their show of excellence equal that of an angel, as yet but in the first hour of his fall, they inherit a fearful curse, because of the crime they commit and the mischief they occasion.

I. Of the greatness of the crime we form but inadequate conceptions, from the blindness produced by our share in the guilt of our race, and also from the faint and remote views we have of God. Yet what arrogance is it, evidently, to alter the teachings of the Unerring and the Omniscient, the Holy One of Israel — what the tearfulness of the presumption, that would correct infinite wisdom and contradict the God of truth ! There is something most daring and portentous in the ingratitude of the creature that would dictate and pre- scribe to the Creator who has made him, and the unwearied Benefactor whose sleepless vigilance protects him from destruction, and whose untiring bounty is daily supplying him. Ajid how aggravated the sin of rejecting, on any pre- text, the plans and the gifts of that Redeemer who has died for us, and of grieving that Spirit which would have recon- ciled and sanctified us. And what language can describe the aggravated cruelty of thus counterworking God's designs of mercy in the Gospel ? It is a revelation of grace, in which wrath was to be appeased, that mercy might have its free course over the miseries of a groaning world. They who set aside this Gospel, remove or clog the channel of God's mercy, that his vengeance may have its original scope, and roll its consuming deluge over a world of sin. The man who would cut off the supplies of food from his famished fellow-creatures in a besieged town — the wretch who should in wantonness destroy all the remedies provided for a hos- pital in which crowds were tossing in agony — agony that, unrelieved, must issue in death, but which these remedies could not only relieve but remove — such a destroyer, such a

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traitor were surely not as cruel as the man who sets aside the true Gospel. For the religion of Christ is the food of the soul and the bread of heaven ; and the atonement of Christ, as Paul preached it, is the one remedy for the wretchedness and sin of our race, and apart from it there is no salvation for the soul to all eternity.

2. The greatness of the mischief is necessarily incalcula- ble. For all earthly powers must fail to span and to gauge that eternity, into which death ushers us, and for which the Gospel is to prepare us. To pervert that Gospel is to aid Satan in thrusting down our race to misery unremitting and unimaginable. What is a conflagration that lay* a city in ashes, or a plague sweeping over the breadth of the land — what is loss of freedom, or reputation, or life, compared with the loss of the soul 1 And he who sets aside the Gos- pel ruins not one soul but many. " Their word will eat as doth a canker." Error is contagious. The victim of delu- sion will seek to quiet his conscience, and increase the influence of his system, by swelling the number of proselytes to his party from every side. Who can calculate the blind, led by the blind, that have already entered the pit, and are now even rejoicing on their way thither? To have any share in producing such mischief, is to aid in feeding the worm that never dies, and to heap fuel on the flame that is never quenched. May the mercy of God save us from such sin. Better were it to beg crumbs with Lazarus, and sit with Job on the dunghill, than to share riches, honor and power here, on condition of preaching another gospel, and prophesying smooth things, and crying "peace, peace," while God's own voice proclaims, " There is no peace to the wicked."

With these views, then, of the character of the Gospel, let us ask ourselves, as in the sight of God, Have we the Gospel that Paul preached, or do we receive another? If we receive that which he preached, do we obey it ? If it be our hope and guide, let us hold it fast with an unwavering confi- dence, and defend it by a fearless profession, though man cavil at, or an angel contradict its testimonies ; content with the assurance that what the Scriptures teach and the Spirit seals shall stand, though the elements melt with fervent heat, and the heavens pass away as a scroll when it is rolled to- gether.

1. It is evidently the interest and duty of every hearer of

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the Gospel to ascertain that he is receiving that system of truth which the apostles taught. The word of God allows not, nor will his bar acquit those who have trusted indo- lently in the numbers attached to their sect, or in the wisdom or piety of their teachers, while careless a» to their own personal experience of religion, and neglect the earnest study of those Scriptures that are to try every doctrine and judge every spirit. In Paul's time the Gospel had its opposers among the Jews who sought after signs, and among the Greeks who looked for wisdom. And men now reject or modify the Gospel for the same causes. Should modern systems, therefore, demand our faith and claim to supplant the Gospel of Paul, either because of the signs and wonders that attest them and the new revelations they boast to have received, on the one hand, or because of the superior wis- dom, refinement and philosophy of those who defend them, on the other hand ; we do well to remember that we receive such systems at our peril. And the wo that smites the teachers of these errors will not spare their followers.

2. Errors in religion are neither rare nor harmless. If even in apostolic times there were not wanting heresies of the most fatal character, we have no reason to expect that they should become less numerous or less fatal, now that the age of miracles is past, and the presence of inspired and infallible teachers is withdrawn. And if, from these varied forms of religious belief, some would infer the harmlessness of error, and teach us that every system, calling itself Chris- tian, has in the main the great truths necessary to piety here and happiness hereafter, we need but bring their theory to the test of the text before us. The teachers opposing Paul, those at least in Galatia, preached apparently the same God and the same judgment and eternal retribution, as did the apostle ; nor is there any evidence that they disputed the divine mission of our Saviour. But there was an entire difference of statement as to the way of salvation. How did Paul act ? Did he respect the independence of those who thus differed from him, and assert their essential union with himself in the great matters of the faith? The course that he pursued so resolutely himself, and so impressively urged upon others, was far different. Instead of dwelling on the opinions held in common, as furnishing a sufficient basis for concord, and acknowledging in the truths they yet retained the basis of a common Christianity, he denounced, without

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compromise or qualification, the opposing doctrine as being "another gospel." For it taught error as to the fundamen- tal truth, the mode of a sinner's acceptance with God.

3. There are truths in religion of such vital importance that departure from them must destroy the soul. The holi- ness that the Gospel came to foster is the effect of truth received in the love of it. And this truth is in its own nature harmonious and one. Truth cannot contradict itself: nor in science or art can there be two opposed and warring truths. So is it also in religion. The singleness of truth constitutes the basis of its exclusiveness. It claims for itself, exclusively and without rival, the faith and obedience of mankind ; a claim that is exclusive because it is just, and that could not be consistent without requiring thus the rejec- tion of all error. These exclusive claims are often misrep- resented as involving the most odious intolerance and illiber- ally. But in truth there is no more a possibility of the existence of several true religions, than there is of the exist- ence of more than one God. From the one Jehovah there can emanate but the one truth — developed, indeed, in differ- ent degrees at different ages, in Judaism the bud, in Chris- tianity the expanded flower — but essentially, and in all ages, the one unchanged and unchangeable religion, revealing for man the sinner, salvation, through an atonement and Medi- ator of Divine appointment. Much of error may be mingled with this truth in various minds ; but there are vital errors which the word of God has doomed as the seals of ruin in those who retain them. It recognizes in the church of God one head and one foundation, and those only are acknow- ledged as the heirs of life who build on this foundation, and

"WHO HOLD THE HEAD."

THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD.

(Delivered at the time of a Collection made for the American Seamen's Friend Society.) " And the sea gave up the dead which were in it." — Rev. xx. 13.

The resurrection was a favorite theme with the apostles. The fact of Christ's having risen, was with them the crowning miracle of his earthly course, and an irrefragable argument of his divine mission. The resurrection of all mankind by Christ's power, to be judged at Christ's bar, was one of the truths upon which the. first ministers of the gospel sought to turn the eyes of all their hearers. Peter preached this doc- trine to the scribes of Jerusalem, and Paul proclaimed it amid the philosophers of Athens. And what thoughts struggle within us, as we look forward to such a change ! These corruptible bodies shall stand again in the closest companion- ship with the souls that once inhabited them — that at death deserted them, but which now have resumed them. Accord- ing to the deeds done in the body, men are to be judged. The term of probation closed when the spirit quitted the body, and dropped it into the grave. The time of judgment begins when that grave is opened and that body reanimated, " that every one may receive the things done in his body."* We are prone, perhaps, to think too much of these perishable tabernacles of clay. But we do not, my beloved hearers, think enough of them, unless we think of them often and vividly, as bodies that are one day to rise again, endued with an indestructible existence, and capacitated for the end- less bliss of heaven, or the eternal misery of hell.

I. This great doctrine, the resurrection of the body, seems yet better fitted than the kindred truth of the immortality of the soul, to make a powerful impression on the mind of man, when receiving the gospel for the first time. The heathen may have heard of the existence after death of the immaterial

* 2 Cor. v. 10.

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spirit within him ; but he thinks of that principle as some- thing impalpable and unearthly, that he has never yet seen, and that is scarce the same with himself. He may have heard even that after death he should still have a body. He may have been taught, as many an idolatrous creed teaches its votaries, that the soul shall pass after death into other bo- dies of the higher or the lower orders of being. But this doc- trine of the transmigration of souls cannot take the same hold on his mind as does the scriptural truth, teaching him the resurrection of the existing body. The thoughts of the man, his fears, his hopes, and his plans, have had reference chiefly to the body. Bring him to look upon it as possible, that this — the material frame-work in which he has enjoyed or suffered, by which he has labored and acquired, which he has clothed and fed, and in which he has sinned — this body, which, in most of his thoughts, has been regarded as the whole of himself — is to live again beyond the grave, and he is startled. Talk to him of the inward* man of the soul, and he listens, as if you spoke of a stranger. But bring your statements home to the outward man of his body, and he feels that it is he himself, who is to be happy or to be wretch- ed in that eternity of which you tell him. Hence a living missionary, in his first religious instructions to the king of a heathen tribe in South Africa, found him indifferent and cal- lous to all his statements of the gospel, until this truth was announced. It aroused in the barbarian chief the wildest emotions, and excited an undisguised alarm. He had been a warrior, and had lifted up his spear against multitudes slain in battle. He asked, in amazement, if these his foes should all live. And the assurance that they should arise, filled him with perplexity and dismay, such as he could not conceal. He could not abide the thought. A lung slumbering con- science had been pierced through all its coverings. Well do such incidents illustrate the fact, that He who gave the gospel knew what was in man, and infused into the leaven of his own word those elements that are mightiest to work upon all the powers of man's soul, and to penetrate with their in- fluence the whole mass of human society. And in our an- nouncement of that gospel, we do well to adhere to the scrip- tural pattern given us by the Author of the gospel. Many ol the other doctrines of Christianity are almost insensibly modified, in our mode of presenting them, by the natural re- ligion which intimates, if it docs not establish, these or similar

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truths. But the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is not a doctrine of natural religion. It is purely a doctrine of revelation, and becomes known to us merely from the living oracles of Scripture. And as man's reason did not discover it, it is not for man's reason to alter or amend the doctrine according to his caprices and prejudices.

In what glorious and terrific imagery does the Scripture before us array the scenes of the resurrection. In the hea- vens, thronged by angels in all their glory, is seen the de- scending throne. Upon it, in his own and his Father's glory, sits the Son of Man, the crucified Nazarene, now the judge of quick and dead. Before him the material heavens are rolled together as a scroll, and the elements melt with fer- vent heat. The creation cannot abide the dread presence of its Creator, " from whose face the earth and the heavens fled away ;" and yet they cannot escape it : " and there was found no place for them." His bare word had accomplished the miracle of creation, and now, by a kindred act of power, his mere glance shakes the world, and awes it into prepara- tion for the judgment. The old heathen talked of their " cloud-compelling Jove," whose eye gathered all the storms of the skies. But how mean is all this to the scriptural ima- gery of a world-compelling Christ. The trumpet sounds. The earth shakes with inward commotions. Its dead — its ancient dead — all the buried of forgotten tribes, and of ante- diluvian times, are coming ; more numerous than the hosts ever mustered by earthly captain to the battle, yet all their numbers infuse into them no courage in meeting their judge. They have no thought of resisting his power. Whatever the gods in whom they trusted once, they feel now the pre- sence, and await the fiat of the one true God, Maker and Judge of heaven and earth. The patriarchs, who lived when the world was young, and the coming generations to be born long after our death, who shall have lived when that world had grown old, shall, with us, stand before the judgment seat. From this tribunal there lies no appeal, and of the sentence now to be uttered there can be no reversal, and no revision.

It will be a scene of solemn interest, not only as the meet- ing of man with his Redeemer and Judge, but from the meeting of mankind together. The scriptural accounts of the judgment represent it as an occasion when we shall know ourselves at least. From their descriptions of that day, as

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a day of disclosures, when the secrets of all hearts shallbe made manifest, they seem also to imply that we shall know others, and be known by them. Without our consciousness of our own identity, there could evidently be no sense of guilt; and without our knowledge of the identity of our fel- low-sinners, it seems to us, there could be no disclosures, such as the Bible predicts. Man then, in that gathering, will not only know himself, and know his God, but he will know his race. And this, to the sinner, will add inconceiva- bly to the terrors of that assembling. The ungodly will meet there the righteous, who warned him in vain, and all whose warnings are about to be verified. Long forgotten emotions, and privileges undervalued and misim proved, will flash upon the memory, as the eye glances on the face of some dead friend, with whom those feelings and opportunities were associated. The unconverted child of the Sabbath schools shall face his faithful teacher ; and parents and chil- dren, pastors and people, all the connections which death had for a time sundered, shall there recognize each other. It will be to some a fearful meeting, as they encounter there for the first time those whose death they had occasioned. The murderer will confront his victim. Cain and Abel, who have been, perhaps, parted from each other since the hour when the fratricide fled from the scene of his crime, and the body of his brother lay breathless in the dust, will now meet again. The body which sunk beneath that murderous blow, dealt by a brother's hand, and the hand which inflicted that blow, will be there, gathered again from the indiscriminate dust over which the world has trodden for scores of centuries. But if it be fearful to meet, thus, any on whom we may have brought temporal death, how much more may the scene be dreaded, by those who have occasioned the spiritual death of others, as the scene of their meeting with the proselytes and admirers, whose souls they aided in ruining for ever. It will be sad for Caiaphas to meet the innocent Messiah whom he adjudged to death, though it was but the death of the body ; but it would seem almost equally sad for the Jewish High Priest to face there his kindred and friends, whose unbelief his arguments sealed, and whose impenitence his example served to render obdurate and final, for upon them he will have brought the death of the soul. The meetings of the resurrection will form, then, no small portion of its terrors. This is the truth, upon which we would chiefly insist, from

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the part of Scripture now before us. We have considered, generally, the resurrection of the dead. Let us proceed next to consider the dead of the sea, who are in our text distin- guished from the rest of the dead ; and thence let us pass to the effects of their re-union with the rest of mankind, who ended their mortal career elsewhere than on the deep. Our remaining divisions will be, therefore,

II. The sea giving up its dead.

III. The meeting of the dead, so given up of the sea, with the dead of the land.

II. The sea will be found thickly peopled with the mortal remains of mankind. In the earlier ages of the world, when the relations of the various nations to each other were gene- rally those of bitter hostility, and the ties of a common bro- therhood were little felt, the sea, in consequence of their comparative ignorance of navigation, served as a barrier, parting the tribes of opposite shores, who might else have met only for mutual slaughter, ending in extermination. Now that a more peaceful spirit prevails, the sea, which once serv- ed to preserve, by dividing the nations, has, in the progress of art and discovery, become the channel of easier intercourse and the medium of uniting the nations. It is the great high- way of traffic, a highway on which the builder cannot en- croach, and no monarch possesses the power of closing the path, or engrossing the travel. Thus continually traversed, the ocean has become, to many of its adventurous voyagers, the place of burial. But it has been also the scene of battle, as well as the highway of commerce. Upon it have been decided many of those conflicts which determined the dynasty or the race, to whom for a time should be committed the empire of the world. It was on the sea, in the light of Sala- mis, that the fleets of Greece and Persia contended, whether the despotism and wealth of the East should extend their widening sway over the freedom and arts of the West. It was in the sea-fight of Actium, that the imperial power of Rome, then claiming dominion over the world, was assured to Augustus and his successors, and the way was prepared for the universal peace that reigned at our Saviour's birth. On this element was fought the battle of Lepanto, where the right arm of the Ottoman was broken. And, as we come down to our own times, the fights of Aboukir, Trafalgar, and Na- varino, all contests upon the sea, were battles affecting in no slight degree the destinies of all Europe, and the civilized

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world. All these have served to gorge the deep with the carcases of men. It has had, again, its shipwrecks. Though man may talk of his power to bridle the elements, and of the triumphs of art, compelling all nature to do his work, yet there are scenes on the sea in which he feels his proper impotence. And when God lets loose his winds, and calls up his billows, man becomes sensible of his dependence. How many in all ages, since commerce first began her voy- ages of profit or discovery, have perished in the waters, foundering in the midnight storm, driven on the unsuspected rocks, engulfed by the whirlpool, or dashed by winds against some iron-bound coast. Even in our own times, with all our improvements in the art of navigation, and with all the expenditures that are incurred to increase the mariner's security, it has been calculated by some, that each year one thousand ships are lost at sea.

The sea, then, has its dead. And when the trump is blown, the archangel's summons to the judgment, the sea shall give up these its long-buried treasures. The gold and the jewels it has accumulated, the "buried argosies," with all the rich freight which it has swallowed up, will be permitted to slumber unreclaimed; but no relic that has formed part of the corpse of a child of Adam will be left unclaimed or unsurrendered in that hour. The invalid, who, in quest of health, embarked on the sea, and perished on the voyage, committed to the deep with the solemn ceremonies of reli- gion— the pirate, flung into the waves from a deck which he had made slippery with blood — the emigrant's child, whose corpse its weeping parents surrendered to the deep on their way to a land of strangers — the whaler, going down quick into death midst his adventurous employment — the wretched slave, perishing amid the horrors of the Middle Passage — the sailor, dropt from the yard-arm in some mid- night gale — the wrecked, and the dead in battle, all will arise at that summons. The mariners of all times, who have died on their loved element, those who rowed on the galleys of Tyre or Carthage, or manned the swift ships of Tarshish, will be there, together with the dead of our own days. The idolater, who sunk from some Chinese junk while invoking his graven images ; and the missionary of the cross, who, like Coke, perished on his way to preach the gospel to the heathen, or who, like Chamberlain, compelled to return from the field of missionary toil, with shattered health, and all

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wearied and spent with labors for Christ, has expired on his homeward way — all, all shall be there. As these shall re- appear from the entombing waters, will their coming have no effect upon the multitudes who died on the shore, and whose bodies also the cemeteries and sepulchres of earth shall on that day have restored ? We have thus reached the last division of our subject.

III. The meeting of the dead of the sea with the dead of the land.

1. There must be, then, in this resurrection from the sea, much to awaken feeling in the others of the risen dead, from this, if from no other cause : these, the dead of the sea, will be the kindred and near connections of those who died upon the land. Among those whom the waters shall in that day have restored, will be some who quitted home expecting a speedy return, and for whose coming attached kindred and friends looked long, but looked in vain. The exact mode, and scene, and hour of their deaths have remained until that day unknown to the rest of mankind. And can it be, with- out feeling, that these will be seen again by those who loved them, and who through weary years longed for their return, still feeding " the hope that keeps alive despair?" The dead of ocean will be the children and pupils, again, of the dead of the land. Their moral character may have been formed, and their eternal interests affected, less by their later asso- ciates on the deep, than by the earlier instructions they received on shore. They may have exhibited on the deck and in the forecastle only the examples they witnessed in the nursery, ar.d the tempers they cherished, and the habits they formed in the home. When these are restored, they are restored to witness for or against their parents, and the associates of their childhood and youth. These last may have died on shore, but by their influence on the mariner, they have transmitted their own spirit and moral character over the wide waste of waters, to remote and barbarous shores. It cannot, in the very nature of the human soul, its memory, its affections, and its conscience remaining what they now are — it cannot but be a scene of solemn interest, when the dead of the land shall behold their kindred dead of the sea.

2. Let it be remembered, again, that a very large propor- tion of those who have thus perished on the ocean, will appear to have perished in the service of the landsman.

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The mariner will appear very generally, we say, to have found his watery grave while in the service of those dwelling upon shore. Some in voyages of discovery, despatched on a mission to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, or to discover new routes for commercial enterprise, and new marts for traffic. Thus perished the French navigator La Peyrouse, whose fate was to the men of the last generation so long the occasion of anxious speculation. Still greater numbers have perished in the service of commerce. The looms and forges of Britain could not continue to work, and famine would stalk through her cities, did not her ships bear abroad the manufactures of her artisans to every clime. It is to the sailor we owe it that the cottons of Manchester, and the cutlery of Birmingham reach even the wigwams of our western Indians. Literature employs and needs the seaman, and the scholar beyond the Alleghanies studies books that were purchased for him in the book-fairs of Germany, and brought across the sea by the adventurous mariner. And look to the home, and see how many of its delicacies, and luxuries, and adornments are brought to us from abroad by the sailor's skill and enterprise. And our agriculture needs his aid. The grains of the North, and the cotton of the South would find little vent, were not the swift ships ready to bear them to a market. They have served the church also. By them the Pilgrim Fathers reached a refuge on these shores, and four\d a home. By them the missionary has been wafted to his station in the heathen world. As a people we are under special obligations to the art and enterprise of the navigator. We are a nation of emigrants. The land we occupy was discovered and colonised by the aid of the mari- ner. The seaman has, then, been employed in our service. And as far as he was our servant, doing our work, we were bound to care for his well-being; and if he perished in our service, it was surely our duty to inquire whether he perish- ed in any degree by our fault. The ten commandments .describe the duties of the employer as well as those of the parent. Care for the servant as well as the child was one of the lessons of Sinai. And though literally the servant named in the Decalogue might be only the servant of the household, not he who docs service for us at a distance; yet the spirit of these commandments is not to be confined by so close and literal an interpretation. When our Saviour was asked, 'Who is my neighbor V he pointed the inquirer to the

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remote and alien Samaritan. All whom we can reach, and all whom we use in service, mediate or immediate, we should seek to benefit, as far as our power and influence extend.

3. Others of those buried in the waters have lost their lives in defence of those upon the shore. In the last of our wars with the mother country, the navy was regarded as the right arm of our defence, under God, from the foreign foe. And so it has been with other lands. Their possessions, their liberties, their families and homes, have been protected by the deaths of those whom they have never known, but who expired, fighting their battles, leagues away, on the deep sea. Are no obligations imposed on us, in behalf of those who have thus befriended us, and in behalf of their successors and associates'? Can a nation claim the praise of common hones- ty or gratitude, who neglect the moral and spiritual interests of these their defenders?

4. Let us reflect, also, on the fact, that many of those who have perished on the waters will be found to have perished through the neglect of those living on shore. We allude not merely to negligence in providing the necessary helps for the navigator. The Government, that should leave the shoals and reefs in its harbors unmarked by buoys, and that, along a line of frequented but dangerous sea-coast, should rear no light-houses, would be held guilty of the death of all shipwrecked in consequence. But may there not be other classes of neglect equally or yet more fatal? The parent who has neglected to govern and instruct his child, until that child, impatient of all restraint, rushes away to the sea as a last refuge, and there sinks, a victim to the sailor's sufferings or the sailor's vices, can scarce meet, with composure, that child in the day when the sea gives up its dead. Or if, as a community, or as churches, we shut our eyes to the miseries of the sick and friendless seaman, or to the vices and oppres- sions by which he is often ruined for time and eternity, shall we be clear in the day when inquisition is made for blood? No, unless the church does her full duty, or in other words, reaches in her efforts the measure of her full ability, for the spiritual benefit of the seaman, her neglect must be charge- able upon her. Now, in the Saviour's description of the condemnation of sinners at the last day, it will be observed, that he selects instances, not of sins of commission, but of sins of omission, as destroying the world. " In as much as ye did it not" is the ground of the doom pronounced,

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May not the perishing sailor take up most of the items of that sentence, and charge them home upon many of the professed disciples of Christ 1 Neither by influence, nor prayers, nor alms, did they relieve his temporal and spiritual destitution, when hungry, or thirsty, or sick, or naked, or in prison. And far as this neglect operated to form the habits that hastened his death, and led, perhaps, to his eter- nal ruin, so far it cannot be desirable to think of meeting him again, among those who shall rise in the last day from the ocean depths, to stand with us before the judgment seat. 5. Many, we remark lastly, of the dead of the sea will be found to have been victims to the sins of those upon shore. Those who have perished in unjust wars waged upon that element, will they have no quarrel of blood against the rulers that sent them forth ? The statesmen, the blunders or the crimes of whose policy the waters have long con- cealed, must one day face those who have been slaughtered by their recklessness. How many of the victims over whom the dark blue sea rolls its waters, have perished, year by year, in the nefarious slave trade. Such is the large propor- tion of the miserable children of Africa who. die on the voy- age, that, along the ordinary course of the slave ship from the eastern shores of Africa to our own continent, the deep must be strewn, and the bottom of the sea, at some portions of the way, paved with the remains of those who have been torn from their country and home, by the orders or conni- vance of the slave-trader, to perish on the ocean. In the day of the resurrection that galaxy of skeletons will rise; and the voice of wailing and accusation, stilled for centuries beneath the waters, will be lifted up to be stilled no more for ever. And so it may be said of every other form of wick- edness, of which those that sail in our ships are rendered the instruments or the victims. The keeper of the dram shop, or the brothel, where the sailor is taught to forget God and harden himself in iniquity, will not find it a light thing, in that great day of retribution, to encounter those whom he made his prey. The seaman may not have died on the pre- mises of his tempter, in drunken riot; but out upon the far ocean he may have carried the habits there acquired, and died, the victim of intemperance, or profligacy, in a climate far removed from that where he was first lessoned in the ways of ruin, sinking perhaps in a shipwreck, caused, as many shipwrecks have been caused, by the intoxication of the

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commander or his crew. But the sea does not contain all the victims among its sons, who have thus been destroyed by the vices learned of the landsman. Many a sailor thus corrupted has perished on shore in a drunken broil, or pined away in some foreign hospital, or ended his days in a prison. Human laws seized not on those who first ensnared him ; but will divine laws be equally indulgent, or equally remiss ? The literature of the shore will be called to account for its influence on the character and well-being of the seaman. The song writer, who, perhaps, a hungry and unprincipled scribbler, penned his doggrel lines in some garret, little careful except as to the compensation he should earn, the dirty pence that were to pay for his rhymes, will one day be made to answer for the influence that went forth from him to those who shouted his verses, in the night watch, on the far sea, or perchance upon some heathen shore. The infidel, who may have sat in elegant and lettered ease, preparing his attacks upon the Bible and the Saviour, thought little, proba- bly, but of the fame and influence he should win upon the shore. But the seeds of death which he scattered may have been wafted whither he never thought to trace them. And in that day of retribution, he may be made to lament his own influence on the rude seaman whom he has hardened in blas- phemy and impiety; and who has sported with objections derived by him at the second hand or third hand from such writers, whilst he figured amongst his illiterate and admiring companions, as the tarred Voltaire or Paine of the forecastle and the round top, the merriest and boldest scoffer of the crew.

The meeting, then, of the dead of the land with the dead of the sea will be one of dread solemnity, because of the ties of kindred and influence that bound them together — and because multitudes of those buried in the deep died in the service of the landsman, or in his defence, many by his ne- glect, and many as the victims of the varied wickedness in which he had instructed, hardened, or employed them. Those who have been allied in sin, and accomplices in trans- gression, will find it one of the elements of their future torment, to be associated together in the scenes of the last judgment, and in those scenes which lie beyond that day. The animosity, revenge, and hate of the unregenerate heart, then released from all restraint, and exasperated by despair,

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will find vent, and rage uncontrolled through the sinner's long eternity of wo.

In conclusion, let us dwell on some of the practical results of the theme we have considered.

1. The dead shall rise, all shall rise, and together. From the land and from the sea, wherever the hand of violence, or the rage of the elements have scattered human dust, shall it be reclaimed. And we rise to give account. We rise to be judged. If, my hearers, we would anticipate that judg- ment, we might, as the apostle assures us, escape it, "for if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged."* If, feeling our sins, we do, as penitents, confess and forsake them, and flee to Christ and implore the Spirit, the dawn of that day will bring to us no terrors, and the sound of that trump be the welcome summons to a higher degree of blessedness. Cleansed in the Saviour's blood, renewed by the Spirit, and arrayed in the righteousness of Christ, we may in that day stand accepted, confident, and fearless. But, out of Christ, judgment will be damnation.

2. If the re-appearance from the seas of the sinner, who perished in his sins, be a thought full of terror; is there not, on the other hand, joy in the anticipation of greeting those who have fallen asleep in Christ, but whose bones found no rest beneath the clods of the valley, and whose remains have been reserved under the waters until that day, while, over their undistinguished resting-place, old ocean with all its billows has for centuries pealed its stormy anthem? Then to see them freed from decay, and restored to the friends in Christ wfro had loved and bewailed them — this will be joy. Ensure, Christian parent, the conversion of your sea-faring child, and then, whatever may betide him, it shall be well. His body may rest as safely amid coral and sea-weed as in the church-yard; and his soul fly as swiftly to the bosom of Christ from the midst of engulfing waters, as from a death- bed, attended by all the watchfulness and all the sympathy of weeping friends.

3. This community especially owes a debt to that class of men, who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in the great waters. The providence of God seems to indicate that our city is yet to become the Tyre of this western world. Some have estimated the seamen who yearly visit our port

* 1 Cor. xi. 31.

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at more than seventy thousand, and suppose the average number constantly in our harbor to be from three to five thousand. Contributing as they do to the comforts and pros- perity of every home, and guarding, as in time of war they do, this commercial metropolis, do they not demand and deserve a still increasing share in our sympathies and aid?

4. It is, again, by no means the policy of the church to overlook so influential a class, as is that of our sea-faring brethren. They are in the path of our missionaries to the heathen. If converted, they might be amongst their most efficient coadjutors, as, whilst unconverted, they are among the most embarrassing hindrances the missionary must en- counter. They have, it should be also remembered, in their keeping, the highways of the earth, along which travel its literature, its commerce, and its freedom. What would be thought of the statesmanship or patriotism of the man who, in time of war, would propose surrendering to the enemy all the roads and bridges of the land, in hopes of retaining possession of the rest of the territory? The mere proposal would be regarded as combining folly the most absurd, and treason the most disastrous. Yet what else is the church doing, if she relinquish the sea-faring class to the influence of sin and to the will of the destroyer of souls ? She would be proposing virtually a most ruinous truce with Satan, when resigning these to his unresisted control, and offering to abandon to his keeping the keepers of the highways of the nations.

5. While humbled in the review of her past negligence, and in the sense of present deficiencies, as to her labors for the seaman, the church has yet cause for devout thankfulness in the much that has recently been done for the souls of those who go down to the sea in ships, and in the perceptible change that has already been wrought in the character of this long-neglected class of our fellow-citizens and fellow- immortals. God has poured out his Spirit even on the inci- pient and uncertain efforts of his people ; and from many a cabin and forecastle the voice of prayer even now ascends, and on many a deck the words of this salvation are read. " Let us not be weary in well-doing."

6. And now, lastly, we ask each of you : In that day, when earth and sea shall meet heaven in the judgment, where do you propose to stand ? Among the saved, or the lost — the holy, or the sinful — at the right hand of the Judge,

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or at his left? Purposes of partial reformation or of future repentance cannot save you. Christ is now waiting to be gracious. He who will at last appear as the Judge, now comes as the Redeemer. He is now an Advocate ; soon he will be the Avenger. Heaven stoops to win you. Hell rises to allure and destroy you. Oh, yield not to Satan. Reject not Christ; for the Judge is at the door. And not this soul only of yours, but this body also must live — must live for ever ; and can you wish it to live in endless, hopeless misery? A throbbing brow, or an aching tooth, are now sufficient to embitter all the enjoyments of life. What will it be when the whole body is cast into torment? Can you desire to meet your impenitent friends, to spend an eternity "together in growing hate and mutual recrimination — to face your pious friends, a godly father, or a praying mother, and catch your last glance of hope, your last sight of happiness, as you see them mounting to glory, whilst you sink your- selves into the sea of fire — the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone for ever and ever ?

THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY*

11 Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem 7 I tell you. Nay ; but, except ye repent, ye

SHALL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH." Luke Xiii. 4, 5.

It was one of the characteristic excellences which marked the teachings of our Saviour, that he preached, in the high- est and best sense of that phrase, to the times, and his minis- try was thus a word in season. He addressed himself to men's present duties, and their present sins and snares ; and the passing events of the day, or the scenery of the spot where he taught, furnished him with ready and apposite illus- trations. The news of a cruel butchery, or a melancholy calamity ; the tidings that told of the Galileans slaughtered over their sacrifices ; or of the unhappy victims in Siloam, crushed by a falling tower — the news that for the time was the burden of all tongues, and made all ears to tingle, was seized by him as affording the occasion of riveting some keen truth upon the memory and conscience of the multitude. And thus it might be, and ought to be, with us. The jour- nals of the day, too often taken up but in the gratification of an idle curiosity, that seeks ever to learn and tell some new thing, might preach to us of Providence and Eternity. We might consult them to see, in the changes they record, how God is governing his own world, with a care that never slum- bers, and a wisdom that never falters. For all that occurs, from the fall of a dying sparrow to the crash of an empire overthrown, is but as He bids or permits it, who " doeth

* A Discourse, on occasion of the explosion in the (J. S. ship of war, Princeton, near Washington, on the 28th of February, 1844, by which the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, with others, lost their lives. Delivered before the Amity Street Baptist Church, Sabbath morning, 3d March, and before the Oliver Street Baptist Church. Sabbath evening. 10th March, 1844.

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according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth."*

An event such as that upon which our Redeemer comment- ed, has occurred amongst ourselves. In the metropolis of our nation, the seat of our government, where so much of the intellect of the nation is congregated, and whence so wide an influence goes forth to the ends of our land, death has made recently its fell inroads. The shadows of the sepulchre have fallen, as in sudden and disastrous eclipse, upon the high places of our republic. A new vessel of war, built with lavish expenditure, in which science had shown her terri- ble skill in inventing new engines of death of fearful potency, had become to that city the theme of general curiosity and admiration. Hundreds of guests thronged her decks. Some of them were the young, the gay, and the fashionable ; others were the aged, the experienced and the influential, citizens distinguished by the station they occupied, or the talents they had displayed. Little did that stately vessel, beneath a bril- liant sky, in her holiday trim, and with her exulting company, seem the fitting scene for auguries of disaster, or the intru- sion of distress. Below, all was merriment and gaiety, whilst the laugh, the jest, and the song, were intermingled with their feastings. The spot consecrated in the hearts of this nation, as that of the abode and last resting-place of the Father of his country, was near. The memory of the mighty dead was not forgotten by the inmates of that vessel as she floated along. But alas ! death was much nearer to that re- joicing throng, than in the tomb where reposed the mortal remains of Washington. " Couched in grim repose," the de- stroyer had already marked fresh and nearer prey. Above, on the deck of that majestic ship, preparations are made to discharge anew the piece of ordnance already so famed for its destructive power, but soon to obtain yet more disastrous fame. Men eminent in station, acting some of them in the cabinet of our Chief Magistrate, as his chosen advisers, and one of their number but a few days installed in his high trust, had gathered around. The discharge took place. Amid the smoke and din, shrieks were heard. When that smoke had passed away, the newly invented engine of destruction was seen itself a ruin, after having made that deck a scene of des- olation and carnage. Two of the ministers of our govern-

* Daniel iv. 35.

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merit, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, with others of the distinguished visiters, lay on that blood- \>espattered deck, disfigured and mutilated, either breathless or gasping their last. How startling and hideous the contrast between the scenes which but the narrow breadth of that deck then separated ; the mangled, the dying and the dead, who were above it, and their nearest relatives, their daughters and their wives, who, cheerful and unconscious, were gathered in joyous groups below it, as yet utterly ignorant of the appall- ing reality. Those thus suddenly deprived of friends had discerned, in the shock of the discharge, no unwonted and foreboding sounds, nor did they dream of the irreparable be- reavement that one brief moment had brought upon its wings of doom. Who shall paint the anguish of an attached wife, that had gone forth in the morning radiant in happiness and hope, but who was now to return at evening to a desolate home and an orphan charge, a new-made widow, meeting her fatherless babes with the cry of Naomi in her heart : " Call me Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me, for I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty ;" — of daughters held back by friendly violence, from the sight of a father's mangled remains — of children left in an instant fatherless, and of friends who had gone forth to begin together a day of rejoicing, but its evening closed on the survivor mournfully bringing back his dead. The station of several of the victims, the presence of their dearest kin- dred, and the festive occasion that had assembled them, all heightened the horror of the scene. In the tumultuous and irrepressible distress of the hour, the mercy might perhaps be forgotten that was yet intermingled with the calamity — the guardian care that had given to the multitude endangered so narrow an escape. For the time, dismay, amazement and horror, filled all hearts. Yet, as it is now easy to see, mercy had watched even over that scene of ^carnage, and lightened the weight of the infliction, or how easily might a far more sweeping desolation have occurred ; and of the hundreds there embarked, but a few frenzied survivors only might have escaped the general wreck, each ready in his distraction to deem himself alone in his deliverance, and each eager to say in the language of those messengers who came with heavy tidings to the patriarch : " I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

46 Hear ye the rod," cried the prophet, " and who hath 41

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appointed it." Such is the command of our God, by his serv< ant Micah, to the community thus suddenly and sorely visited, Does calamity befall us, it is not voiceless. It was no blind chance that launched the bolt. Trouble springs not out of the dust, nor is it dumb. The Scriptures give speech and articulate utterance as it were, to each such bereavement ; and, as the tomb opens to receive its new tenants, a still, small voice is heard issuing from its dim chambers, a voice of remonstrance and warning, of tender expostulation and compassionate entreaty. And as our text shows us, we have not only the warrant of our Saviour's example, for making such seasons the occasion of religious instruction ; but we have here, in the records of the evangelist, the exact lessons wrhich such scenes of sudden and public calamity were intend- ed to illustrate and to enforce. May His Spirit enable us rightly to read, and honestly to apply them.

Some of the judgments of the Divine Providence need no interpreter. Sorrow and guilt are, in the natural workings of man's conscience, and in the general estimate of mankind, closely conjoined. And there are times, as when a Nadab perishes before the altar he has desecrated, or an Uzzah is blasted beside the ark — as when the storm of fire comes down upon the cities of the plain, or the ark of Noah rides on the whelming waters past the hapless and despairing sin- ners who had derided his warnings — when God's judgments follow so closely man's transgressions, that he who runs may read the purport of the visitation, and see in the pecu- liar guilt of the sufferers, the reason of their peculiar fate. But it is not always so. Men are, in our days, as in the times of the Saviour they were, prone, on hearing of some strange and sudden calamity, to indulge themselves in rash and uncharitable judgments. They think of the suffer- ers as more careless or more criminal than others, and sup- pose them to have become thus the victims of an avenging Providence. Judging of character as the mass of mankind do, merely from the success which attends it, attributing excellence when they see prosperity, and imputing guilt or weakness where they discover the presence of adversity, they adopt the rule on which Job's friends so tenaciously and cruelly insisted, that calamity is proof of crime ; a rule that, in the use of it by those misguided patriarchs, God so signally disavowed and rebuked. It was on this same false principle that the Saviour himself was judged by his own countrymen

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and cotemporaries, " We," said the prophet, speaking by anticipation in the name of his people — " we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted." And was he not heavily afflicted, stricken most sorely, and was it not God that smote and bruised him ? It was indeed so ; but not, as they supposed, for the peculiar sins of the sufferer himself. *' The Man of Sorrows," on whom all griefs centered, was yet " holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners." In our text, the Redeemer, as he speaks of the slaughtered Galileans, and of the falling tower, rebukes this spirit of rash judgment. He does not deny, indeed, that sin was found in Pilate's victims, and in those who died at Siloam : but he asks ; " Were they sinners more than others ? Were they more deserving this fate than yo urselves ? Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" The connection which the mind of man traces, instinctively as it were, between sin and suf- fering, is not to be made to concentrate upon the individual, but rather to rebound back on the conscience of the race ; not to rest on the head of the stranger who perishes, but rather on the heart of the survivor who witnesses it, and who, were God but strict in the immediate exaction of punish- ment, deserves to share the ruin which he has but beheld.

We cannot, then, misinterpret Providence, when we have thus the comments of the Lord himself, who wields the scep- tre of the universe. It is the Legislator of the world, sitting to interpret his own statutes, and to expound the reasons of his own procedure. He teaches us, that the fate of one is the desert of all ; that as sinners we all merit a sudden and violent end, and that except we repent, we ultimately and universally perish. These are humbling truths, it must be confessed, but they are salutary. Let us ponder them, in the order in which our Saviour's language presents them.

I. All of us are sinners.

Christ's hearers were such as well as the Galileans, the survivors as well as the sufferers, and we as well as those whose death we deplore.

II. All of us are liable to sudden death.

III. Death to the impenitent sinner is destruction.

IV. Repentance is our only safeguard from eventual ruin. I. We are all sinners. " Think ye they were sinners above

all men ? I tell you, Nay : but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

The fact of man's sinfulness is one scarce needing to be

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argued. The conscience of the world and the history of the world, are here in accord with the Scriptures of the world's Maker and Judge. Our own observation and the experience of those around us, who have been most and longest conver- sant with Human Nature, and our complaints against our fellow-men, attest the melancholy truth which Scripture ut- ters in no dubious terms. When God looked down from heaven to behold the children of men, he saw " none good, no, not one." We are each, by nature, the children of wrath, even as others. We may dispute the statement as to our- selves, and a few select favorites, but we are generally prone not only to admit but to assert it of the mass of society. Our complaints of governments and whole classes of society and entire nations, show that we do not deem the multitude of mankind faultless. What page of the world's history is not blotted with tears and stained with blood — tears which man's misconduct has wrung from the eyes of suffering weakness — blood which man's violence has shed ? But we need not go to men's vices to prove their sinfulness; it is proved too sufficiently by their very virtues. For what vir- tue save that exhibited in the one character of Christ, is per- fect, symmetrica], stainless ? The confessions of men, like Daniel, the man greatly beloved of heaven, under the old dispensation, and the defects of John, the beloved disciple of Christ under the new dispensation, are decisive as to the defective and imperfect character of man on the earth. And if not sinners, what need, again, had the race of a Redeem- er % By the heights of glory from which the Ransomer needed to plunge when he rescued us, I may gauge the depths of debasement and guilt into which the ransomed had sunk ; and the moral demerit of the first Adam may be in- ferred from the tremendous sacrifice, and the infinite dignity demanded in the second Adam, who came to deliver and to save him. Let us remember our sinfulness, that we may know our true position before the Holy Ruler of the universe. We are not the innocent beings which He at first made us. We were formed upright, but we have " sought out many inventions," and perverse and rebellious inventions they have been. The guilt is our own, an invention of mankind. Hence it is, and not by any original perversion in our crea- tion, that sorrow and anguish have entered our world, and become the heritage of our race. Bereavement and death are strangers, who have intruded into God's happy universe,

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and for whose admission into our own world, our own hands have torn a pathway. The very presence of death is evi- dence of sin. " Death" entered " by sin, and so death passed upon all men for that all men have sinned."* And when we view its ravages in those we love, or but read its record in the obituary or upon the gravestone, we are admonished afresh of that truth uttered beside the cross of the world's Redeemer. The lips of the dying thief then, at least, spoke truly, and what he said to an expiring companion, belongs as justly to each one of our dying race, " Thou art in the same condemnation." Afflictions and bereavements, the removal of our friends, the calamities witnessed in the high places of our land, are proofs of our common sinfulness.

But though afflictions prove our common sinfulness, they afford in this world no test as to our comparative sinfulness. The man less afflicted here on earth is not therefore more holy than his neighbor who is more afflicted. The towers of Siloam fell, while turrets in more guilty districts of Jeru- salem stood immovable. The hapless Galilean mingled his blood with his sacrifices at the altar, while the more guilty Caiaphas was permitted to wear undisturbed his pontifical tiara, and the wretched Judas yet possessed, in comparative security, the dignity and privileges of the Apostleship. But the death of the poor peasants from the shores of Gennesa- reth, on the one hand, and the lengthened life of the high priest, and of the false apostle, on the other hand, were no proofs that the earliest victims were the chiefest sinners. Pilate, who had commanded the massacre, was doubtless, in the sight of God, although still surviving, a greater of- fender than those men whom he had butchered. When our Heavenly Father singles out a man, as the subject of an afflictive dispensation, it is no proof that he is peculiarly guilty above all his fellows.

Again, when God sends a sweeping visitation on a people, he often involves the righteous and the wicked in an indis- criminate death. It is not, indeed, always so ; at times God sees fit to make distinctions even in this life in behalf of his servants that fear him. This it was for which Abraham pleaded when the storm was gathering over the devoted cities of the plain. " To slay the righteous with the wicked — that be far from thee : shall not the Judge of all the earth

* Romans v.. 12.

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do right?" This it was in which the Psalmist trusted, and in which he exhorted others to trust. " A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand ; but it shall not come nigh thee." And thus it was that the three Hebrew children walked unharmed in the heart of that fur- nace, whose fiery mouth destroyed others that came near only to feed its flames. And thus it was that Daniel sat unharmed amid lions who brake of his adversaries every bone in their body ere they reached the bottom of the den. God may specially preserve his servants from afflictions that destroy others. He did it, perhaps, more under the Old Testament dispensation than under the New, because the earlier dispensation was especially one of temporal rewards and deliverances, and of prompt punishments. But under either economy, God often has seen fit to make the righteous and the sinner fall indiscriminately in some common calam- ity. It had been so in the days of Solomon, and he observ- ed it : " All things come alike to all. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked — to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not."* He observed it, we say, and not yet having reached the conclusion which he ulti- mately attained, and with which he shuts up his book,f the bringing of every work in eternity to a just judgment ; not yet having found (for the book is a diary of doubts ending in certainty, and inquiries that grope after and at last clutch the truth) — not yet having gained the clue to the mystery, and the solution of his difficulties, a clue and solution which he afterwards found in the retributions of the last judgment, he for the time exclaimed, as he beheld the common fate of the good and the bad : " This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all. "J In days long preceding those of this wise monarch, the same fact had been perceived and lamented. Job mourn- fully exclaimed, that in times of sudden and general calam- ity, the righteous perished with his ungodly neighbor. "If the scourge slay suddenly, he (it) will laugh at the trial of the innocent. "§ In other words, when the instrument of the divine vengeance is uplifted, be the rod what it may, it makes a wide and fell swoop, and it scorns to linger that it may draw distinctions between the innocent and the guilty. The distinction is left to the eternal world. It is drawn

* Ecclcs. ix. 2. t Eccles. xii. 13, 14. 1 Ecules. ix. 3. § Job ix. 23.

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sufficiently at the bar of Final Judgment. " Then shall ye return and discern between the righteous and the wicked."* For piety in the best is no safeguard from death, or from a sudden, a violent, a painful, or a shameful end.

Often, in fact, the guilt of a sinful community may fall most heavily on the heads of its most innocent members. When the righteous Josiah fell in battle with the king of Egypt, the sins of the guilty Jews lighted on the head of their pious monarch. And so when Naboth perished in the days of Ahab, and Zachariah was stoned between the porch and the altar, and James the Apostle was beheaded by Herod to please the people of the Jews, each of the victims was taken away, in fact, not so much because of his own sins, as because of the sins of others who survived him. " The righteous is taken from the evil to come." The nation is left with an intercessor less to avert the coming vengeance ; and often with one enormity more to swell their coming account. One more twig is withdrawn from the lessening dyke that as yet shuts out the rising flood of wrath and ruin from a guilty land.

A similarity of fate is then no proof of an equal sinfulness. Go with me to the camp of Israel as they are entering the Promised Land. A curse from God has retarded the ad- vance of their armies. They have selected one individual as the cause of their disasters. And they are stoning him in the valley of Achor. Let us. go down some centuries later in the stream of their history. Accompany me again, and without the walls of Jerusalem I show you a similar victim enduring the like fate. But the resemblance in their fate proves no similarity in their character ; for the one of these hapless sufferers is Achan, the troubler of Israel, and the other is the righteous Stephen, who dies with his face shining like that of an angel, blesses with parting breath his ferocious murderers, and lifts heavenwards eyes that have been already purged from earthly films, to discern the Son of Man standing in glory and power at the right hand of the Father, a Saviour waiting to welcome and to crown the pro- tomartyr of his Church. The same disaster that sweeps one soul away to the horrors of eternal despair, may waft an- other to the endless harpings of heaven : and angels and de- mons may hover over the same field of death, commissioned

* Malachi iii. 18.

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the one to bear their exulting charge to the Father's home, the other to drag their despairing prey to the abodes of wail- ing, to be plunged into the pit of unquenchable fire.

While death, then, proves us all sinful, the mode of our death affords no standard of our relative sinfulness. The murderer may, like the elder Herod, die on his pillow, while the martyr of Christ expires on the rack. And the same judgment which admits one of its victims to the rest of Paradise, may consign another, who perished at his side, to the flames of hell.

If any of my hearers are slow to allow their own sinful- ness, slow to feel the justice of the Saviour's warning as to their own case, and that, except they repent, they shall like- wise perish, we would urge upon their consideration but one more fact as bearing on the question of their sinfulness. Your dread of death, that instinctive horror of the grave which all feel, what is it but an implied confession of un- worthiness and want of moral fitness for the change dissolu- tion brings? Man's fear of death is itself, we say, proof of sin. For believing, as well nigh all of us do, that death will bring us nearer to God, and place us more immediately than before in his presence, we must also acknowledge that He to whom death thus approximates us is the holiest, and best, and happiest of beings. To enjoy the nearer society of such a Deing, must then be increased felicity to all the good. If we were really holy, would not the anticipation of such ad- mission to the presence of God be the highest solace to be found amid the cares and conflicts of life '! Should we not long for the day of our introduction to the presence-chamber oi the great King ; and, in the language of the poet of Methodism, should we not "press to the issues of death?" Should we not habitually, with Paul, long to depart? But we do, in fact, dread death. And that we do thus shrink from it, involving, as that event does, a nearer approach to God, is in itself an impeachment of our moral character. To have a disiike of God's society is in itself a sinful state of feeling. It is a confession, on our part, of the want of holiness, and of the requisite sympathy with pure and heav- enly beings. This dread of death may be regarded as an unconscious reminiscence of our old and original state of sinlessness, and its forfeited privileges. Then the presence of God, when he visited the garden of Eden, was the delight and glory of our unfallen parents. But soon as they sinned

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His presence became formidable. It was that of the detect- or and the avenger : and they shrank from the blaze of eyes too pure to look upon iniquity. Let men talk as they may of their own moral blamelessness before God, and of the moral dignity of the race, the general dread of death is in itself the acknowledgment of a state of heart that could not exist in a sinless being. It is this sense of moral defect and demerit that arms the destroyer with his terrors, and that points and envenoms the dart with which he threatens us. The sting of death is sin.

II. From the truth of our common sinfulness we pass to one of its consequences, our common liability to a death that may be unexpected and violent. We are all liable to sudden death. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." And this is the second division of our remarks.

That each of us is exposed to sudden death is a truth none will dispute, yet, like other undeniable truths, it is not suf- ficiently remembered. As death is the original penalty of sin, and the iirst existence of sin in us incurred that dread punishment, God has at any time, and however suddenly, a right to exact from us the penalty. And there is wisdom and mercy in his making the execution sudden. It is the more startling to others, our fellow-offenders. The possi- bility of it, and our apprehension of it, may restrain us from many a sin into which we might else have rushed, had we been assured of any long term of impunity, or any protract- ed interval between our transgression and our removal. It is kind, we say, in our heavenly Father, by these sudden deaths, to set up mementoes, as it were, of man's mortality, in all our scenes of business and amusement ; that we may thus in no spot feel ourselves entitled to forget him ; and that he may thus hedge up the way of the transgressor with salutary terrors, by letting in upon every point the dread light of eternity, and making each eminence along the path- way command the prospect of an opening grave.

And in the accomplishment of that sentence of death which man's sin has provoked, how various are the means employed. Naught is so trivial but that God can make it the executioner of his vengeance, be it the worm that smote the pride of Herod, or the smooth pebble of the brook that cleft the brow of Goliah. Naught is so vast and unwieldy, but that it readily lends itself to accomplish suddenly man's removal into eternity. The air, with all the winds and

42

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storms that store its arsenals, the waters, and the solid earth, are ready to do his bidding, and avenge his quarrel with his creature, man. The first deluge of water, and the last del- uge of fire, either serves, at his pleasure, to purge his earth of sinners. But, besides these more stately and solemn messengers, how many less noticeable emissaries has he at his command. The starting of a horse, the obstructed valve of an engine, a failing plank in the vessel's side, a sunken rock no navigator has discovered and designated on no chart, a misplaced step, a falling tile — all may be his effec- tual messengers. And so in any scene, the ball-room, the theatre, the warehouse, or the highway, as well as in the home, we may be summoned. Death has all seasons and all scenes for his own. Invited to a festive excursion, we nvay, for aught that we know, be but decking ourselves as smiling and garlanded victims for the place of sacrifice. Such was the coming of the last messenger to those whose death has cast a gloom over the face of our land.

Now, if death be ever terrible, he is especially so when his coming is sudden. When, instead of making sickness and slow decay his forerunners, he dispenses with these harbingers and appears unannounced, his coming makes many a stout heart quail. The thread we had looked to see slowly attenuated and long drawn out, is snapped, as with a stroke, rudely and for ever. Life, with its cares, and hopes, and vanities, and eternity, with its tremendous retributions, are brought into startling proximity, and seem the more strongly contrasted. But chiefly is sudden death terrible, because many, even of those habitually ready for another world, feel as if they would wish some interval between the secular business of this life and its close, some span, not only to set their house in order, but to scrutinize their own hopes for eternity, and fit the soul for its dread change as it hov- ers on the verge of another world. But to the sinner how awful is it to be cut off from his cherished hope that he may be allowed, before quitting earth, a brief preparation ! This great work, which should be his first care, he, from a desire of enjoying the world, makes his last ; and defers to the hurry, delirium, and feebleness of a death-bed the great business of a life-time. To cut him off suddenly is, then, to deprive him of his favorite resort, and to flood, in stern ven- geance, that refuge of lies in which he had proposed to take a final shelter from the wrath of God, when he might no

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longer enjoy his idols. He had purposed to give to the ways of sin the strength of his faculties, and to pour on God's altars the last poor dregs of the wine-cup of life : to make youth, and health, and zeal, and influence, and energy a burnt-offering to Satan, and then to carry the poor offals of the sacrifice, age, feebleness, and sickness, to Christ, An unexpected death shuts him out from this refuge, where he has risked and lost his all.

But there are those to whom death, and even sudden death, is not terrible. Some, like the British Christian, whose frequent prayer, answered as it was in the mode of his removal, is inscribed on his tomb, have longed for an in- stantaneous summons, and exclaimed, " Sudden death, sud- den glory." To them the King of Terrors had lost his ghastliness, and seemed, in their eyes, but the angel Death, commissioned by the Father to release them from cares and sins, enfranchise them from all the assaults of temptation, and admit them, introduced by the hand of the Mediator, to all the glories and all the joys of the beatific vision.

It is not then the circumstances of our death, be it vio- lent and disastrous, or otherwise — be it sudden or lingering, that should be the chief question. It is rather the character of the dying man, the moral image he carries into the world of spirits. What are his relations to God ? Let me die the death of the righteous, be it violent or peaceful, be it slow decay or some sudden stroke, be it solitary or amid compan- ions and friends, be it a rude and agonizing dislodgement of the soul from the body, or a gentle and noiseless lapse, as of one falling asleep in Christ.

III. For, and this is the third division of our remarks, death to the sinner is destruction, and consequently sudden death is, to such, but sudden damnation. This is implied in the Saviour's language: " Ye shall all likewise perish."

Now, this could not mean the future destruction of the Jewish people in the fall of Jerusalem, for many sinners among his hearers died in their beds before the storm of God's wrath burst in all its fierceness upon that guilty and doomed city, and ere there were seen yet, even as specks in the distant horizon, the Roman eagles gathering eagerly to the prey. Nor could it be a violent death, by sword or fall- ing tower, like that of the Galileans or the people of Siloam ; for we cannot suppose, with any show of reason, that all the enemies of Christ among the Jews, who did not perish by

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the Roman war, died by some other painful end. Nor could it be any mere death of the body that he intended, for he speaks of it as something which repentance, and repentance alone, could enable them to avoid. Now, from the death of the body, repentance does not save the man. The peni- tent must enter the shroud and the coffin as well as his un- godly neighbor. But the evil from which repentance does save us, is eternal destruction ; and this, therefore, our Sa- viour intends when he uses the word "perishing." It is the eternal ruin that awaits the dying sinner.

Death, although often used but in that narrow sense, in- cludes more than the corruption and decay of the body. We are in arrears to a violated law. The dissolution of the body is but the first instalment of our debt. Death is often spoken of as the debt of nature. More justly it might be termed the debt of sin ; for our nature, while sinless, as it came from the Maker's plastic hand, was not mortal. The destruction of the body, then, is but a partial satisfaction of the debt which sin owes to the justice of God. And if you observe the margin of our text, you will perceive that a literal rendering of the word is : " W ere they debtors more than others?" The diseases and pains, the decay and disso- lution of the body, are but the earlier instalments of the vast penalty. Behind it comes the loss of the soul when in the resurrection the body has been revivified and re-united to the soul, its old associate in sin, and both are cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, and with it eventu- ally sinners " perish " by a ruin endless, remediless, and hopeless.

The death of the body is but a transient act, the portal through which we pass into the far eternity beyond. It puts, indeed, an indelible imprint on a man's character. It leaves the filthy eternally filthy, and the holy unalterably holy ; stripping the one of all hope, as it exempts the other from air fear of a change. It snaps for ever the bond that binds the believer while on earth, to care, and temptation, and conflict ; and it also sunders the ties of opportunity, mercy, and hope, that surrounded and held up the unbe- liever, while in this world of probation. Death is not, as the journalist too often in the case of the suicide terms it, "a termination of existence." This is phraseology said to have come in upon us with the Atheism of the French

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Revolution.* Man, at death, it may rather be said, but be- gins to exist, in the highest sense of that word. His being is developed, and he has higher powers, and wider know- ledge, and keener feelings, when made a disembodied spirit. And when scepticism would write, as did Revolutionary France, over the gateway of the cemetery, the inscription : " Death is an eternal sleep," the saddened eye of faith reads, in its stead, the more true but melancholy sentence over the graves of those who have lived and died without hope and without God in the world : " And I looked and beheld a pale horse ; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."] On the dissolution of the body, fol- lows, in the case of the ungodly, Hell with all its trooping terrors, though its fulness of anguish and its last torments may be reserved for the day of judgment.

How awful is the exchange which the sinner makes at death ! " In that very day his thoughts perish ;" his vain expectations of worldly enjoyments, of impunity in sin, and of a final season and space for repentance ; his earthly plans ; and all his rivalries, hopes and fears, which regarded exclu- sively the life that then suddenly closed its gates on him and closed them for ever. For his pleasures he has endless pain. During life, nothing could utterly extinguish hope within him ; now, during eternity, nothing can rekindle it. From a world of religious privileges, and sacred times, and gra- cious invitations, he goes to a world that has no Sabbaths, no mercy-seat, no Advocate, no influences of the Spirit, not a promise, not a hope. On making the sad exchange, how must his forfeited and vanishing blessings brighten in his view, as they take their everlasting flight. How strangely contrasted, though drawn by the same hand, would be the two pictures of this world drawn by the sinner's spirit, when as yet without, and again when passed within, the veil that hides the eternal world. While yet in the body, and on this side the intervening barrier between the world of sense and show, and the world of reality, sense and self were all ; time was as eternity, and eternity was brief and valueless as time. But now, entered on the further world, and when both are known by experience, eternity appears in its true infinitude, and time shrinks and dwindles into its proper littleness. Now Heaven and Hell are no longer dreams,

* President DwighL . t Rev. vi. 8.

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and Christ is recognized as really a Saviour, King, and God ; but a God now alienated, a King defied and incensed, whose power pervades all space and permits no escape, and a Sa- viour whose favor is forfeited irrecoverably and for ever.

Well were it for us if we kept these consequences of death more steadily before us. For this purpose, our Heavenly Father makes the lessons of our mortality so frequent, im- pressive, and various. The dead are quietly glancing upon the student from the shelves of his library. History is but, in a great measure, spoils won from the grave, or a compi- lation of the epitaphs of those who have gone before us. Nor is it literature only that is thus redolent of the tomb. Each scene of retired and domestic life has its avenues of memory and regret that lead back to the grave. Every household has its seat by the table and the hearth now vacant, where once was seen a face now hidden and buried out of sight, and where once wTas heard a voice now stilled in the silence of the sepulchre. Who may build himself a mansion, however stored with all that can adorn or gladden life, and say, Over this threshold the coffin shall not pass ? The funeral hearse rolls on its way past the doors of the ball-room and the theatre. In the pulpit and at the bar, in the Senate chamber or on the main-deck, we see the place of the departed, or the scene, it may even be, of their de- parture. Thus " Wisdom crieth without ; she uttereth her voice in the streets ; she crieth in the chief place of con- course ;"* and death is made to unroll its solemn commis- sion, and publish its stern testimony in our thronged thor- oughfares. Thus, in our own city, the most populous of our grave-yards, with vegetation all rank, and a soil fattened by the accumulated corpses of a century, draws its sad length beside our most crowded street, as if it would throw out a dyke to stem the torrent of frivolity and fashion, each day rushing by ; and the field of death looks down from its silent eminence, upon the long line of banking-houses, and the street of our busiest trafficking, as if a skeleton hand were beckoning from the spirit land to our merchant princes, and bidding them with all their gettings to get wisdom, and to consider their latter end that they may be really wise. For death to be unprepared is the shipwreck of all hopes

* l'rov. i. 20.

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and the destruction of all happiness. But how shall we be prepared ?

IV. And thus we reach our fourth and closing division. Repentance is our only safeguard. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

To prepare for death, the world knows no fitter method than to forget what cannot be evaded, and to drown all se- rious reflection in the din of business and amid the tumult of revelry. It is like bandaging the eyes to screen us from an exploding battery. The less we reflect, the greater, in fact, our danger of rushing blindfolded into ruin. It is such preparation as Joab gave Amasa when he grasped his beard as in friendly greeting, and asked of his health, whilst seek- ing the fatal spot where a single stroke would be sure and speedy death — a preparation it is that disarms, indeed, of anxiety and suspicion, and relieves us of intrusive fears, but that, at the same time, robs us of life and seals us to ruin. Not such the method of Scripture. It may alarm, but it alarms to save. It bids you prepare for death by retreating for protection from the impending destruction to that im- pregnable refuge, the Saviour's cross. There the penitent finds balm for his wounds, pardon for his sins, and life, eter- nal life, for his death.

For " the sting of death is sin." To remove sin is, there- fore, the only mode of depriving the grave of its victory, and rendering the King of Terrors not only harmless but benefi- cent. How shall sin be removed but by renouncing it ; and how can we renounce it but in Christ's strength ; or how can our repentance be accepted but through his intercession, or our sins be forgiven but through his righteousness, or our bodies, once consigned to the grave, be released from its prison, but as his resurrection becomes the pledge of ours ? A true repentance grasps the cross.

Death, then, preaches repentance. What John the Bap- tist cried in the wilderness, and Jesus of Nazareth in the streets of Jerusalem, this recent visitation of Divine Provi- dence is proclaiming throughout our land, as from its high places of dignity and influence : " Repent ye. The axe is laid at the root of the trees. Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

Let the community repent, like Nineveh at the preaching of Jonah, and she may escape sore and impending judg- ments. What woes were those that overtook the Jewish

328 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY.

people because they refused the command and repented not? Let a nation be exalted and enriched, as is our own, with physical and moral advantages, with all religious and civil privileges, an impenitent and godless spirit is yet sufficient to squander them all, and leave corruption, disunion, decay and subjection, as her final heritage. Let her, on the other hand, however afflicted and debased, but repent ; and God can restore her from the deepest degradation, exalt and bless and establish her, till she that was servant of servants comes to sit as a queen among the nations.

Let the individual sinner repent. It is, by the will and the oath of God, his only hope of escaping the second death and evading the horrible pit of hell, on whose verge his un- happy step already wanders. It assures him of his ultimate deliverance, not only from the fear of death, but from all fears and all care, temptation and sin ; and it houses the fugitive, at last, in the bosom of God. Does he ask : How am I to repent? We answer: Not of some sins only, but of all sins. Renounce your idols. Turn to Christ for par- don. Resolve in his strength. Plead his merits and trust his cross. In his name ask for light, and follow it when given. And not only clasp but wear the cross, making it your badge before the world, as well as your plea before God ; and this done, the earth sinks subjected beneath your feet, hell withdraws baffled of its aim and spoiled of its prey, and Heaven comes nearer the nearer you draw to the inevi- table tomb.

Are you a penitent? Then, however young and feeble and obscure you may be, you are contributing to avert, as the impenitent is contributing to attract, the clouds and the resounding tempests of God's wrath. Are you careless ? Careless amid death and bereavement and danger ? Careless amid Sabbaths and Bibles and the Saviour's invitations, and the Spirit's stirrings ? Recollect that it is no vain word, no braggart threat, but the stern law of the skies : " He, that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy."

Let the world tell you what it will of natural innocence, and a morality of your own with which God cannot be angry, remember the world is not the law-giver or the judge in this matter. It must itself bide the law and face the Judge. That law is : Turn or perish ; Repent and live. It is the fiat of your Creator, Saviour and Judge. Repent,

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then, we entreat you, and be saved ; for it is mercy that calls, an infinite and divine forbearance that yet waits, and Heaven itself stoops to allure, to welcome and to shelter you.

Thus have we reviewed the lessons of eternal truth our Saviour has annexed to such dispensations of his Provi- dence, as that which we are now remembering. We have seen how each such calamity proclaims man's sinfulness, reminds us of our common and continual exposure to an end as sudden, bids us remember the destruction that waits on the death of the impenitent, and commands us to exercise that repentance which alone saves from Hell and fits for death. Each such dispensation reveals to us, as by a sudden flash, the benighted sea of life which we are traversing, and the dim shores of the eternity we are nearing. It comes from God as on a mission to man, and while it recalls to him his sin and his danger, it also announces his one hope and saivation, and bids the penitent see in the cross and tomb of his Redeemer the gates of Paradise opened anew on Calvary, to a doomed and dying race ; while to the impenitent, it tells of a death of despair, and shows below the yawning tomb a lower depth and the lurid fires of its torments. It compresses our business in one world, and our prospects for the next, into three brief words : Repent or Perish.

In conclusion, we would remark :

1. First, on the sins of the nation ; for each such visita- tion calls us to remember these. Have we not, in many things, declined from the ways of our forefathers ? Could any candid and intelligent observer claim, for the mass of the statesmen of this country in our times, the high charac- ter for integrity and moral principle accorded to the fathers of the Revolution ? Virtue and talent there are ; but is the average of right principle in our great political parties equal to that displayed in the times of our forefathers? In the growing rapacity and corruption of public servants ; in the violence o»f party discord and its venality ; and in the mad- ness of passion seen disgracing even the halls of national legislation by brawls ; are there auguries for good, as to the destinies of the nation thus guided, and of the rising genera- tion, thus to be trained and moulded? The desecration of the Sabbath ; our national eagerness for gain — our growing luxury — the character of our widely spread and cheaper lit- erature, much of the best of it frivolous, and much of it

43

330 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY.

worse than frivolous, "sensual and devilish " — are not all these causes for humiliation and alarm, and do they not afford on such an occasion as this, materials for heart-search- ing inquiry and profound and penitent meditation? We have, as a people, many and rich mercies, but they are re- viewed with safety when regarded as heightening our re- sponsibility, and, if neglected and perverted, as enhancing the more the darkness of our guilt, and the severity of our punishment. We are a young nation, and, to the community as to the individual, youth is the season of ardor, hope, and boastfulness. If there has been justice in the charge other nations have made against us, that we are given to vaunting, has not God, in the disaster with which he has now visited us, occurring as it did in the Navy, the pride of the nation, and not long after another of our vessels of war had perished in a night at the mouth of the Mediterranean, taught us how powerless for our defence, and how powerful for o.ur ruin, he may make our very armaments and ships of war ?

"They trust in navies, and their navies fail, God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail."

In the anxiety which some display to entangle our country in war, is there not shown a recklessness greatly to be deprecated 1 We believe government endowed, by the law of God, with power to take away human life — the life of the individual in the case of crime, and the lives of multitudes in the case of a just war. But seeing the butchery, profli- gacy and wretchedness which war, even when most just, must bring in its train, neither humanity nor piety allows us, for any petty cause, to employ this melancholy and last re- sort. We may not lightly spread through our borders such scenes as God has lately made us to behold on the deck of the Princeton. To rebuke the spirit of war may have been one merciful design of the recent calamity. It may be easy to unleash the hounds of war and give them course over some distant territory, by issuing, amid the quiet scenes of legislation and diplomacy, the act that exposes leagues of defenceless coast to the marauder, or consigns some obscure and remote home, upon our frontiers, to pillage and slaugh- ter, and all the tender mercies of the savage, the scalping- knife and the firebrand. It is not as easily borne to see the ruin entering our own habitations, and the slaughter spread around and upon us. And now that God has permitted, ill

THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 331

his wisdom, one of these gory and hideous spectacles, that are but the ordinary accompaniments of battle, to be pre- sented in a time of profound peace, and almost beneath the shadow of our Capitol, let us pray that the lesson may not be lost on the law-makers gathered in those halls, but that by its severe, yet salutary schooling, it may " teach our sen- ators wisdom."* We believe war, in a just cause, not inde- fensible : but it may not be lightly undertaken. It is in no careless mood, and for no trivial reasons, that the rulers of this people may bring such scenes as those recently witness- ed into the houses and the peaceful commercial marine of our country ; — make multitudes of their countrywomen as suddenly widows ; and doom, by hundreds, unconscious and prattling infants thus summarily to orphanage, anc* to all the multiform sorrows and perils that beset the path of the fatherless.

2. Next, let us not forget that we have, as a nation, re- ceived from the Most High loud and memorable warnings. In commercial reverses, has not God checked our reckless love of gain ? In the death, shortly after his installation, of a former Chief Magistrate, the first instance in the history of our country of one dying while administering that high office, and in the subsequent removal of members both from the executive and from the legislative departments of our national government, and now again in this startling calami- ty, is not God reading to us, as a people, lessons of humility, dependence, and penitence? In the history of our present Chief Magistrate, distinguished as he has been by the fre- quent and near approach of mortality to his person, whilst he himself has been spared, how has God spoken to him, and to the whole land, of the uncertainty of life, and that a higher power than man's controls the affairs of the world ! Having seen, as he has done, death vacating the Presidential chair for his occupancy, and soon after vacating again, by the death of the statesman who took it, the chair of the Vice Presidency he had quitted ; — his predecessor in the first office of state falling on his right hand, his successor in the second station of dignity in the land falling on his left hand ; — • bereaved, as he has been, by the incursions of death into the circle of his friends ; bereaved in his home of a consort, who, from sharing his exaltation, passed soon to the tomb ;

*Ps. cv.22.

332 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY.

and bereaved in his cabinet, first, of Legare, rich in promise, talents, and acquirements, and smitten down in the fullness of his strength ; and now of Upshur and Gilmer, his personal as well as political friends, men of principle and talent, and possessed of the confidence of the people ; — is there not much to awaken in his behalf the sympathies and prayers of the churches ? Commanded as we are in Scripture to pray for them that are in authority, should not the wish of each Christian patriot be, that a course so singularly marked may, by the grace of God, be sanctified to teach him who has run it, the uncertainty of all earthly honors, held as they are by the tenure of a life so soon spent, and often so suddenly ter- minated ; and should* not our prayer be that he who has been, like Paul, " in deaths oft" may also, with the Apos- tle, be able to say, as he reviews the course and purpose of his life, " to me, to live is Christ," and with Paul to add, as he looks fearlessly towards its close, " and to die is gain ?" For difficult as is ever and in all conditions the Christian's path, and glorious as is his triumph over the world in any lot, the difficulty and the glory are each en- hanced in the case of exalted station. To serve God and his generation faithfully, not in the less embarrassed walks of private life, but in a position of eminence, amid the strife of tongues, the collisions and wranglings of parties, and the thronging snares, the incessant and wasting cares, and the heavy responsibilities of public life, needs no ordinary meas- ure of divine grace. And happy, as rare, is the worldly greatness that does not, in consequence, peril the soul of its possessor. And whether tempted unduly to envy or rashly to blame those in eminent stations, are we not as a people warned, by so many deaths in the high places of our land, when not, as is most generally the case, single victims, but whole clusters and groups are reaped for the grave — are we not warned less eagerly to covet distinctions death so soon levels, and more habitually to trust, and more faith- fully to serve, that God who only is great, for he is the unchangeable and the Almighty one " who only hath immor- tality?"

3. Again, do not incidents of this kind loudly call upon the Christians of the land to know their rights and duties? Are they not warned, that they never, amid the fierce con- flicts of party, and the din and routine of business, forget their one profession, and the high principles it involves "?

THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 333

Ever is the Judge at hand. His coming is near ; and that servant labors most wisely and most safely who does it con- tinually, as under his Great Taskmaster's eye. In the con- tentions of the day, political or religious, is it not well that the image of death should often interpose itself, casting its chill and calming shadow over the feverish strifes of the hour, lest we cherish against those who oppose us such feel- ings as we should not wish to recall over their graves, or to be surprised by the summons of death while indulging? It seems but too evident that the churches of our day can retain their hold upon some great and vital truths only at the price of earnest controversy. Yet inevitable as it may be, and in its results most beneficial, it must also be admitted, that most adverse to piety and happiness are the feelings it too often engenders. How harshly do the censures that political antagonists or religious controversialists may utter against their opponents, sound on the ear, when once the subject of them is suddenly entombed ; and how pitiable, as we now look back upon them, the exasperated personal bickerings of writers, housed in a common sepulchre. It was an affecting regret of an eminent scholar — it is Erasmus of whom we speak — in the days of the Revival of Letters, that one of his opponents had been snatched away by death, before they could exchange forgiveness for their mutual offences against the law of charity. And if to the political contests, ever eager and rife amongst us, must in this age be added the social agitation, produced by churches " contend- ing earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," it will be, as in the near prospect of the grave, and as in con- stant preparation for a sudden departure, that Christians will best be harnessed, manfully yet meekly, to defend the truth a Saviour bequeathed to their charge, the legacy of a Master who overcame by suffering, and who built, as it were, out of the cross upon which he had hung, the steps of that throne where he sits a crowned conqueror. Above all, let Christians remember their duties to their country in the closet. That hand, out of which the prophet saw streaming beams of glory, where are the hidings of Divine Power, is opened in blessings to the believer kneeling in his retire- ment. And when the churches invoke it, that hand arms itself, as with gauntlet and glaive, for the defence of the land, or, as the Psalmist prayed, "takes hold of shield and

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buckler, draws out also the spear, and stops the way "# of the adversaries. Thus works the Almighty where men are found who make his right arm their reliance, and who, like Daniel, greatly beloved of Heaven, are, like him, constant in supplication before the throne, for themselves, and for their people, and for the Israel of God.

4. Death, in all its aspects, is formidable to man the sin- ner, except as it is viewed in its relation to the death of Christ. And if, from all the scenes of worldly pomp and rejoicing, from earth's high places of coveted dignity and influence, and from its lowliest nooks of retirement, a path is ever found leading to the grave ; so, to the eye of the believer, from every scene in life, and from every theme in morals or religion, there is opened a broad and direct avenue to the grave of his Saviour. The cross of Christ is the world's hope. He who became the

"Death of death, and Hell's destruction,"

was revealed to destroy the works of the devil, " and that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death ."f To know him is life ; to reject him is the seal of the second death, and the earnest of eternal ruin. Well, then, may Christ's sacrifice receive the prominence given it in Scripture and in the scenes of the eternal world. His death was the theme, as Moses the receiver, and Elias the reviver, of the law, talked with our Lord, on the mount, and " spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem."| It is the glorying of the ransomed before the throne of light. When heaven visits earth, as on the moun- tain of transfiguration, and when earth visits heaven, as in the ascension of the emancipated and glorified spirit to the general assembly and church of the first-born, this one event is the bond of their common fellowship, and the death upon Calvary is the basis of their common happiness. Exulting in this, the saint looks forward to the last trial as but brief, and its issue as sure and peaceful. The sinner, rejecting the benefits of this sacrifice, does it amid a world which, in spite of his irreligion, is none the less a world of bereave- ment and death ; and on the verge of another world, in which, because of his irreligion, death can never be unstung,

* Ps. xxxv. 2, 3. t Heb. ii. 14; 1 John iii. 8. X Luke ix. 31.

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whose ruin has no redemption, and on whose dark and heav- ing sea of woe breaks no solitary beam of hope.

5. It is, lastly, the wisdom of man, born as he is the heir of mortality, to be living in a state of constant preparation for his great change. It was said by that sweet singer of our modern Israel, Dr. Watts, in the latter years of his life, that each night he composed himself to slumber, little anx- ious whether he awoke in time or in eternity. Of that orna- ment of the English bench, the Christian magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, it is said that he was once administering jus- tice, when a strange darkness overspreading the country, joined with some idle predictions that had become current, tilled men's minds with alarm, as if the end of the world had come. The devout judge proceeded calmly in the discharge of his office, wishing, if the world ended, to be found in the assiduous fulfilment of his duties. A habitual preparation for sudden death would be itself a sufficient preparation, and the best, for that judgment which some of our erring breth- ren announce as near.

Are there any scenes or employments in which we should not wish to be surprised by the messenger of death ? It is scar*ee safe to be employed in them for any time, however brief, for that brief hour may bring the close of our days, and seal up our history to the time of the end. Let us not indulge in those things, or busy ourselves in those employ- ments, to be surprised in which would be our shame and our ruin at the hour of death, lest we be like " the wicked, driven away in his wickedness." And what can be more tremendous in prospect than this ? Let poverty the most grinding afflict me — let me be racked by disease — let helplessness, exile, and shame wait around my death-bed ; but let not sin, unrepented and unforgiven sin, be the com- panion and curse of my dying hours, for then I perish. The trembling Esther, as she went, in peril of her life, to urge her request, exclaimed, " If I perish, I perish," but perished not. The timorous disciples, as they saw the waters tempestuous, and the vessel ready to be filled, ex- claimed to their Lord, " Master, we perish ;" and he arose and spoke, and the waters were calmed, and the disciples saved. But if sin be my master, cherished, trusted, and idolized, no such peradventure as encouraged Esther remains for me. I perish without an alternative, inevitably, and for ever. No deliverance like that which rescued the Apostles

336 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY.

will be wrought for me. For if sin be my master, it is a master that cannot save. And the God of heaven and earth will say to the impenitent sinner as said his servant Peter to the sorcerer Simon, " Thy money " — thine idol, be it what it may — "perish with thee" Death is on the way, and hell following with it ; and if sin rule in us, the ruler and the ruled, the master and the servant, the idol and the idolator, must sink together into endless perdition. Now by lessons, therefore, in the opening leaves of the volume of Providence, that enforce and repeat the admonitions of the volume of Scripture ; and now by lessons in Scripture that illustrate and interpret, in their turn, the visitations of Providence ; by the mutual and reflected light of inspiration and calamity, the one explaining the other ; by " the rod" and the voice of Him "who hath appointed it," as He wields the one and utters the other — God is instructing us to renounce our sins. He who rules, and who is soon to judge the world, is reiter- ating over our land his denunciations against sin, his warn- ings against ruin, and his demands of repentance. Repent- ance is alike his claim and our duty. Each calamity cries aloud, and this is its message. And from the depths of our own conscience, in our hours of solitude and serious reflec- tion, the summons is re-echoed, " Repent ye." "Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you, Nay ; but, except yc repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN.

(A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the Seminary Baptist Church in Hamilton, Madi- son Co., N. Y., Thursday Evening, Nov. 13, 1845.)

" Pastors and teachers ; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of christ. * * *

" That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine. *******

* * " The head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly join- ed TOGETHER, AND COMPACTED BY THAT WHICH EVERY JOINT SUPPLIETH, AC- CORDING TO THE EFFECTUAL WORKING IN THE MEASURE OF EVERY PART, MAKETH INCREASE OF THE BODY UNTO THE EDIFYING OF ITSELF IN LOVE."

Ephes. iv. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16.

The scene, and the occasion of our assembling at this time, both deserve notice. The place where we are gathered is known widely in our own land, and in some remote and heathen regions, as the site of a school of the prophets, where the young men of our churches, called and endowed of God's Spirit to the Christian ministry, are trained for their largest usefulness. The occasion that calls us together, within these quiet scenes of study and prayer, is the public recognition of a church of Christ, not confined, indeed, to the inmates of this Theological Seminary, but seeking nevertheless their especial benefit as one main object of its constitution. There are those of us who might not be prepared to counsel the formation of a church, limited to one class of society in its membership. Believing that its Divine Founder meant that his church should embrace his disciples of every age, and of either sex, and that it should intermingle all classes of soci- ety for their mutual benefit, we should dread the establish- ment of a body, that would isolate instead of intermingling these various layers of human society, which together make up the field of the world. If limited exclusively to theolo- gical students, it would include the zeal of youth without the ripe experience of age, and receiving the energy of one sex would reject the gentleness of the other, and gathering the men of letters would have little room for the practical sagacity of the men of business ; and thus would the church, 44

338 THE CHURCH,

which, from the genius of the gospel and the design of its Author, was to be free as the air and wide as the world in its invitations and consolations, be converted into the narrow, self-conceited, and exclusive caste. It would again, seek- ing its own edification and not the world's conversion, want one main element of success, and evade one great errand of the church. But it is not, as we suppose, the purpose of those who have come together in the new church, thus to circum- scribe their membership, and narrow the pale of their fel- lowship and duties. But, whilst wishing to admit all else who may desire to unite in its services, the well-being of the youths who look forward to the Christian ministry will be a prominent object. It has been thought, that, during the years which our younger brethren spend within these walls, sev- ered from the intimacies and removed from the oversight of the churches, which received their baptismal vows and en- couraged their ministerial aspirations, it was but fitting that they should be surrounded, more closely than has heretofore been possible, with the privileges and guards of a church organization. Much as their esteemed instructors, who fill the chairs of instruction in this seminary, may have accom- plished, under God, by their public lectures and their private influence, it was felt that more was needed. It was evident, that the men who were to become the pastors of churches should not in the best years of their youth be destitute of the privileges and sympathies and disciplinary restraints of a church ; or lack entirely all personal and experimental ac- quaintance with the practical working of that church polity, which as pastors they were hereafter to conduct. It was seen, that no school of man's devising could supply the ben- efits or supersede the necessity of that school of Christ's devising, the Church of the Living God, the organization that Infinite Goodness and Infallible Wisdom had framed, for the best training of Christ's servants for their work on earth and their place in heaven.

Education is the art of urging and guiding the growth of the human mind. It is measured, not merely, or even mainly, by the amount of knowledge it brings in, but rather by the amount of power that it brings out. It educes the hidden energies of the soul, strengthens them, and multiplies and facilitates their application to the various tasks of life, as the air, the light, the water, and the earth educe the flower from the buried seed, and evolve from the acorn the sturdy

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 339

boughs and the massive foliage of the oak. It is one of the characteristics of our time, that this duty of the aged to the young, this good service due from the generation that rule to the generation that shall soon replace them, is awakening larger interest ; and its far-reaching results and widely varied relations are arousing discussion, and even inflaming contro- versy. It is felt, that, in the truest sense of that term, educa- tion is not confined to the town-school or the college ; that it begins in the cradle with the infant's expanding faculties, ere the school has snatched him from the nursery ; and that it continues when seminaries and colleges have dismissed their pupil, and that it is protracted in the action of society and the endeavors of the student, and the influence of these on his character and powers, until he enters the grave. And reli- gion, showing as it does that this life is but the outcourt of eternity, and that the aims and duties of this world can be ascertained only by remembering the destinies of another world, thus shows that the education of an immortal spirit is a work never to pause ; and that the enlargement of his expe- rience, and the expansion of his powers, and the development of his moral nature, will be, through the long cycles of eter- nity, the necessary and the inevitable employment of each child of Adam. It is seen, therefore, that other influences than those of the school, technically so called, are at work in man's education. In Ireland and in France, the mingling of the religious element with the tasks of the highest schools or colleges of the nation, is at this very time the theme of bitter controversy. In England, and in some parts of our own Union, the intermingling of the same element with the lowest or primary schools of the country, has awakened the like eagerness of discussion. It is well that the relations of Education and Religion should be discussed.

The Christian sees, in the church founded by his Redeem- er, a school of higher endowments and loftier aims than the best appointed universities of the nations. Even the Theo- logical Seminary, religious as are its instructions, and spir- itual as is its influence, it is found, cannot supply the place of the Master's own simple, sublime organization, the Christian Church, with its ordinances and discipline, its intermingling of sympathies and ks mutual duties. The testimony given on this spot, and by these present services, to the unrivalled and indispensable blessings of the Christian church, leads us nat- urally to the selection of our theme. The topic of those

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remarks, to which we ask your patient and devout attention, is, the Christian Church, a School for Heaven. And may the Spirit of all truth, promised by our Saviour as the Com- forter and Guide of His people, be invoked and received by all here met. May His living Light and ineffable Might unfold to us the lessons, and burn in upon our hearts the prin- ciples of that gospel which He alone indited, which He alone effectually interprets, and which it is or soon will be the business of so many here to proclaim. Soon to be scattered, perhaps, through many nations, but bearing every where one message ; soon to be gathered to remote graves, but dying every where we trust in one confession, and finding eveiy where one God, witnessing every where of one cross, and summoning to one throne, let us meditate on the character and blessings of that one spiritual church which we should seek every where to plant and to defend, because it is the one Church which the World's one Redeemer and Judge, as we understand His word, devised for the men of all climes and the men of all times.

It is one of the distinctions between the works of God and the handiwork of man, that the workmanship of human skill is unable to bear close scrutiny or the stress of long use. It is soon worn out, and on one side or other, by minute and varied examination, is found imperfect, awkward, unfinished or defective. But the fabrics of the Divine Hand are found more perfect, the more varied the aspects in which they are viewed, the more closely they are scanned, and the more thoroughly they are tried. It is so with the Church. Human societies, and governments, and philosophies, are found in- efficient for the new emergencies and the enlarged experi- ences of society. But the Church, as God framed it, perpet- uates itself, containing the elements of its own repair and permanence ; and, built upon Christ the Rock of Ages, and endowed with the graces of that Divine Spirit, who is the treasury of all wisdom and might, it goes down in the hands of prayerful and faithful men, adequate to meet the conflicts of every age, and the requirements of all forms and condi- tions of society. Leave it but as Christ left it, and it bears transplantation to tho frozen North or the burning South, thrives under the sides of the despot's throne, or in the soil of a republic, and adapts itself to all grades of human culture, from the races — forlorn, fetid, and loathsome — that seem on the verge of bare brutalism, up to those, which, refined, ele-

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vated and intoxicated by successive centuries of civilization, are ready with Herod to deem themselves gods upon earth. The Church is described in the Scriptures by various imagery, that we may contemplate its adaptations and pur- poses on various sides. It is called now the husbandry, now the building, here the house and there the temple of God, implying His continued activity upon it, and His presence within it. Now, by metaphors derived from another walk of society, it is called the flock and fold of Christ, of which he is the chief Shepherd, implying its dependent weakness and His directing care. Now it is His bride, ransomed by his death, adorned with the jewels of his glory, and sharing his royalty. This is the metaphor not only of the New Testament, but of the Old in some of the Psa'ms and in the book of Canticles — Psalms quoted and indorsed, in that inter- pretation of them, by the Holy Ghost in the epistle to the Hebrews. And as marriage in the eyes of the old common law makes those it has united one person, and in the lan- guage of Scripture they are one body, there is no violent transition from this last metaphor to another, which makes the Church the Body of Christ. This last is the reigning imagery of the context, in that portion of the epistle to the Ephesians, from which our text is taken. In Paul's first epistle to the Corinthian disciples, the same illustration is followed, at yet greater length. In our text the apostle blends the similitude of a body of which Christ is the head, with the imagery of a school having " teachers " some of whose pupils remain but " children" or novices, when they should have grown up to adult proficiency, or as he elsewhere phrases it, " babes inChrist" needing to be taught again the first and elementary principles of the faith ; or as he here continues the illustration, in danger of being " car- ried away with every wind of doctrine ," the storms of every new and popular teaching, however novel, unauthenticated and contradictory such teachings may be — winds to which the immature Christian gives too easy heed, however oppo- site the points from which they blow, and however awful the gulfs into which they would hurl him. To have brought for- ward the whole unbroken context, would involve a wider range of discussion than may be admissible. We have selected those portions of the context, which bear most directly on the church in its aspect of a school, representing

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the members of the Christian Church as learners, who should go on to maturity and perfection.

The Christian Church, as a school, is an image familiar to the New Testament. Christ Himself had called His follow- ers, disciples or scholars. The multitude who did not become such learners, yet admired the Lord in His character of an Instructor, who taught, to use their language, is one having authority. He invited the weary to " learn of Him," and urged men to test His "doctrine," whether it were not of the Father. And on quitting the earth, he left it in charge of His churches to disciple all nations, or to call all mankind into His school. In the times of the apostles, the ministry are often described as " the teachers" of their brethren, and Paul makes it a qualification for the office that a man be apt to teach. The private member he elsewhere de- scribes as " him that is taught," and enjoins it upon him to communicate of his substance " unto him that teacheth." It may be said that in his letter to the Galatians the same apostle declares that we are " no more under a schoolmas- ter,'' but an examination of the context shows him to be re- buking the Jews for clinging to the law as yet their instruc- tor, when that schoolmaster had already brought and trans- ferred them to the higher form, and to the loftier guidance of Christ, as John the Baptist sent his disciples to the Sa- viour. In saying that the church had no more a schoolmas- ter, Christ was certainly excepted, just as elsewhere when the Saviour himself forbade his people to call any man Rabbi or Master, he yet included not Himself in the prohibition, declaring " that one was their Master," and that Himself was such Master and Lord. The Church, then, is a school. It trains in truth and in holiness. It trains for eternity, for Heaven and God. Elsewhere, and quite as frequently, the Church is designated as a family, all named from their one Elder Brother ; and still more frequently, perhaps, as a kingdom, all governed by one law, and one sovereign ; and moving onward to an assured conquest and a com- mon throne. So it is a host, and Christ is the Captain of its salvation. The school, as we have said, is but one therefore of the many sides, on which the Scriptures view that great scheme of Divine Wisdom and Love, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is that side of this spiritual structure, to the contemplation of which, the spot where we stand, and the occasion that has assembled us, most naturally invite us.

A. SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 343

As such, let us reverently and prayerfully, since every school has its instructors, its manuals and pupils, inquire,

I. Who are the Teachers in this, the School of Heaven ?

II. What the manuals, which they employ ?

III. And, lastly, who are the learners ?

The instructors, the text-books, and the pupils, form, then, the three divisions under which our remarks will be grouped.

I. The Church, is a term used in the New Testament in two varying senses, to describe an invisible and a visible body. So its teachers are of two classes, the invisible and the visible. It has its Divine and its human instructors. We said the word Church in the language of inspiration has two meanings. It is applied to describe the general assembly of all saints, those who were once, and those who are, and those who are yet to be on the earth, as all now foreseen, or hereafter met and made perfect in heaven. This is the general assembly and church of the First-born, and from the very necessity of our condition, is therefore to the inhabit- ants of the earth an invisible church. This church excludes what every earthly and visible church probably includes, errorists, who hold not the Head, formalists and hypocrites. It is composed of the elect, and the elect alone. The word Church is used in another and more limited sense of the visible assembly of saints, real or supposed, that holding the truth, meet for worship in one place. This is the visi- ble church of the Bible, and is from its nature a single con- gregation. The theologians have invented and made cur- rent another and intermediate use of the word, a national visible church, which they describe, as made up of several hundred congregations, or even of the entire nation. For this the Holy Ghost gives no warrant ; and yet on this unwarranted assumption rest many of the claims of prelacy and the papacy. The New Testament speaks not of the church of Asia, or the church of Judea, as this theory would have required it to do ; but of the seven churches of Asia and the churches in Judea, showing that the visible church of the New Testament is a single congregation. Each such congregation, by the concurrent testimony of the New Testament and primitive antiquity, is independent of its sister churches. Yet each such visible church, far as it dis- penses essentially the same truth, and enjoys the same Sa- viour's presence and the same Spirit's influences, is a section of the great Catholic Invisible Church ; and is truly apostolic,

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for it has union with the apostles now before the throne ; and is truly Catholic, for it is one in spirit, testimony and heritage with the godly of all dispensations and all ages. As the church organization is then, in one aspect, a visible body, and in another of its aspects and relations, part and parcel of what is as yet to man an invisible body, seen and read only of God ; we need not wonder to find that it has its two classes of teachers, the seen and the unseen ; answering to the two worlds which it unites, to that visible and material earth where it is, in its sections, for the time planted, and to those invisible heavens, whither it is finally to be transplanted, in its entirety, and to find its better and eternal home, melting there all its distinct congregations into the general assembly and church of the First-born.

1. God is, then, the great and effectual Teacher, invisibly, of this school of saints. He is the Unseen Instructor of the Church. It was promised even under the old dispensation, " All thy children shall be taught of God."* Each person in the adorable Trinity co-operates in this work of spiritual education. By a peculiarity which lifts this school above all those of human origin and endowment, its true and effec- tual learners are all changed in heart ; a lesson is set them, so wondrous and energetic, that they are by it renewed as to the spirit of their minds. The Bible describes this, the great crisis in the science of salvation, as a new birth, the com- mencement of a higher stage and a worthier mode of spiritual existence. The share of the Father in this work we learn from the lips of His Son. " No man cometh unto me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him."t Why some are thus drawn and others are not drawn, who may say ? Exercising over our world a righteous sovereignty, of which the history of the world and of the church alike attest the reality, but of which the united wisdom of the world and the church would alike fail to fathom all the mystery, the Father makes some his, by adopting grace, and passes over others. The general call, the imperative summons, and the gracious invitations and expostulations of his gospel, are hon- estly addressed to all ; but he makes them to become an effectual calling, only in the case of His own elect. As to the iSon's share in this instruction, the work of Christ in this teaching is spread over every page, almost, of the New Tes-

* Isaiah liv. 13. t John vi. 44.

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tament. In the context before us, he is made the Head from which the entire body depends. Elsewhere he is said to be formed in the hearts of the regenerate, as the hope of glory. They are the sheep that hear his voice. All who come to the Father come by Him, and none know that Father but as that Son reveals Him. Present, to the end of the world, in the humblest assemblies of His people, and aiding the stammering lips of the feeblest of his true ministers, this, His pledged presence, is the secret of their indefectibility. And, as in the days of Paul's youth he sat at Gamaliel's feet, and as in the days of Christ's flesh Mary sat at that Saviour's feet, so must, now and forever, every true learner in the school of Heaven sit at the feet of Jesus the Great Teacher, and learn of Him. But it is to the Holy Ghost that especial prominence is given by the New Testament, as the great Invisible Teacher and Comforter of the church, He opens the sealed eyes and unstops the ears long closed. He takes the stores of wisdom that are of the Father and of the Son, and shows them unto us. By Him we pray acceptably, and in His light see the light of the Scriptures. He not only renews and sanctifies each private member of the church, but His alone it is to call, and endow, and prosper the pastors or human and visible teachers of the Church. Christ gave this Spirit, in all his varying and inexhaustible influences, as the accompaniment and attestation of His own kingly ascension, when he quitted the earth to regain his native skies, and to resume the glory which He had for the time relinquished. To sin wilfully against this great Invisible but indispensa- ble Agent, is the unpardonable sin for which there is no remis- sion. ' Grieve Him not,' ' Quench not His kindled influ- ences,' is the loud and solemn warning of Christ and Christ's apostles to the churches. Forgetfulness of His rights and of His incommunicable prerogatives is the secret of declension, heresy, and wide-spread ruin, to the churches of earth in every age. As the glorious reformation was traceable to a restoration of Christ to his rightful place as the Mediator and the Righteousness of the church ; so we suppose, that the melancholy pause and reaction which was seen in the progress of that reformation, was traceable to a neglect on the part of the Churches, to give to the Holy Ghost his due place and honors in the system of Christianity. Men trusted in the truth, apart from Him, the Spirit of Truth. They relied on the graves of their reformed Fathers instead of the everlast-

346 THE CHURCH,

ing God of those Fathers ; on controversies and in creeds, dissevered from prayer for the influences of the Paraclete. The effect was that the chariot of salvation faltered in its course, and its wheels drave heavily, and the banners of Antichrist turned again from their earlier flight, and flouted anew the standards of a purer faith ; and Christian Europe saw itself like the victim on one of whose sides palsy has laid its blight ; the half had sense and life, and half struggled with the torpor of death.

The great mission of our own denomination, as distin- guished from other sections of true Christians, is, not only to proclaim, with them, the need of personal and individual re- generation by this blessed Spirit, but also to discriminate the effectual Spirit from the emblematic rite, and to isolate the individual, — apart from the nation, and apart from the family, — shutting him up, singly and alone, to the need, for himself, personally and apart from all hope in his fellows, of this regenerating Spirit, for himself individually. When Christians, (even wise, and good, and great men,) in the old world, confound the Church and the State ; when, as we suppose, Christians in the New World, of undisputed ex- cellence and wisdom, are yet chargeable with the error of confounding the Church and the household, thus bringing in the carnal and unregenerate element into the constitution of a church that should be exclusively spiritual and all regen- erate, it is our duty to declare that the influences of this great Invisible Teacher are riot transmissible, as a material hereditament, by mere right of descent. Our peculiar voca- tion it is to call each to look to himself, and that he say not, as did the Jews in the times of Christ's forerunner : We are the seed of the spiritual, " We have Abraham to our father ;" as if it followed thence, by an inevitable sequence, that they had the spirit of adoption, and could legitimately cry to Je- hovah : « Abba, Father.'

And if ever, which may God forbid, the inscription of Ichabod, the memorial of departed power and of vanished glory, the mournful sentence that has been inscribed on many a Theological Seminary in Europe and on some in America, — Seminaries, that, reared in faith, have passed over into the hands of formalism and heresy — if that dread and desolating inscription be ever legible on these walls, reared by the sac- rifices, and fragrant with the prayers of men who revered and adored the Holy Ghost, it will be, probably, by a wrong done

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 347

to this Divine Teacher, that the work of desecration will have been begun : — the neglect of the Paraclete will be the abomin- ation that maketh desolate. If, against the examples, and the entreaties, and the instructions of your pious teachers, young men of this Seminary, the hope and joy of the Churches — let a dying sinner say to his fellow-heirs of mortality and of sin — if you substitute learning for spirituality, and a reli- ance on intellect for trust in the Divine Teacher, and prefer speculation to prayer, it is against this, the pre-eminent and Supreme Teacher of the Church, that you will be sinning. And the city of Mansoul, as Bunyan depicts it, beleaguered in all her gates, and with treason busy on her walls and in her citadel, while this, the Lord Secretary, alienated by neglect, has withdrawn himself in disgust from an oblivious and un- grateful people, — Mansoul, we say, besieged and disheart- ened, famished and terrified, and deserted of her Lord, will becorne but the feeble image of the Churches to which you may minister, with the stores of an unsanctified learning, and of a godless and self-deifying intellect.

2. Subordinate to this Divine Teaching, and valueless without it, there come, next, the human teachers, the ushers under the great and paramount Teacher, God. They are described in our text and the adjoining sentences. Some of these human teachers were of an extraordinary and miracu- lous character, given to apostolic times, but not continued in later ages of the Church. Of this kind, are the three first named by the apostle, among these visible and mortal teachers of Christ's school : apostles, prophets, and evangelists. By the last was probably intended a class of men like Timothy and Titus, who might best be described by a name which Rome has used for other purposes, as apostolical vicars, act- ing in an apostle's stead, under his directions, and as we sup- pose, only during his life-time. Thus Titus traversed Crete and ordered its churches with a delegated share of Paul's power. The name, evangelist, is now often given to breth- ren in the ministry confined to no pastoral charge, and who are devoted mainly to labors, for the revival of the churches and for the conversion of sinners, over a wide district. We would neither deny nor disparage the eminent usefulness and graces of some men like Whitfield and the Wesleys and the Tennents, who have been thus employed. We believe that the churches need true revivals, and should pray for them and seek them, and finding them from God,

348 THE CHURCH,

may then well multiply and protract their religious services. But, that this text recognizes and describes, here, preachers devoted mainly to such efforts, as to their one work, as the class it intends by the term evangelists, we doubt. Far as such laborers for God rebuke the apathy of Christian churches and Christian ministers, and turn many to righteousness, we would rejoice in their success and emulate their graces. But far as such examples, on the other hand, are pleaded as authority, and they have unhappily been so pleaded, for measures more mechanical than spiritual, and for modes of worship rather dramatic than devotional ; far as periodical excitements have been made to discredit and replace God's Sabbaths and the appointed and permanent preaching of the word ; and far as, intentionally, there have been efforts to break down the pastoral authority, to substitute for it, a virtual control and supervision by a higher class of laborers, who should themselves be bound to no spot, and responsible to no church, we believe the pleas so made unwarranted, and the results, as the churches have already proved, may be abundantly disastrous. The church is, in one of its great uses, as a nursery and school for the children of God. It is dangerous to convert it, by our hot haste, into a Foundling Hospital, crowded with those of dubious or spurious parent- age. The inmates of such receptacles in Europe are known to die, the larger mass of them, before reaching maturity. And as the Foundling Hospitals of the old world have not been proved to favor either the population or public morals of a land ; so the rapid and indiscriminate admissions to church membership advocated by some indiscreet laborers, — the receiving as God's children those who give scanty evi- dence of His adoption, — the letting in upon God's heritage of an alien seed, — the giving, as Christ said, the children's bread to dogs, — has not wrought happily on the purity or prosperity of our churches. And how fatal must be its effect on those thus baptized into an unregenerate hope, and who, if they but maintain an ordinary morality, burden our church- es as formalists or errorists — or who, if casting off moral re- straints, they incur exclusion, generally harden into infidels and mockers. Let us not decry protracted meetings : let us not unduly rely on their aid. Let us not crowd all our de- votion into six weeks or seven of the fifty-two that make up the year, more than the merchant would crowd all his hon- esty into one month of the twelve. Let us give due honor

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to brethren, to whom God may have given special endow- ments for awakening the impenitent and backslidden. But let us not claim the support of this text for these as if they* were the extraordinary evangelists of apostolic times, tra- versing the land with a divine commission, to set up, at their pleasure, or to put down pastors. But let us cling tena- ciously to God's mechanism for the world's conversion and for the sanctification of the Church, the ordinary ministry and the pastorate ; and let us expect a harvest-time for souls running through all the Sabbaths of the year. Let us recollect that, in all communions, we are in danger from the error, which so beguiled and enlarged Rome. She, to make religion popular, and conversions rapid and multitu- dinous, hewed the strait gate wider, and made the narrow way broad as the path to death. Thus has she, under pre- tence of evangelizing the nations, carnalized the gospel and secularized the church. Instead of converting the nations, this is but a conversion of the gospel to something other and more and worse than what Christ left it.

Of the details of the pastor's duty we have not now time to speak. God has all varieties of gifts in these his ministers. There are some whose minds are formed for patient inquiry, and others for impressive statement and irresistible appeal. One man shows his strength in his prayers, and another in his sermons, and yet another in his pastoral visits. There are some whose doctrine distils like the gathering dew, softly and almost imperceptibly bathing the mind of a hearer. Oth- ers have a gentle profusion of sentiment and language, that like the speech of old Nestor, as Homer describes it, falls as the snow, and covers all with its light, feathery flakes. And there are still others, whose words, slow, ponderous, and compact with compressed meaning, fall like the hail-storm mentioned in the Apocalyptic vision, where each stone was of a talent's weight, and crushed when it struck. A dull uni- formity in the gifts of the pastorate, would not conduce to gen- eral edification ; and the attempt, sometimes apparent, to make any individual teacher the standard, to whose personal endowments every other must be conformed, or suffer re- jection, is an attempt to mend God's better methods of using all and all varieties of gifts in his school. Peter could nei- ther speak, write, nor act like John ; and John was incapable of assuming the tone and port of Peter ; and neither could dilate, with the broad magnificence, or dive into the deep

350 THE CHURCH,

mysteries of truth, with the unfathomed profundity of Paul : yet Paul, and Peter, and John were all servants of the same Christ, organs and channels of the same Holy Spirit, and effi- cient servants of the same Church of the Living God. Let pastor and student, while shunning all needless eccentricity, cultivate and develope fearlessly their own individuality, and occupy the talents, few or many, given to their especial keeping. It is the duty of the pastor to look to himself and his ministry ; to study, that he may teach; to pray much, that he may have much of the Spirit's influences ; and to vary his appeals, warnings, and instructions to the varying charac- acter, and needs, and state of the souls entrusted to his charge.

3. Again, the Church, collectively, is in a certain sense to teach. All Christians bear, in their measure, part in the human instructions, due from the Church. In this school they are to.be living epistles of Christ, seen and read of all men. They are to hold forth the word of life. The Church is to grow, as our context shows, by that which " every joint supplieth." When there is a failure on the part of the several members of this church to feel and meet this obliga- tion, we see the apostle's command to the churches practi- cally read, by a melancholy travesty, as if the body of Christ, his Church, were to be, instead of compacted, " dislocated by that which every joint w ithholdeth, according to the inefficient working, in the measure of every part, and maketh waste of the body, unto the destruction of itself, in general uncharita- bleness, and a reigning selfishness." Such churches pine un- der an atrophy of Christian graces and a palsy of all spiritual activity. In every station and of either sex, true Christians may in their appropriate sphere witness for Christ. Thus even in the sex to which Paul forbade public teaching in the church, he commands that in the seclusion of the home and in the associations of the domestic circle, the aged women be " teachers of good things."

Thus have we observed how the divine and the human, the visible and the invisible, combine as the appointed teachers of the Church as it is God's school : the mortal usher seen, but the Great Master by whom and for whom he works, un- seen.

II. Let us now pass, in the second place, to the manuals, which this school uses, the text-books out of which the lessons are to be furnished. They are all volumes of God's inditing, the first and the last marred by the share of man in their

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transcription ; the second is the only volume to which strictly belongs the title of a revelation.

1. The book of man's conscience, is, perhaps, the first to be named. When describing the work of the great Invisible Teacher of the Church, the blessed Spirit of God, the Saviour represents Him, as unrolling this volume. He convinces, or makes to be read in the inner conscience the guilt of those he teaches ; convicting the world first of sin, bringing home to the human spirit the sense of its guilt, and haunting it with the memory of its long-buried trespasses. So the apostle, describing the heathen who enters the Christian assembly to meet God there, represents him as having the secrets of his heart made manifest, and then falling down with the confes- sion that God is indeed in the midst of the church. So Sol- omon, in the ancient dispensation, calls the acceptable sup- pliant of God's courts the man who knows the plague of his own heart. So Paul depicts the faithful preacher of the gospel, as commending himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. This is one of the books that will be open- ed in the day of judgment: and it is, even now, the business of the human teacher of the church, instrument ally, and the prerogative of the Divine Teacher of the church, effectually, to turn the leaves of this dread text-book, and show to men what they are and what they need, the guilt they have in- curred and the mercy they require. So the Christian is to try his heart and way, keeping with all diligence that heart out of which are the issues of the life, and whence, in the case of the renewed man, springs a well of water unto life everlasting.

2. The second is the volume of God's Scriptures. Where is this revelation of God to be found 1 Is it within the lids of the volume of the written word; or in the depths of the human intellect, which in the first writers originated that word, and in each of its readers, is to try that word ; or is it in the traditions of the Church, at whose hands we are to take this word, and from whose lips tojiave it interpreted and amplified? For our churches, and the evangelical sects of Protestantism, there is no hesitation, in choosing the pro- per definition, and the true seat of Revelation. To us the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the ultimate and complete revelation of God. Before the canon of the New Testament was finished, and whilst apostles, having plenary inspiration, yet guided the Church, their teachings

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orally had, with the Christian disciples, the authority now due to their written testimonies. The revelation of that age was in their lips. Their writings gathered and fixed revela- tion ; and gave it a local habitation in the Bible. Just, as philosophers tell us, as the light existed before the creation of the sun, floating in irregular masses ; so was it with revela- tion in the first century. Until apostles, by their writings, compiled, and by their death closed the canon of the New Testament, this, the light of Heaven for the human soul, was floating in the oral instructions of the teachers, and in the memories of their converts. The formation of the New Testament, and the departure of inspired apostles, gathered, and fixed, and limited Divine Revelation, in an embodiment, from which, now, nothing may be taken, and to which no- thing may be added.

To this book, however, exception is taken, from opposite quarters. The votaries of tradition represent the volume as incomplete, needing theit traditions, as its appendix and its exposition. The disciples of rationalism regard it as inexact, and needing to be corrected and amended, by the better judgment of each reader, and the rising lights of each new and wiser generation. Widely, then, as these two opposing errors diverge from each other, they yet converge together, in the one principle, that Scripture is defective. Our church- es deny all such alleged defect, and recognize, in the Book, a type of the Wisdom of its Author, as a record omitting nought that is needful for its purposes, and retaining nought that is needless. We recognize the rights of human reason, in its own legitimate sphere, and within the narrow scope of its feeble powers, to examine, with patient thorough- ness, all the evidences of the Divine origin of the document, and carefully to settle the exact text of the document ; but, these done, it is bound meekly to receive much that may be mysterious, believing that what God has said, is and must be true, and that the weakness of God is stronger than man, and the foolishness of God wiser than man.

The God, who educes good out of evil, may, we believe, bring to his Church profit and edification, even out of the results of the most lawless rationalism, as exhibited in those German scholars, who seem to graft a Sadducean temerity, as to the doctrines of the Bible, upon a Pharisaic precise- ness, as to the text of the Bible. The churches may be called to bless God, for the siftings to which German Neol-

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ogy has subjected the text of the New Testament, as they do for the bigoted strictness of the ancient Pharisee, as to the text of the Old Testament : and yet our churches may as little sympathize with the principles of the German exe- gete as with those of the ancient Scribes.

As to the attempt to make tradition an indispensable sup- plement to Scripture, and to prove that Revelation is to be compiled, and a system of religious truth selected, out of the Fathers, Councils and Decretals, it seems to us, on its face, as absurd, as would be the proposal, that we should set ourselves to compile and complete the Paradise Lost of Milton, a book of the seventeenth century, out of the news- papers and general literature of the nineteenth century. We might better content ourselves with the copy as it stands, in its original integrity. If we are to go out of it, we may find in the floating sheets of our time, all the words of Milton's poem, covered by myriads of other words, and destitute of all order and cohesion. But the task of disentanglino;, iden- tifying and arranging these " scattered members " of the poet, would involve a toil quite as difficult for our incompe- tency as the writing of a new and rival Paradise Lost. And so, in the traditions of the Church, and the teachings of the Fathers, tortuous, and contradictory, and confused as they are, Inspiration and Omniscience would be quite as much needed to disentangle truth from error, as to write any gos- pel or epistle in all the New Testament. The inspired se- lection of the true tradition would need, too, as much mira- culous evidence to warrant the claim, as was vouchsafed to the inspired dictation of the canonical Scriptures.

But it is said, by the advocates of Patristic lore ; you do not know the canonical Scriptures, except by the testimony of the early fathers ; and if they, it is, who give you the Testament, you are bound to take with it their interpreta- tion. We do not admit this. The early Christians are but as the postman, who brings to us a letter from some friend, the resident of a distant city. The epistle is authenticated, in part indeed, by the postmark and the carrier. But, be- sides and above the evidence thus supplied, the letter itself, and its contents, as tallving with the known character and earlier correspondence of our distant friend, are evidences also : and if these last be wanting, the others would be un- availing. In his place the carrier does good service, and bears availing testimony : but if, because he is the postman,

46

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he claims to open for us, and to interpret to us, the epistle he brings, he grossly exaggerates his own prerogatives. Even so is it with the early churches. As the bearers, in Divine Providence, to us of our Father's letters missive, they may legitimately testify to certain facts within their know- ledge, that certain compositions were written by apostles and apostolic men whom the apostles explicitly authorized thereto. This is a fact of history. They are the masters of the post where the letter was mailed, and their mark fixes its origin at such place and at such date. But there are other historical witnesses besides them. The very oppo- nents of the gospel, in earlier ages, give similar testimony. Julian the apostate is himself, then, one of the postmen. But, even traditionists would not contend that he is there- fore an interpreter of the document, which he aids in authen- ticating and forwarding.

But are we told, by the men of reason, on the other hand, that, if we admit man's intellect to sit in judgment on the historical and other evidences of the Divine origin of the document, and on the just letter and text of the document, then, we must, of necessity, hold that intellect competent to judge the substance, as well as the text of the document, and to alter and amend this, to the requirements of the cul- tivated reason ? We answer : the claim, though urged by those who call themselves rationalists, seems the embodi- ment of all that is irrational, as well as irreverent. If-rea- son can thus make and remake a revelation, it certainly does not need one : if, confessedly, it needs one, then it cannot make one. The principle of such an exegesis is, that we first reason out by our own native powers, a system of doc- trine or morals, and that we then hew and crush God's scripture into harmony with this our preconceived standard. If this system leaves Scripture any place, it is that of being the stuttering interpreter of Reason, by an enunciation, awkward, quaint, and obscure, bringing out what Reason herself states more clearly, more systematically, and more forcibly. The Bible is, then, a Moses, of stammering lips : whilst Reason is the Aaron, the eloquent speaker. On this principle, Revelation is seen, stumbling on crutches; whilst Reason moves before it, like some parent bird before its un- fledged offspring, poised on airy wings. The Bible, and Conscience, and man's own honest, and unintoxicated Rea- son, coincide in reversing this imaginary relation ; and as-

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 355

cribe the real ownership of the crutches to Reason, and of the wings to Revelation.

Instead of being outgrown, as some intimate, by the grow- ing civilization of the race, the Scriptures, with the infinite wisdom they derive from their Divine Author, are found, age after age, developing still new glories with each deeper investigation. No past age has exhausted all the lodes and veins of truth these mines contain. The gospel is as inex- haustible, as man's wants, and life's changes, and God's grace. Until the breathing of these troops of students shall have stript these hills of their keen and bracing air, — until the lungs of the race shall have exhausted the atmosphere of our globe, — until your thirst shall have drained the seas, and your eyes have beggared sun and stars of all their light, you need not fear, brethren in the Christian ministry, that your studies and your sermons will have drawn dry the fountain of God's oracles. The only concern we need to feel is, that, as in Jonathan Edwards, and Andrew Fuller, and Henry Martyn, study and piety should keep pace ; and that the results of our profoundest thinking should be used to feed the flames of a seraphic devotion ; and that, like the warrior psalmist of Israel, vigor and valor in the outer battle- field of the world, should never be regarded as a dispensa- tion from lowly and lonely adoration, within the curtains of the tabernacle.

A portion of this book of Revelation is prophetic. It limns, with more or less of distinctness, the shape of the times that are to pass over the churches and the nations. "If (said the apostle to Timothy) thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ " (1 Tim. iv. 6). Look to the context of that saying, and it is found that these things, thus commended as the theme of pastoral admonition, are the difficult, con- troverted and mysterious lessons of prophecy ; but practical, in all their mystery, for they forewarn of an impending, gradual and general apostasy, and this as growing, in part, out of a practical mistake, false views of Christian holiness. Prophecy had bidden the churches discern the gatherings of that cloud, which burst in a storm of delusion upon Chris- tendom, and continued for successive centuries. We do not say that prophecy is to be the one staple of the pulpit, that it is to be the exclusive, or even the paramount subject of study to the churches. The milk which befits the babes in

356 THE CHURCH,

Christian grace, and the simple bread for which the poor of the Lord hunger, are not to be sought, mainly, in gauging the apocalyptic vials. Sinai, and the Mount of Beatitudes, and Calvary, have their right to be heeded, as well as those dread blasts which issue from the trumpets of the apocalyptic vision. But, on the other hand, what God thought it neces- sary to write, the Church may not safely think it unnecessary to read : and whilst it is our folly to be wise above what is written, it is our privilege to be wise up to what God has so written. Do we shrink from controversy ? It is often in- evitable, to pass safely the ordeal of some popular error. Does prophecy, as a study, seem wanting in practical uses ? Certainly, in the text already indicated from Paul's letters to his son in the faith, the essence of Christian practice, the true nature of holiness, is represented in the prophecy, as being widely mistaken within the nominal Church. Without pondering this, and similar predictions, we are not sure that we set out, with just principles, in our elementary views of Christian graces, and of practical holiness. And, on the other hand, the prophetic portions of the Bible were, in the hands of the early reformers, most potent weapons, of daily use, against Rome. It is a remarkable and significant fact of our times, that whilst Rome, as in dread of their power, has sought to turn from herself the evangelical descriptions of Antichrist which the reformers quoted against her, there should be, at two remote points, having little intercourse or sympathy, the Oxford Tractarians of Britain, on the one. side, and some esteemed expositors of our own land, on the other, a disposition to pass to the Romanist system of inter- pretation, thus surrendering an outwork held, both long be- fore and long after the Reformation, by those who have wit- nessed against that apostate Church. A return to the views of our fathers, is, in this matter, we believe, demanded by the harmony of Scripture, and indispensable to the triumphs of the Gospel. With them, we must hold Pontifical Rome to be the mystical Babylon of the New Testament. As Babylon of the Chaldees held Israel captive by the Euphra- tes, so has this fallen Church, beside the streams of her Tiber, wielded a more cruel tyranny, over a wider region, and for a far longer term. Prophetic exposition, as one of the weapons of the Reformation against her, has not yet lost its temper, and may not be spared from the armory of the soldiers of truth.

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 357

Scripture, then, in its fulness and its sufficiency — in its morals, and its mysteries, and its prophecies also, must be, and remain, the chief text-book and manual, in the School, where God trains the children of Adam for the employments and associations of Heaven.

3. But besides the manuals of man's conscience and God's Scriptures, there is another book to be studied in the church. The third is the volume of God's providence. God is ruling the world. His dealings are full of instruction. " Whoso is wise," said the Psalmist, " and will observe these things, even they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord."* That portion of the volume of Scripture to which we have" last alluded, and which contains God's prophecies of the fu- ture, is to be interpreted by collation with this other and cor- responding volume of His providence. This forms the chief value of Church History. It illustrates the reasonableness and justice of the warnings of inspired men, the value of their doctrines to holiness, and shows the effect of all at- tempts to improve their doctrines by a higher sanctity, to be eventually the fostering of unholiness. It shows impressive- ly the unity of the Divine Spirit, and of the Saviour's image, in true Christians of all ages and all communions. One great excellence of the labors of the devout and eminent Neander, is the mode in which he thus analyzes and recog- nizes the elements of true piety, wherever found ; and de- tects the unity of the true members of Christ's Church amid all the varieties of discipline, and customs, and nations. The church history may be accessible to few : but the book of God's providence has other pages that are accessible to all. And how impressive may a Christian find this volume, as it contains, not the history of past centuries merely, but as it in- cludes his own career and that of his fellow-disciples person- ally known and dear to him. How much light is reflected back, from those pages of his personal experience and his own observation of God's dealings, upon the volume of Scrip- ture ; and how are the promises, the warnings, and the re- bukes of Scripture, shown under a new aspect. And not the history of the Church only, but the annals of the world become intelligible and profitable, only when studied as the book of God and of his Christ. Jesus, the Messiah, is the being whose advent and work knit together the raveled and

* Psalm cvii. 43.

358 THE CHURCH,

tangled web of the world's history ; and give it symmetry and aim, a meaning and a plan. The first successful attempt to write a Universal History, as even irreligious critics allow, was that which was made on Christian principles, by Bos- suet, and all subsequent attempts to substitute a secular for a spiritual point of view, in a general history of the race, — to look at God's government of the world from the footstool and not from the throne, — from the plans of the creature, over- ruled and frustrated, and not from the plan of the Creator, overruling all and not to be frustrated by any ; — all attempts to delineate the school of God's Providence, as seen from the forms of the scholar and not as beheld from the seat of the great Teacher — all such earth-born schemes of writing a symmetrical history of man and of his earth, have failed and will fail. It is God's book : and to overlook Him and His purposes in it, is to tear out the title-page, and preface and index, from the volume.

As geometry must be studied with diagrams, and as the readers of our age delight in a literature rich with pictorial illustrations, so has God enriched and illustrated, so to speak, the volume of his Scriptures with the pictured scenes of the volume of Providence. The problems and demonstrations of the one book, are made more plain by consulting the dia- grams of the other.

Thus out of His volumes, as inscribed on man's memory and heart ; — as written upon the page of Scripture ; — and as delineated upon the pictured page of Providence, has the Great Teacher of this school for Heaven furnished manuals, to be pondered and collated by the human teachers and pu- pils of His church. These are our text-books in the school of Christ. We study any or all to profit, only under the eye of the great, Divine, and Invisible Teacher, the Holy Ghost.

III. Lastly, let us dwell on the character of the learners in this, the academy that trains for heaven the children of earth.

1. The universal race, the unawakened world of mankind are, then, to be invited to these studies. The books tell — Scripture distinctly — conscience and Providence by implica- tion— the destiny of the race. This Bible is the record of their Judge and their Redeemer. The Church is, of right and from Christ's organization, a missionary body, baptizing her converts under a missionary charter, and enlisting their services for a war of holy aggression, on a world lying prone

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 359

and captive in the bonds of the wicked one, and in the prac- tice of all wickedness. " Go ye into all nations" is the voice yet ringing over all the forms of this school, from its pre- sent Saviour ; and breathed oft by the whisperings of the unseen Spirit into the ear of the missionary teacher. That it is little heeded and so scantily obeyed, this it is thatrcon- stitutes the guilt and shame of the Christian church. The feast was spread indeed for guests, many of whom, though bidden, would not come. But how sad the thought of the myriads never bidden by the Church. The school was opened for many who have refused to become learners there, yet what countless myriads have never heard even the Great Teacher's name, or seen one leaf, or read one line of the volume of His Scripture.

2. But besides the world, all invited to be learners, the body of private members of the Church are, again, evidently learners in the school of Christ. They will profit, only as they reduce what they learn to practice, try the human teach- er by the Scripture, and compare the scriptural page with the books of Conscience and of Providence, and pray that upon themselves and their earthly instructors may ever rest the in- fluence of the Divine Teacher, the Paraclete. Thus prayer- ful and heedful, every visit to the sanctuary, every interview with a fellow-disciple, every Sabbath and every sermon be- come the means of edification, and minister to the daily growth of the Christian. His mind is educed and evolved. It unfolds like the flower, it towers like the oak. They shall grow as the lily, and cast forth their roots as Lebanon. He profits and is profited. The joy and crown of his pastor's rejoicing, he is the counsellor and friend and pattern of his fellow-members. The world is abashed before his transpa- rent sincerity and his unruffled meekness ; and, going from strength to strength, he appears at last before God, removed from the lower forms of earth to the higher level and the wider vision of the heavenly world. Seeing, here, through a glass darkly, and knowing but in part, there he knows even as he is known.

3. But these are not the only learners. Pastors as well as their people learn. The earthly and visible teachers of the church are not released from the duty of continuing pupils in the school. Their profiting should appear to all men, and even the feeblest of their fellow-disciples, and the most inconsistent of their fellow-professors, may aid their spirit-

360 THE CHURCH,

ual education. As the birth of an infant into a household, and the claims it brings on the sympathies and cares of the elder children, train them to an affection and thoughtfulness before unknown ; so, the feeble and infirm of the flock may- augment the graces of their stronger brethren on whom they lean. The eye, the hand, and the foot, exchange mu- tual aid. If the eye now guides the hand, the hand at other times tears down the barriers that obstruct the vision of the eye. If the eye now directs the climbing foot, the foot it is that gains the mountain top, and gives to the eye the range of a wider horizon. At the bed-side of a dying child, or of an ignorant but godly Christian, what pastor has not had his religious attainments enlarged ? Even heresies may profit. They must be, said the apostle, that those who are approved may be made manifest. The fall of Peter in the high priest's hall, and his rebuke, in after days by Paul, for the want of Christian simplicity, served as a warning to each apostle who heard them. So even from the infirmities, divisions, and scandals of the churches, the spiritual man may extract les- sons of good.

4. But beyond the world, and the private Christian, and the ministers of Christ's gospel, there is still another rank of learners, who gaze upon the lessons of this school. Faith sees, towering over the seats of the sanctuary, another rank of learners, all attent, and all believing. The Christian Church is a study to angels, so Paul asserts. " To the in- tent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God."* They gain, by the Spirit's government of the Church, new views of the evil of sin and the dangers of error ; and loftier conceptions of the extent of the Divine Love and the range of the Divine Wisdom. Jesus, the great Head of the Church, was " seen of angels." As of old their golden resemblances, the cherubim of the mercy-seat, bowed over the mystic contents of the ark, where the law of inflexible justice was resting beneath the lids of the mercy- seat on which was enthroned a God of forgiveness, so do these angels, not emblematically but really, )^et desire to " look into these things ;" and watch, with interest and sym- pathy, the course of those human spirits, once the children of wrath, whom grace has made the children of God, — once,

* Ephcsians iii. 10.

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with Adam, learners, in the school of sin, of the fatal know- ledge of good and evil, and now, under the second Adam, learners of the knowledge of good, good only and ever- more. They rejoiced before the throne over the sinner's conversion. They minister to the onward course of the struggling saint. We forget this. Kneeling in feebleness, and gloom, and loneliness, in his secluded closet, the tempt- ed disciple seeing for the time but the visible, and forgetting the invisible, deems himself the unnoticed and solitary wres- tler, that is but " beating the air." He seems to urge an unheard plea, and hardly to maintain an unavailing strife. But, in truth, he is visible to those who are to him invisible. That solitary wrestler of the secluded closet is, in fact, the victorious athlete on whom is gathered the gaze of a vast, and thronged, and resplendent amphitheatre. He is watched by a great cloud of witnesses. "We are made," said the apostle, " a spectacle to angels and to men." And, above all, there rests upon him, evermore, the eye of his Father who seeth in secret and will reward him openly.

Such are the instructors, lessons, and learners of the school God's grace has opened in the church of the redeemed.

1. May not the recollections of the invisible and spiritual church, furnish the most availing counterpoise to the claims of Antichrist ? If, at first view, this imagery of a great Cath- olic and visible church, having wide nations in its communion, a visible head, and a long succession of such heads, enchant and overpower the imagination ; how do these dwindle and shrivel, beside the spiritual views the Scripture presents, of a great catholic, invisible church, of the elect of all times, now invisible but one day to be manifested, having an infalli- ble and sinless High Priest, Christ Jesus, really present unto all his worshippers, and a King who only hath immortality. To traditions, contradictory and obscure, locked up in de- cretals and acts of councils, and collections of papal bulls ; let us oppose the Eternal and Unerring Spirit, leading into all truth, accessible every where to prayer, and dwelling in the believer's heart — not to be sought at Rome by voyage and pilgrimage, but near as his word, in our mouth and our heart. The plea of private judgment, which some make the exclusive, and most the prominent point of resistance to the Roman argument, seems really liable to the objection Roman- ists adduce against it, of leading into wild and impious ration- alism. It is so liable, whenever severed from the recognition 47

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of our continual dependence on the Divine Spirit, and sev- ered from his infallible faithfulness to our appeals, when that dependence is but acknowledged. Take these truths with it, and place them before it ; and the right of private judg- ment is impregnable. But sever them ; and the claims of antiquity, authority, and an infallible church, as the inter- preter of Scripture, become to some minds irresistible.

2. Honor to the Divine Teacher is, then, the safeguard and glory of the Church, of the Theological school, of our pul- pits, and of our professorial chairs. Separate the visible and the invisible, exaggerate the sufficiency and power of the first, depreciate and forget the sovereignty of the last; let the usher affect independence of the Master, and let the minis- try, the human teachers of this school, overlook the Divine teachings of the Holy Ghost ; divorce the desk from the closet ; attempt to read the written page of Scripture, and the pictured page of Providence, and the blotted page of Con- science, apart from the Divine Interpreter of them all : and your pastorate becomes fruitless, your churches barren, and your students heretical. Puny sciolism is earth's best schol- arship, when it affects independence of the Holy Ghost. Let eloquence adorn, and science strengthen, the teachings thus opposed to the Holy Ghost, the work and the workman are something worse than worthless : they are accursed. The frosts of the second death will seal those fluent lips. The fires of the burning throne will smite the man thus faith- less as a shepherd of Christ's flock, and thus dishonest as the steward of the Divine mysteries, and who preaches re- ligious falsehood in the chair of spiritual verity.

3. If the Church be indeed, in one of its multiform aspects, a school for Heaven, a device of Infinite Wisdom to urge and guide the powers of the soul in their onward and upward aspirations, it is manifestly the duty of the youthful student, who looks, as pastor or missionary, to aid and extend the Churches of Christ, to seek for himself, in the progress of his scholastic education, the benefits of this spiritual education, and to acquire a personal experience of the workings of church order, and the advantages of church fellowship. Not, as if it were to put himself under irksome restraints, but as a matter of delight and advantage to his own soul, and as a token of his own deference to that Great Teacher whom he is about to commend to others, he must value the Church which his Lord and Saviour organized ; and place himself

A. SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 363

under the cherishing and stimulating, the guardian and the impulsive influences of that school which Christ devised. Not that students should necessarily, or generally, even, be- come full members. But if, the desire to keep unbroken the ties of union to the Church of their original member- ship, seem to render their full dismission undesirable ; and the loss of all their licentiates for the ministry were, on the other hand, no inconsiderable and no safe sacrifice, to be made by the Churches abroad : this sundering of old ties and surrender of youthful licentiates might perhaps be avoided, and the end desired might yet be secured, if the churches abroad, instead of giving to these students the ordinary letter of recommendation, indefinite in extent of duration and vague in its address, as being intended for all churches alike, should give a special letter of recommendation, in the case of their students at the Theological Seminary. This peculiar letter of commendation might recommend them, for certain years of their studies, to the peculiar church of that Seminary, as subjects of its special care and recipients of all its advantages. There would, thus, be given to the church of the Seminary its special right to expect the communion in its ordinances, and the aid in its services of the young stu- dent, while leaving to the original church all rights of final discipline and entire dismission. Thus the church, at the scene of their studies, would serve as the trustee, with lim- ited and defined powers, of the church of their proper mem- bership ; and the youthful scholar would not, amid his books and lectures, want this education, an education equally valuable with books and lectures, and that the church affords in its various services, and its mutual sympathies and cares. 4. If God, the Highest, comes down to the minds of the feeble and the ignorant who sit in His school, the Church, surely it should be the joy of the Christian scholar to bring down his highest attainments to the aid of the least and of the least esteemed in Christ's Church. The beam that drops out of the side of the sun into the heart of the violet, paint- ing it with its rich hues, has travelled myriads of miles with the utmost speed, and, past stars and systems, it shot along its undiverted way, to reach that lowly end, and to do this its ap- pointed errand — So let the youthful servants of the cross, in fetching like Elihu their knowledge from afar,* delight glad-

* Job xxxvi. 3.

364 THE CHURCH,

ly to distil its results into the lowliest offices of the pastorate, and instead of seeking after high things, condescend to men of low estate, as the true ministers of a Teacher, who hum- bled himself, coming not to be ministered unto but to min* ister, and who had fishermen for his apostles.

We trust, there are none such among the youthful stu- dents of this Institution ; but, to an evil, in some quarters betraying itself, it is fitting to allude in the modes its vota- ries will best understand. If an affectation of gentility be the highest aim of any misguided youth, who has condescended to patronize the religirm of that Carpenter's Son, who de- meaned Himself so far even, as to die the malefactors' death ; why should such an aspirau cling to the ministra- tions of a faith, which must be, to his first principles of con- duct, so uncongenial and repulsive ? Let him rather ' sacri- fice to the Graces,' and restore that elegant Polytheism, whose fall Gibbon deplored. Seeking, first and evermore, the honor that cometh from man, he is likely to become more versed in the gospel according to Chesterfield, than in either of the four evangelists. Conscious, although he may have little claim to talent, attainments, or piety, that he is clothed with what to him seem far higher endowments than are these, why should he sully his exquisite nature with preaching a Gospel, which its Founder gave especially for the poor? Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? How can the elegant youth consent to put the mark of his distin- guished approbation upon the Bible, on learning that it actually contains the awkward and astounding fact, that an- gels from heaven once were seen rendering lowly service to a dead beggar? And this, too, when by continuing their progress but a few paces farther, they might have been hon- ored with the hospitalities of a member of ' good society,' who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. On learning, from some devouter friend, that the New Testament actually contained the unaccountable recital, and on ascertaining, from some more studious asso- ciate, that German criticism has not pronounced the strange narrative an interpolation, how could the refined and es- senced candidate for the Christian ministry explain, with courtly dignity, so much neglect of those within the pale of refined society, and such undue familiarity toward one with- out that dread enclosure? If he did not, with indignation, repudiate the volume, the best apology his ingenuity could

A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 365

construct for intelligences so regardless of all social distinc* tions, must be, that all this occurred before the manuals of politeness, now so valuable and so common, were published, and that perhaps it was not the felicity of angels, even in these later times, to be intimately acquainted with Chester- field. The delicate youth must hope, that the society, which in the high festivals of heaven recline near the bosom of Abraham, have become of late years more select than when they admitted Lazarus : else can they expect to be honored by the accession to their number of a well-bred pastor and his well-bred converts, who, while extending a proper patron- age to the Bible, feel, with a more lively faith, the all-suffi- ciency of Fashion, that capricious and despotic deity?

Brethren, we are persuaded better things of you, though we thus speak. We trust, that you would emulate the spirit of that apostle, courteous indeed, and magnanimous, if ever man was ; but who said : If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.* Let others forge anew the golden calf, and dance around it, even at the foot of the quaking Sinai. Fix your eye on the smoking summit ; and let the thunder of its oracles drown, in your ears, the tink- ling of their cymbals ; and count yourself more honored than annoyed, by the scorn they may lavish on you, for the re- fusal to share their adorations. The Christian preacher is not the man of any caste : in lowliness, he is to deem him- self beneath the meanest ; but, in the dignity of his mission, and in the authority of his Master, he is entitled to look down on the loftiest and mightiest of earth's transgressors.

5. Education, for the judgment day and for eternity, is the first and last business of this life. Are we thus educated ourselves, and educating others? It is this, the invisible and the endless, that must give due authority to our mes- sage, and effect to our testimony. Soon, brethren in the pastorate, the invisible realities of eternity will have become visible. As the dreams of the sleeper vanish, when the films of sleep melt from his eyes ; and the real world, unseen during his slumbers, floats in upon his awaking : — so, breth- ren in the ministry, will it soon be with us and writh our hearers. The day — that day — will try our work, of what sort it is. The dreams and phantoms, that now occupy man- kind, will disappear, when the night is once past ; and the

* Galat. i. 10.

366 THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN.

dread, or the glorious realities of eternity, of which we tes- tify, will take their place. The Invisible God, of our sanc- tuaries and our closets, will become the Visible God, of the judgment-seat. Let us, like Moses, now, by faith, " discern Him, the Invisible." Let us remember, that, when Daniel stood before Belshazzar, the monarch and his appalled court- iers quaked, not so much before the visible and human pro- phet, as before that prophet's Invisible Master, whose hand only was seen, tracing on the wall the dread characters of doom. There might well have been, in that court, many a more august visage, and a sterner voice, than were Daniel's ; but behind the human messenger loomed the dread majesty of that Almighty Avenger, for whom he spake. So must it be with us. Let our churches, and congregations, be compelled to recognize, behind the mortal pastor, who is but the human and visible usher in Christ's school ; looming in Divine Ma- jesty, the Invisible and Almighty Teacher of the Church, and Sovereign of the world. Thus only, shall we benefit both. The churches, honoring Him, will be compacted into unity, and developed into symmetry. The body of Christ will grow evermore, in his likeness. For the students in the school of Christ never graduate. Throughout all eter- nity, theirs is a growing expansion of intellect, and a widen- ing range of intelligence ; and as death puts no end to their spiritual being, so the universe interposes no barrier to their endless advancement. Thus, too, shall we benefit the uncon- verted as well ; and startle a doomed world, to a salutary fear, and a saving faith, as they shall see the pulpit itself, but in the foreground, and rising awfully, in the distance be- hind, the Great White Throne. "The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. '

(A Discourse delivered on the first Sabbath of the year 1847.)

" SCATTER THOU THE PEOPLE THAT DELIGHT IN WAR." — Psalm lxviU. 30.

It was said by the Queen Regent of Scotland, when speak- ing of the great Reformer of that country, whose principles she hated, whilst she was awed by his piety, that " she dreaded the prayers of John Knox more than an army of ten thousand men." And better and safer were it, my beloved hearers, to face a cloud of hurtling spears, and to bear the iron rain of arrow and javelin, and a wiser venture were it to walk up to the park of artillery, pealing from its mouth a fiery sleet of death, than to encounter the prayers of God's saints united with resistless urgency, and darting with invisible potency against ue and our cause. We have here the Zion of the Most High, lifting up, as by the single but inspired voice of David, their protest, their supplication, and their adjuration against all who find pleasure in scenes of carnage and reckless devastation. Now the prayers which our Heav- enly Father has taught to His people, reveal the principles upon which He administers His government of the nations. The God-given supplications of the Church, by implication, teach the statutes of the Head of the Church. The prayer which inspiration has furnished, Providence will accomplish. What He bids us ask Him to do, we may be assured, He means Himself to do. The petitions He indites, and the edicts He promulgates, are identical in their tenor.

Our country is at this time engaged in war against a neigh- boring nation. It is impossible but that the question of the lawfulness of this present contest, and indeed of all war, should be agitated. It is, in no sense, our intention, nor is it our province, to prostitute the influence of the pulpit to the uses of political partisanship. But we hold that a religious

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teacher may state what he believes to be the teachings of the Bible on the rights and the wrongs, the duties and the sins of his times. He is not to shrink from rebuking sin in the powerful, more than in the obscure and the poor ; in the many more than in the few ; in the sovereign, more than in the subject. Thus Nathan discharged his office, unavved by the station, the power, or the feelings of David, the writer of this Psalm ; thus Ahab, though a sovereign, found a re- prover in his subject Elijah ; and thus Herod quailed before the stern fidelity of John the Baptist ; and thus, too, Paul the apostle, before a magistrate whose enmity it was, in his condition as a prisoner, peculiarly dangerous to incur, and whose character was neither marked by righteousness nor temperance, nor fears of judgment in this world or the next, chose to testify of the virtues in which his judge was deficient, and dared to remind him of a tribunal where he, with his meanest victim, must stand equally amenable. Sin, then, wherever found, as it is God's enemy, is the fair quarry and mark of the preacher to whom God has said, as to his pro- phet of old, " Preach the preaching that I bid thee."*

With us the people hold the sovereignty. It is the prin- ciple of the gospel that " he that ruleth " should do it " with diligence"] — or know his responsibilities, and strenuously aim to meet them. The people, like all other sovereigns, owe allegiance to the " Blessed and only Potentate "J above, and may well study, therefore, His oracles for their guidance, implore His favor in the ways of obedience, as the only con- dition of perfect and permanent safety, and deprecate His wrath, as involving sure and remediless ruin to the stormy and multitudinous democracy, no less than to the solitary despot. The pulpit may then censure national as well as individual sins, and bring up the great principles which con- trol or should control the movement of the masses, as well as the precepts that require the obedience of individuals in private life.

But, on the other hand, the minister of the gospel may not be a mere politician. He may see in all political organi- zations too much of inconsistency and corruption, to attach himself blindly to the guidance of any. He sees sins in the men of all forms of government, and in the members of all political confederations ; and he sees also in men of

* Jonah iii. 2. t Rom. xii. 8. I 1 Tim. vi. 15.

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every class, and tribe, and country, the abject, the hostile and the criminal, souls infinitely precious. His Master has proclaimed that His " kingdom is not of this world." The Church of Christ may not then become the drudge and tool of any ruler, or people, much less of any section of a people. The conversion of a soul is to the true pastor, in his better hours, of more moment than the political interests of an empire. Never then may questions of government become with him paramount to the great truths of the gos- pel, sin and Hell, conversion and Heaven, an eternal salva- tion and an everlasting perdition, the atoning Redeemer, and the renewing, sanctifying Spirit. When, losing these views, the pulpit becomes the mere channel of political con- troversy, it damages the Church without benefiting the State. Jesuitism gave to kings and courts its own confess- ors, thus pouring through the ears of a monarch its own principles into the counsels of his cabinet. Protestantism would not be more wisely or honorably employed, were it to send its ministers to crowd the antichambers or climb the backstairs of rulers, or to edit for the sovereign nation their political journals. A teacher of Christ's gospel has higher, better work, than that of the mere politician, though the poli- tician is not beyond the purview of the great principles which the Christian minister is to expound and enforce. And, on the other hand, as we have sought to show, the minister of Christ may preach of national sins, where nations do sin, and announce from the exhaustless and unerring oracles of the Universal Sovereign, the great elementary laws of na- tional duty. In doing this, he may for the time be claimed by one party, or branded by another, as doing a work of political partisanship. Imputations of a similar kind are in his path, in the discharge of many other duties. He cannot interfere in healing private grievances, or re-uniting brethren that contend, or in administering the discipline of the Church, but at the price of similar misconstructions. Misconception and reproach are to some extent inevitable. His duty, it would seem to us, is to lay down great principles — to avoid, as far as possible, all interference with personal and political details, and eyeing God's truth as his law, to commend his work to God's judgment, indifferent to man's praise or blame, so he have but testified for God, and before Him — for God, the truth, — before God, that truth in sincerity.

These remarks may have seemed tedious. They appeared 48

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to us necessary, as vindicating and explaining what we sup- pose are the rights of the Christian ministry in such matters. We entreat, now, your attention and patient consideration, and the aid of your prayers, that the All-ruling and All-en- lightening God may give us to know and say, see and obey His own Truth, as we examine the lesson of the Psalmist's prayer.

Our text presents a great principle in the Divine govern- ment. He will, as his Church prays that he would, " scatter the people that delight in war." His Providence has re- echoed and interpreted His Scripture in this respect.

In the secluded valleys of the Pyrenees in southern France, have been found for centuries an outcast and scattered race, generally maimed, covered with tatters and vermin, and the victims of scrofula and leprosy, who are called- the Cagots. They have for centuries been a separate people from the peasants around, the objects of contempt, hatred and per- secution ; the vilest offences have been imputed to them ; and most trades and professions barred against them. They were, in earlier centuries, required to wear on their clothes some mark to distinguish them from others, were permit- ted to enter the church only by a separate door, long were denied sepulture in the ordinary burial grounds, and the priests refused to admit them to confession ; they wandered about without fire in winter, with no settled habitation, re- tiring at night to barns and hovels. In ancient times, the testimony of seven of them was held equivalent to the evi- dence of one freeman. The antiquaries of France have been divided and perplexed as to the origin of these people, and of that envenomed hostility and prejudice which bayed and snarled at their feet, wherever they wandered, an abject and outcast race. The most plausible opinion is that they are the remains of a race once an invading and powerful one, since subjugated and scattered, and that the remembrance of their old cruelties is the origin of those long centuries of cruel op- pression they have undergone. Some find in their very name traces of their descent from those mighty and valiant Goths who in earlier centuries rolled their successive billows of desolation over so many kingdoms of Europe.* If this be so, here have we, in the Providence of God, such reply to and confirmation of the voice of Scripture as we have already

* See Appendix.

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described. But whether the " scattered " and peeled, the pale, timid and abject Cagot, be or be not the descendant of the bold and warlike Goth, " delighting in war," the princi- ple of our text stands not on the right or wrong interpreta- tion of that dark and difficult page in European history. The whole volume of history establishes the truth, in instances not dubious, not few, and not remote. War, loved for its own sake, ultimately "scatters" the nation thus sanguinary in their tastes. Those taking the sword with bloodthirsty carelessness, perish by it.

But is all war thus visited and thus condemned as displeas- ing to God? We do not see the scriptural evidence that it is.

I. We would then, first, examine the question, Is all war sinful ?

II. Next we would consider the class undoubtedly sinful, and here denounced, "who delight in war."

III. And in the last place, we would return to the punish- ment here invoked upon such from God : that they should be dispersed and reduced: " scattered " by the whirlwind they have loved to raise and to ride.

I. We cannot, then, with some Christians, believe that all war is forbidden by the gospel. Private revenge is undoubt- edly forbidden, but so is not Divine vengeance. It is be- yond all question, we think, prohibited to unite the Church with the State, and so make Christ's kingdom of this world ; but although the Christian faith is forbidden to seek the aid and endowment of government, government itself is not made an unlawful and unchristian thing. They who from the law in the Sermon on the Mount, where private quarrels are discouraged by the command to turn, when smitten on the one cheek, the other also, educe the sweeping inference, that the magistrate and the soldier are usurpers, ought, in con- sistency, to give the same broad interpretation to another command in the same discourse, that we give to all asking, and turn not from the borrower ; and then if the first pre- cept forbids forcible government and war, the second pro- hibits all claim of private property. For what is war but for- cible government — physical might sustaining moral right? Now Paul expressly taught that the magistrate was not to bear the sword in vain. What is the sword? An instrument forged for the single and express purpose of taking away, not brutal, but human life, Paul teaches, then (or rather Paul's

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Master, Christ, and the inspiring and unerring Holy Ghost, teach by him), that the magistrate may take man's life. Val- uable as human life may be, right and order are yet dearer ; and to maintain the last, the just and pious governor may take away the first. In the case of a single wrong-doer, this is capi- tal punishment. When several wrong-doers combine, when the offenders are more than a mob, — a disorganized and revolted province, — or a hostile and wrong-doing nation, this is war — ■ and such violent wrong maybe resisted on Christian principles by physical force. But it is urged, is not the spread of Chris- tianity to abolish, in the last days, war, and .o convert the sword into the plowshare 1 We allow this, but the Scripture represents the gospel as abolishing war, just as it abolishes aw-suits, not by rendering the one or the other unlawful or unchristian, but by abating and suppressing men's wrong feelings, and thus exterminating those acts which make the suit before a tribunal, or the appeal to arms, necessary for the vindication of right. Judges are not unlawful, although so much of litigation is unreasonable and wicked. War is not unscriptural, although existing wars so often be most unjust. But, is it urged that it is not consistent with the spiritual character of Christ's new and blessed dispensation, to uphold moral right with animal, physical force? We answer, God's whole government proceeds on the principle of doing so. He plagues the sinner with bodily disease. Outward trouble visited the sin of Uzziah, and brought to Manasseh spiritual healing. He vexes the guilty inhabitants of earth with fam- ine and pestilence, and with physical destruction from the earthquake and volcano ; and He calls them to recognize His equity and His spirituality and His wisdom in these physical inflictions, as well as in the moral influences of His word and His Spirit. What is the voice of the fiery pit of wo ? Is not its anguish in part a physical anguish, as de- scribed by the Judge himself, our Lord Jesus, when he de- clares that both soul and body are cast into hell ?

And it should be observed, that after those times of spirit- ual reformation, when peace shall long prevail over the whole earth, and the Millennial rest be enjoyed, the Bible seems to represent the return of a time when there shall be war again between the saints of God's Church and the enemies of that Church. God's people are not depicted as passive victims, but as strenuous combatants in that conflict. The triumph of the gospel, through Earth's long Sabbath, had not made

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\rar unlawful, but only for one thousand years unnecessary. If war, as some represent it, were in all cases but promiscu- ous butchery and murder multiplied, would it ever have been said, as it is in the imagery of the Apocalypse, that there was " war in Heaven," and would it have been proclaimed, as it is of the Lord Jesus himself, in that book, that in "faithful- ness he doth judge and make war?" Is this tantamount to the declaration (as some ultraists in the advocacy of peace define war) in reference to the Saviour Jesus, that in faithfulness he murders? Forbid the blasphemy! No. But it teaches the great truth already indicated, that the faith- fulness of Jesus Christ as universal Governor, wTill be mani- fested in " judging " those who acknowledge, and in " war- ring " against those who defy his sway. He will dispense his enactments and instructions as a judge, and if to some these avail not, he will resort to force, physical force, as the Just Governor of the Universe, making war upon and sub- duing its criminals and revolters.

And when Christ came himself into the world, neither he nor his immediate forerunner, the Baptist, nor his followers the Apostles, though under plenary inspiration, taught that the profession of arms was unlawful and murderous. John the Baptist instructed soldiers to be content with their wages. If he had regarded these wages as but the price of blood, would such have been the lessons of a Reformer, come in the spirit and power of Elias, to denounce all sin, and to require a general and prayerful repentance ? So the Acts of the Apos- tles contain not the slightest intimation, that Cornelius the Roman centurion, a chief of soldiers, was required by the Holy Spirit which he received to abandon his post ; nor that Sergius Paulus, the Governor, was commanded to relinquish his connection with the central government at Rome, essen- tially and in all its relations a military and war-making power. The description given of the attendant of Cornelius, seems unaccountable, if the views of some Christians against all war were correct. " A devout soldier," on these principles, is as great an anomaly as a religious assassin or a seraphic poisoner.

But it is said that the early Christians held war unlawful. This we deny on the authority of Neander, one of the high- est authorities in such a question.* There seem to have

* In his " Denkwurdigkeiten," and his Church History.

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been those in the second and third centuries among them doubting its propriety ; but that it was not with the early Christians a prevalent sentiment, appears sufficiently from the boast of Tertullian, when he represents Christians as fill- ing the Roman camps as well as forums. Their conversion to Christ had not driven them from the standards of their country.

God has authority, it will be allowed, to take away life. He may grant it to human governments. It seems to us a plain teaching of Scripture that he has done so. Force may sustain Right. This, against a single wrong-doer, becomes imprisonment, and may become capital punishment — against a multitude of wrong-doers it becomes war. Dear as human life may be, the sentiment of every heart is that there are blessings that should be yet dearer. The martyr relinquishes his life rather than forego the truth, because truth should be dearer than life. The criminal forfeits his life to justice, because justice is and should be dearer than life. And God, in the case of the occupation of Canaan by Israel, explicitly required war, and that a war of devastation. Its Hittites and Perizzites were criminals of an aggravated turpitude and audacious hardihood in crime. He was their magistrate. The Jew was his commissioned executioner.

And whilst we allow that in war all forms of wickedness are generally rife, and that war is always a calamity, and generally an enormous crime on the one side or the other, or perhaps occasionally on both, we cannot but think that the voice of conscience and history, and the common senti- ment of mankind testify, that in the terrible conflicts of war have also been seen specimens of the high and heroic devel- opment of our nature. Joshua, and David, and the noble Jonathan, all warriors, were they not men of the highest excellence ? Was not Abraham, the father of the faithful, blessed by Melchisedec, the holy prince of Salem, as he returned from a warlike foray and rescue? Can the heart think coldly of Leonidas, holding with his brave band the nar- row strait against the dense masses of his country's invaders ; or of Arnold de Winkelreid, the Swiss worthy, making a prac- ticable breach for his compatriots in the spear-bearing and ser-' ried ranks of the enemy by gathering " a sheaf of their spears" into his single breast? And Christian virtue, too, has been found, and that of a high order, amid the din and carnage of the camp. Baxter was an army chaplain when he wrote the

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Saint's Everlasting Rest. Hampden, we believe, died the death of a Christian as well as a patriot, when mortally wounded in defence of his country's liberties, unjustly and tyrannically assailed by the First Charles. Col. Hutchinson, one of the converts to the views of the Baptists in the times of the Commonwealth, was a soldier as well as a Christian ; and so was the upright, ardent, and indomitable Harrison, another Baptist of the Commonwealth, who in the Restora- tion suffered death as one of the judges of Charles. Col. Blackadder, a Scotch officer, was eminent for piety among the officers, as John Haimes, one of Wesley's exhorters, was among the privates of the English armies in Flanders ; and by the labors of the last, the work of conversion went on amid battles and sieges. Col. Gardiner, we doubt not, be- lieved himself as really serving God when, fighting against the return of the Stuarts, and with them of Romanism, to the throne of England, he perished by Highland claymores on the field of Preston Pans, as when a few hours before he had been bowing the knee in private devotion to his God.

It is, we suppose, a plain teaching of Scripture that war is not in all cases unlawful. It is a principle with God, that when Reason and Conscience will not restrain wrong, then Might, physical Might, shall. He acts upon it Himself. He authorizes government to act upon it. Indeed, it is a right necessary to the very existence of government, and government we suppose necessary to the continued existence of the race, as it certainly is to their well-being. The ruler may not only advise and entreat, he may, and if it be neces- sary, he must also coerce.

II. But it may be asked, if war be allowable, is not " de- light in war " also allowable ? We answer, this by no means follows. Brutus believed that justice required it of him to condemn his own sons to death. But whilst this was patriot- ism, it would have been brutality had he " delighted " in the terrible sacrifice. Abraham honored God when, at his re- quirement, he lifted the knife against the white, soft neck of his only, his promised child Isaac ; but he would have dis- honored himself and his God, had he gloated with "delight" over the prospect of seeing soon the severed veins, the spout- ing blood, and the writhing limbs of his darling son. The officer who for just cause inflicts the last sanction of the law on some foul murderer, may but do his duty. But the spec- tator, who has what some men have shown a perverted taste,

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relishing executions, and who loves the sight of a dying wretch in his last agonies, is not to be respected or excused. The distinction between " warring " and delighting in war," is a broad one. It is the same in principle as that which separates the parent who chastises his child reluctantly, and from a sense of duty, and the hardened and unnatural father, who delights to worry and torture his offspring, and beats from his delight in the infliction of pain. It is the difference between the surgeon who amputates to lessen suffering, and the Indian tormenting his captive in every mode that a fierce ingenuity can devise to heighten pain into intolerable intensity.

We may do, and rightfully do, acts in which we have no right to delight. A wise teacher will not delight in rebuke, yet rebuke may be at times inevitable and profitable. A Church of Christ may be compelled to exscind an offending member, but they can never delight in it ; however, it may be not only lawful, but even demanded of them, so that the neglect of it would be unlawful and criminal.

When we remember the misery and devastation, the rapine and conflagration, the violence and carnage, the privations and bereavements, the orphanage and widowhood, the muti- lations and butcheries that war involves, and the bitter feuds between conterminous nations, which have been transmitted to successive generations by its means, we must see that it is, even wThen most mercifully managed, a tremendous evil, a last and terrible resort. It is only as the inevitable and just defence of Right that it is itself defensible or even tole- rable. When pushed beyond the limits which the vindication of a momentous right requires, or when itself founded on Wrong, it is a crime of huge and indescribable enormity, an offence alike against the Earth whose peace it disturbs, and the Heaven whose justice it defies. But there are those who, without respect to the justice or injustice, the right or wrong of a war, seem to find pleasure in its excitement, its perils, the honors it wins for the victor, or the plunder with which it enriches or the power wherewith it invests him. David seems to have warred generally from a regard to the rights of his people. His kinsman and general, Joab, brave but unprincipled and sanguinary, seems to have delighted in the game of battle for its own sake.

1. Very many, then, it is to be feared, of those who fight the battles of a country, come within the range of the impre- cation here uttered. The private soldier is often one who

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looks to scenes of lawless riot and easy plunder as the chief inducements to enlist under the standards of his country; as the officer who commands him may often be careless of the waste of life, if it but minister to his promotion and gain.

2. The classes who sustain war are often involved in the same condemnation. The army contractor, who accumulates wealth easily and rapidly, at the expense of the lives of an invading host, and the butchery and plunder of an invaded nation, does not he, with a cruel and bloody love of lucre, "delight in war?" The farmers of England, from the rise in the price of agricultural products occasioned by the needs of their large armies, became wealthy in their long wars with France, and delighted in contests that thus enhanced their gains ; though in later years, among the bones imported from Continental battle-fields to manure the lands of Eng- land, some of these same men probably received the remains of their own sons, killed in battle, and by the strange retribu- tions of Providence, now returned to fatten the paternal acres. Any portion of our own territory benefited by the demand for provisions which war would create, but not ex- posed by maritime position, or other causes, to the invasions it provokes, would be likely to furnish a similar class, reck- lessly rejoicing in what ruined others to enrich them.

3. The rulers who wage war too often incur this condem- nation. History has greatly and generally belied kings, if they have not plunged their people into most causeless, cruel, and protracted conflicts upon the most frivolous pretexts, or with the most crying injustice. Territory, or glory, or plun- der, has been the object. Lives they have estimated as the vile price, cheaply paid for the coveted prize. When the Supreme Governor " shall make inquisition for blood," who will envy their fame, rank, or power ? Nor are such un- worthy motives unknown in other than monarchical govern- ments. Ambition may render the demagogue as sanguinary in his heartless recklessness as the despot. The froth and foam of a speech enkindling every bad passion may cost the blood of hapless hundreds. Reports drafted in the quiet peace of a cabinet, may to the presaging eye seem dripping with more of gore than all that any one bayonet ever shed. The desire of personal distinction, or the eagerness for party triumph, may induce men to carve, as it were, the whitened bones of their fellow-citizens into dice for the gamblings of political strife. A Syrian Pacha, under the Ottoman

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Porte, in the last generation, gloried in the epithet of Djezzar or butcher, that his remorseless murders had won him. The political aspirants, and orators, and statesmen, that bring on, for selfish purposes, a needless or an unjust war — what are. they but the Djezzars of a republic ? The tears of the widow and of the fatherless orphan may run unstaunched for weary years, if they but drench and freshen the laurels of these votaries of glory. The wealth of the merchant may be confiscated, and the gains of the industrious artisan, to swell the prize-money of the privateersman, thence to run speedily into the exchequer of the dram-shop and the bro- thel— scenes of riot and debauch, that are like the miry places of the prophet's vision, the moral quagmires of the state.

4. The literary classes of a nation may have their share in the woes of our text. The true rulers of a people are often, less the men recognized as magistrates and monarchs by the ensigns of office, and rather the popular authors Avho give coloring to the tastes and sentiments, and shape to the principles of their times. Wearing no tiara, wielding no sceptre, they are yet often really throned as rulers in the mind of the nation and the age. When these, as such in authority, feed a taste for war, reckless of right, and greedy only of glory and plunder, they sin, and God holds them answerable for the homes from which they lure the adven- turous son or husband enlisting for a soldier's perils — and an- swerable for the darker desolation of the abodes into which war carries pollution and remorseless carnage. Poetry has too much made the fray, and the banner, and nodding plume, the resounding march, and the murderous volley, its favorite themes, careless of the right or wrong of the quarrel. And one of the many causes of contention that Virtue and Piety have with the drama, especially in modern times, is its love of slaughter, and the insane profusion with which it as- sumes to expend human life like water, and gluts and fires an admiring crowd with its spectacles of imaged suicide and murder. Into these things a God of justice will search. They have helped to make fallen man, like the tiger, raven for blood. When our own Robert Hall urged the volunteers of his country to contend against foreign invasion, he did not unwisely or wrongly. But he who, irrespective of the justice of the contest, delights in blood shedding, (if left to have his own solitary and undisputed influence,) would convert

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society into a shambles, and quench freedom, industry, and knowledge in a Red Sea of blood.

5. A nation itself may become passionately enamored of war. Intoxicated by glory, and swollen with plunder, rich and easily won, how many a people, in the history of the race, originally simple, free, and comparatively happy, have become drunk with blood. For a time, God made them his terrible scourges, but the time of retribution always came. No nation delighting in war for its own sake, but has had, in time, the poisonous chalice pressed to its own loathing lips, and the spoiler has been in his turn the spoiled, and the terrible of one age has become the contemptible of the next. In a government constituted like our own, the acts of the rulers are, more than with most other people, the acts of the entire nation. If we have as a people been, as some con- tend, driven by the misconduct of an enemy into our present contest, well will it be for our rulers and ourselves, in the day of unerring scrutiny and final decision. But if, as others insist, we have transcended a known and rightful boundary, to provoke war, " removing the land-mark," which, a sin as God has made it in the individual, is not less sin surely in a nation ; or if we have rushed into a war for which there might be some provocation, without exhausting all possible efforts to avoid this melancholy alternative, they who have caused, and who continue, and who uphold the conflict, must answer it to One, whose rules of judgment were not learned in earthly cabinets, and whose statutes may not be set aside by protocols and proclamations.

III. We have now reached the third and last division of our subject — the prayer that God would scatter those who thus love the bloody game of war. It is the prayer of the groaning conscience, sick of the horrors of a needless and unrighteous contest — the prayer of the outraged affections stung into keenest sympathy in the view of mourning fami- lies, and weeping and fatherless children, and bleeding afresh with each new incident of massacre and desolation brought in the journals of the contest — the prayer of Industry, driven from its wonted tasks, and taxed for aid it is loth to give — and the prayer of Humanity, acknowledging in the foe, plundered, and defeated, and dying, a man and brother. But it is above all the prayer of Christianity, anxious that as war was hushed at the Saviour's birth, to give to the new message of peace with Heaven a free course over the quiet

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nations, so now the cause of Missions may be no longer hindered by the outbreak of war, and the tumult of battle, but universal peace make ready the way of the Lord ; and that instead of a strife as to strength, and a rivalry in the infliction and endurance of injury, the only contest may be the emulation of brothers, in the manifestation of mutual kindness, and in the service of a common father — a common Brother and Redeemer. Mute Nature, speechless as she is before man, is not so before her Maker in this quarrel. The earth, from which cried the blood of the first-slain Abel, has it ceased to cry, as fresh victims watered it with their opened veins ? No ; Earth, " the creation made subject unto vanity not willingly," cries, "Lord, how long?" And the Church cries, Scatter, O Lord, the nations and the hosts, the parties and the cabinets that delight in war.

2. The prayer has been in times past fulfilled. We have seen how, if the Cagots of France be indeed, as some anti- quarians believe them, the relics of the old and valiant and terrible Goths, they illustrate the tremendous significance of the text. Based as the prayer is on a recognized principle of the Divine government, that existed ere the Psalm was inspired, we see that principle ere the Psalmist's days, an- nounced in God's treatment of some of the ancestors of that Psalmist's nation, Simeon and Levi. They had recourse to treacherous butchery for the avenging of a domestic wrong, and as their dying father, in denouncing their conduct, said, " Cursed be their anger for it was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel :" and he added in the name of his God, " I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in, Israel."* Read the fortunes of Egypt. In ancient days her Sesos- tris led the pride and prowess of Mizraim in triumphant invasion into distant lands. Now beside the lofty walls yet brilliantly commemorating those conquests, and painting the victor, and his car, and his triumphal train, cowers the mod- ern Copt, a craven and timorous slave, building his hut of mud beside the ruinous palace of his fathers, whilst the country has sunk for centuries to the level which prophecy assigned it, of " the basest of kingdoms." Contrast the pages of ancient history and their picture of Babylon as she was in her days of conquest, and the pages of modern travel and their picture of Babylon as she is, " swept with the besom

* Gen. xlix. 7.

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of desolation." Look at the Persian as he was, and the Per- sian as he is ; the valorous and terrible Turk of other cen- turies, and the effete and dependent Turk of our times. See the memorials of the far-travelled and victorious legions of ancient Rome in the days of her republican might and her imperial pride — then turn to trace, if you can, the features of that terrible nation, who so excelled and so delighted in war, in the effeminate, treacherous and vindictive Italian, who has passion without power, and feeling without princi- ple, his animal sensibilities, as nurtured amid the nudities of exquisite statuary and matchless painting to a refined delicacy of taste, educated until they have outgrown the moral, and left behind no delicacy whatever of moral feel- ings. Their Virgil boasted once, in the days of warlike power, that other people might better carve and better paint, but Romans were born to rule. The curse of Providence on the mad love of military rapine has inverted the boast of their poet. The modern Roman carves and paints, but rule he cannot, himself or others. The bayonets of Austria govern him, and the Swiss mercenaries are the guards of his Pontiff. The assassin has replaced the warrior, the fiddler the statesman, and for the severe virtue of her Cato and the simple patriotism of her Cincinnatus, you see a nation with- out conscience, without dignity, and without power, getting up melo-dramatic conspiracies and sanguinary outbreaks, but without the pith and manhood to recover their freedom.* They who delighted in war, how are they scattered, al- though the arches and the pillars yet stand that tell of their old manhood, and enterprise, and renown ; and under the shadow of Trajan's column and the arch of Titus clamors Ihe mendicant and lurks the assassin. The old Sclavi, once a formidable people, whose name in their own language sig- nified "glory," were at first terrible in their brave, fierce invasions, but became in their time and turn vanquished and captives ; and now their national name is in our own and several European languages the term to describe the bond- man, the man not only who has lost peace, but who has lost freedom also. Yes, our very word " slave" is a standing memorial of the great retributive law of our text — " The scatterer scattered," the prowler preyed upon, the troubler

* Written in 1847, and ere the struggles of 1849 had developed3 in the char- acter of some of the Italians, new and nobler elements.

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caught in the pitfall he has dug. So, turn to the European ancestors of the race with whom is waged our present con- test. So, see Spain, once the mightiest and bravest nation of Europe, now at home poor, though her universal exche- quer once was gorged with the wealth of both the Indies ; and in her colonies, once the scene of the valor of a Pizarro and a Cortez, see her race now how spent and abject. In times nearer our own, how dreadfully were the invasions of Revolutionary and Imperial France requited in her own cap- ital twice entered by an enemy, and in the fate of her own great Captain, coming at first, as it was predicted of Cyrus, " upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay," afterwards fretting himself to death within the circuit of his narrow island prison — how did God seem reading a fresh comment for a new and forgetful generation, on this old and forgotten law of his Providence.

3. If it be asked, Why is this so ? we answer, Because God wills it ; and because also, from the very nature of war and of man's mind and heart, such must be the ultimate results even of successful war, on those who delight in it, as a gainful trade and a pleasant recreation. It inflates pride, and Earth and Heaven delight in abasing pride. It fosters a spirit of reckless violence and aggression, that must ulti- mately provoke an opposition too strong and general to be surmounted, and a revenge that will spare no humiliation of its old oppressor. It undermines quiet industry and self- reliance to substitute gains that, though large and easily won, yet, like those of the robber, are soon wasted and little satisfactory while possessed. It sets up in the nation a false standard of honor, and the strong will that makes its passions triumph over other men's wills, is counted great, rather than the magnanimity that bows its own and other men's passions to the simple, silent majesty of the laws. Seldom, therefore, has liberty or law long stood before mili- tary glory and power. The secret of military success is, again, unreflecting, implicit submission to the leader's will. The secret of permanent liberty is the trial of the leader's will by the general conscience and reason of the people. Jesuitism organized its terrible compactness, its lithe and mighty unity, by the adoption of military principles of im- plicit and entire submission. Its founder was a soldier, and brought to his task military reminiscences. But as con- science was crushed under the law of obedience by that

AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 383

system, so is it in its measure in all other systems of power and grandeur, built upon the warlike basis. Our country and its institutions, if preserved in their original entireness and purity, need the education and development, not the suppression and extinction of the national conscience. And war and its military training go to strain and break that conscience, instead of training it.

4. God has set before us as a people a magnificent task. To unite in the bonds of a common piety and freedom the various people from whom our colonists are drawn ; to prove to less free nations in the old world, how with popular free- dom may consist popular self-restraint, and how they who rule themselves may be a law-abiding and God-fearing peo- ple ; — this is the labor and the prize set before us. But if we become a rapacious and unscrupulous nation, scornful of laws, aggressive and unjust, we travesty our own most solemn professions, we aid the cause of despotism in the Eastern world, and prepare the path and the necessity for the rise of a military despotism among ourselves on these Western shores. God is not mocked by republics more safely than by churches, by statesmen than by religionists. The unjust cannot long be free, the violent are never event- ually safe.

Thus have we wished to bring out of our text the great lessons it teaches. We have sought to show that war is not in all circumstances unlawful even under the gospel, but that it is, yet, always a calamity, and generally an enormous crime. We have sought to show how delighting in war was sinful, and what the classes were thus guilty. We have seen how, in ancient and modern history, God has governed the world on the principle which the prayer of our text invokes.

We have sought to shun all needless and controversial details. It is not long since the leaders of the two great and rival parties of the nation united in declaring that the an- nexation of Texas would involve our Union in a war. The friends of the measure of annexation denied this. The province was annexed. The war has ensued.

Is it our duty to raise the cry in such circumstances, " Our country, right or wrong?" In the days of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, Blake, a religious man, the brave English admiral who first began the long course of England's naval triumphs, did not in all things fully sympathize with the ruling powers at home. But he was accustomed to say that

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the seaman must leave the powers at home to settle the affairs of the nation — it was his business to see that foreign- ers did not wrong the country abroad. Now, if the wars abroad were not unjust (and such they were not), we sup- pose the principle that good and brave man announced as his rule not an untenable one. But to a distinguished naval warrior of our own country is assigned a sentiment more sweeping, often quoted and highly lauded, " Our country, right or wrong" Now, there may be questions as to right and wrong in the policy and course of a country, where good men and able are nearly equally divided. A man in doubt, after his own best efforts to decide the question, may, perhaps, safely leave such difficult and intricate ques- tions to others, and do the work of his station. But a man, who, after the first investigation, believes clearly his country engaged in a wrong course, may and should, by all proper means, protest against the wrong-doing, not only for his own sake, and to clear his own soul, but for the benefit of his country. God's right over man is older than that of the country or the family even. If this principle on which we comment were true in morals and patriotism — if our country, irrespective of the justice of her claims, should be sustained — then in those countries whose government is des- potic, and where the king says virtually, like the royal Bour- bon, "I am the State" — this maxim, "the country right or wrong," is tantamount to saying, Let the will of the prince, whether vicious or good, be my supreme law. And if that will not only justifies but demands my obedience as a patriot — if to be true to her and her government, I must close my eyes and leave conscience in abeyance — then the elders of Jezreel were blameless before God for obey- ing the signet of Ahab and the letter of Jezebel, and shed- ding the innocent blood of Naboth to obtain the confisca- tion of his vineyard. Then John was a traitor for not leav- ing uncensured the domestic relations of his sovereign He- rod. Then the inhabitants of Madagascar are bound, by our laws of patriotism, since such is their queen's will, to perse- cute in our days Christians to the death.

If, as some wish, all discussion were treasonable, soon as a war had been provoked, no matter how regularly and how justly, or how irregularly and how unjustly ; and if thence- forward to discuss its origin and character were unlawful, it were virtually a proclamation of martial law over the land

AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 385

— it were the enunciation by political power of a pontifical interdict upon the nation's conscience, forbidding, as did the rash edict of Darius the Mede, all prayer to God, as a Judge,' till the quarrel were ended. The patriotism of Daniel was best shown, by refusing calmly to abide any such interdict, usurping on the rights alike of conscience, and of the Lord of conscience. No, our country — be her sovereign one or her rulers many, be she a democracy or a despotism — our coun- try and its government may never dispense us from oui primary allegiance to God's eternal and immutable law of right. No, as we love God and fear his anger, let right stand ever before either country or home. God and right are to the truly religious man, the patriot of scriptural principles, dearer than his country. So Jeremiah loved his country, and sacrificed popularity and perilled life, in counselling Zed- ekiah and his nobles against a war that began by the break- ing of a solemn treaty. Or rather, the enlightened believer knows that his country can be safe but as brought right ; and loves her true and permanent interests too well, to wish her transient, and deceptive, and ruinous success, in a course of. wrong-doing. '

Much is said of the destinies of the Anglo-Saxon race, and of their irresistible development. May our God make that de- velopment in science and art, in integrity and influence, more than its loudest eulogist has dared to promise. But a slight glance at the past history of the world suffices to discover, that in races as in individuals, pride goeth before destruc- tion, and is the first symptom of internal decay in the power of which it vaunts. The core and pith of a nation's manhood soon becomes rotten, when the outer rind and enamel of its conscience and self-control and honesty scales off. And when men claim, in the development of their talents and might, to go beyond God's ordinary law of morals, God is accustomed to transcend His ordinary laws of Providence for their punishment. The antediluvian and gigantic races of the old world arrogated to themselves to transcend vulgar laws of justice and religion; and God, to meet with condign retribution their hardihood, gave to Nature to develope laws and powers before unknown. The cisterns of heaven and the fountains of the great deep were allowed to break their old statutes, and spurn their original restraints, and the deluge came to assert the supremacy of Right over Might. Mon- strosities of crime provoke miracles of vengeance. These

50

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may come from quarters remote and opposite to those whence clanger alone was dreaded. But come when it may or whence it may, it must come ultimately, and come the heavier from the delay in its movements and the distance it has traversed — an avalanche that has gathered in mass every moment it lingered, and every fathom it travelled of the wide interval.

The man or the people would be far out of their course, who should claim a development that had outgrown the Decalogue as God's own voice proclaimed it on Sinai, and who should boast of a patent to possess the earth by virtue of a physical and mental superiority that reverses, in their case, the eighth and tenth commandments, and converts the prohibition into a charter, which says, in effect, to them, " Thou shalt covet (because of his inferior numbers and cul- ture, his lower grade of piety and powers) thy neighbor's possessions ;" and " Thou shalt steal (because of his wretched misgovernment) thy neighbor's land." Jehovah never re- cognized the right, either of an infallible pontiff or of a sov- ereign people, to proclaim a dispensation from the obligations of his immutable statutes, by the development of their pow- ers or because of their national greatness.

There is no successful warring against the Lord of Hosts. His will is Fate, his might the quiet irresistibility of Omnip- otence. Neither nations nor individuals can contend with Him. And now, dismissing all questions of social interest, let us individually inquire, whether we are serving or rebel- ling against Him ? Look round the scarred and ruinous earth : look up to heaven spoiled of Lucifer and the host whom he trailed after him, partners of his revolt and fall. Look to the hell where he writhes. See his conflicts with Christ in the days of His incarnation. See the Church of God often assailed, but the gates of hell not prevailing. Look to sinners on their death-beds. Look into your own consciences, in your more sober and wiser hours, and see, my fellow-sinners, if it be safe to war and to delight in war- ring against a Holy and Almighty God ? Then think of the treachery and ingratitude of fighting a friend, a Deliver- er, and see what reasons you can find for beginning another year with a continued quarrel against the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour, who bought you with His own blood? If you war against the redeeming cross, will not, must not the Last Judgment scatter your hopes for ever, and hurl your souls into endless perdition ?

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The universe is one great battle-field. The founder of the Jesuit order wisely and truly represented all mankind as making up but two great camps, the one under the banners of Satan the Destroyer, the other grouped around the stand- ard of Christ the Redeemer. There is no debatable ground between the hosts. No neutrality is possible in this war. He that gathereth not with Christ scattereth abroad, and shall himself be scattered in the sifting blasts of the Last Judgment. He that is not with us is against us. With whom, then, are you choosing your sides ? Each new year, each pause in the procession to eternity, each stile you cross, and each milestone along the highway and in the pilgrimage of life, invites you to review your march and inquire your prospects. Are you still bent on rejecting Christ, and re- sisting God and defying heaven ? How mad the war you wage ; it is one of disinheriting for yourself, — of expatriation, endless and hopeless, from the heavenly mansion and home. Against you are angels, and saints, and God, and all holy beings, the prayers of the Church, and the statutes of Omnipotence. With you are the wicked, and the lawless, and the abomina- ble, earth's burden now, and soon to be the fuel of the pit. O, why fight for death, and for damnation, and for endless despair ?

388 THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE.

APPENDIX.

THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE.

From the travels, which, under the assumed name of Derwent Conway, and with the title of " Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees, in mdcccxxx," were issued in Constable's Miscellany, as volumes lxvi. and lxvii., of that work, by R. D. Inglis, Esq., a lineal descendant, we believe, Df the excellent Col. Gardiner, we take the following extract, relative to this peculiar race. Inglis published, under his own name, several volumes of tra- vels, marked with much acuteness of observation, strong sense, and felici- tous description.

"In speaking of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees, I must not overlook that extraordinary race, which has baffled the historian in his vain endeavors to account for its origin, and which has furnished matter of interest both to the novelist and the traveller. It is probable, that many readers of this volume may never have heard of the Cagots, and that others may know only of the existence of such a race ; and although, in presenting some details respecting this extraordinary people, I disclaim any pretension to novelty or original elucidation, yet, having travelled among their valleys, and seen their huts and themselves, I feel that it would be an unpardonable omission, were I to omit availing myself of even the common sources of information, in order that I may include, in this volume, a short account of the Cagots.

"The Cagots are found in several of the more secluded valleys of the Pyrenees, particularly in the lateral valleys that branch from the valley of Bareges, Luchon, and Aure. So sedulously do the Cagots keep apart from the rest of their fellow-men, that one might travel through the Pyrenees without seeing an individual of the race, unless inquiry were specially direct- ed towards them. It was not until I expressed a desire to the guide who at- tended me in my excursions from St. Sauveur, to see one of the race of Ca- gots, that my curiosity was gratified. This was in one of the lateral valleys that runs to the right, between Bareges and the Tourmalet, a valley traversed by no road, and which only leads to the lac d? escaibous. The Cagot is known by his sallow and unhealthy countenance — his expression of stupidity — his want of vigor, and relaxed appearance — his imperfect articulation — and, in many cases, his disposition to goitres. If we were to credit the assertion of the novelist, we should reject one of these characteristics, or at least say, that the stupidity of the Cagot is only apparent. It is possible, that a knowledge of his degraded condition, and the contempt, if not aversion, with which he is regarded, as well as the total seclusion in which the family of the Cagot lives, may have their effect in impressing upon his countenance an expression of humility, distrust, and timidity, that might be mistaken for intellectual defi- ciency. But the observation of all those who have studied with the greatest advantages the peculiarities of this race, concur in allotting to the Cagot an inferior share of mental capacity.

"The days of Cagol persecution have passed away ; but tradition has pre- served a recollection of the degradation and sufferings of the race, and has

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even, in some small degree, handed down, along with the history of these persecutions, some vestiges of the prejudices which gave rise to it. From time immemorial, the Cagot families have inhabited the most retired valleys, and the most miserable habitations. The race has always been regarded as infamous, and the individuals of it outcasts from the family of mankind. They were excluded from all rights of citizens ; they were not permitted to have arms, or to exercise any other trade than that of wood-cutters : and, in more remote times, they were obliged to bear upon their breast a red mark, the sign of their degradation. So far, indeed, was aversion towards this un- fortunate people carried, that they entered the churches by a separate door, and occupied seats allotted to the rejected caste. The persecutions have long ceased ; and time and its attendant improvements have diminished the pre- judices, and weakened the feelings of aversion with which they were formerly regarded. But they are still the race of Cagots — still a separate family — still outcasts — still a people who are evidently no kindred of those who live around them, but the remnant of a different and more ancient family.

"It is impossible for the traveller, still less the philosopher, to know of the existence of this caste, without endeavoring to pierce the clouds that hang over its origin, and the causes of its persecution. But it is at least doubtful, whether any of these inquiries have thrown true light upon the subject. History, indeed, records the peculiar persecutions of which they were the subjects ; and proves, that these persecutions, pursuing a despised and hated race, were directed against the same people, whether found in Brittany, La Vendee, Auvergne, or the Pyrenees. We find the Parliament of Rennes in- terfering in their favor, to obtain them the right of sepulture. In the elev- enth century, we find the Cagots of Beam disposed of by testament as slaves. The priests would not admit them to confession ; and, by an ancient act of Beam, it was resolved that the testimony of seven of them should be equiva- lent to the evidence of one free citizen ; and even so late as the fifteenth cen- tury, they were forbidden to walk the streets barefooted, in case of infection being communicated to the stones ; and upon their clothes was impressed the foot of a goose. Yet all these marks of .hatred are unaccounted for. No record has descended to us, by which the cause of this persecution may be explained ; and we are left to guess at the origin of that reprobation which has followed this reje-cted people from the earliest times, and in whatever country they have been found.

"M. Ramond, in his disquisition upon this subject, says, 'The Cagots of all France have a common origin. The same event has confined them all in the most remote and desert spots ; and, whatever this event may be, it must be such as will account for every thing— it must be great and general — must have impressed at once upon the whole of France the same sentiments of hatred — have marked its victims with the seal of the same reprobation — and have disgraced the race, and all its subdivisions, with the opprobrium of a name which every where awakened the same ideas of horror and con- tempt.' This is just reasoning; but we are as far as ever from the event which has fixed hatred and opprobrium upon the dispersed race of Cagots. Some have held, that they are descendants of lepers, and, as such, exiled from the society of others ; but to this, M. Ramond replies, that although lepers have been exiled or confined, there is no record of their having ever been sold or disposed of by testament. Others have contended, that the Ca- gots are the descendants of the ancient Gauls, brought into a state of slavery by the people who drove out the Romans ; but to this hypothesis, also, M. Ramond answers, that under the dominion of the Goths, the Gaul and the Roman were never reduced to a state of slavery ; and he rightly adds, that the tyranny merely of a conqueror enslaving the vanquished, would not ac- count for the origin of the Cagot ; because the feeling with which the Cagot has been regarded, has not been merely that of .contempt, but of aversion, and even horror. But the explanation attempted by M. Ramond seems to me

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to be alike inefficient to explain the origin of this hatred and persecution. He says, ' Such victory as may have terminated the conflict of two nations equally ferocious and inflamed against each other by. a long train of rivalry ■ — the invasion of one barbarian punished by another barbarian — the reaction of the oppressed against the oppressor — at last completely disarmed — bloody combats — disastrous defeats — such only could have been the sources of the hatred and fury which could have given rise to miseries like those which we behold.' But it appears to me, that such events as M. Ramond supposes, would lead only to oppression, and perhaps slavery, but not to aversion or horror ; and that even the deadliest feelings of hatred, engendered from such causes, would not have outlived the generation which first imbibed them. But even the explanation of M. Ramond, if satisfactory, would still leave the origin of Cagots and Cagot persecution as dark as ever ; for, among the nu- merous hordes of barbarians who pushed one another from their conquests, and among the endless and confused strife of battles which destroyed, min- gled, and separated the different races, how can we determine, whether Alans, or Suevi, or Vandals, or Huns, or Goths, or Francs, or Moors, or Saracens, were that peculiar race, whose remnant has descended to these days with the mark of persecution and hatred stamped upon it 1

"It would prove to most readers an uninteresting detail, were I to go over the arguments of M. de Gebelin, who contends that the Cagots are the re- mains of the Alans ; or of M. Ramond, who believes them to be a remnant of the Goths. Nothing approaching to certainty, -scarcely even bordering upon probability, appears in the reasoning of either. The Cagots may have been Alans, or they may have been Goths; but there seems to be nearly the same reason for believing them the remnant of the one as of the other people. If this miserable and proscribed race should, indeed, be all that remains of the Gothic conquerors of half the world, what a lesson for pride is there !

" I cannot conclude this hasty sketch better than in the words of M. Ra- mond, who, whatever his philosophical powers may be, is evidently a kind- hearted and an observing man, and who possessed the best of all opportuni- ties forjudging of the people which were the object of his inquiry.

" 1 1 have seen,' says he, ' some families of these unfortunate creatures. They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has ban- ished them. The side-doors by which they were formerly obliged to enter the churches are useless (M. Ramond might have said shut up, for so they are in general), and some degree of pity mingles, at length, with the contempt and aversion which they formerly inspired ; yet I have been in some of their retreats, where they still fear the insults of prejudice, and await the- visits of the compassionate. I have found among them the poorest be- ings perhaps that exist upon the face of the earth. I have met with brothers, who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want of isolated men. I have seen among them women, whose affection had a somewhat in it of that submission and devotion which are inspired by feeble- ness and misfortune. And never, in this half annihilation of those beings of my species, could I recognize, without shuddering, the extent of the power which we may exercise over the existence of our fellow — the narrow circle of knowledge and of enjoyment within which we may confine him— the smallness of the sphere to which we may reduce his usefulness.' " — Consta- bles Miscellany, vol. lxvii., pp. 123 — 134.

The Breton antiquarians, who find in their own portion of France the same race, have seemed inclined to trace them no farther back than to the lepers of the media3val times, victims as they suppose of a disease brought back into Europe by the Crusaders. But the allusions to this remarkable people run back to a far earlier era than that of the first crusade. Michelet. the historian, leaves undetermined (he origin of these " Pariahs of the West," as he calls them. The recent erudite and elaborate work of F. Michel, (His- toire des Races Maudites de la France etde l'Espagne. Paris, 1847, 2 tomes,)

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who has devoted the first volume of his treatise to the Cagots, accepts, in the main, as true, the ancient tradition that they are chiefly, though not ex- clusively, descendants of the Goths, and sustains the derivation of the name supported by Scaliger, Canis Gothics, (or that, in token of the popular hate and scorn, they were styled Dogs of Goths,) (Michel, I. 355.) He assigns as the era of their settlement in southern France, the disastrous return of Char- lemagne, from his expedition into Spain, about the close of the eighth cen- tury, when the residents of Spain, Gothic and Arabian, who had adhered to hisbanners, sought, on his retreat, safety from their Moorish masters, by re- tiring into Charlemagne's dominions, though meeting there the hereditary and invincible dislike of his earlier subjects already settled in the regions where he fixed these new colonists. The work of Michel furnishes the most cu- rious details, as to the popular enmity, and social disadvantages, and en- venomed contempt, of which the Cagots were for ten centuries the victims ; their advent into France, according to his theory, going back to the times of the battle of Roncesvalles, so celebrated in the fables of chivalry, when Ro- land, the nephew of Charlemagne, and the Orlando of mediaeval romance, perished, in fighting the Saracens.