/. %J~f . / J ^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^ BV 4501 .W64 1870 Williams, William R., 1804- 1885. Religious progress RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. RELIGIOUS PROGRESS; DISCOURSES ON THB DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER BT V WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. The morality of tbe Bible excepted, there hae nerer appeared an ethical nstein— oriental or western, which might not fairly be described as a splendid enormity — or a glittering fraermeott which owed all iu ralue to the spoliation of some spumed and forgotten qualities.— /cooc TViylor. Praesena quisque gradua nibieqnentem pant et facBem leddit ; lubaequeni priorem tempeni ac perScit.— .Sangal. BOSTON: GOULD AND LINCOLN, 69 ■WASHINGTON STREET. NEW YORK: SHELDON, BLAKEMAN & CO. CINCINNATI : GEORGE S. BLANCIIARD. 18 70. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, In the Clerk's OflBce for the ©outhera District of New Yoiib TO ELISHA TUCKER, D.D., OF CHICAGO, THESE LECTUBES, PREPARED AT HIS SUGGESTIOlSr AND PUBLISHED BY HIS REQUEST, ARE AFEECTIONATELT INSCRIBED BT HIS FRIEND AND BROTHER. New York, Octobei 1850. PREFACE. The following Lectures were originally prepared for the pul- pit, and delivered to the peopie of his charge by the author. In a time, when the eyes of the nations are so generally strained towards the undefined and glowing horizon of the Future, and when the cry of " Progress" has awakened alike so much of soh- citude and of hope, it seemed not unfitting that a Christian pastor should call his hearers to consider the elements and the laws of that higher moral progress stretching into eternity, of which the gospel of Christ witnesses, and for which the grace of God alone qualifies us. It was the belief of some of his hearers, that the reflections thus presented might find readers. To the favor of that God whose blessing alone can give these imperfect sketches acceptance or usefulness, they are commended. W. R. W. New York, October, 1850. CONTENTS. PAOC LECTURE I. — Religion a Principle of Growth, . 13 II. — Faith its Root, 37 m.— Virtue, 60 IV. — Knowledge, 80 V. — Temperance 104 VI.— Patience, 134 VII.— Godliness, 160 Vin. — Brotherly Kjndness 182 IX.— Charity, 206 Appendix, 237 AND BESIDE THIS, QIVINQ ALL DILIGENCE, ADD TO TOUB FAITH TIBTDE ; AJfD TO VIRTUE KNOWLEDGE ; AND TO KNOWLEDGE TEM- FZBANOE; AND TO TEMPERANCE PATIENCE; AND TO PATTENOB godliness; AND TO GODLINESS BEOTHEBLY KINDNESS; AND TO BKOTHEBLT KINDNESS OHABITT. LECTURE I. RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. " ADD TO YOUR FAITH " 2 Peter, i. S Our age is writing " progress" on its banners, and sends along the benches of its schools, and the ranks of its combatants, as the watchword of the times : " Onwards." It bids us to forget the things that are behind, as incomplete and unsatisfactory, and to press toward those which are yet before us. We believe that the gospel, and it alone, adequately, and to the full content of the heart, meets this deeply-seated craving of our times. Religion is a principle of perpetual progress. Not that it distends and pieces its old creed by constant innovations ; or retracts the severity of its early warnings and re- strictions ; or makes Fashion its Sinai. Not that it is the docile handmaid of Philosophy, or the con- tented retainer and serf of worldly rulers, wearing their livery, taking their wages and orders, and act- ing merely as a higher branch of their police, — a spiritual constabulary force. If it grew thus with the growth of secular systems and governments, it must on the other hand share in their decay, and li RELIGIOUS PROGRESS.. perish in their fall, like a parasitic plant blasted by the death of its sturdier supporter. But setting before us, as the great end of our ex- istence, and as the only perfect model of moral excel- lence, the Infinite Jehovah, it requires, and it also ministers an ever-growing conformity to Him. And yet the Exemplar, thus to be approached, is ever above the highest soarings of our adoration, gratitude, and love. The elevation of our moral ascent towards him widens continually the horizon of pur knowl- edge, and deepens the sense of our dependence and deficiency, — and earth and self are thus made con- tinually to dwindle. Mere terrene virtue becomes soon giddy and haughty, in proportion to the height of its real or imaginary flights. But the grace of Christ Jesus makes lowliness and self-renunciation to increase in proportion with the increase of true wis- dom and goodness. As it spreads more canvass to the breeze, it steadies with new and heavier ballast the keel. And the more humbly and deeply this grace is imbibed, the richer are its effects on the individual heart, and on the character and well-being of the nation, and on the movements and destinies of the age. Each new trial of its infinite resources displays still new depths of truth adequate to every emergency of every people, and of every time. The infatuation of its enemies disputes this fact. They would compliment the re- ligion of the cross into the grave, as an old-world ex- cellence, that is now obsolete ; or, others of them, hoot it out of sight as a detected and spent imposture. The remissness of its friends suppresses or obscures RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 15 this same cliaractcr of permanent development in true piety. But we suppose the times in which we live, eminently to need that Christians remember and act upon the principle, that their religion is a law of moral and interminable growth. " Grow in grace," is the apostle's injunction to all recipients of that grace. It is the secret and rule of personal reform, constantly advancing, and of social amelioration, en- franchisement and elevation. For the gospel alone it ia that can meet the world's wants in their highest and fullest sense ; coming to right the wronged, and to guide the darkling, and to relieve the wretched, and to uplift the down-trodden. Compared with its high aims, the loftiest quarry of earthly ambition is but low and poor. The saint wins victories that an Alex- ander might have coveted in vain, for better is he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. And the negro, who in the low, dark slave-hut, breathes out confidingly his departing soul, trusting the Saviour and entering heaven, has a glory which all his armies and all his conquests would of themselves fail to give to the expiring Napoleon. This trait in the gospel, — its character as a prin- ciple of steady and indefinite growth, and of limitless advancement, — needs to be pondered. Our business is now indeed, not so much with the influence of this re- ligion on the community, as on the individual heart and character. But the individual elevated, uplifts necessarily the family and state and age of which he forms a part, and in which he is a necessary and vital element. There is much in the present condition of 16 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. the churchi3S, and muoh in the present aspect of thd world, that makes this progressive energy of Chris- tianity, a lesson needing now to be especially urged by the teachers and heeded by the disciples of this faith. The church, we said, needs in this age, to be kept in mind of the great truth, that there remains yet much land to be possessed, not only as the common heritage of the faithful, but as the personal allotment, and homestead, so to speak, of each one of the faithful. The churches, re-discovering a long neglected duty, are now attempting to evangelize the heathen. It is an age of Missions. The islands of the Pacific have heard the cry after the lapse of eighteen centuries, that our earth has been honored and blessed by the coming of a Divine Redeemer. China has shuddered to see the long dominion of her Confucius and her Boodh invaded by the gospel of Jesus the Nazarene. The Shasters of Braminism find their sacred Sanscrit tongue employed, by the diligence and fidelity of mis- sionary translators, to utter the oracles of that One True God, who will banish from under the heavens which they have not made, and which He has made, all the hundred thousand gods of the Hindoo Pan- theon, with all the other idols of the nations, however ancient and however popular. The tinglings of a new life from on high seem, along the coasts of Asia and of Africa, shooting into nations that Paganism held for centuries senseless and palsied. Is not Ethiopia soon to be. as the prophetic eye of the Psalmist long ages ago saw het, stretching out her hands unto G-od ? But whilst each Christian church, each band of RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 17 spiritual disciples, in lands long evangelized is thus lengthening the cords of her tent to take in the Gen- tiles under its broad canopy, she must in consequence, and as it were in counterpoise, of the extension, strengthen her stakes at home, to bear the increased tension and the extended shelter. Her supports must be proportionately augmented at home, by a deepen- ing piety and a sturdier vigor of principle in her discipleship, or the work will soon come to a stand abroad. A sickly and bedwarfed Christianity here will not furnish the requisite laborers, or the needful funds. Expansion without solidity will bring upon our Zion the ruin of the arch unduly elongate4 and heavily overloaded. Christendom itself must be more thoroughly Christianized, before Heathendom will re- linquish its old character and worship, and learn our creed and love our Saviour. Already the zeal and heroic sacrifices of some of our recent converts shame and should stimulate the comparative worldliness and lukewarmness of the churches that had first sent to them the missionary and the Bible. The churches have again gloried in the claim, that theirs has been an Ag-e of Revivals, in which the work of conversion has been rapid, and the Divine Word has had its free cour.se over the community. Far as these scenes and seasons of religious profiting have been, really and purely, the work of .Grod's Spirit, they should call forth our praises to the grace that gave them, and our prayers and best efforts for their continuance and extension. But where man's work has undertaken to replace God's work, vigilance and 18 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, fearless fidelity are needed on the part both of the ministry and the churches, lest God should be pro- voked to scorn the service and the worshippers, when censers and altars have been blazing with strange fire. And when, as often it has been, God's Spirit has really wrought. Christians need to keep in view, for themselves and for their new found brethren, the great truth that godliness is a life and a growth. In its beginning, indeed, a change, or turning, or con- version, the importance of which cannot be exag- gerated ; that change is but initial to an ever-growing conformity ; that turning, the entrance into a way to be patiently travelled ; and that conversion, the pas- sage from an earthly-miudedness which went ever downward, into a heavenly-mindedness which as ne- cessarily mounts evermore upward. The church must not allow herself to be satisfied with suspicious, or at best but superficial evidences of conversion ; and to DC contented by accounting an increase of members, however won, and however taught, necessarily an in- crease of her strength. The church is to be, indeed, to those whom a true regeneration has made the babes of Christ's household, a nursery, full of provident ten- derness, and patient forbearance : but it is to be also, for its members of varied advantages and longer date, something more than this ; — a camp no less than a nursery. The trainers of God's sacramental host may not always be employed in feeding and swathing ; and although the new-born babe is to desire the sincere milk of the word, the more advanced disciples are re- buked by the apostle, if, after years, and oppor- RELIGION A PRINCIPLK OF GROWTH. 19 tunities, and experience, they need' to be "taught again the first principles of the oraches of God, and are become such as have need of milk and not of strong meat — unskilful in the word of righteous- ness ;"* and not " going on unto perfection ;"t when '' for the time" spent in Christian profession and un- der varied religious nurture, they " ought to be teachers ;"1: masterly instructors of others, rather than feeble neophytes in the faith. It is, again, a memorable fact in the present po- sition of Christ's people, that the age is one of his- torical research. The religious controversies of our times seem to transfer themselves into that historic field. The battle with the enemy at the gates soon shifts its scene to the graves of the fathers, and the monuments of the old Past. There is, on the part of the favorers and of the opposers alike of spiritual re- ligion, an anxious tendency to inquire into the creeds and the deeds of the forefathers, A D'Aubigne is fighting over again the old battles, and reviving the forgotten watchwords of the Reformation, by his graphic portraiture of the men and the events of that stirring era. The Puritan Fathers are beginning to know the honors of a partial resurrection, as our age is disinterring and relieving them from the foul cere- ments in which they were enwrapped, and the lying epitaphs under which they were buried, by the lewd and godless age that immediately succeeded them. As we look on the stalwart, spiritual proportions of these ancient worthies, Christians of our own day seem * Heb. V. 11-14. t Heb. vi. 1. % Heb. v. 12. 20 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. convicted of comparative degeneracy. With larger means, and wider opportunities, we appear to accom- plish less than did these devoted men. As we look at their writings so voluminous and rich, and at their toils so varied and incessant, their fierce and absorb- ing conflicts, and their far-reaching and still-brighten- ing influence, we seem to ourselves like mere infants in the tribes of Israel, when handling, in wonder and despair, the sword of G-oliath, and remembering how a David wielded it against its stout owner, or when touching the bedstead of Og, king of Bashan, that was nine cubits long ; — a dwindling race who may not wear the armor, or renew the victories of those who have preceded us. And yet what were the Puritans, or the Reformers even, to the primitive Christians ? The honor and memorial of an Owen, a Bunyan, or a Baxter, a Samuel Rutherford, a John Knox, a Simon Menno, a Latimer, a Calvin or a Luther, pale beside the story of the fi.shermen apostles, who cheered by no precedents, and without the furniture of learning, or wealth, or numbers, stood forth confronting the dark Sanhedrim, and lifting at the foot of Csesar's throne an un blenched brow, and delivering before Pride and Might a cheerful testimony that faltered not, even whilst they heard the roar already of the lions which in the dens of the amphitheatre were awaiting their Christian victims, and whilst they saw the ruddy glare of those martyr fires even then closing the earthly existence of so many of their meek fellow confessors. To complete their work, and to gather in the full fruits of that covenant, of which they seized RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 21 the first ripe cars only, we need their spirit. Their memory is a summons. And thus, we say, the his- tories of the past, as they are in our times awakening new interest and study, challenge it of the churches, that they become more than they now are, full of piety and mighty in faith, and more closely conformed to what their godly forerunners were, firm in trust, and valiant in deed, — fearlessly defying man, because simply relying on God. 2, And if, from the peculiar state and needs of the churches, we turn to review the present aspect of the world, we seem to discover similar reasons, -why the churches should not, now at least, overlook the fact, that the gospel is, to its obedient disciples, a principle of continuous advancement, a law of expansion and moral elevation. The world, falsely or with justice, is shouting its own progress, and promising in the advancement of the masses, the moral development of the individual It is an age of eager and rapid discovery in the Phys- ical Scieyices. The laws and uses of matter receive profound investigation, and each day are practically applied with some new success. But some of the philosophers thus busied about the material world, seem to think that the world of mind is virtually a nonentity. As G-eology scratches the rind of our globe, some are hoping to dig up and fling out before the nations a contradiction to the oracles of the earth's Creator ; and to find a birth-mark on the creature that shall impeach the truth of its Maker's registers as to its age and history. Others, in the strides of 22 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Astronomy along her star-paved way, hope to see her travel beyond the eye of the Hebrew Jehovah, and bringing back from her far journey a denial of the word that His lips have uttered. Yet Physical Sci- ence can certainly neither create nor replace Moral Truth. The crucible of the chemist cannot disin- tegrate the human soul, or evaporate the Moral Law. The Decalogue, and the Sermon on the Mount ; Con- science and Sin ; the superhuman majesty and purity of Christ ; the Holy Ghost, and the Mercy Seat, would remain, even if a new Cuvier and another Newton should arise, to carry far higher and to sink far deeper, than it has ever yet done, the line of human research ; and even if these new masters of physical lore should blaspheme where the older teachers may have adored. Some claim that Revelation must be recast, to meet the advances in Natural Science. They over- look the true limitations, as to the power and pre- rogatives of mere Material Knowledge. And what are the new and loftier views of man's origin and destiny which these reformers propose to substitute for those views which they would abolish ? On the basis of a few hardy generalizations upon imaginary or distorted facts, and by the aid of some ingenious assumptions, a sys- tem is excogitated that is to strip the race of immortal- ity, conscience and accountability ; and that represents us as but a development of the ape, to be one day su- perseded by some being of yet nobler developments than our own, and who will have the right to rule and kill us, as we now rule and kill the beasts of the forest. And is it thus, that Philosophy reforms upon the RELIGION A P R I N C I P L R OF GROWTH. 23 Bible ? No — in the endeavor to out-grow Revelation, it has but succeeded in out-growing reason and bruti- fying humanity. No — let science perfect yet more her telescopes, and make taller her observatories, and deeper her mines, and more searching her crucibles ; all will not undermine Jehovah's throne, or sweep out of the moral heavens the great star-like truths of Revelation, and least of all the Sun of Righteousness. God's omniscience is never to be ultimately brought down to, and schooled by man's nescience, as its last standard and test. The last and greatest of the world's scholars will, we doubt not, be among the lowliest worshippers, and the loudest heralds of the crucified Nazarene. The gospel is true — true in- tensely, entirely and eternally : and all other and in- ferior truth, as it shall be more patiently and thorough- ly evolved, will assume its due place and proportion, as buttressing and exalting the grgat, pervading, con- trolling and incarnate Truth — Christ the Maker, the Sovereign, the Upholder, and the Judge, no less than the Redeemer of the world. Bat besides these advances in physical science, our age is one of wondrous political revolutions. Beside the oldest thrones of Europe, where successive genera- tions had slept in contented bondage, kissing and gild- ing their hereditary fetters, the cry of Progress, and Change and Freedom has been raised. Is the de- liverance promised now to be won, or to be again baffled, and yet to be long delayed ? The belitiver ex- pected change, long before the political agitator pro- claimed it ; and continues patiently to await it, long 24 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. after the foiled revolutionist may have despaired of iti coming. The Christian has seen in the Bible of his God the pledge of a Millennium. He has read in the sure omens and thick-coming tokens of G-od's providence, the signs of its gradual march of approach, often most rapid where most noiseless. And in this age of political agita- tion, of seething eagerness, and of tumultuous and an- archical hope, should not the gospel be announced with new boldness, and embraced with greater tenacity by all those who have long known it ? For that gospel proclaims the great principle, so reasonable, so right- eous, and yet so generally overlooked, that to precede and sustain national progress, there must be in- dividual progress, — and that, to give it permanence and worth, a moral change must underlie the civil and social change. Need it be again wrought out to a dreadful and bloody demonstration, — that truth — so often and cruelly illustrated in the history of revolu- tions, that ■' The bad rebel, but never can be free ;" that a sinner must by G-od's grace subdue himself and his own corruptions, to obtain the subjugation of his worst tyrants ; — that the truest and most brutish serf- dom is the bondage of evil principles and unholy habits, or that very " rehabilitation of the senses," in which, some in the old world, " filthy dreamers, defil- ing the flesh,"* have proclaimed, as the hope of the race, what would be really the carnival of hell ? A nation, who are all drudges and dupes of Satan, can- * Jude 8. RELIGION A PKIiNClPLE OF GROWTH. 25 not be a nation of patriots and freemen. The salt necessary to preserve a people from moral putridity is lacking in them. Conscience, — relieved from the guilt and dominion of Sin, under the sprinkled blood of the Redeemer, and the regeneration of the Holy Ghost, the Renewer, — is to become, when thus itself emancipated, the grand emancipator of the nations, supplying to them alike the needful impulse, and the necessary restraints Citizens would men be, and not serfs ? Citizens let them be ; yet let them recollect that the citizen as well as the serf is a mortal and a sinner, and needs an atonement with pardon for his guilt, a Comforter with solace for his inevitable woes, and a resurrection ministering peace to his death-bed, and assuring a good hope for his eternity beyond the tomb. Let states, and the helmsmen of states re- member, that there is a governor on high, " higher than they," no despot and no changeling, whose law they must ponder and obey, for it overrides their legis- lation, and whose sovereign favor they must invoke ; or else their freedom is an unblest impossibility, — impos- sible even were it to such godless states a blessing, and unblest even were it to such godless states a possibility. It is again, even in lands and governments where political revolution is not needed or is not desired, an age of social reform. And in such a time, when the operatives, the proletary class, to use a word of French thinkers, the men living on the day's wages, the laborious and the begrimed, the doers of hard and honest work, are crying out because of the long neg- lect and cruel oppression which they deem them- 2 26 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. selves to have endured on the part of their richei brethren, — is it not especially the season, when alike all those who seek and all those who dread such hanges, should study, in the scriptures emanating from the Former and Ruler of Society, man's duties to man, and his obligations to his &od ? The law of lUman brotherhood is there illustrated as no where else, spread as it is not only over Christ's teachings, but enforced and exemplified by Christ's sacrifice. There we see how the most radical of all reforms is also the most quiet and the most accessible to us all. It is the most radical, for it alters, to the inmost cen- tre and to the outermost circumference, our relations to ourselves and to our race, to the universe, to eter- nity and to God. It is the most quiet, because it comes not with garments rolled in blood and the con- fused noise of the battle-field, but in the depths of the heart and with the still, small voice of Grod's Spirit, ** not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." It is the most accessible, for it waits not for the will of majorities, the success of some favorite candidate, or the action of some busy cabal ; it stays not for protocol or senate, or cabinet, but in the solitude of our own closets, and in the secrecy of our own bosoms, it does its lonely, personal and uncontrollable work. It is the reform of our own individual lives, as growing out of a change sought at Christ's feet, and from God's almighty grace, and by the energy of His renewing Spirit, in our own in- dividual hearts. A freedom thus won, what tyran- nous invader shall ever reconquer ? A constitution RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 27 and legislation, revealed in the Divine Scriptures from heaven above, and accepted and retranscribed in the heart of the regenerate convert on earth, secures his gravest interests beyond the reach of all sublunary revolutions and mischances. Thus reformed and ele- vated, we shall not cherish extravagant expectations from the earth, or from the laws or societies of earth ; nor yet, whilst that God rules, shall we ever, in the darkest era, despair unduly of amelioration in those laws and of advancemement for those societies. Then, we shall know at once the dignity of Christ's freedmen, and the loyalty of Christ's servants ; and long, with a passionate affection, to make our breth- ren, however .un amiable or brutified, the willing sharers of our blessed submission, and the eternal par- ticipants of our unspeakable immunities. But, under the lessons of this school, earthly liberty and property will be seen to have their duties quite as much as their privileges. Stewardship to heaven, and Irater- nal sympathy for the race, will be seen graven on each charter of national emancipation, and on each distinguishing boon of our personal allotment. Then too, instead of resembling children, who think with their feet to reach, and with their hands to touch, the far rainbow and the ever-receding horizon, we shall find our S-aviour's instructions giving us just and limited hopes, far as earth and man are concerned, and transferring for us to eternity and to heaven those desires and anticipations which nought but eternity and heaven cian truly satisfy. There will be social pro- gress, then ; but it will be sober, and considerate, and 28 R E L I (J 1 o r y r ii o g r e s s. sell-restrained. ; not demanding the impossible, and not frettinc; at and fio^htins: a^rainst the inevitable. Sickness, Want and Sorrow, what political revolution, or what social reform shall ever utterly obliterate, even in the case of the richest of mortals, until Christ come again ? And if Christ be ours, then earth's ills, transient and disciplinary, shall be transmuted into blessings. They shall furnish the crucible that is to separate and purge away our dross ; and will leave the gold to which that dross once so closely adhered, the brighter from the keen, brief flame that tried it, and the fitter for the service of that upper sanctuary, to which death shall soon transfer it. 3. And now, having seen, how in the aspects, both secular and ecclesiastical, of our age, Christians wer", especially summoned to remember and evolve what of progression there was in their own faith, let us see how, in the inspired presentations of that faith, the fullest provision is made for man's moral growth, and perpetual elevation, alike when considered in his own personal isolation, and when regarded as a member of the communities of earth, or of that eternity and uni- verse lying beyond earth's narrow horizon. Were there no other precept of that tenor, the single utterance of our God : " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,"* would be sufficient to show how a limitless growth and ex- pansion of our intellectual and moral stature was set before us in the gospel. That utterance was a pare of the Sermon on the Mount, The morality there * Matt. V. 48. RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 29 taught, and which has smitten infidels with admira- tion, goes beyond — far beyond — that temporal and sec- ular order to which they would limit it. To man, the heir of immortality, it prescribes the law, and war- rants the hope, of an immortal progression ; — a pro- gression of which time is but the starting-point, and eternity the long career, and (jod, the unreached and ever-ascending goal of its endless and jubilant ascent. The mistakes and crude hopes of the irreligious, and the peculiar dangers and duties environing the re- ligious men and women of our times, should alike en- force this great principle. It is written, again and again, over the New Testament. The chief Master and Apostle of our profession prayed for his people that his joy might remain in them, and that their joy might be full, in keeping his commandments, and that thus their Father and His Father might be glorified, in their " bearing ml'ch fruit."* Sanctified for their sake, He prayed "that they also might be sanctified through the truth."* Complete and final as was their justification, when once believing in Him, whose sacrifice and work made an end of sin, and brought in an everlasting righteousness ; their sanctification was but initial, and was to continue progressive, ascend- ing from grace to grace, and even when culminating in the invisible glory, it was even there to know through the long lapse of eternity an intenser glow of love, and to scan a widening horizon of knowledge, and to evolve a higher grade of holiness, as the dread, glad perfection of their Father God loomed on them * John XV. and xviL 30 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. more vastly, and shone on them more nearly and more clearly. And, in the light of his great Master's lessons, counting himself not to have attained, but struggling onward to apprehend that for which also he was apprehended and converted of his God, Paul bade Christians go onward and forward to perfection, and leaving the nursery, and its pattering by rote of elementary truths, he bade them proceed to the studies and attainments of a vigorous maturity in truth and holiness. So, he elsewhere compares the Christian to a vessel meet for the Master's use, only as it is properly kept, purged, and adorned. Now in the preparation of the vessels of the old sanctuary, there were stages of advance. The mould was pre- pared ; the ore was dug, broken, and sifted and mol- ten ; and the vessel, when cast, was chased by the graver's tool, and burnished, and oftentimes cleansed. The casting of the soul by faith into the mould of Christ and into the great doctrine of His atonement now justifies the character of the true disciple, as really gold of the sanctuary. But many a lesson, and many a trial, are needed, in the way of sanctification, to prove, for that soul, its adaptation and meetness, as a vessel for the Master's use, in His lower and in His higher courts, as an urn or a censer, in which to store the manna of His testimonies, and to bear the flaming incense of His acceptable worship. There are stages in Christian attainment ; and one but prepares for an- other, and, without all, the Christian cannot be fully useful or perfectly blessed. And similar to Paul's teachings, is the teaching, in our text, of his fellow RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROW Til. 31 apostle, Peter. He sets before the astounded convert the high aim, and the large boon, of " all things that pertain unto life antl godliness," and of beeoming "partaker of the divine nature," — not surely, in aspiration after an equality with its incommunicable Deity ; — nor in Pantheistic, Boodhist absorption into its substance and Unity: but, in moral sympathy with, and ever-growing assimilation to its holiness; and in the enlarged participation of its informing Spirit ; and in still loftier exultation over its universal and inde- feasible Sovereignty. Then, having fixed the shrink- ing eye of the abashed and self-condemning worship- per on this blaze of insufferable brightness, as his Teacher and Pattern, his Light and Life, the apostle shuns, as no uninspired teacher could, what seems next an irretrievable fall into the lowest bathos, in his descent from the Throne thus surveyed, to the Footstool, where the convert is for the time to labor and serve. He accomplishes the transition, by un- rolling a? it were from the feet and under the eye of that High Teacher, the life-long lesson for earth and for eternity, of each scholai in Christ's heavenly school. Having counteracted the awe that might crush the learner's spirit, by the grace that won and raised it, ^' whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature ;" and having stated their effect on the believing recipient, who by them will " escape the corrnplion that is in the world through lust ;" he, once, the fisherman of the Gal- ilean lake, little conversant, we should suppose, with no RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. themes bigh, and vast, and spiritual, launches out into a description of moral symmetry and spiritual ex- cellence, such as no sage of G-reek or Oriental fame, and no Doctor of his own national ^nhedrim, ever even approached. The hand, once wont to grasp the clammy meshes of his net, or to scrape the scales from his finny prey, now guided in its use of the style, by God's own wisdom, engraves for all the churches of all succeeding time this charge : " And beside this," (as if, what had gone before were not large enough, and lofty enough, to blind the eye with excess of light, and overwhelm the panting, toiling intellect) — " be- side this, giving all diligence," (with no delay, with no drowsy effort, or half-hearted resolve, but in all promptitude, and with all energy, by every method, and with a relentless perseverance, undismayed, un- baffled, and untiring,) ^^ giving all diligence, add to yovr faith virtue ; and to virtue knowledge ; and to knowledge temperance ; and to temperance patience ; and to patience godliness ; and to godliness brotherly kindness ; and to brotherly kindness charity.''' And to this inventory of man's moral glory, fetched from God's throne and grace, he attaches the argument from gratitude, as due towards the Lord bestowing them : " For if these things be in you and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor un- fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." And to this he attaches the argument from shame, or the reproach else to be incurred of ignorance, forge t- fulness and blindness : " But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath for- RElilGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 33 gotten that he was purged from his old sins.^^ And to this ho attaches the argument from danger, and having before flung back the veil from the face of the Supreme Throne, he tears now the covering from the mouth of the flaming pit, which awaits the plunge of the apostate : " Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things ye shall never fall." And then to the arguments from gratitude, and from shame, and from danger, he appends, as the triumph- ant climax, the argument from hope: " For so an en- trance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christy 4. And passing from the context, the peculiar phraseology of the text itself intimates the same great lesson. From the word " add," a heedless reader might infer, that all the graces thus clustered were in- dependent each of the other, and might be selected or omitted as each disciple saw fit; and that a man might at least be safe in having but the first, though in his negligence lacking all the rest. But such is not the apostle's meaning. The word rendered in our excellent version, " add," is, as scholars tell us, a pe- culiar one, having no term in our own language that is its exact antitype and correlative. The Greeks, the people whose language God saw fit to employ in the New Testament, were accustomed in the solemn spec- tacles of their republics to employ choirs, of trained artists, numerous and costly. It was one of the honorable burdens, imposed at times upon some opu- 84 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. lent private citizen, that lie should, as the offering and expression of his patriotism, furnish or supply, to the magnificent shows of the state, these choirs at his own personal expense, hiring himself the musicians and others who composed the choir. The word de- rived from this custom, and which represented one so gratuitously contributing or ministering a band, or harmotiious troop, is the term used both by Paul and by Peter, in the sense of minister, or furnish. It re- appears in this same chapter, at the eleventh verse, where the disciple is encouraged with the prospect of an abundant entrance at death into Grod's king- dom, being ^^ ministered" unto him; or that Grod would " add" to him the full company of benefits and joys that went to make a triumphant outgate from earth, and a magnificent entrance into Paradise. And in the text now before us, the older English translators, Wycliffe, and the martyr Tyndal, and the martyr Cranmer, in their several versions have here, also, the word " minister," where our majestic, re- ceived version has put " add." Neither term, as we have said, nor any other single word supplied by our tongue, can reproduce the idea of the original Greek. As recurring here, it implies that the believer is called upon to furnish not a single and isolated grace, but to supply, " adding" one to another, the whole consent- ing train, and harmonious, interwoven troop, the complete, sisterly choir of Christian graces. He is to look upon the one in this cluster of Christian ex- cellencies, as fragmentary and untuned without the others. The one grace is the supplement and comple- RELIGION A PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH. 35 ment, indispensable to the symmetry and melody of all its sister graces. Now in this choir or train, Faith is the elder born, and upon it all these other graces depend. It alone justifies, but as the old theologians were fond of say- ing, not being- alone. It comes singly to the task of man's justification, but in the heart and life of the jus- tified man, it does not come as a solitary, building there its lonely hermitage. Faith enters there rather, as came Miriam when leading at the Red Sea the ex- ultant songs of her Hebrew sisters ; and a whole troop comes up at her feet : and whilst at the bar of G-od's law, when righteousness is demanded, she answers alone, and her plea is but one word, " Christ ;" into the earthly church and into the general assembly of heaven, she walks not unattended, but every other grace of the regenerate comes with her, bearing her train, and attesting her kingly descent from Grod. When, then, the apostle bids us " adcr' to this faith, his intent is not that Faith is properly, in its concret-e existence in the human heart as renewed by divine grace, an isolated principle, divisible from Virtue, or from Charity, afterwards enumerated. Where the ^st are utterly absent, Faith is unreal. The addition meant is not the mechanical superposition of one on the other, as the miser adds coin to coin, each distinct from the other, and every one perfect and complete apart ; or as the architect adds stone to stone in his edifice, each now block having no necessary aflinity with those upon which it is laid. But we are to supplement the one grace of Christianity with the other, as one voice 36 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. or performer in the trained choir requires the aid and addition of others, or, as the seed cast into the good soil, and drinking gladly the dew, and rain, and airs of heaven, adds to itself the root, and to the root adds the stem, and to the stem superadds the branches ; and then, naturally and by necessary growth, these branches are crowned with the twig and the leaflet, and the blossom, and the full-formed fruit : and then each part in that living choir, from the lowest root that buries itself below the sod, to the topmost leaf that quivers in the sunbeam, bears its share in the symmetrical life of the tree, and in showing forth the high praises of the God who planted, developed, and united that verdant and waving monument of His skill. Religious life is, thus considered, the out- growth from faith implanted in the soul. True prog- ress is but the natural efflorescence, the budding and blossoming of a living belief of Grod's truth, as mani- fest in the various fruits of the Spirit, in benevolence towards man, and piety towards G-od, in usefulness on earth, and meetness for heaven. LECTURE II. FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFR ." ADD TO YOnR FAITH " 2 Peur, i. i. When the Vatican issued the celebrated Bull Uni- genitus, the occasion of so many scandals, and of such fierce and protracted controversy, and in which it con- demned, as abounding with most portentous errors, the excellent commentary upon the New Testament of the pious Father Quesnel, it selected as one of those errors, a remark of the good Jansenist upon the chapter before us, that " Faith is the first of graces, and the source of every others* And yet what else than this very sentiment does the language of the apostle here suggest ? Faith is put by him first in order ; and is it not so put by Peter's Lord and Master, the chief Apostle and Bishop of our profession ? Has not our Saviour explicitly made the presence of faith the warrant of our salvation, and the absence of it the- seal of our perdition ? " He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on him."t And with the * See Appendix A. f John, ill 36. 38 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. high importance thus assigned to Faith, in the theory of religion, considered as a system of doctrines, tallies the effect and power, in practice, of its presentation to the world, as the hinge of the sinner's justification o condemnation. The Reformers gave it this cardinal place and authority, and announcing to the startled nations the forgotten but primitive truth of .Justifica- tion by Faith, the vast and deeply-rooted fabric oi the Papacy vibrated to its inmost centre at the shock of their testimony. Our Protestant Missionaries preach it. To some speculative minds at home, it might seein but a metaphysical abstraction, which many of the Pagans are too ignorant and besotted to under- stand, much less to value. But how has it seemed to create an intelligence it had not found, and in how many a tribe has the heathen abjured, at this sound, his brutishness, and his idolatry, and his cannibali.sm. Its old miracles of power, and of moral exorcism, are repeated in our own times, and as it were beneath our very eyes. Nay, in your own hearts, have not many of you found its wondrous energy, to awaken hope, and yet to enkindle penitence ; and are you not your- selves the monuments that this principle it was, which first broke within you the dominion of sin, and the yoke of Satan, and whilst it taught you to build every plea on the grace of Christ Jesus, you found in that grace the bond of Duty strengthened within you, and fastened upon you, as the law, apart from faith in Christ, could never do it ? Of the principle, thus claiming the first rank in the earliest and in these latest teachings of the churches FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 39 of Christ, and thus mighty in its influence, let us in- quire : I. What is this Faith ; II. Why it has assigned it, this priority in the Christian system ; and III. How, from the necessity of its nature, it be- comes a root of spiritual growth, and practical devel- opment. I. Faith is not, then, the mere hereditary and pas- sive acquiescence in Christianity as the religion of our country and of our forefathers. Nor is it a reception into the intellect merely, apart from the heart, of any creed however orthodox. Nor is it a mere enthusias- tic persuasion, without scriptural evidence, and un- sustained by the warrant and witness of the Holy Ghost, that God loves us personally. Nor is it, as the enemies of religion would persuade you, a blind, bigoted credulity, the creature and retainer of Priest- craft. The faith revealed in the Bible, in its tendency to sever from all human merits, and intercessors — from all earthly sacrifices and priesthoods — and to shut the soul up to a direct and personal appeal to Christ, and to an exclusive reliance upon the cross ; — and the Bible enjoining that faith, as the one con- dition and term of salvation ; — that faith and that Bible, we say, are the fellest and sternest foes of Priestcraft which the world has ever seen. Faith, in its widest sense, is trust or belief; confi dence in the word, character or work of another. Though requisite in religion, it is as much requisite elsewhere. Human society in its whole framework is 40 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, SO held together ; and the kindreds, and amusennents, and business of the world, are presenting to the most earthly-minded, continual images and intimations of that faith, which, when demanded of him by the church and by the "Word of God, he may sometimes affect to regard as strange and unexampled. The generous confidence of soldiers in a tried and heroic leader, that enables them, in his company, to dare, at immense odds, all peril, and to pluck victory out of the teeth of death ; — the implicit confidence of his correspondents in a merchant of known means, and of proved integrity and sagacity, bidding them set a for- tune afloat on the credit of his mere signature ; — the trust of the voyager in the intelligence and vigilance of the navigator, to whose keel he commits his estate, and family, and life ; — the unshaken assurance of a friend in the worth and affection of one whom he has long known and intimately loved ; — and the quiet, serene and rooted trust of a wife or a child, in the husband or the parent to whom for years they have looked, and never looked in vain: — these are all but examples, in daily recurrence, of the use and the need, of the sweetness and of the power, of a reasonable faith and a well-placed trust. The faith of the gospel is something more than these, only as being trust in God. It is trust, as to matters of higher concernment, and upon better war- rant, and in a Greater and Better Being. It is a re- liance on His true testimony. It is not irrational, for it has overwhelming evidence, both intrinsic and ex- trinsic, that the testimony is really from Him. Yet FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 41 much, declared and revealed by this Divine testimony, may jar on our prejudices, and wound our pride : and is received as true, because being His word, it must be true. If we received at His lips only what oar own reason could first have predicted, or afterwards have fully explained and grasped, it would be vir- tually to impeach God's testimony, by treating Him as we treat a discredited witness, whose word we re- ceive only as far as it is corroborated by other, and in- dependent testimony. As the great theme of this divine testimony is Christ Jesus, the Incarnation of God for the redemption of man, Faith cannot truly receive that testimony without believing on Christ. That Christ true faith accepts as He, in this volume of His testimony, reveals himself, as being the God no less than the man, and as becoming the Sov- ereign no less than the Saviour of His people. The Socinian denies the first ; the Antinomian suppresses the last of these twin truths. But true faith wel- comes all, not attempting where God hath joined that man should put asunder. And as Christ came to ele- vate and free, to ransom and sanctify His subjects ; and finally to bring the prisoners of Hell into the pos- session of the immunities and joys of Paradise ; and gives even here the earnest of these eternal benefits ; true Faith, even for this present life, ennobles and liberates its votaries by bestowing upon them the first instalments of their coming and celestial inheritance. Instead of its being, as the bigots of scepticism (for Infidelity has its blind and bitter bigotry) represent it, a bandage for the eyes, and a manacle for the free 42 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, hand Faith is thus really, to the eyes of the soul, a tele* scope bringing near the far glories of Heaven : " the evidence of things not seen, and the substance of things hoped for." And it is, to the hand, a clue leading our steps out of the mazy dungeon of Sin, and through the labyrinth of Earth. It is a magnet pointing the voyager to his desired haven; the char- ter, to the criminal, of an undeserved and full pardon ; and the warranty and title deed, to the forlorn and homeless prodigal, of a rich, unfading and princely heritage, and of his welcome to a recovered home and a reconciled Father. Speaking, as does this divine testimony, of a Renewing Spirit no less than a Re- deeming Son of God, and describing as this word does that Spirit as witnessing with the Scripture, and of Christ, and for Christ, to the prayerful and penitent learner, Faith receives too this testimony, and finds that Divine Spirit, aiding and answering prayer, ex- plaining and applying Scripture, and enabling the dis- ciple successfully to collate, if we may so speak, the parallel passages of God's record in the written- volume, and of God's living inscription on the fleshly tablets of the heart, in the disciples' own conscience, and experience, and history. And as this Faith is trust in the truth of the ever Truthful God, it is high- est wisdom : as it is reliance on the Omnipresent, the Almighty, and the Everlasting Jehovah, it is the surest, the only safety. Expelling moral death, and becoming the inlet and channel of a restored inter course with the Ever-living God, it brings life — eter^ nal 'ife. TAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 43 As being enwrought by the Divine Ppirif, the glory of it and its first origin belong to God, the Father of Lights and author of every good and perfect gift. But working, as that Divine ki^pirit does, upon man not as mere passive matter, but as an active and in- telligent soul, it is man's act under God's agency : God working in us to will and to do, of his own good pleasure. And as the act is reasonable, and the tes- timony trustworthy, and the evidence overwhelming, and the summons universal, our failure to believe is irrational and inexcusable. Unbelief is our sin and our ruin. Contemplating the work of man's salvation from the point, whence Paul in the Epistle to the Ro- mans regards it ; God's effectual calling, and, yet be- fore that. His divine foreknowledge and predestina- tion, go before that Faith, in which man is justified. " For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first-born among many brethren. More- over, whom he did predestinate, them he also called : and whom he called, them he also jnstified.''''* But considering the Christian graces, in the order of their implantation and manifestation, in the regenerate soul. Faith stands forth as the first-born of those graces. JI. And should it be asked, why has it this priority in the Christian system ; we answer, it may well oc- cupy this place of precedency in the scheme of man's salvation, for various reasons. Four might be named ; one derived from man's past history, another, from * Rom. viii. 29, 30. 44 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. the relations of God and man, yet another from God's great goodness, and the last, from man''s present, besetting sin. Man's history required it. Unbelief, the opposite of faith, had the primary place in man's fall and perdition. When the Tempter instilled sus- picion, as to the Divine veracity, into the minds of our first parents, then, as to them, " Sin was con- ceived," and soon " it brought forth death," and let in all our v\'oe. They, who had originally known good only and fully, knew thenceforward " good and evil," the one by its loss, and the other by its cruel and con- stant presence. It occupies the first place, again, from the nature respectively, of God and man. He, as the Infinite and Omniscient, knows much which man, as the finite being of limited faculties and ex- istence, can know only through His divine testimony. The past of our original history, and the dim future of our final destiny, we can learn only from God's revelations. And going beyond our own history and destiny, what could we learn, as to the counsels and purposes of God concerning other orders and hierar- chies of his creatures, and concerning other worlds of His universe, except as He, in His sure Oracles, vouchsafed to disclose, with more or less of clearness, the edge and outline, so to speak, of those vast coun- sels, those sublime and indefeasible purposes ? Now till we have faith we cannot take in these teachings. Again, God''s unutterable tenderness and goodness have assigned to Faith this post of precedency. The babe, yet but a prattler, may have full trust and con- fidence in the parent who cherishes and fondles it FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIKE. 45 Before it can reason, or even speak, it may believe in its father and mother. Had God required great tal- ents, or rich attainments, or profound study ; had He said to the inquirer : Be a Palcy, a Butler, a Chal- mers, and build up thy salvation by the study of many volumes beneath the midnight lamp; where had hope been for the young, the ignorant, the bar- barian, — in fact for the masses of the race ? But He, whose kind purpose it was to bring " many sons" unto salvation, in love for the race whom, after all their provocations, He consented not to abandon, ap- pointed not Learning, not Philosophy, not Wisdom, but Faith to be the handmaiden keeping the gate of everlasting life. And man's besetting sin, — the pride, which, after all the deep descent and all the foul wal- lowings of the Fall, clings so persistently to him, how- ever degraded and brutified, — made it fitting, that the mode of his acceptance before God should be one that allowed no occasion for boasting. Had merit or ser- vice, intellectual or moral, been the plea, the presen- tation of which would win our pardon, and open to us Heaven, then man's obstinate infirmity, the pride that first precipitated him out of Eden, would have been fostered and confirmed. But what shadow of merit can we claim, in believing the true testimony of a truthful and trustworthy witness ? Peremptorily and finally God thus excluded all self-righteousness. Or, as Paul argues, it is of faith and not of works, that before God no flesh may boast. And so also, that before God no flesh may despair. The vilest may repent and believe, and accept free forgiveness. 46 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. The best must repent and believe, and accept free for- giveness. No immorality is too low, and foul, for this righteousness of Faith to reach : no morality is too high and pure, that it should need this righteousness of Faith, for the concealment of its deficiencies and ' the pardon of its demerits. The sinner fleeing to the city of refuge, must take the cross on his way, and bow, in faith, before Him who hanging thereon made an end of sin, and brought in an everlasting righteous- ness. III. But will not a scheme of salvation, thus free and indiscriminate, break down all virtue, and " the dignity of human nature," and abolish law, and holi- ness, and truth ; and give up the church militant and triumphant to the incursion of the offscourings of our race? So, in all ages, objectors have argued. But the Providence of Grod, and the history of the Churches, have sufficiently answered and exploded these cavillings. The faith that justifies, is implanted by a transforming Spirit, and reconciles to a Holy and sin-hating Father, and unites to a Redeemer, detest- ing and destroying iniquity. He came to save His people //"o^H their sin ; not as Antinomianism virtually travesties it, to save them in their sins : — to destroy the works of the devil ; not to g;ild, and canonize and perpetuate them. "Whilst Faith then accepts pardon as God's free gift, it accepts as the inseparable con- comitants of that pardon, penitence for sin ; gratitude to the Griver ; ingenuous love ; adoption into the household of G-od ; and assimilation to the Elder Brother, — the head of that household. "While the FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 47 energy of His righteousness justifies, the energy of the Renewing and Sealing Spirit sanctifies. From Ike necessity of its nature, the implanted Faith becomes a root of spiritual growth, and a prin- ciple of practical development. For Faith must take a whole Christ, in the entireness of his offices, as the Sovereign no less than as the Redeemer ; and take a whole Scripture, in its precepts, its solemn warnings, and its awful denunciations, no less than in its prom- ises, free, full and benignant ; and take a whole God, in the august fulness of His perfections, the Jealous God, and the Avenger, whose eyes are too pare to look upon iniquity, as well as the Gracious and the Long- suffering, who will not have any to perish. Faith does not assume to dissect away the Divine Justice from the Divine Mercy. It was a fraudulent claimant to the sacred title of mother, who at the throne of Solomon, asked the division of the living child. And it is but a spurious Faith, and a forged Christianity, that would hew apart, at the foot of the Mercy Seat, the living Christ, and taking his grace, leave His holi- ness. In its earlier stages, faith is generally but feeble. That it should remain so, is not the will of Him who implants, who requires, and who sustains it. When our Lord rebuked his disciples, it was as those of "little faith," and so small did he regard it, in its ex- isting measure as shown in their hearts and acts, that it did not equal the mustard-seed. Had they but even that scanty and petty degree of faith, they could remove mountains at a word, and fling their uprooted 48 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. bulk into the seas. The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, in a later day of the dispensation, when the Spirit had been more largely poured forth, rejoiced over the Thessalonian Christians, in the increase, — the " exceeding" increase, of their faith, and that not in the case of a favored few only, but in their whole community. " We are bound to thank Grod always for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your faith groweth exceedingly ^ and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth."* . It is recorded to Abraham's honor, that he was " mighty in faith." And whilst all have not the actual. attain- ment of the like might of trust in God, it is set before all, as alike their privilege and their duty. Those who have attained, are honored, and presented as pat- terns and incentives for the emulation of those who come after. " Being dead, they yet speak." It was a touching memorial to their comrade, the warrior of Breton birth. La Tour d'Auvergne, the first grenadier of France, as he was called, when after his death, his comrades insisted that, though dead, his name should not be removed from the rolls : it was still regularly called, and one of the survivors as regularly an- swered for the departed soldier : " Dead on the field." The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews is such roll-call of the dead. It is the regis- ter of a regiment, which will not allow death to blot names from its page, but records the soldiers who have, in its ranks, won honorable graves and long-abid- ing victories. Faith was the principle that wrought * 2 Thessal. ii. 3. FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN- LIFE. 49 in these ancient worthies of the church their prowess and their high achievements. And though dead to man on earth, they are yet " living unto God." "We are to press forward in their steps, to emulate their might and glory, and to uphold and extend their conquests. 1. From the nature of faith, and of the human mind itself, faith, where well placed, on a trustworthy object, must grow and strengthen by exercise and continual repetition. The friend with whom we have taken long and intimate counsel, who has lightened, by dividing, our sorrows, and heightened, by doubling them, our enjoyments, must occupy in our confidence a place such as no stranger can suddenly conquer. And God has so arranged the changes and tests of his provi- dence, that man needs daily to appeal afresh in the new emergencies of the new day, to the care, and skill, and truth of his Father on high. If such appeal be but made, the act becomes a rooted habit ; and he who, in earlier times, but cried, through tears, as he felt the waverings of a feeble faith, and the blasts of mighty temptation, " Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," learns to adopt, in his later experience, the firm assur- ance of Paul, " I know in whom I have believed ;" or with the patriarch exclaims, " I know that my Re- deemer liveth." 2. The growth set before our faith appears, again, from the character and structure of Scripture, the vokime on whose testimonies faith fastens, and in whose rich pastures she mu.st ever feed. God might have made it a book to be exhausted at one reading ; or a record of the Past, unavailing to the men of the 3 50 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Present ; or a mysterious outline of the Future, of lit- tle clearness or usefulness till the times of its fulfil- ment had come. Instead of this, it is a book of all times, full of the ancient Past, and the busy Present, and the dread or gorgeous Future. It has the simplest teachings interwoven inextricably with its most fathom- less mysteries ; and precept, and promise, and threat- ening, and history, and parable, and psalm, so grouped, that every taste may be gratified, and none sated and cloyed. A Newton, sitting down to its perusal, finds it still opening new depths of wonder and glory, the more prolonged and devout are his meditations upon it. The new convert, dazzled over its pages with the ec- stacy of his new-foand hope, yet, cannot as deeply and ardently love and value it, as he will do when a gray- headed patriarch, years after, he turns afresh its won- drous leaves to adore the ever- full freshness of its les- sons, and to remember all the lights it has cast upon his weary pathway. It is the book not of an academic lustrum only, nor of a lifetime, but of generations. As centuries have rolled on, this august volume has notched on their calendar new fulfilments of its prophe- cies, new illustrations of its truthfulness, and new evidences that its authorship could come from none other than the Former of the worlds, and the Ruler of all centuries. Now, when Faith is presented with such a manual, not to be mastered in weeks or years, but still evolving new lights to the latest studies of the longest lifetime, does not the character and structure of the book proclaim the intent of God, that Faith FAITH Tlin ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 51 should not sit down content with present attainments, and its as yet immature strength? 3. And so too, the character of God Himself pro- claims the same great law of the constant growth of faith. " Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace," is the demand of Reason, no less than Scripture. It is not in the mere exercise of his Sovereignty, but quite as much from the mere impulse of his mercy, that He requires the beings He has formed and en- dowed to seek him. Man has capacities and aspira- tions that the earthly, the perishable, the finite and the sinful can never satisfy. In tenderness to our race, God commands them to seek in Himself, in the knowl- edge of His nature and will, and in communion with Him, those enjoyments that nought lower and less than Himself can furnish. We can easily conceive, in the lower orders of creation, how unhappy it were that a being of higher endowments and long duration, should be decreed to mate with, and hang upon one of much inferior nature, and of shorter date than it- self. If, for instance, the aloe, the plant of centuries, were fated to be the appendage and parasite of the ephemeron, the insect of a day, it would be doomed virtually to early and lonely widowhood by the un- timely decay of its idol, and the perfect inadequacy and early rottenness of its appointed prop. The soul, with its unrenounceable immortality, and its infinite aspirations, is such plant of the long centuries, an aloe of the eternities beyond this world. Did God permit man to accept as his supreme standard, and object, and end, aught finite, mortal and imperfect, it 52 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. would be mating this, his creature, to inevitable dis- appointment, and boundless misery. But being Him- self the only one in whom man can be at peace, it is in love no less than in righteousness, that He demands man's devotion and reliance. Faith is the channel of this. And the exhaustless infinitude of the reservoir thus opened implies the growing faith, and the grow- ing love, and the growing gratitude of the human and dependent being, between whom and the Fountain of all Being, faith has opened the channel. The revela- tion Grod has made of Himself, sets before the soul eternity as the limitless horizon of its hopes and des- tinies. When Sorrow is musing over the mouldering dust of the lost, and Philosophy whispers and stam- mers its faint hopes of an obscure and shadowy Per- haps, and of a Judge who may perchance be friendly, and of an Eternity perad venture one of felicity. Faith — mighty Faith, clasping the clue of Scripture, and look- ing to the cross and opened tomb of him who is the Re- deemer and the Resurrection, — that Christ Jesus who brought life and immortality to light, — sees clearly, and promises, confidently and explicitly, an abundant en- trance into an everlasting kingdom, and a cordial wel- come to a glorious home, in the brotherhood of angels, the bosom of the Redeemer and the heart of the Divino Father. In the character of Jesus, the incarnate G-od, it finds, for all its aspirations after excellence an Infi- nite and Perfect Pattern, and for all its cravings after sympathy, an unfailing and effective Solace. In the Scriptures discovering and pursuing an exhaustless mine of truth, it discerns also along the whole course FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 53 of history, the track and foot-prints of a Superintend- ing and Unerring Providence, the same in purpose and plan that the Bible describes in the Lord of lords and King of kings. Thus taught, it sees the mysteries and sorrows, the vexations and conflicts of life ex- plained as elsewhere they are not ; and to its view, thus strengthened and extended, earth and Heaven run into each other. This prepares for that state. That state redresses the wrongs and woes of this. And the Christian's duties, trials and snares compel him more habitually to ponder these truths, and make it continually more and more his interest to heed and trust God's true testimonies as to the reasons of His dispensations. And Christ is found, in the believer's prolonged experience, more and more to deserve at the hands of His followers an implicit credence and an unreserved confidence. The more frequently He is consulted, and the more simply He is relied upon, the better is He loved, and yet the more deeply is He re- vered and adored. The more clearly is He seen to be, at the same time, in His humanity near and approach- able, and in His holy symmetry of moral character, and in his full Divinity the infinitely high and unap- proachable ; and thus is He, at the same time, very near, as the centre of our existence in whom we live and have our being, and yet infinitely outspread be- yond and above us, as the wide and untraceable cir- cumference of an all-embracing and omnipresent Deity. And as we see how the promises of Scripture, all radi- ating from Him, and all attracting to Him, changed in earlier times the face of earth and opdned the win- 54 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. dows of Heaven, we are rebuked in our apathy, and become awakened to prove for ourselves their yet un- spent energy. You see in the missionary carrying this gospel to the ancient haunts of Paganism where Satan's seat is, and you read in the story of the Re- formers and the primitive Christians, the need and the might of Faith, resting upon these same promises, and upon the Great Head of the Church around whom these promises cluster. And what these laborers needed and yet need, you alike require. Faith is as indispensable to you as to them, for this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. And the world and sin and Satan are foes to be vanquished by the followers of Christ in every station and era : for they are enemies not peculiar to the fields of heathenism, or to the times of Truth's first collisions with Rome Pagan, or Rome Papal. 4. The office and character of the Holy Ghost, the author of Faith, point to the same results. The Sa- viour himself described the influence of this Spirit's indwelling, " as a well of water" in the disciple *' springing up into everlasting life."* The fountain, leaping into the sunlight, with ever fresh waters, is not wearied — is not spent, because for ages it has been pouring forth its new streams, under changing skies, and rolling seasons, and amid the revolutions and decay of human empires. For it there has been needed no pause, no intermission ; but it goes rejoic- ing and sparkling on its way. And even thus we are taught that the waters of life within the renewed * John, iv. 14. FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN L.". FE. 55 soul, — the impulses of Faith caught from the Spirit, the former of faith — will be evermore shooting up- ward with an unspent energy, and maintaining a per- petual freshness. It may be objected, such views of this grace imply its continuance into the eternal world. We accept the inference. The apostle Paul expressly speaks of Faith with Hope and Charity as abiding. Tho excellent Watts, in many of his hymns, has aided to foster the opinion that Faith expires with the attain- ment of the celestial state. But whilst we allow that the saints in light " walk" not " by faith," as do the saints of earth, but rather " by sight ;" we do not see that this involves the extinction of all faith. Much of all the knowledge of a finite and dependent being must consist in faith upon the statements of the Om- niscient and All-sustaining God, the Being whose knowledge is alone all-embracing sight, and omnipres- ent vision. Even the angels, we know, have not un- limited knowledge, for the Saviour declares that they know not the date of the judgment day. Imagine one of these angels to have from God hereafter, and before its occurrence, intelligence of that dread date, how otherwise would he know it than by faith, — faith in the veracity and fuller knowledge of the God mak- ing to him such special communication ? The celes- tial state, and even the angelical rank, are not then inconsistent with the need and exercise of Faith. Faith, thus ever-growing, alike from the nature and laws of the human mind into which it comes, and of the revelation and scripture on which it feeds, and of the God on whose chara/jter and work it dwells, and 56 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. of the Holy Spirit in whose agency it begins and is continued, spreads its influence into all the affections of the soul, and all its estimates of life, and moulds alike its views of duty and danger and interest. If " as the man thinketh in his heart, so is he ;" especially do those " thinkings'^ which refer to eternity and G-od affect and mould his whole " being.'''' True, genuine Faith, whilst before God it is the most humble and dependent of principles, becomes before the world and Hell, the most independent, impracticable, and unman- ageable of principles. It " endures" and subdues the world and the Prince of this world, " as seeing" the Victor and Doomer of that world, "Him the In- visible" Grod. It is a pregnant remark of the acute and devout Bengel, that as Faith is here made the parent of all Christian graces, so Unbelief, its opposite, gives birth and kindred to a long train of allied sins.* He who scouts the word of God's good revelation and that Incarnate Son, who is eminently the Word of God, will find that his unbelief does not dwell alone, a solitary and sterile sin. It takes to itself, necessarily, other sins, its kin and descendants ; and as in the par- able of our Lord, "seven devils worse than the first," may be found, at last, the occupants of that soul, which seemed, at first, " empty, swept and garnished." The modes, in which an enlargement of this grace is to be sought, we cannot here and now specify^ Prayer — much prayer is evidently needed. ' The Spirit as the implanter and sustainer of faith, and Christ as its great Theme and Root, are to be honored by such * See Appendix. Note B. FAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 57 earnest and constant prayer. The connection of strong supplication with strong confidence is beautifully im- plied, in the manner in which the Old Testament, and the New, vary the language of one. and the same promise. The prophet Isaiah, in announcing the Messiah, as the object of faith to the Gentiles, has the language, as our translators literally render it from the Hebrew : " And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people ; to it shall the Gentiles seek."* The same Holy Spirit, when moving on the mind of the Apostle Paul to reproduce this testimony, in another language, the Greek, thus varies it: "And again Esaias saith: there shall be a Root of Jesse, and he that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles ; in him shall the Gentiles TRusT."t The "seeking" of prayer and adoration, and the " trusting" of Faith, are here regarded as one and interchangeable. And whether the efficacy of Prayer, in obtaining and in expanding the gift of Faith, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the spontaneous, energetic impulse of Faith, to reveal and embody itself, in vows, and appeals, and strong sup- plications to the object of its trust, be regarded, it will readily be seen, how the seekers soon become those who trust in Christ, and how those trusting in this Root of Jesse and this Ensign to the Gentiles, do habitually and earnestly seek Him. Blessed will our lot be thus to believe, and thus to worship. For he that believeth shall be saved. And whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. * Isaiah, xL 10. t Eoto. xv. 12. 3* 58 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Faith is, again, to be clierished and strengthened, by exercise. As the earthly warrior is not made such, by the hokliday parade merely, the epaulette, and the nodding plume, and the fluttering of silken standards, but by the dust and toil of the actual field, and by the agony of the strife and the death-grapple ; so the heroes of faith become such, not by mere profession, or large knowledge, or solemn rite, but by fighting manfully the good fight of faith, armed with the whole armor of God, and resisting, in the name and strength of the Captain of their salvation, sin unto the death. They thus resist it in the world, and in the church, in heathendom abroad and in Christendom at home ; but most anxiously and most earnestly, first and last, do they resist its triumphs and detest its power in their own hearts and lives. Even the worldly and sensual G-oethe could admire, and in his biography has recorded his admiration of, the power of a simple faith in his friend, the pious, but at times visionary Jung Stilling. Be, disciple of Christ, what interest, and duty, and vows — what a Redeemer's commands and a Redeemer's promises — what the love and the energy of the Indwelling Spirit, all alike require thee to be — eminently a believer. Let a " thus saith the Lord," be to thee, evidence suf- ficient and indubitable. A " thus saith the Lord," built the world at first. It may well lay and rear the whole fabric of thy hopes from nethermost base to topmost pinnacle. It was the Messiah's own weapon, in his personal conflict with the Tempter, and Satan remembers yet its deadly edge. Even for this life, fAITH THE ROOT OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 59 what power has a blind or misplaced Faith. Buona- parte exulted in the vague sentiment, that a Higher Power held and guided him. He claimed to be the Child of Destiny. It made his will iron, and his hopes generally invincible. It is your felicity and glory, not vaguely to hope, but distinctly to know from the book, and covenant, and oath of the Almighty God, that you are the child, not of a blind, unpledged Fate, but the ward and offspring of a paternal and be- nignant Providence ; and that as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. So called — so guided — so guarded, run the race set before thee ; fight the good fight — win the bright crown ; — the race, and the fight, and the crown of an overcomini; faith. LECTURE III. VIRTUE. « ADD TO YO0R FAITH, VIRTUE." 2 Peter, i. 5. We hear mucli from the moralist in praise of virtue. He portrays in brilliant hues her serene loveliness and majesty ; and calls the world to bow at her feet, daz- zled by, and adoring her radiance. And it is some- times intimated, that all of true value in the New Testament is the resplendent perfection of its morality ; and, that having extracted this, we may safely dismiss its doctrines and mysteries as a worthless residuum, — the lifeless dregs, of no further advantage when the es- sence and elixir of their composition, or the moral code of the Lawgiver of Nazareth, has been once drawn off. Christ was indeed a matchless teacher of morals ; but He was something more. The Christian cannot accede to such representations. He would as soon praise the flower of the tulip at the expense of its root, and believe the plant the better for the loss of what gave it support and life ; and as easily be per- suaded to show his sense of the beauty of the cloud of blossoms that covers a fruit-tree in spring, by gird- ling and blasting the darker trunk and the contorted VIRTUE, 61 and liidden radicles from which they have grown, and thus renouncing the hiscions and rnll-fonned fruit, into whicli the later season of autumn would make those blpssoms to grow, as he would hope to exalt true virtue by disparaging that faith whence it is to shoot, and by which it is to be sustained and perfected. I. And what is virtue ? When applied to beings above man or to objects beneath man, we suppose it to mean power for good. So when our incarnate "God and Saviour was touched by the woman having for years an issue of blood, her trembling grasp stole virtue. There was power for good and for hejfling, in the rustling garments and the hem of the robe of the In- carnate Deity. 80 too in objects inanimate we may ascribe to a remedy virtue, or a power to assuage pain and repel disease. But applied to man and human conduct^ virtue may be said to designate habits of GOOD. It is not the occasional act, but the settled and daily practice, and the rooted habit that are requisite to render a man truly virtuous. The old heathen looked to certain classes of excellencies, and gave them the especial, if not exclusive, name of virtue. With the Roman (and so the Greek before him) it was courage. He knew no higher moral adorning for man than this bold and fearless manhood that defied peril, and braved death. And some interpreters of Scripture, looking to this narrow and classical use of the term, would give to the word in our text but the restricted meaning of boldness in the profession of faith, and would suppose the apostle to require of the disciple believing in Jesus fearlessly to publish it before the 62 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. persecuting magistrate who might occupy the Pagan tribunal, and the murderous rabble crowding the Pa- gan shrines. In the few other instances in which the word occurs in the New Testament, we see no trace of such limited and narrow signification, and would not, therefore, give it here ; alien too as such confined and partial sense seems to the current of the passage.* In the days of chivalry, a similar disposition to give the honors and title of virtue to certain isolated traits of excellence displayed itself. Then, as in classic an- tiquity, virtue was in the one sex but courage and loyalty, and*in the other but the absence of indelicacy. It was the praise of a noble family, the inventory of its hereditary virtues, that all its sons were brave, and all its daughters chaste. But certainly these are not the whole of virtue. A warrior may be brave as his own sword, and have too as little conscience or mercy as his weapon. Is he therefore, virtuous, though, like Tilley the brave, he give a Magdeburg to the horrors of fire, pillage, and rapine for whole days ? Through the long gallery of British sovereigns is seen moving sullenly Mary of the Tudor line. She was of unim- peached purity, and shall we for that single cause deem her like the character portrayed in the book of Proverbs, entitled to the honors of a " virtuous woman^^ whilst we remember her cold, stern ferocity, and whilst there cling to her queenly robes the odors of burnt flesh, gathered from her human holocausts of the meek martyrs of Smithfield ? No. Virtue is a word of wider meaning. We suppose it, in the Scriptural • See Appendix, Note C. VIRTUE. 63 use of it, to include all that moral excellence which the world honors, all those habits of good which are useful to human society, and conduce to the happiness and order of this present life. Now godliness is profit- able for the world that now is, as well as for the world to come. Virtue thus considered is the human and terrestrial side of true piety. Religion has its two aspects, its bearing upon the one hand on eternity, and God, and the invisible world of his abode ; and, on the other side, its bearing on time and man, and this vis- ible transitory scene of our earthly pilgrimage. And men may see the beauty of one of these aspects who have no sympathy with, or adequate conception of, the other of them. The generosity of Dorcas might win the praise of her poorer neighbors, whilst they neither understood nor liked her new faith, and for themselves clung to Paganism, and daily adored the idols whom she had most earnestly renounced. The centurion Julius, and the governor Festus, and the king Agrippa, might all respect the temperance,* and magnanimity, and intelligence of the apostle Paul ; whilst for the Saviour whom he served they had neither ears nor heart. Demetrius had " good report of all men''' for his virtues, whilst his piety and prayerful habits, and religious principles, could be appreciated only by his fellow-disciples. Here we see, also, the reason why, in the Bible — the book that has done so much to im- plant and confirm, to perfect and diffuse virtue through- out the world — the volume, to which personal integrity, and the household charities, and the civic virtues, are all so largely indebted, there is yet so little said of 64 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. mtue under that name. The Scriptures talk much more of Holiness and Righteousness, of the love of Grod and the love of man. The Bible represents us as men having duties and relations in two distinct and remote countries. The «ne is on these earthly shores. Here we are bound to our fellow-man, and in our rela- tions to him should cherish and display all the virtues and charities of the home, and the neighborhood, and the state, as upright, diligent, pure, and patriotic, and useful men. But there is another land where are our gravest ties, and where we are to make our longest abode, and find our chiefest inheritance. Though in- visible to the eye of sense, E-eason whispers of it. Con- science intimates it, and Faith reveals it. There our God dwells, there adjudges upon character, and seals on it the imprint of indelibility and eternity. Already we are under his wrath by sin. He sent thence the ambassador and atonement to witness the possibility and the avenue of pardon. Accessible to prayer. He is yet sending thence grace, forgiveness, and hope ; and thither at death he gathers the good into endless bliss, and from his throne there consigns to exile and wrath the unholy, in bonds never to be parted, and in flames never to be quenched. Now, in the commerce of this life we see men hav- ing obligations in two countries. If they have debts and duties in both, their discharge of these debts and duties in one land is not enough to pronounce them honest, should they wilfully overlook and violate the obligations incumbent upon them in the other. So is man the citizen alike of Time and Eternity, — the two VIRTUE. 65 ■worlds, sevoied by the narrow frith of death; — the land of the vif>ible and transitory, and the land of the invisible and imperishable. Now the scriptural term, Holiness, includes both classes of duties. It takes in the common law of both these worlds. Virtue, the world's more favored term, comprises on the other hand, but that part of a man's obligations, in this life, which bind him to his fellow- citizens here. It is then but a part — an important part it must be owned, — but still only a lesser and subordinate part of the entire field of his duties. The Book of God, looking at the sons of Adam as the creatures of Heaven, framed by it, and for it, demands of them holiness, the indispensable term of citizenship there. Looking at G-od in his character of a Righteous Sovereign, it demands of us, His subjects, righteous- ness — inherent or imputed — that we may please Him whom the vinrighteous cannot please. Looking at Him as the Source, and Sum, and Model of all Moral Excellency, it demands conformity to that peerless image, or godliness. Looking at the motive as the true coloring and law of the act, and at the heart as the great fountain of feeling and motive, it requires of that heart as its supreme law, Love to God in the supremest degree, and an equitable love of our neigh bor even as ourselves ; and by these motives would have all feeling and all action prompted. Holiness, or Godli- ness, or Righteousness, as prophets and apostles speak, is the whole duty of man in his entire being, and as the citizen of two worlds. It includes Virtue, as the whole includes a part. But Virtue does not include Holi- 66 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. ness. A man may, as far as the outer act is concerned, not be notoriously deficient (he may even be eminent and praiseworthy) in his earthly and human relations, and yet lack piety, true faith to God, and true love to Him, and so miss His favor, and forfeit His heaven. When, then, cavillers ask, Why should not the Chris- tian give up his doctrines and mysteries of Faith, and fall back content on the mere bare morals of the New Testament — it will be seen that the objection assumes to divide what God has not divided — to sever the man's immortality from his mortality. Eternity from Time, and Heaven from Earth, the throne of reckon- ing from the scene of probation, and the Sovereign Creator from His creature and subject. It assumes to discharge a man from all his obligations to his native country, Heaven, and to his Father and Maker there, provided he will but defray his moral indebtedness, his debts of human duty in this foreign land of earth, where he stays but for the brief date of this present life, and which he must quit at death. It sets up a power in human society and earthly morality, to com- pound for man's hopeless insolvency before another tribunal, in a greater country and a mightier kingdom than Earth : whilst, at the same time, this earth re- mains necessarily and ever but a subject province and outlying colony of that greater, mightier kingdom. It teaches a man to take out, under the pettifogging legislation, and abridged and diluted morality of the world, an indemnity and release, that is to discharge him from the claims of his Maker, and the retributions VIRTUE. C7 of Eternity. Is the attempt wise ? "Will tlio exper- iment be safe ? "We have thus seen the nature of virtno. and its limits as a part of true piety, and inohided within holiness, but not itself comprehendins^ all that the Scriptures denote under the names of godliness, and righteousness, and kindred terms. Now the apostle speaks of Faith as requiring the addition of Virtue, or as involving in its natural growth and development, the exhibition of these hu- man and earthly excellencies. Yet there has been unhappily a disposition to divorce the two. Faith has been professed by some as if it might exist bereft of Virtue. These have been misjudging, or unfaithful professors of Christianity. Others, secretly, or by un- blushing avowal, the opponents of the Gospel, have claimed to show the sufficiency of Virtue without Faith. Let us look at the teachings of the G-od who made us, and of the Revelation that shall judge us, and learn thence how Virtue must be added, to or grow out of Faith. These will furnish the remaining divisions of our theme. The nature of Virtue wo have already discussed. It is left to consider II. Faith without Virtue. III. Virtue without Faith : and lastly, IV. Faith growing into Virtue. II. As early, then, as the days of apostles, ere yet the canon of the New Testament had been closed with its last seals, and shut up with its dread and final thunderings, there were in the Christian Church those 68 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. who would make Faith suffice without Virtue. And Paul denounced them for turning the grace of G-od into licentiousness ; and James challenged them to show, if it were possible, a genuine Faith without works of Virtue and Piety, and he would be content to show his Faith by such works and fruits, and which are, in fact, the only possible evidences before men of its indwelling. In later times there have been similar errors. Some really loving and practising piety, have yet, in their crude and hasty theories, dis- credited morality and virtue, for the purpose of ex- tolling, as they supposed, Religion. Others, enemies to true holiness, have, there is reason to fear, sought to hold the truth of God in unrighteousness, — with what success let the history of the Cliurch and the world show. To the honest and erring panegyrists of Faith at the expense of Virtue, it has seemed impossible to preserve otherwise the great doctrine of Justification by Faith in the Righteousness of Christ. They have feared that an anxiety on the part of Christian teachers to enforce morality on the disciples of the Saviour, was, in the matchless imagery of the immor- tal dreamer, sending men to inquire the way to the Celestial City " from that young man, Mr. Civility, dwelling in the town of Morality," who would leave the burdened inquirer to shiver and perish under the overhanging and flaming precipices of Sinai, when the true pathway led to the foot of the Cross. They have asked ; If practising good works to man be neces- sary, how could the dying thief be saved, who had VIRTUE. 69 not leisure and scope to work them ? Pointing to the great and unlcniable fact of human depravity, as running through and tainting the best services even of the best saints, whilst yet on earth, they ask. Can such deeds, so imperfect at best, have any share in our salvation ? Quoting the language of Augustine, when in his own daring and magnificent style he called the most resplendent virtues of old heathenism and of the Gentile philosophy, but " splendid sins," from the pride and self-reliance which they displayed, such friends of Faith have asked ; What room has Virtue, human and imperfect, in the scheme of Divine Grace ? In all this, they overlook the harmony of Paul and James. With the great apostle of the Uncircumcision we must hold, that Faith alone justifies before God, and this without works. But with the apostle of the Circumcision we must also hold that the genuine Faith, thus justifying before God, without works and by Christ's merits and righteousness, yet necessarily must, when it quits God's courts and brooks man's scrutiny, before man justify itself by works, and by Christ's sanctification in us, as proof of such faith. Before the dread tribunal, — the grand and fina' audit — who of us dare appear with any other discharge than that which the mighty Luther saw in his dream, the record steeped in the blood of Christ ? Yes, there, over our sentence and the long, dark catalogue of of- fence and demerit, stands inscribed, alone and suffi- cient, on the roll: ^'■Chrift dicdy He was made sin for us. But before ma.., and in ihis life, (before *'ae 70 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. man of the church and the man of the world,) I un- furl another, an inferior record. The faith I ask you to accept and fraternize, men of the church — the faith I ask you to honor and imitate, men of the world, — is one evidencing its origin by all works of holy obedience ; and the sentiment emblazoned on it is, " Work out your own salvation with fear and trem- bhng." Thus much may be said to those loving the great cardinal truth of Justification by Faith, and dreading its subversion by any honors as they fear unwarrant- ably given to good works, or virtue. But, there is an- other class who would substitute faith for virtue. It was most wittily, and not unjustly said, by a French scholar, against the Jesuits, in their anxiety to compli- cate doctrine and eliminate piety, that they were men who lengthened the creed and shortened the command- ments. Such eras of misdirected activity in the pro- fessed churches of Christ have been followed by the evident and sorest scourges of Divine Providence. The . Greek Church, losing all practical holiness, and wrangling about questions of no profit, as the apostle terms them, made way for the grand outburst of Ma- hommedan imposture and conquest and devastation. In a few generations after Luther, the churches of Prot- estant Germany became thus speculative and litigious for the faith, and there too, foulest scandals and fiercest wars ensued. In Catholic France, Louis XY., the most debauched of the profligate race of the Bourbon sovereigns, was in his fashion a stickler for faith, instructing in religious doctrines and observances VIRTUE. 71 the wretched companions of his lewder hours. But what better service did such motiveless faith do, for religion, than was done by the sceptic of Ferney, the relentless Voltaire, in his unblushing blasphemies? A faith that shamed decency, and an indecency that scouted faith, were both alike unchristian : and in all the carnival of Hell that marked the first French Revolution, was to be seen not more the action of the Infidelity that rejected Christ, than the reaction of the foul Hypocrisy that, feigning to adore Him, had crucified Him afresh. The piety of such mitred and anointed pretenders as Cardinal Dubois and his royal master Louis XY., was, to say the least, as much re- sponsible for the Reign of Terror, as was the impiety of Diderot, A^oltaire, or D'Holbach. And the modern professor of Christ's name needs to watch, lest he, by formality or hypocrisy, renew the sale that Judas made of the Master to his fiercest enemies, and put to an open shame the Lord to whom he has vowed and owes the profoundest adoration. As for Antinomian- ism, where it really exists, claiming Righteousness and rejecting Holiness, and making orthodoxy a cloak for all unhealed corruption, it is a foul abuse of Grod's most glorious and gracious truths. It conserves sin, when the gospel w^ould subdue and exterminate it. It wastes the balm and spikenard and myrrh of Christ's grace in embalming that body of death against which Paul groaned and fought. The true gospel, [honoring' the law,) came to work on man a moral resurrection, raising the spiritually dead to newness and holiness of life. This gospel [against the law) comes to put 72 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. in the place of this moral miracle, in the room of thig spiritual resurrection of the regenerate soul, a mere Egyptian resurrection, — retaining the shrivelled and loathsome and decaying mummy, swathed in grave- clothes, voiceless and motionless — not a soul new born from sin, but a soul coffined and embalmed in sin. III. But there is another class who proclaim the superiority of Virtue to Faith, and the sufficiency be- fore G-od and man, for this life and the next, of Virtue without Faith. They are wont to quote the maxim, as if it were an unquestionable axiom : " For modes of faith let graceless bigots tight, His faith cannot be wrong, whose life is right." But if, as we have endeavored to show. Virtue be but the small portion of man's duties that he owes in this life to his fellow-mortals, and man be formed for an- other life as well as this, and have a G-od as well as human society to regard and propitiate, it seems im- possible on any rational principle, much more upon any scriptural basis, to establish it that the discharge of this small portion of his obligations shall be accepted in full for his neglect of yet higher duties to a yet higher Being. And if, in matters of human courtesy and friendship even, you are wont to look at the mo- tive as determining the worth or worthlessness of the service rendered, does it not seem necessary even to the claim of true virtue for these social and human duties, that the man discharging them do it from right motives, from the true love of man and the paramount love and fear of Almighty God? Now, G-od has VIRTUE. 73 wisely and kindly so framed and united us, that these human virtues are profitable to men, and honored amongst them. And from mere selfish love of such profit, from mere vain craving after this attendant honor and praise, men may discharge the duties. But are such duties, so prompted by lower and baser mo- tives, genuine virtue? Must not God try the heart to fix the character of those actions that externally and apparently are virtue, but that may prove what Augus- tine branded as " splendid sins" ? Again, take a few of the more eminent and exem- plary of those whose virtues are thus held up as sur- passing the fruits of Christian faith. Take Hobbes, the philosophical oracle of the court of the last Stuarts. Take Hume, whom his friend, Adam Smith, pronoun- ced among the most faultless of human characters ; or in later times Bentham. We have selected names amongst those destitute of faith, who were, more than ordinarily sceptics are, examples free from the ordinary blots of immorality that attend the rejection of the Christian faith. And after a close analysis of the lives and influence of these men, do you not find the inquiry of the apostle remaining still in full force, " Who is he that overcometh the tvorld, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ ?" Was the morality of any of these men superior to the average morality of their times ? Did Virtue do in them what Faith achieves in the Christian — overcome the world ? Did it rise above the world as they found it? Again, did it tend to improve that world, recovering its degraded, and uplifting its oppressed classes ? To ascertain this, 4 1f^ RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. look beyond the men to the character of their associ- ates and disciples, in the case of those who most de- Uberately and boldly propagated their own rejection of the faith of the Saviour. Take Hume's doctrine of tlie comparative harmlessness of licentiousness, and the innocence of suicide, and looking at the moral re- sults of the doctrines, can you accept the teacher of such dogmas as a virtuous man, more than you would call an honest and good-tempered retailer of covert poisons, virtuous ? Look at the deadly efTect on morals, and patriotism, and public virtue, of the les- sons of Hobbes, quoted and applauded in the most profligate and unprincipled court that ever cursed England — look at the social speculations and princi- ples of some of Bentham's most intimate and admir- ing disciples : and do you not see that instead of over- coming the world, theirs was a virtue, if it be called such, that was overcome, debased, and lowered by the world ? But take their principles, abstracted from the continual corrective and counterpoise of Christian influence in the community around. Lay aside all Christian faith. Go out, as missionaries of the new Lights of Philosophy without Christianity ; and who of you would hope to see the new creed, like the faith of the New Testament, teaching the barbarian, taming the cannibal, quenching the funeral pyre of the Hindoo widow, snatching the daughters of China from death in infancy, and everywhere disciplining conscience, in- spiring hope, repressing passion, and establishing order — making Freedom possible, and Law and Duty sov- ereign over the nations ? VIRTUE. ^ To this principle of the sufficiency of virtue without faith, we have, then, these objections. It overlooks man's immortality, and the existence of an endless state beyond the tomb, and ignores the being and the rights of G-od. It takes, again, from virtue its root and its law, its sanctions and its motives, and thus exposes it to speedy decay. It wrongs man by trun- cating his nature of conscience and immortality. It wrongs G-od, by rejecting His revelation, and spurning as needless, His provisions of the Redeeming Christ and the Renewing Spirit. Instead of evangelizing the nations, and reforming them, it has but aided to em- broil and brutify them. IV. But turn, in conclusion, to dwell rather upon the union that Scripture makes between the two prin- ciples, which we have seen isolated and divorced, re- quiring as those Scriptures do, the man of Faith to become the pattern of Virtue, abounding in every good word and work. Multitudes of the race, then, (and this the -mere moralist overlooks,) have become the victims of Vice, outcasts from the school, and hostile to the restraints of Virtue. The problem is not to guide the sinless, but to recover the sinful. They are the rabble whom the philosopher, in mingled scorn and despair, does not attempt even to lecture, an audience neither " fit" nor " few" enough to accept or appreciate his labors. They are the unwashen, savage hordes, whom civiliza- tion mowed down in the progress of her colonies, or held pent up apart in the purlieus of her great cities, or harnessed and drove as a part of the machinery to 76 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. conduct and to be consuvwed by her gigantic manufac- tures. What shall reform this forlorn class ? If you bring but human and terrene motives, if you can min- ister to them only earthly and mortal aids, can you crane them up to the desired level of knowledge and self-respect ? How can you efface the brand of sin on their souls ? Morality has not the Atoning Calvary. It cannot call down on its Pentecostal aspirations the rushing fires of the Holy Ghost, falling to infuse a new soul in the corrupt grave of a fallen humanity, and to create out of the drudge and dupe of Belial, the heir of Heaven and the child of Grod. The virtue that would be thus recuperative, on the masses, must be preceded by a faith, with which shall go the regenerating power of Ood, and for which shall have been first provided the great remedial and reconciliatory process of the Redemption. Vir- tue, then, needs Faith to furnish the requisite soil, in which to set her pleasant plants of righteousness, and then she needs to find in the lessons and examples of Faith, the framework on which those plants may grow, and above all, the root Christ, on whose grace and aid all true virtue in man must be engrafted ; and then she needs in Faith to find the showers of the Spirit, refreshing, and increasing, and fructifying the offshoots of righteousness, thus planted, thus trained, and thus engrafted. With these resources, Yirtue may be spread and sustained. But without them, where is the power that can make the individual, the house- hold, the neighborhood, the tribe, and the race, really and permanently, habitually and radically, virtuous ? VIRTUE. 77 Let the Pharisee or the Sadducee go with another doc- trine than that of Faith to Zaocheus, would they have won his fourfold restitution of aught wrongly gained ? Let the Stoio or Epicurean go to the converts c'' Ephesus, whilst not yet disciples of Jesus, and when, as at first, addicted to magical arts. Could Philosophy have ejected the superstition and the imposture, and relaxed the hold of Fraud and of Greed upon their souls ? Or, to come down to our times, see in the Karert Mission Ko Thah-Byu, the robber and murderer. Thirty of his fellow-men, that tiger in human form has destroyed. Can your philosophy, your morality, your faith-scorning virtue make him what the Missionaries of Christian faith made him — penitent, lowly, loving, gentle, prayerful, and harmless? To the test. Build for your virtue its altar against the altar of our faith. Call down the living fire. And, as said to the priests of Baal, the prophet of Jehovah, so say we to you : The God that shall answer by fire, he is God. Faith can produce Virtue. Look again at the way in which she instructs virtue. Read the 12th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, or take the same apos- tle's discourse of Charity and its fruits, in the 13th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthian church. Saw you ever such full, and brilliant, and unmatched portraitures of Virtue as this ? But beside these preceptive instructions, remember that all the doctrines and mysteries that Faith receives have their practical lessons. The Fall, and Original Sin, how they teach humility and dependence on God — the first lessons of moral progress. The Incarnation 78 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. and Redemption — is that a mere logomachy ? On the contrary, see in it a great scheme for the subdual of sin, and the implantation of Hope, and Love, and Grratitude. Look at the Trinity, and "dark with in- Bufferable brightness" as that deep and astounding mystery is, yet all its truths minister readily and con- tinually to practical virtue. The Father stoops to adopt you into his household, and awaken confidence and filial awe. The Son speeds him from the throne of Paradise to the deepest, foulest hold of your dun- geon-home, to uplift, and ransom, and ennoble you — to become your Brother, and Liberator, and Exemplar. The Spirit bends over your ignorance, as the Teacher, and over your sadness as the Comforter ; and Grod, in His Trinity, is thus, on every side, and by every method, your Help and exceeding great Reward, Well might the poet cry, " Talk they of morals ? The grand morality, thou bleeding Lamb, Is love of Thee 1" But must Faith produce always Virtue ? It must, or it is not genuine. The inseparable accompaniment of true Faith in Scripture is Repentance ; and what is Repentance but the practical and hearty, the out- word and inward renunciation of Sin ? Such practi- cal fruits Christ regarded as glorifying His Father, and rejected the disciples that called him Lord, Lord, and " diiV not the things He said. And the rule of the Judgment day is men's doings, the practical effects of Faith on their character, wherever life was VIRTUE. 79 80 lengthened as to give scope to the exhibitio-a of such effects. " Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, yc can in no case enter into the kingdom of Heaven," was Christ's announcement to his disciples while on earth. Do you suppose that when the Heavens restore Him again to the expectant and shuddering earth, in the Last Judgment, He will come to retract that law ? Be ye ready for its inevitable and unfaltering application. We should have delighted to pursue this theme, and show how the Faith of Christ has benefited the indi- vidual, elevated the family, emancipated woman ; how much, even where not fully received and obeyed, it has awed and shamed and restrained human wick- edness : but our time forbids us. Are you the pledged scholars and examples of this Faith ? remember it is? not to be a barren creed, or an Antinomian heresy, a lying form, or a goodly mask, or a whited sepulchre ; but a glowing, up-growing, fruit-bearing reality. To your faith add " Virtue." LECTURE IV. KNOWLEDGE. «» AND TO VIRTUE, KNOWLEDGE." S Peter, i. (. The Apostle bade Christians to become " living epistles" of Christ. And with what an impressive brilliancy do some transcribe and publish the power and glory of their Saviour, although placed in circum- stances of comparative obscurity and penury. Little indebted it may be to this world's schools, and sharing but in scanty measure, the world's possessions, yet in their illiterate retirement they read and ponder their Bible, and they are taught of the Spirit which first indited those Scriptures, and trust the testimonies of their Grod with a childlike and unquestioning faith, and adorn that faith by a humble and blameless vir- tue in their intercourse with their fellow-men. And although they " Just know, and know no more, their Bible true." * yet the lowly cottages which they tenant, and the pallet of infirmity and disease where they languish, are schools of spiritual profiting to all who may visit * Cowper. KNOWLEDGE. 81 them. How radiant and mighty would be the churches of Christ, were they all made up of such a member- ship. How much of the scorn which the ungodly re- tort upon the admonitions of the Christian, — how much of the scepticism that, confessed or unconfessed, withstands the truth as it is in Jesus, would be at once quelled and hushed into an abashed silence, were but the Faith of Christ's disciples a more simple ethereal, and earnest Faith, and their virtue in th( home and by the way, in the more private and the more public relations of life, only a more vigorous, symmetrical, and earnest virtue. And having this faith and such virtue, it might be said : "What need we more ? But here end not the requirements of God's word, and here should not be stayed the aspirations of God's servants. It is well that Christians should, by their eminence in the prac- tice of Christian graces, witness for Christ where they may be unable to write or preach for Him, as in the days of Romish persecution in England, the aged dis- ciple whom the ecclesiastical judges, ere her martyr- dom, sought to perplex by captious questions, replied : " I cannot argue for my Saviour, but I can burn for Him." But is there not, beyond the testimony of the life and the confession of the lips, and the seal of the death even, an enlargement and illumination of the understanding, due alike to the gospel and to the char- acter of its Divine Author ? And when Faith appre- hends cheerfully the Truth of God, and when Virtue reflects on mankind the goodness of God, so Christian knowledge comes in to ponder and to commend the 4* 82 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. wisdom of God. Faith clasps Truth with the heart , Virtue subordinates to it the life ; knowledge erabathes with it the intellect. And as religion demands the consecration of the entire man, so has it made, in the instrumentalities which it employs and in the influ- ence which it sheds, provision for all the faculties of his soul, and so the intellect as well as the conscience, the understanding of the man no less than his affec- tions, are summoned to develop themselves in those wide realms of the Messiah's dominion, and far-reach- ing vistas of duty for the Messiah's subjects which God's Providence opens, and in those broad pastures and richest mines of Revelation which the Scriptures present. Growth in grace implies an advance in re- ligious knowledge, no less than an increase of personal holiness. Such is the lesson of our text. "And to virtue knowledge." And to feel the significance of that injunction, let us implore the aids of that Divine Spirit whence alone Cometh the knowledge which bringeth salvation, as we consider I. A prejudice here rebuked ; II. The grace here enjoined ; and III. Its order, as following and completing the Christian excellencies which precede it. I, There is, we suppose, then, in the Church of God, as well as in society generally, a disposition to exalt Practice at the expense of Theory ; and yet all prac- tice is but the embodiment of some theory. There is in some minds a disposition to mock at all science, and all patient and thorough thought as being but idle KNOWLEDGE. 83^ and unprofitable speculation. Common Sense is lauded at the expense of Study and Research. The laborer is exalted above, the thinker, and the man of exper- imental activity is pronounced the truly useful, whilst the studious and reflecting is denounced as a thriftless and unprofitable cumberer of the earth, over which he moves in lonely and quiet meditation, little disposed, and it may be, also, little qualified, to uplift his voice amid the strife and din of the world's crowded arena. Bat Society and the Christian Church, need the thinker as much as they require the laborer. If the spade-man who digs the canal or rears the embankment of the rail- road be, as he really is, a most profitable servant, is the engineer who drew the line and ascertained the level, where the waters might liow and be fed, and where the rail-car might dart unimpeded, utterly un- profitable ? If the hand does excellent service in the body, moving quickly as it does, and grasping firmly, and thrusting vigorously, is there no room and no need in the body for the eye, because its usefulness is quite of another kind, as it holds in silence and fixedness its place in its ever quiet watch-tower, neither going out of its own nook, nor lifting a finger's weight of the obstacle or burden before it ? It is well for the church to be vigorously and practically virtuous, but is there no intelligence needed to direct, and to cher- ish, and to diff"use this virtue ? It was not fitting that every Christian convert should write epistles, in the days of the first Christians. But were the apostles therefore profitless when so employed ? It is not needed, now, that every disciple become a Biblical 84 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. critic, or write a commentary, or indite a body of the- ology ; but because a man may be abundantly useful without undertaking these forms of ueligious service, is it a sound inference, or is it merely a baseless preju- dice, which some cherish, when they would teach that commentaries, and criticism, and theology are all of little worth to the cause of Christ ? There is in the minds of some eager and zealous disciples of our Lord, an impatience which cannot brook the applica- tion of profound thought, and spurns, as impertinent and wasteful delay, what is really honest and thorough examination. They demand results, forgetting that results require processes to attain them. Every sea- man is not expected to construct his own nautical ta- bles, or every miner to build his own steam-engine, that may uplift the ore, or drain off the superfluous waters. Yet without the aid of the astronomer and the ma- chinist, of what avail would be the practical energy of the hardy mariner, or the begrimed miner toiling in his ever dark and narrow gallery ? So, in religion, a just, religious practice must grow out of just, re- ligious principles. And although a simple and child- like Faith may readily grasp the great outlines of these principles, it requires that Faith should be pa- tient, and studious, — (it requires that Faith should de- velop itself, in fact, into Knowledge,) in order that these principles may be fully understood and justly stated, may be seen in their due position, and may be held in their just proportion, and in their mutual de- pendence and symmetry. It required days and nights of profound and philosophical research for Franklin to KNOWLEDGE. 85 devise the rod that draws from the thunder-cloud its lightnings harmlessly; and Chemistry needed its years of study, ere Sir Humphrey Davy could prepare the safety-lamp, which was to guard the delver in the mines from their perilous explosions. A child, or the most ignorant ])easant, may bo practically benefited by these contrivances, which certainly mere ignorance could never have invented. So in the labors of the churches of our own times, — are not we, — the hum- blest and most obscure laborers of us all, — benefited by the iron perseverance, and the patient acuteness with which God enabled some great and leading cham- pions of His gospel to ponder, and enunciate, and do- fend the truths taught in that G-ospel ? 2. But it may be said in extenuation of the preju- dice : Is it not in the learned classes that most here- sies have had their origin ? We allow that many who have misguided their thousands have been strong in the lore of this world. Bat, on the other hand, .shall we be told that the founder of Mormonism, and of that more wide-spread and enduring imposture, Mohammedanism, were, either of them, learned men ? And if, in other forms of spiritual delusion, an abused Learning has been the leader, who, it may be asked, has furnished the mass of the proselytes but an abused Ignorance ? If ignorance often saves a man from the danger of being a teacher in heresy, it would seem that it by no means protects him from the possibility of becoming a scholar in errors, alike preposterous and ruinous. But, it is said. Has not the voice of Scrip- ture warned us against " oppositions of Science" (or in 86 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. other words, knowledge) " falsely so called ?" Has it not lifted aloud its protest, that "the world, by wis- dom, knew not God," and that " the wisdom of this world is foolishness with G-od ?" Has not an apostle cautioned us, that knowledge puffeth up? "Why then, it may be said, should the humble scholar of prophets and apostles covet wisdom and knowledge ? Let us remember, that all this is but God's interdict against science or knowledge ^'■falsely so called ;" — the wisdom that is of this world, and which is there- fore unreal and deceitful. But the wisdom coming from above, we are bidden to implore and to expect. Of knowledge, genuine and celestial, it is said, that it is not good that the soul be without it, and the Most High complains that His ^^ ^people perish for lack of il.''^ It was the guilt of the Pharisees, the class as- ■suming to control religious opinion in their age and their country, that they took away from their nation the key of knowledge, and that thus they would not let the multitudes enter the way of salvation. It is made the pivot, in the eternal destinies of the heathen dying without the gospel, that they have turned away from that ivhich might be knoivn of God in the works of Nature and the movements of Providence ; and this wilful shutting of the eyes, against an unwelcome knowledge of the Divine Nature and Divine Goodness, seals them to perdition. No. God's word does not prohibit the endeavor to attain true knowledge. It cautions us against the deceitful splendors of a false and superficial science — a knowledge wrongfully so called, consisting but of dreams and shows, — a knowl- KNOWLEDGE. 87 edge of evil, mainly or only, that would nullify Truth, and banish the wisdom of the skies, to give her abdi- cated throne to the wisdom which is earthly and sen- sual, and devilish. II. Now our text, and, in full harmony with it, the entire body of Divine Scripture, require that the Christian profit in his religious course, by going on from faith to virtue, and from virtue to knowledge. The first great necessity of our nature is that we know 07(rselves, — that we learn from the book of God our origin and destiny, — the story of our Fall, and the story yet more wondrous, and yet more glad, of our Redemption — that we accept from the Scriptures the explanation of that moral dislocation, which we find in our own nature, and of that intestine warfare of Reason and Appetite, of Duty and Desire, under which the wisest of the heathen world have groaned, unrelieved and despairing. But thus to know our- selves, is the nearest and most necessary and most natural of all subjects of research ; and yet how dif- ficult to man unaided, is the study, and how rare are any deep attainments in these home-bred mysteries of our nature. But to have a just and safe knowledge of ourselves, it is needful that we know our God. Framed by Him and for Him, clinging to His arm by an eternal and inevitable dependence, enveloped and upheld by His perpetual and omnipresent Providence, — we cannot ascertain the moral bearings, or calculate, so to speak, the latitude and longitude of our own drifting course over the ocean of life ; but, as we refer to Him whose will is the meridian line by which we 88 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. estimate the position of all beings, and whose favor is the Light and central Sun of our moral Life. And knowing ourselves, anl knowing our God in Scrip- ture, we are called upon (as our duty and station in society may require it,) to know this world, — that portion of it called Nature, which we can reach and survey ; to know that course of events in man's past generations, and that march of the Divine purposes in the government of the race which we call History ; and to know Life, or those arts, and occupations, and relations, and human laws, and local customs, that are to affect us in the discharge of our duties to oui fellows : making an Aquila, serviceable as a tent- maker, a Lydia, an upright vender of purple, an Eliezer, an honest steward of his master's household, and a Daniel, the sagacious and intrepid administrator of a mighty empire. AVe are required to know Man, not only as he should be, and as in his original inno- cence he ivas, but man as he is, in his selfishness, craftiness, and wretchedness, and yet, withal, in the long and tangled train of all his susceptibilities, and his capabilities, and his hopes and his fears, his sensi- tive conscience, his grovelling desires and his soaring aspirations, and his kindlier affections, — all the wrecks of Eden, that drift yet along the foaming and roaring stream of the world's strifes and the world's sins — relics of what Earth was ere Sin trode it, intimations of what Earth would be had grace not intervened, and of what Hell will be where grace is rejected, and mementoes of what Man may yet be, when grace shall KNOWLEDGE. 89 have done its restoring and renewing work upon him, as made complete in righteousness. 2. Is there not here a field suffieiently wide for all of power, and all of leisure that any of us can com- mand ? It was not the Scripture that proclaimed Ig- norance the mother of Devotion. On the contrary, religion has ever been the truest friend of real knowl- edge. It calls man indeed to acquire that knowledge in another order than that which an unrenewed and revolted world practise and commend. It bids us seek, first, the things of first moment — the pardon of sin, the renewal of the heart, and the favor and the kingdom of God. It bids us, in the spirit of a sound philosophy, and of a science celestial and sure, to go for our first principles to the first authority — Grod. It makes His revelations paramount to all the teachings of man. Grod's assertions as to the past, the present, or the future, in regard to the character and destiny of the race, must here override all the philosophies and all the conjectures of the Schools It is so in Re- ligious Truth. It is so in Physical Science. To read the tangled maze of this world's chaotic history. Re- ligion lends us the clue of the Divine Providence. The first successful attempt to write a Universal History, was made by Bossuet. Holding this clue, he found Order, and Progress, and Harmony, where, to all scholars who wanted, or who spurned that guiding thread, there seems but wild uproar and a seething chaos of change without Progress and without Law. It is no arrogance to predict, that no satisfactory Uni- versal History can be written, except by the scholars 90 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. who, like Bossuet and Miiller, take up that same clue, and see in the wild and vast field of history, every- where, the footprints of a supervisory and sleepless Providence, and who rear at every era, and at each stile in the track of ages, an Ebenezer to the G-od hitherto helping the race toward the final goal of His own sure and good purposes. Our first business is, then, to know by earnest and prayerful study of the Scriptures, ourselves — our sin and our duty, our own conversion and the means of our continued sa notification. That Scripture must be studied in prayer for the influences of the Spirit. Led of Him, the Spirit of Truth, into all truth; — brought into friendly and even filial relations with that God, the laws of whose works make Science, and whose human subjects act out History, and conjecture or dream what they call Philosophy — and invent Art, and establish Government, we shall, G-od-guided, study Government, and Art, and Philosophy, and History, and Science and Revelation in their due relations to each other. We shall, then, according to the sublime language of a Christian philosopher of France,* " See God in all things, and all things in God." 3. Now, many Christians content themselves with the fragmentary and alphabetical knowledge of re- ligious truth, which they had acquired in their first exercise of a new-found Faith ; and they seem to sup- pose it idle, or even presumptuous, to go further. They dread an unsanctified science, and they do justly in dreading it. It is atheistic or Pantheistic, arrogant * Malebranche. KNOWLEDGE. 91 and blasphemous ; and irrational, as well as irrdiginns, because scouting the facts and edicts of the Snprenio and Creative Reason, God. They look upon History as an old and profitless calendar. They forget, that it is a register of Providence, the story, how a AVise God is governing the world that had forgotten Him, and that all its events have looked forward or backward to the Cross of Calvary, and speed onward the march nf the race to the foot of that Great White Throne, where the Sujferer of the Cross is to be the Judge of tho world, and the unraveller of all its mysteries, con- densing, closing, and appending the infallible Index to all its histories, all its incidents, and all its actors. They forget, that to the pure all things are pure, and that a mind fast rooted in religious principle, and con- trolled by the fear and love of God, may move un- harmed through all the fields of human bewilderment and depravity, uninfected by the errors which surround it, and moved only to pity, and zeal, and love of the truth, by all the revolting wickedness that it sees dis- played in the hearts, and lives, and schemes of mankind. The age is one of Physical Science. Far as this science is just and sound, it will not contradict God's revelation, for one God made both. But scientific men have in all ages been prone to generalize too rapidly, and have too oft asserted their own theory, as if it were God's scientific law. Here has been the collision. And men, holding lightly and reluctantly God's word, and clutching eagerly and tenaciously any word, how- ever rash, that promised plausi])ly to impugn God's utterances, have dropped their Bible, and adored their 92 RELiaiOUS PROGRESS. Philoso]ihy. Investigation went on. The theory, so bold and symmetrical, was found to have exceptions The exceptions multiplied. The theory was first sus- pected — then scouted — and ultimately left to float away, a dishonored wreck, — and, after the exercise of a little patience, it was seen that, back of the wreck, loomed aloft, intact and entire, the book and the throne of Jehovah. So has it been — so shall it be — so must it be — by the will of the world's Maker. The schools of Science, no less than the halls of Empire, have had their Nebuchadnezzars, from whose fall, partial and temporary, or final and irretrievable, must come out afresh the testimony, once uttered in Babylon, that the God of Israel is one, " whose dominion is an ever- lasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation" — " all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment, and those that walk in pride he is able to abase."* 4. It is not the Religion of an open Bible, and of a free, unfettered gospel that asks for the Prohibitory Index, and for the rituals of devotion in a dead lan- guage ; and that would make religious knowledge, like Braminism or Phariseeism, the patrimony and monopoly of a favored caste. As being Grod's revela- tion to all, the pure gospel asks, — it brooks, — it challenges, the scrutiny of all. No penal code, no flaming Auto da Fe, no band of fierce and steel-clad crusaders, no Inquisition frowning in sanctimonious despotism over an affrighted land, were made by apostles the guardians of Faith and of Evangelical * Daniel, c. iv. KNOWLEDGE. 93 Purity. The £Tospel asks to be sifted. It stands up, amid the light of the nineteenth century, nut a bed- riddtMi, or a superannuated faith — but the Truth, en- tirely and evermore, — the Truth ever young, for its years arc eternal — and in its origin as old as God, it can no more become obsolete, than can He, the Un- changeable and the Everlasting. 5. Meanwhile, let us say, that we have no fellowship with those views of religious truth, which represent its great outlines, and its elementary doctrines, as capable of amendment from the influence of social progress and human science. As the research of navigators and travellers may make geography more perfect in its minor details, but can by no means alter its main boundaries, so is it with religious truth. Its continents and head-lands, the line of its coast, and its great havens, no possible advancement in religious knowledge can make other than they are; whilst, on the other hand, the developments of Providence, and the unroll- ing volume of Prophecy, and the descending influences of the Spirit, and the growth of Holiness, and the more general diffusion of scriptural knowledge, may alter our general views as to the nature and proportion of some of the lesser details of this gospel, its creeks, its mountain heights, and its tracts yet comparatively uncultivated and unbroken.* But Theology admits of no uninspired Columbus, the discoverer of a New World of religious truth. Its sphere and orb was completed, long since, by the inspired apostles of Him "who brought life and immortality to light." * See Appendix, Note D. 94 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. III. And now we have reached the concluding por- tion of our remarks : The order of Christian knowledge as following and tending to guard and crown faith and virtue. Why should it be set here, and not at an earlier place, in the rank of Christian excellencies ? 1. We suppose the reason to have been this. It was to remind us of a great truth, that Practical Obedience, or Virtue, is necessary, if we would gain any great advancement in Christian knowledge. This was the law of Grod's school in the times of the ancient Psalmist: " A good understanding have all they that do his commandments."* Not only, is such obedience an evidence of a sound understanding ; but it is also a safeguard for it. No man can keep a healthy and sound intellect who is perpetually sporting with known error, and wallowing in known iniquity. The very conscience may become defiled, and the eyes of the soul contract blindness, by disuse and misuse. So our Saviour taught the Jews: "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of. God or whether I speak of myself."! We must use the light already given, if we would win more. To him that hath, it shall be given. On the other hand, we cannot long keep " the truth prisoner in unrighteous- ness." It pines, shrivels, and at last expires. A truth disobeyed, is likely to become, ere long, a truth dis- csteemed ; and a truth disesteemed, will very readily sink into a truth disbelieved. Virtue must precede knowledge. It is the holy, who are led into the audience hall and the council chamber of the Most * Psalm cxi. 10. f John, vii. 17. KNOWI-F, DGK. 95 Holv. Truth, when it is disregarded, frets, irritates, and perhaps at last cauterizes the conscience, and so slips away from the memory ; shaken off, because not rightly used to promote a virtuous and honest alle- giance to the giver of Truth. So it was, that, in Patriarchal times, as Panl teaches us, Idolatry and Polytheism began. Men lilvcd not to retain God in their knowledge, and He went out of their intellect, where he was not welcomed and adored. The absence of Virtue, procured the abolition of knowledge. If a school or a tribe affect and woo Moral Darkness, the Sun of Truth and Righteousness may, far as they are concerned, go down whilst it is yet noon. 2. Virtue was, again, made to precede Knowledge^ in order to protect agaijist a great error, that began to be promulgated ere the first apostles had quitted the arena of the Church militant, for the palms and thrones of the Church triumphant. G-nosticism, or the system of knowledge, — for such is the meaning of its arrogant name — claimed in the early Christian Church, the highest prerogatives. The Apostle John seems especially to aim many of his statements against it. It sought to plant knowledge, or the teach- ings of its own wild and foul philosophy, as the very basis of Faith. Much of the Rationalism and Panthe- ism of our own times, proceeds on the same most false and most fatal principle. Instead of going out of our- selves, to find, by Faith, in God's testimonies, what ' He is and what we ourselves are, and to obtain the recuperative grace that sanctifies the heart and so en- lightens the intellect, this system (as irrational as it 96 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. is impious) drags the God and the oracle and the rev- elation into man's self, makes its own purblind reason, and its own hasty and crude utterances, in the natural state of alienation from God and morrd blindness, ihe law of judgment, to God and to His teachings. And thus, our folly is to control God's wisdom ; and the Most High is to remake Himself and His revelation into our likeness and to our arrogant liking. Piety, instead of being a regeneration of the man into the forfeited image of his God, is to be a regeneration and a recasting of the only Wise God, the Holy One of Israel, into the mould of man, the frail, the erring, and the dying. And yet, what harmony is there be- tween the several shrines and oracles of this reason, thus God-dethroning ; — as that reason works in me, and as that same reason works, in contrary results and utterances, in my neighbor? No — such are the changes made by successive philosophers, and by con- tending heretics, in the knowledge thus enunciated as paramount to Revelation, that after a time the mutual contradiction produces a universal scepticism. Thus, instead of knowledge, as seen exploding Religion ; Religion, and knowledge itself, are replaced by utter Ignorance, in the matters of the soul and of eternity. " Thus saith the Lord" is the emphatic announce- ment of Scripture ; and a sound Reason bows to the veracity and competency of the Divine Oracle. Against that voice of thunder comes up, from these teachers, in shrill and petulant contradiction, the " Perhaps" — or the hesitating " Who knows ?" And man is ex- pected to congratulate himself on the exchange of the KNOWLEDGE. 97 old, the clear and celestial sun-light, for this earth- born gloom. Now, on the principles of reason itself, it is evident, that, as to the eternity past, and the eternity to come, we, a race who are but of a day, — who yesterday were not here, and to-morrow will have gone hence, — cannot know anything, but as the God who alone " was, and is, and is to be," shall declare it. To forswear Faith, then, is to proclaim, as to all that wide and momentous expanse and abyss of knowledge, an edict against the race of irreclaimable nescience, of perpetual infancy, of hopeless and peren- nial stultification. It is taking refuge from the pa- rentage and control of Heaven, by suing out, against our kind, a decree of irremediable idiocy, and utter orphanage. "When Nahash, the Ammonite, came against the city of Jabesh-gilead,* he made the proposition, that all its inhabitants should have each his right eye thrust out, in sign of subjection and vassalage. There was a natural reluctance to accept terms so painful and degj-ading. "Wliy should we be required, instead of the blessed and divinely-warranted affirmations of Scripture, to accept these sheltering negations of a Philosophy of Universal Doubt ? It wo^ild fain make Human Nature, suicidally to become its own Jabesh- gilead, by demanding that we sacrifice not one eye but both, — not the bodily vision, but the nobler and inner powers of the soul ; and would proclaim, as the irreversible law of our nature, the law of blindness — blindness to all eternity, blindness to God, blindness to * 1 Samuel, xL 5 98 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. duty, and blindness to truth ; and would it not be eventually blindness to virtue, and blindness to hap- piness, as well ? Such science, falsely so called, is, then, a knowledge, that ultimately resolves itself into the absence of all knowledge. " Professing them- selves to be wise, they become fools^ Their scepti- cism, like the imprisoned spirit in Eastern fable, when released from its cell, soars and swells, and rarefies, till it becomes a formless pillar of smoke, van- ishing into thin air, — a mere shapeless, shadowy and intangible Negation. 3. The gospel does not proscribe knowledge : it requires it. It makes knowledge possible to the savage, by awakening aspirations where before w.ere only appetites; and by letting out, on every side, the horizon of his cribbed and narrow intellect, into the wide eternity and the high infinity around and above him. Its Missions have carried, with a saintly hero- ism, the School and the Press into the snow-hut of the Greenlander, into the mud-built kraal of the Hot- tentot, and into the cabins overshadowed by the bread- fruit tree of the luxurious islands that gem the Pacific, — it has gone, thus, to Ashantee, where the graves of the dead are watered by human sacrifices, and to New Zealand, where the cannibal prepared human flesh as his choicest banquet. It not only patronizes and diffuses knowledge. It classifies it, as humanity unaided can- not do it. The mere scholar puts subordinate qualifi- cations and accomplishments into a superior place; and sacrifices the indispensable to the trivial, postpon- ing to the many things that, at best, are but helpful, KNOWLEDGE. 99 the " One thing that is needful." The Bible puts the necessary before the convenient, and the ethereal and the eternal before the animal and the temporal. It seeks, first, the kingdom of Grod. And does it wisely in this ? Hear the dying Grotius, with all his diversified stores of knowledge, and his wide and con- summate scholarship, lamenting on his death-bed, that he had not, like his humble and illiterate friend, the pif>u."» John Uri, given his days more exclusively to the Bible and to God. Hear the dying Selden, the com- peer and contemporary of Grotius, after a life of active and enduring influence, as a legislator, and a scholar, and a patriot, with all the honors of a wondrous erudi- tion, as wielded by the vigor of a masculine intellect, clustering around him, yet declaring that of all the learned tomes and ancient manuscripts which he had read, none brought him comfort and light like those words of the apostle : " For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world ; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour, Jesus Christ ; who gave Himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works."* And does not your own heart, in your better hours, judge as do the dying; and is not the science of salvation felt, at such times, to be above all price, and above all parallel ? Thus giving to the various branches of * Titus, iL 11—14. 100 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. knowledge their appropriate place and due proportion of honor and precedency, the gospel uses knowledge for the defence and diffusion of this faith. See this gospel irradiated by the labors of a Boyle, a Pascal, and a Newton. See God selecting a Paul, the most learned of the apostles, to be the chief writer of the New Testament. See, in the Reformation, the at- tainments of a Luther and a Melancthon, a Zuingle and a Calvin, a Ridley and a Cranmer, made subsid- iary to the vindication of Truth. See in modern Missions the usefulness and glory of consecrated learn- ing in a William Carey and a Herny Martyn, a Mor- rison and a Judson ; and is it not evident, that, what- ever else the gospel be, it is not the patron or the par- asite of Ignorance ? 4. Physical Science in our day has made rapid progress. Religion frowns not on it. But far as Physical Science claims to be paramount and sufficient and exclusive, it has usurped honors that are not its due. It would, in so doing, treat man as a being of mere bodily organs, without conscience, without a G-od, and without an eternity ; and in so regarding our race it robs and degrades us. Religious knowledge comes in to prevent the degradation, and to denounce the usurpation : and to supply as she alone can the re- quisite aliment and scope for the cravings and inex- tinguishable wants of man's soul — his higher and spiritual organization. Political Economy is another favorite form of science, in our century and land. Far as it abjures moral economy, or man's subor- dination in the getting and using of wealth, to the KNOWLEDGE. 101 law of brotherly Charity and of Piety, so far, here again, Religious Knowliulgc comes in to remedy the deficiency, and to right the wrong. Political Enfranchisement or the recovery of the rights of the masses — is another most popular subject of thought and debate, flinging its M'atchwords, like flaming fire-brands, over the breadth of Christendom. But when was Humanity so elevated, as when the Creator assumed its likeness in Bethlehem ? When was human misery so comforted, as when its heaviest woe was dropped into the cup of the Crucified on Calvary? How is Fraternity to be expounded and established, but by bringing men to look on themselves, as being in common amenable to the Last Judgment, and as being also in common interested in the Great Propitiation ? Liberty — is that a matter of laws merely, and of prisons, — of the body and its locomotion, so much as it is of the soul, and its enslaving passions, and its earthward and grovelling appetites, and its debasing superstitions, and its unappeasable fears, and its intolerable despair? And where is there true emancipation from the bon- dage of these, beside that proclaimed by the Holy Spirit, when that Spirit comes down upon the Re- deemer's accepted and atoning sacrifice, as sent from that Redeemer's celestial and sovereign Throne ? Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty — the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free. The gospel it is then that gives the best knowledge ; ascertains the relative rank and worth of all knowledge ; popularizes, diffuses, and defends it; and above all 102 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. gives to man, the sufferer, the knowledge of the Consoler ; and to man, the sinner, the'revelation of the atonement ; and to the groping captive of sin and heir of the pit, announces Liberty and Holiness, citizenship in Heaven and sonship with Grod. That Saviour of whom prophets and apostles testified is the Ruler of all worlds. "We honor him best, when meekly, reverently, and diligently, we store, with all true and fitting knowl- ledge, the souls he has ransomed, discern his glory in all his works, and seek his scrutiny and benediction upon all our tasks. We obey him by seeking every- where to diffuse that gospel, which is effectually to end among the nations the dominion of Error and Ignorance. We bless the race, and serve the Redeemer of that race, by striving to wreathe each discovery and each invention, all art and all science, into harmonious and devout subordination around that redeeming Cross, whence radiates the world's chiefest truth and its only hope of everlasting life. And of the stores of wisdom which the Spirit unseals in the work and gifts of the Saviour, eternity will be but evolving continually new wonders and glories. The knowledge merely of earth will not bear transportation into the world beyond the grave ; or becomes obsolete and worthless there. But the knowledge of Christ, is a treasure whose value Death only the more highly enhances ; and Heaven evermore but the more clearly through its long ages reveals, and extols and adores " the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." Far as any Christian overlooks Christ's interest in this present world, as being the Creator of all its ma- KNOWLEDGE. 103 terial wonders and of all the laws of Nature so called ; and overlooks Christ's interest in the history of its na- tions, as being their Covenanted Sovereign, by his per- petual Providence, overlapping and permeating and controlling all their transactions ; and overlooks Christ's interest in the social blamelessness and usefulness of his disciples, in their appointed day and station, as being the light and salt of the world ; so far that fol- lower of the Saviour comes short of the glory of his Master, and of the " knowledge" that should guard his faith, and crown his virtue. And in the knowl- edge of highest worth, in acquaintance with his own heart, and with his Father's word, and with his Saviour's love, it is the privilege and the duty of each Christian to become daily more versed. He will thus be a delighted student in that school, where angels are his fellow-disciples, where the lessons are of un- mingled and unchangeable truth, and where God is himself the Teacher. " Who teacheth like Him," re- newing, assimilating, blessing, and finally translating to higher than earthly scenes, and better than mortal associations, all those who are learners at His feet ? LECTURE V. TEMPERANCE. "akb to knowledge, temperance." 2 Peter, i. S. And what is the Temperance here enjoined upon the Christian ? Is the same word, when the enemies of drunkenness have inscribed it upon the banners of their blessed and peaceful crusade, clothed in their application of it with all the rich fulness of meaning which belongs to this scriptural term ? Their quiet conquests are, indeed, thrice blessed ; but does the man who aids in them necessarily fulfil to its utmost extent, the requirements of our text ? We answer : the ordinary use of this word, by them and by others, conveys, as we believe, but a fragment of the sense which the Holy Grhost intended us to attach to Chris- tian temperance. To save himself, and to rescue others from the miseries and the sins of the drunkard, the member of a Temperance Society consents to ab- stinence from all that can intoxicate. On the ground of Christian expediency, a religious man thus may abridge certain of his enjoyments, and invite others so to guard themselves. It is a hedge about his path and home, and about the path and home of his neigh- TEMPERANCE. 105 bors. It is a pledge against the maddening bowl and its brutalizing influence. But the temperance of the apostle goes much further. It refers not to the beverage only, but to viands as well. It denounces not only the death in the goblet, but the death in the charger, the profuse feeder, no less than the insatiate drinker. It inculcates upon the disciple, purity and restraint in all his gratifications. The word, which the apostle here uses, is explained by one Grreek writer as " self-discipline,''''* and by another,t as being " ab- stinence from evil,'''' as from excess in food, drink or enjoyment. The elements of the original word, imply a holding in or reining back that is imposed upon man's natural appetites. The Psalmist speaks of the horse yet scarce tamed from his fierceness, the fiery barb of the desert, as needing control, " whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee."1: The word selected by the in- spired writer, here, seems to involve this metaphor of curbing or bridling. Man's desires are like impetuous coursers, champing the bit, and needing to be kept back by Reason, and Conscience, and Religion. These appetencies are like mettled and fiery steeds, that re- quire for their safe guidance the wary eye and the firm hand of sober Restraint. Now, Temperance is the curb, bringing into subjection all those passions of human nature that tend to voluptuousness, just as Pa- tience and Meekness check and keep under the fiercer passions or those tending to violence. " Let your * Hesychius, in Schleusner Lex. V. T. \ Suidas, Ibidem. X Psalm xxxiL 9. 5* 106 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. moderation," said Paul,* " be known to all men." "We suppor-o our text to include that idea, also. It is a ma a Iieeping himself from all immoderate and undue attachments to sense and earth. Christian temper- ance, then, sets itself in opposition to the drunkard's bowl, and the glutton's banquet, and the revels of tht', profligate, and the anxious longings of the covetous ; and against the undue and immoderate desire of what is not ours, as well as against the undue and im- moderate abuse of what is ours. It includes, thus considered, Sobriety, and Chastity, and Moderation, — all the forms and all the varieties of a wise self- discipline, imposed on man's fierce quest of pleasure. Christian Temperance, then, embraces indeed the Temperance ordinarily so called ; but it includes also, much more : just as the State of New York embraces indeed the city of New York, but besides this, the metropolis, it takes in a far wider region of field, river, and mountain, and thus is spread over scenes of far greater variety than those which our streets present, or our wharves bound. So the Temperance of our text is abstinence from intoxication, but it is also very much more. The Temperance sought and upheld by our voluntary organizations is merely a single ward or county, in the wide region of moral reformation occupied by the other virtue. A man, then, may meet the re- quirements of the pledge, so called, totally abstaining from aught that should inebriate,. and yet come short utterly of the temperance here demanded, on the part of every true disciple. The voice of Christian Tem- * Philipp. iv. 5. • TEMPERANCE. 107 perance is, to use the language of Paul to the Romans,* in that memorable passage which wrought the conver- sion of St. Augustine, — " Let us walk honestly," (or, as in the margin — decently,) "as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wan- tonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh' to fulfil the lusts thereof." It is asunmions to put off, and extrude, and expel the self-pleasing brute, and the self-exalting fiend, and to put on the self-abasing and self-restraining Christ. This grace in its completeness, was the subject of the same Paul's appeals before the Roman G-overnor, when " he reasoned of righteousness, temperance^ and judgment to come," and Felix trem- bled. The Roman Praetor was pale and cowering, as he found himself shut in on either hand by the bold testimony of the prisoner-apostle on the one side, and the dread echo of his own guilty conscience on the other side. He was thus between Ebal and Gorizim: and thunder pealed back its response to thunder, and Guilt shivered in the commingling blast and storm of truth. That Temperance, whose claims thus shot into his soul from the burning lips of Christ's servant, and were riveted upon him by his own accusing con- sciousness, not only forbade his sharing the profuse and drunken banquets of his imperial master, Nero, but it denounced as well the bribes, which his covetous- ness sought for the delay or for the sale of justice, and which he would fain have extorted as the price of Paul's just liberation ; and it rebuked too, the guilty * Rom. xiiL 13, 14. lOS RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. • union he had formed with the adulteress, Drusilla, a fugitive from her home and from her rightful spouse. The Temperance of the G-ospel, as one apostle preached it before a heathen magistrate, and as another apostle, in our text, enjoins it upon all Christian disciples, fro^Yns alike on the drunken and the impure, the glut- ton, and the lecher, and " the covetous man, who is an idolater." Besides enjoining upon a man his duties to himself in his own self-government, it also, in rep- resenting his duties to his neighbor, envelops in itself the substance and essence of the Seventh and the Tenth commandments of the Decalogue, and glances at the First precept also, or that requiring supreme love of our G-od. Having thus, then, in the first instance, seen the meaning of Christian temperance, let us now II. In the next place, ask you to observe the rela- tion between knowledge and Christian temperance. III. Then, we would, in passing, glance at the bear- ing of this Christian grace on the Temperance Refor- mation, so called, and IV. In the fourth and last place, present the claims of Temperance, in the fullest sense of that term, upon the Christians of our times. II. Let your knowledge, then, said the apostle to the readers of his epistle, defend itself by the compan- ionship of Temperance. Why, it may be asked, should this be selected, and not any other of those clustering graces, which go to crown the true believer, and that attest the energy and fruitfulness of the Divine Spirit TliMPERAI. I • . 109 in the work of ^is moral renovation? It maybe said, might we not quite as naturally have looked to hear him say : Add to your knowledge patience, or adorn it with chan'f// ? But the imputed foolishness of God, is wiser than the conceited wisdom of man, and often our closer study of God's Scripture, will give us to see the profoundest truth and beauty in the order that, at the first heedless glance, seemed entirely arbitrary and unaccountable. Let it be remembered, then, that in the first sin of our first parents, the knowledge which they sought, beyond God and against His instructions, was knowl- edge wfliich brought with it a sin against the holy temperance that had before been the law of Paradise, and the accompaniment and defence of primeval inno- cence. Whilst in the mind, Pride sprang up, desiring the knowledge of good and evil, which should make them equal to their Maker and independent of their God, there wrought with it, in the bodi/ and its senses, as the eye gazed on the forbidden fruit, the intemperate longings of those senses to be gratified with the taste of that prohibited boon. The love of a baleful and proud knowledge, and the indulgence of mere bodily appetite, wrought together to make up the Fall. Was it not then fitting, in all this course of holy and heavenly knowledge, into which the vic- tim of the Fall is again uplifted by the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and by the renewal of the Spirit, that he, the scholar, should be perpetually reminded of his need to be on his guard evermore, against that dominion of the bodily senses into which the Fall be- 110 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. trayed us ? And was it not well, that lie should be cautioned, evermore, as said Paul, to put on Christ and to provide not for the flesh ? Was not such con- nection of temperance with knowledge, virtually say- ing : In Satan's school knowledge brought forth In- temperance ; but it must not be so in Christ's school ? Knowledge there slacked the rein, nay, threw it off. Here knowledge must knit it and bind it on. Is it not, again, a fact, sustained by the history of the Christian Churches, and the experience of every educated people in Christendom, that even when men enjoy this Gospel, their knowledge, both in things secular and things spiritual, is but too often perverted into a license for casting off the sobriety, and self-con- trol, and the high piety and the serene moderation of Christian principle ? Is not a palmy civilization often found shading a feverish and lawless sensuality ? We say, knowledge too often in a community nomi- nally Christian, subverts Christian temperance and sobriety. We might, at first sight, expect just the contrary. It might be said, will not knowledge, and a taste for acquiring it, and the books and the lectures which facilitate its acquisition, be just the best and surest remedies against all brutishness and lawless self- indulgence ? So men have expected the book to re- place the wine-cup ; and the Lyceum and the Lec- ture to close the dram-shop, and to leave the theatres tenantless, without patronage or character. But has it been so ? Did the British Society for the Diffu- sion of Useful Knowledge, much as it promised and largely as it hoped from its eminent patrons and col- TEMPERANCE. Ill laborators, and by its profuse supplies of a cheapened literature, draw from the beer-shops their crowd of customers, and leave the gin palaces of the British metropolis shorn of their glory, bankrupt, unvisited, and void ? Far from it : — an unsanctified knowledge is, everywhere, and evermore, a self-indulgent knowl- edge. Sensuality will thrive under it, and will thrive not only in spite of it, but by means of it. Yanity- Fair may gather within its walls, alike the university and the drinking-booth, and the scholars of the one be the gamblers, duellists, and tipplers of the other. Temperance, in the large and Christian sense of that word, may be subverted by knowledge, and is daily and lamentably so subverted. Literature, so called, has manufactured furniture and gathered fuel for the brothel. Knowledge, indeed, claims to liberalize and enlarge the mind, but instead, it may but liberate the senses, and give a dispensation to reckless immorality. The increase of knowledge, whether it be gained by travel, or by books, or by a long life of acquaintance with mankind, or by religious instructions and institu- tions even, — if these last are not cordially received and obeyed, — may be made a dispensation, — a virtual Letter of License for casting off the oldest and the soundest moral restraints, as if they were but anti- quated and worthless prejudices. Was it not thus, that Solomon, — after his wide research, that wrote of plants from the Cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, — and in consequence of his growing acquaint- ance and his large converse with heathen society,— -be- 112 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. came in his old age a doting conformist to the lewd idolatry of Ashtaroth? Travel is commended, as expanding the mind, and giving a knowledge to be obtained in no other mode. Thus, the devout Archbishop Leighton was accustomed to express a lively sense of the advantages he had gained from his own youthful visit to the Continent. But is a like harmless and beneficial result, seen as flowing from the knowledge gained by others in their travels? On the contrary, may not our own c latry be seriously prejudiced in her morals and habits, not only by the principles which many of the immigrants from the old world bring with them, but by those also which some of her own sons travelling thither bring back amongst us ? One of our statesmen wished that an ocean of fire rolled between the Old World and the New, to cut off the injurious effects of European intercourse upon our nascent liberties and forming character. Without sympathizing in his wishes, can we not yet, as christian patriots, see much of peril and of alarm, in the lowering of the moral tone and the de- basement of principle, brought back by some of the travelled sons of our land, as their only trophies from the banks of the Seine and the Tiber ? They see the godless, but glittering dissipation and profligacy of Paris or Yienna. Their foreign acquaintance " think it strange that they run not with them to the same excess of riot^"* and the visitants also " think it strange,'''' if the teachings of the home and the preju- dices, as they learn to call them, of their countrymen should prevent their so ''^ running,''^ with their accom- TEMPERANCE. 113 plished hosts, into the same gorgeous mazes and en- chanted bowers of luxurious indulgence. At the richly-spread table of the packet-ship, the youth im- bibes, instead of the temperance and sobriety of his cottage home, the tastes of a refined epicure. On the foreign shore, he learns to deem Republican simplicity insipid and coarse ; and he longs, perhaps, for the spectacles, the trappings and the titles of a court. In the galleries of Europe, he has acquired a taste for Art, however luxurious and meretricious may be many of her most admired masterpieces. And Modesty is lameness, and Virtue is affectation with him. He has gazed whilst his brain was in a whirl of giddy, guilty fascination, on the . shameless twirling of the Opera dancer ; and on the foul, simmering caldron of the mot- ley masquerade, where Frivolity, and Passion, and Vice bubbled together, and sent their clouding steam, as a rank offence, into the face of Heaven. And have not some who had retained, at home, with some degree of general confidence, their profession of christian charao ter, learned whilst abroad to neglect the closet, and desecrate the Sabbath, and nullify the Decalogue ; and brought back to their christian friends at home the lamentable spectacle of a soul, whose spiritual health had been blighted, incurably and forever, amid the pestilential miasma of foreign dissipation — of a man, who thought that he had travelled out of the reach of Sinai and its fiery law, when he had only sunken so deep in the mire of sense as to lose sight of the flaming summit, still near to him and still 114 Ri^LIGIOUS PROGRESS. threatening him, with its peals of thunder waxing louder and louder ? And if the Knowledge won by travel, may so corrupt, the knowledge gained by indiscriminate reading or by unguarded speculation may be equally deleterious. A youth, even of religious training, — and it may be, even one aspiring to the tasks and responsibilities of the christian ministry, — who should give himself to the eager and indiscriminate perusal of the filth, inanity and venom that, in the form of cheap literature, runs in an incessant stream from the press, could hardly re- tain soundness of moral perceptions. To root and wallow, but for a few months, in this garbage, would threaten to render him hopelessly an inmate of the " Epicurean sty." It would be as ruinous as literal drunkenness. It would be an intellectual debauch. The notions which such a student forms of happi- ness are swinish. His highest conception of heroism is brigandage or piracy. And so he, who commits himself, without requisite thought and prayer, to the heedless collation of the varieties of human opinion, and to the survey of the sophistries and endless wan- derings of the unguided, unaided intellect of man, is little likely to come out of such course of unregulated study, as sound in principle as he entered it. The Corinthian Christians prided themselves on their knowledge ; and on the plea that from this knowledge they had learned " an idol to be nothing," — a virtual nonentity, — they with an audacious baseness, sate at meat in the idol's temple, thus insulting the true G-od, evading His commands and scandalizing His churches. TEMPERANCE. 315 Their knowledge "puffed up," but it did not neces- sarily, as they supposed, elevate. The huiiiiin mind, like an ill-managed balloon, may be inflated by its ill- won, ill-used knowledge, — and, yet bound to the earth by its grovelling nature, and prevented from ascend- ing, may be, from its inflation, dat^hed only the more violently into the neighboring quagmires of immorality and profligacy. So Grerman Pantheism, now, with its vast hoards of erudition, is talking most madly of " the rehabilitation* of the senses," and proposing to proclaim the overthrow of all morality, and the restoration to appetite and to brutal license of all the sway which Reason, Conscience, and Religion have hitherto exer- cised over them. Knowledge is to eject the lingering manhood, the last vestige of immortality, and develop the roluiid, and lawless, and contented brute, without a conscience, an eternity, or a God. So is it, also, with the knowledge won by lon^ ex- perience of the world. A man thus knowing man- kind, as it is called, may in his old age become the yielding prey to temptations, that shall be based on his long and wide acquaintance with human nature. He ntny thus learn to look suspiciously and selfishly on all iiis race, and, like Isaac in his blindness, solace himself with the poor consolation of the savory meat that his soul loveth, or flee to the inebriating draught, or concentrate his trust and heart on the gold from which death must soon rend him. * A term of the old Roman or civil law for the restoration of rights long withheld Tho senses are regarded as heirs long defrauded of their just rights and liberty. 116 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. So IS it, even, with the instructions and institutions of religion, as ministering to our knowledge, if dis- obeyed or perverted. We may from them, only de- rive a dispensation for the indulgence of our fleshly and earthly senses. Religious knowledge became, with the Pharisee, an excuse for his failing to touch with one of his fingers, the heavy burden of obedience to that law, which he imposed on the shoulders of others. His sacred lore sealed him a Bull of Indul- gence ; and made the convert he taught but tenfold more the child of Hell. So, Saint's holidays have been crowded into the Calendar, in the nominal Chris- tian Church, and " the knowledge" of the holy men and of the sacred miracles of the Church, rapidly in- creased, till the Sabbath was stript of its legitimate honors, of its sanctities not only, but of its decencies even; and until the idleness thus consecrated on other days of rightful toil led the way to all thriftlessness, and drunkenness, and debauchery. And so, in our own Protestant land, has our religious knowledge saved us as a nation from all wrong-doing in our treatment of the Indian ? Has the red man of the forest no reason to complain, on the contrary, of the Christians, if they are so to be called, who from the land of the Bible and the church-going bell, came to initiate him only in the mysteries of the liquid death, that dropped from the worm of the still, and in the oaths, and in the frauds, and in the vices of a corrupt civilization ? And what has been the plea urged to excuse us ? Our cultivation by knowledge, and his uncultivated and savage ignorance. Has the Mohammedan of Turkey, TEMPERANCE. 117 or of far Persia, no right to complain of Puritan Now England, whose intelligent and church-goiil^ mer- chants have wafted over the sea, and rolled to his very door their casks of New England Rum, — the present of Christian civilization in its completeness to the in- complete civilization of the Moslem ? A land boast- ful of its knowledge in art and science, — of its educa- tion and general intelligence and Christian lore — is thus sending over the sea to the scenes of the first Apostles' labors and martyrdom, the barrelled apostle- ship of fiery and murderous Intemperance. And, to come yet nearer to our own hearts and frailties, how easy is it, brethren, in the ministry of the word, for the Christian Pastor to mistake the perception of a truth for conformity to its commands. The man sees, and brings others to see, the worth and Scriptural evidence, and paramount demands of a great doctrine or duty of the Gospel ; but, meanwhile, satisfied with this, never thinks to ask, if he has laid his own heart and his own life, as a pinioned victim, in unresisting sacrifioo on the altar of that his Lord's law. He luxuriates in the sublimer and lovelier aspects of Re ligion, and would have them play like the rainbow or the northern lights, on the surface of the imagination ; but will not have truth's dark and strong roots shoot themselves deep into his own treasured affections — the inmost subsoil of his soul. He rejoices in the ideal of Christianity, but loathes its practical side. His knowl- edge is INTEMPERATE. There may then be knowledge from travel over the wide main and among many lands, and the men of 118 • RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. many tongues, — knowledge from the stored library and i.ofn converse with its mighty dead, — and knowl- edge from long and close observation of mankind, — and even religious knowledge gained from the faithful pulpit and the Inspired Oracles, so corrupted, or so perversely used that its effect is only to subvert moral restraint, and to blight the heart of purity, and to in- troduce a wide-spread and inveterate social demoral- ization that unknits the bonds of obligation and eats out the pith of conscience. " Take heed how ye hear," cried the One Infallible Teacher and Saviour of the race. And we suppose that warning to say virtually to all who pursue after knowledge : Take heed how ye read in the varied, and often frivolous, and often baleful productions of the human intellect. Take heed how, and in what mood — prayerless or prayerful, heedless or obedient — ye peruse, even my own pure utterances. Take heed how ye see, and make a covenant with your eyes, that they. turn away from beholding and desiring the van- ity which cannot fail to meet your vision. Take heed how you THINK, for out of the secret chambers of meditation, the covert labyrinths of thought, comes forth at last the overt act, and there stalks out to the noon-day light, the unveiled character. Knowledge should minister to temperance. Let not your knowl- edge minister only to license and folly, and error, and sin, and death. , Much is, by some, most confidently predicted from the wide diffusion of education, and the cheapening of the issues of the press. The newspaper visiting TEMPERANCE. 119 every door, and the school enlightening every neighbor- hood, and worldly lore climbing every pulpit — all are spoken of as if AVickedness and Misery were to vanish from their glance. Has it been so ? Will it be so ? On the contrary, a mastery of worldly knowledge without religious principle, — or an intermixture of overlooked error in a great increase of knowledge, — or a heartless and searing familiarity with disobeyed Scripture, may leave the heart but more possessed with earthliness, and less susceptible of control. " The commandment has come" with fuller light and clearer knowledge, and " sin has revived," as said the lament- ing apostle. If grain be borne to a famishing people, it stays their hunger ; but if the ergot be in the grain, those who are fed, are likely to be also palsied and mutilated. Has there been no instance, in which the harvest of knowledge has borne to the garners of an irreligious nation, or of a formal hypocritical church, only the mental aliment that poisoned and dismem- bered the body corporate ? Knowledge has its. ergot. And woe to those who greedily, indiscreetly, and indis- criminately devour it. Having thus, then, seen how knowledge may sub- vert Christian temperance, we proposed in. To glance, in passing, at the bearing of this Christian grace on the Temperance Reformation of our times. We said that the temperance of the Gospel included this last, but it embraced also very much more. For the amount of good attempted and accom- plished by this reform, every patriot and every Chris- tian should rejoice. The Bible does not, indeed, like iCO RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. th'' Temperance Socioty, make it the imperative duty of thi; Christian, in all times, and in all circumstances, to forego the use of the beverage, that taken in excess may induce drunkenness. But christian expediency, as taught in the New Testament, may require it of the Christians of a certain time, and of a land r: ^tly ac- cursed vv^ith a free use of what ^nay int^jxi;- te, to forego their abstract rights from a v/ise regard '" iheir own infirmity, and a kind desire i>i their Lhj; iters preservation. Churches may not make entire absti- nence a term of fellowship ; for they are not entitled to institute new conditions of Commi'uion. But they may, and must protest against, and discipline those who heedlessly and heartlessly aid to swell a general scandal, and aggravate a national curse. In some of the friends of the Temperance Reform there may have been errors to be lamented, and amongst these may be named a disposition to desecrate the Sabbath, and to depreciate Christianity and the Christian Church, — a weak love of mutual" applause, and, above all, a resort to secret societies, with their oaths, and signs, and watch- words. But whilst condemning all these, it is yet true that the penitentiaries, and the alms-houses, and the homes of the land, and even its sanctuaries, needed the Temperance movement. The Book that shows intemperance, in the histories of Noah and of Lot, working so disastrously — that traces to the glut- tony of the Cities of the Plain, and to their " fulness of bread," their awful sin and doom — that shows Bel- shazzar and his Babylon feasting to drunkenness on the night of the Persian irruption, and of the resound- TEMTE RANGE. 121 ing fall of the Chaldean Empire, — that paints the chosen tribes in the wilderness sitting down to eat and to drink, and rising up to idolatrous play, and in the latest and worst days of their history as a monarchy, represents their Princes as strong to mingle strong drink, but weak in counsel, and in valor, and in pub- lic virtue, — the Book that thus portrays and condemns intoxication and excess, and excludes the drunkard from the kingdom of G-od, does not teach its reverent and docile students to think lightly, or speak scof- fingly of a movement, that, on either side of the At- lantic, has done so much to arrest personal and social ruin, to restore the fallen, and to stay the feet that were ready to slide, brought back many a prodigal to despairing parents, and restored to a wife more than widowed, and to children worse than fatherless, the husband and father disembruted, clothed, and in his right mind. But we suppose that the best friends of Tejiiperance will yet find that, to give it permanence, it needs the broader basis and the deeper root of a re- ligious movement ; and that here, as in so many other earthly reforms, the controlling motives — the effectual lever, must rest on some stronger and firmer basis than earthly considerations. And let not the ardent pane- gyrists of Temperance forget, that a man may renounce drunkenness, and yet remain the enemy of God, and the heir of perdition. Neither Judas nor Ahithophel is charged with intoxication. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau was a drunkard, although Paine was. "Was Temperance, in them, necessarily the sum of all virtue? No. The atoning Cross and the renewing Spirit remain 6 122 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. yet the one pathway to Heaven, and mere abstinence from a single form of moral debasement constitutes but a slender shred of moral adornment and defence, if it be pleaded as a man's sole and sufficient warrant for his admission to the general assembly of the heavenly world. He will need another " wedding gar- ment," who is " called to go in to the marriage-supper of the Lamb." Drunkenness is enough to damn a man ; but the mere absence of Drunkenness is by no means enough to save him. Christian Temperance, even, in its further reaching claims, is not in itself evidence of a meetness for Heaven. It is but one of a train of developed moral excellencies, springing out of the root of true faith — one of the fruits of the re- newing Spirit. IV. We have now reached the last division of our subject ; the claims of this Christian grace, taken in the wide and comprehensive sense which Scripture at- taches to it, upon the disciples of our times. It is neces&ary, then, to true piety. The knowledge and love of God cannot lodge in a heart crowded and drag- ged downward by debasing, and carnal, and sinful pleasure. God is the maker of both the body and the soul. He deems both wronged by those who cast off the restraints of His law of Temperance. Such trans- gressors are charged with dishonoring their own bodies* And they are warned as to fleshly lusts, in their influence on the inner man, that these war against the soul.t Communion with God, the duties of the closet, and the accepted and profitable attend- * Rom. L 24. f 1 Peter, ii 11. TEMPERANQE. 123 ance on the sanctuary require that the man who at- tempts these, dwell not in the company of the foolish, and in the tents of the transgressors, nor roll wicked- ness under his tongue as a sweet morsel, nor regard iniquity in his heart. If men are Christ's, they are crucified with Him to the flesh and the world. It is necessary as well to christian usefulness. The man who would be really and widely useful must have an unselfish sympathy. Now, of this, the lovers of pleasure are notoriously and necessarily destitute. Few things more rapidly and surely bring a seared callousness over the heart than the habitual pursuit of gross and selfish pleasure. The actor, it may be, as the scene shifts, drops before such lovers of pleasure in the crowded Theatre, snatched quick into eternity, but he must be carried to his agonized family and his lonely death-bed ; it may not mar or delay the sports of the children of worldly gayety. Sternly, fiercely resolute, though the wing of the destroying angel has just brushed them in his flight, — they would forget care and compel joy upon the very scene where the boards are yet warm from the victim's limbs, writhing in their mortal agony. In the conflict of our times, again, with the self-sacrificing zeal of some Romanists on the one hand, and with the Utopian but enthusias- tic benevolence of some errorists 'or sceptics on the other, Christians must (to maintain their due promi- nence and pre-eminence in the ranks of reform and philanthropy) become more than ever self-denying, and not at all subject themselves to the imputation of seem- ing " lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God.''^ 124 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. To secure, again, the time and the pecuniary resources required for wide usefulness, it is requisite that the church waste not her leisure or her wealth on worldly and vain gratifications. Eras of revolution have been to a people loving their country, eras of heavy and yet cheerfully endured taxation. Our earth is passing into a crisis of moral revolution ; and the revenues of the church, and the time of Christians, must yield more largely their tribute to meet the emergencies of the impending conflict. But christian temperance is needful still more to christian happiness. True felicity is found most readily, when not sovight for imme- diately and for its own sake. Much that the world calls such, and as such seeks, is wrongly styled Happi- ness ; and when reached, her name and looks are found those of Disappointment or of Remorse. For what is, to a rational and mortal and immortal being, pleasure, in the justest sense of that term ? Is it the deity of Pagan legends, with reeling steps, empurpled face, and bloodshot eye, — careless, and bloated, and brazen in his shamelessness ? In the days of the Stuarts, England to such a deity raised her May-poles, crowned with garlands and circled with dances. Read in contemporary dramatists and annalists, the effect, on the morals and character, of such amusements. To such a deity James I. should have dedicated his Book of Sports, enjoined to be read from the pulpit, and requiring the stern Puritan to forego a part of his Sabbath, and to give the church-yard of Christ's sanc- tuaries, on the afternoon of the hallowed day, to the gambol and the revel and the masque. Read in tho TEAIPK RANGE. 125 story of Baxter's youth the character and piety of such Sabbath revellers. Was true pleasure for the individual or the family so won ? Put, in the days of the later Stuarts, as an instance of true and waking felicity, the household of Philip Henry, orderly, reverent, and guarded with the sermon, and prayers, and catechizing, and singing, and all their Sabbath-day employments, — against the drunken bouts, the rude, rough wit, the profanity, and the reckless indulgence, of Henry's acquaintance and neighbor, the Lord Chancellor .JefF- eries ; — and was it the law-biding saint, or the lawless Cavalier, that was most blest, even for this life and in their several chosen employments ? You lot)k in, upon the godly father amid his children all godly, and you hear him exclaiming, as the Sabbath evening shades shut down around them, as at that hour he often exclaimed, " If this be not Heaven, it surely is the nearest way thither, and the likest to it" And your conscience reiterates the justness of the sentiment. Yes, where the self-restraint was, Heaven already shot anticipatory gleams ; where there was no self-restraiat, the brightness was livid. It came from beneath. It shed an ominous and ghastly ray. And so, in our own times, is it the youth, returning jaded, and guilty, from the Sabbath excursion, pur- chased perhaps too often by pilferings from the till — is it the parent, dragging back his fatigued and irreligious household to an unblest home : — or, is it the Sabbath-school teacher, or the pious parent, worn, but not fretted by the sweet toils of the day passed in the sanctuary, — who is on the Sabbath most serenely 126 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. and most truly blest ? Do you say, how can such restraint, by any possibility, be blest, or even tolera- ble ? We answer, true happiness is, like Purity and Truth and Honor and Heroism, and aught that is really good, a law and restraint to itself. It shrinks and braces itself up from the degradation and con- tamination of an uncontrolled course. It sees in G-od's Book, among His most dreaded denunciations, the threat of the removal of all restraint — that removal which is, by some, so coveted : " So I gave them up to their own hearts' lust" is G-od's declaration in the Psalms, of His sorest earthly visitation on a guilty people.* It is necessary to National well-being and pros- perity. When, some years since, an officer in com- mand of a ship of the United States Navy, visited an island of the South Seas ; — and vi(^ently restored there, against the will of the converted natives and of the Sovereign, the old and Pagan licentiousness, and maligned and assailed the Christian Missionaries, his own countrymen, who were there laboring ; what man of right feeling did not for his country's honor and for his country's interest, denounce so shameless and high-handed a wrong? In the recent violent expul- sion of the OVleans branch of the Bourbons, from the throne and soil of France, is not the Christian re- minded of similar violences inflicted on Tahiti and not as here, disavowed by the government under whose flag it was done ? Was there no evidence, then re- 'Tealed to the observant mind, that the G-od whose * Psalm Ixxxi. 12. TEMPERANCE. 127 name often ushers in treaties, but whose existence is often forgotten by diplomatists, is looking in upon the guilty cabinets that persecute His Gospel ? Was .there nothing to remind us, in the clamor of that Revolution, when the throne was borne, a dishonored wreck, along the tumultuous streets, that the dust shaken at the Master's bidding from the feet of a despised, and rejected Missionary of that Master, may, dust though it be, avail to scatter, when God chooses, like summer chaff, the loftiest thrones and the oldest dynasties ? "With us national power has not yet been thus used. And if we might thus use our national fleets to trample down moral restraint abroad, is it not evident, we might be in turn the victims, by a just retribution : and who would wish himself and his kindred to be thus the prey of the lawless for- eigner ? Succeeding expeditions, under Bolton, and under Wilkes, were most honorably contrasted, in their treatment of converts from heathenism and of their Missionary pastors, with this wretched and loath- some spectacle. We allude to it, only to suggest what would be the national destiny of a people who should adopt such policy, and the inquiry whether a giddy, inebriated and profligate people, shedding abroad giddi- ness and profligacy, — it matters not what their strength or their numbers or their valor, — can expect long to maintain self-government and free institutions ? If a nation be like our own, eager and earnest for the sustentation and the diffiision of freedom, are we not doubly pledged to those morals of Christian Tem- perance which are necessary as a part of the basis of 128 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. enduring liberty ? Take away the restraints of Prot- estant Christianity, and substitute even another form of Christianity, as Rome presents it. G-ive up the Pu- ritan Sabbath, with its principled quiet, and its sacred order — receive, in exchange, the Carnival of Rome, with its principled misrule and consecrated disorder. Both seasons are intended to commemorate the same Saviour : — but the one is all redolent of christian tem- perance ; the other as abhorrent of it ; — and what far-sighted patriot could hesitate, as to the relative in- fluence of the two institutions on the security, and freedom, and prosperity of the nation ? 2. But what does christian temperance require, and what does it forbid ? In fashion, then, it censures all that is wasteful, all that trenches on immodesty, and all that feeds pride and starves alms-giving. In dress and in furniture, in the table and in the equipage, it prescribes simplicity without affected singularity, plenty without luxury, liberality without ostentation, and the spirit of those who eat to live, rather than the tastes of those who live to eat. It enjoins a chas- tened moderation in the day of prosperity, and a sus- tained meekness and trustfulness in the day of adver- sity, — a holding of the world loosely, but a holding our own inclinations and desires tightly, and under vigilant control. It does not prescribe austerities for their own sake, or as in themselves meritorious. ThR maceration of the body, the severe penances, practised in the ritual of La Trappe, or by the fir^t anchorites of the Egyptian desert, it does not find paralleled, or commended in the New Testament. Yet, it resrards TEMPERANCE. 129 Paul's charge, that the body bo brought under subjection to the soul. " Keeping my body under," as says the apostle, " lest I become a castaway." It sees in that body, in the case of each Christian, " a temple of the Holy G-host." Rome shows its Loretto, — a sacred house, the chamber of the Virgin Mary, which it fables to have been carried in the air from Syria, and planted down where it now stands, in Italy. The Gospel teaches us to see, in the believer's body, the true Lo- retto, a house that shall be translated into a higher world, and rebuilt there, another and yet the same, and therefore to be honored, even in its present and earthly uses. In the soul it recognizes the rights of a new master, the Deliverer, who has emancipated it from the tyranny of its old despot and destroyer, the Father of Lies. And the powers of that soul are consecrated to a chris- tian allegiance. " Lord Will-be- Will," according to Bunyan's allegory, holds Man-soul for its new sov- ereign in christian vigilance, and with christian decision. 3. It may be objected, And are no amusements al- lowable to the disciple of Christ ? The book of Ec- clesiastes is perhaps misquoted in defence of worldly enjoyments. Misquoted, we say, for the earlier por- tion of that book, instead of containing what were really Solomon's parting counsels to his reader, but records his erring principles and endeavors, in his ear ier and misguided pursuit of happiness. To quote its opening statements and sentiments, as if they were the final result and settled principle of Solomon's ex- perience, is to mistake the details of the preceding dis- 6* 130 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. ease for the recipes of the subsequent recovery. But does the Bible forbid all cheerfulness, and joyousness ? Docs true Piety scowl from under the knit brow, on all that savors of gladness, and hope, and peace ? By no means. Our Saviour was present at feasts. One of His apostles, (it was Matthew,) after being called to forsake his receipt of custom and follow Christ, gave a ban- quet to his friends. Our Saviour honored a wedding- festival at Cana, in Galilee, by a miracle there wrought. He watched the sports of children, and grounded on them one of His parables. He praised the beauty of the lily, and the blithe trustfulness of the bird. Surely, He who did all this, and who as the Grod of Provi- dence is yet waking the melodies of the grove, and flashing splendor along the skies, painting the tulip and perfuming the leaf of the rose and the heart of the violet, is not disposed to inhibit to man all joy and delight in the use of the senses which He has formed, and in the contemplation of the objects with which He has surrounded His creatures : Nature, and Art, and Society, all may minister to the Christian's en- joyment. But Heaven is his chief point of attraction even here, and whatever is alien in spirit to that world of light and purity, he must dread. His pleasures should be therefore rational, and not unduly exciting, and not in excess — the relaxation, and not the business of life. An easy test, as to the lawfulness of many forms of recreation, might be found in inquiring. Should I be willing, were Christ bodily and visibly present, to pursue the amusement under His meek yet searching glance ? C ould the modern theatre, or the modern ball- TEMPERANCE. 131 room either, be visited by a Chri.stian, if this test were once apphed ? Take each, with its ordinary accom- paniments, and its general results on the minds and religious character of its visitants ; and could we look to see our Saviour there stand by us with approval beaming from his eyes ? Can we imagine Him, had He visited at the time the court of Herod, watching with benignant smile the young and fair girl, the daughter of Herodias, as in her dance she pleased her father and the chief lords of Gralilee ? Even, had not the prophet's gory head been the grim prize of her gracefulness, can we conceive of Clii-ist's sympathiz- ing in her exhibition ? "Weddings in the East, of old were, and yet are, frequently celebrated by the dancing of hired women. The Almehs of Egypt, and the Bayaderes of Hindostan, thus display themselves, as contributing their portion to the amusements of the wedding-festival. Imagine such an accompaniment of the nuptial festivity at Cana in Galilee, commenced beneath Christ's eyes, and would you not almost expect, that the scourge of small cords, which did its work so vigorously in the Jewish temple on the sellers of doves, would have done an anticipatory work there ; — thus avenging the insulted purity of the home, as He after- wards vindicated the outraged majesty of the Sanc- tuary ? If worldly pleasure were innocuous and evan- gelical, as some represent it, it ought certainly to fit those practising it, better than it actually does, for the infirmities of age and the tremendous realities of the death-bed. But are such votaries of pleasure cheered in sickness and soothed in decay, and in the near view 132 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. of the grave, by their reminiscences of the years given to levity and folly ? Read the language of the gay, and witty, and accomplished Chesterfield, as he de- scribes his listlessness, and weariness, and wretched- ness, in the closing scenes of life. See the Madame du Barry, who had so flaunted in gay and guilty splendor in the court of Louis XV., as she is dragged, shrieking, in her last years, to the Revolutionary guil- lotine, the least self-possessed and the most frantic of its many female victims. And can you doubt more ? Read, above all, the stern language of the New Testa- ment : "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." "Whose god is their belly, whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things." " Of whom I have told you weeping, they are the enemies of the cross of Christ. "Whose end is destruction." " The belly for meats and meats for the belly, but God shall destroy both them and it." "To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." " Be not conformed to the world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds." " Set your affections not on things which are on the earth, but, on things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of Grod." "No man can serve two masters, ye cannot serve Grod and Mammon." " What concord hath Christ with Belial ? Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. Do ye provoke the Lord to jealousy ? Are we stronger than He ?" Christian sobriety and modera- tion, then, are requisite to our discipleship. Have we them ? Is the Church elevating or sinking her stand- TEMPERANCE. 133 ard of Christian attainment as to this grace ? Does not the age require the former and prohibit the latter ; and demand that Christians, whilst loving the men of the world with a true philanthropy, should protest against the ivays of the world with more of holy decision ; and 'for every new advance in knowledge become more weaned in holy self-denial, from vanity, and sense, and sin, and from " all that is in the world ;" from " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," all which, as the Apostle John testifies, " is not of the Father, but is of the world ?" LECTURE VI. PATIENCE. « AKD TO TEMPERANCE, PATIENCE." 2 Peter, i. 6, Patience is, in the estimation of some, a mere drudge among the virtues ; and regarded as being, if necessary, yet but servile in her character. In Scrip- ture, she is a queen, magnanimous and dignified. It is a criticism of Calvin, that the order, in which these several christian graces are here presented by the Apostle of the circumcision, must be regarded as evidently but arbitrary, because patience is made in Peter's catalogue to precede charity, when, in truth, it must spring from and succeed that grace. A man must, in the exercise of an evangelical charity, love his God and his neighbor, to bear uncomplainingly ad- versity from the one and injury from the other. But let us turn aside to inquire more closely, whether the arrangement of these several excellencies of the chris- tian character, is indeed, as alleged, thus without sufficient cause ; and whether a just connection be not traceable amongst them. They are not, we think that it will be found, presented as independent, the one of the other, — entirely distinct and readily divisi- PATIENCE. 135 ble, like the several pearls of a necklace, that may be parted without injury and assorted at pleasure. They are rather like the members of the body, though dis- tinguishable, yet mutually dependent, and all needful to the perfection and symmetry of the frame, and all knitted in the fittest arrangement, the one to the other. To be truly a Christian, a man must in some degree combine them all. Some true disciples are, indeed, more distinguished by one and some by another of these jewels, and some of a Christian's individual graces may in massiveness and splendor far surpass others ; but all of them, the ruby of knowledge, and the pearl of faith, and the diamond of charity, belong to the princely and priestly array of each son of God, who, as king and priest, shall follow the Lamb in His glory. Faith, the first enumerated by the apostle, cannot exist without charity, the last. Their order does not then determine the date of their origin in the renewed soul. But the several traits of true piety seem here named by the All- wise spirit of inspiration, as they are needed, the one to become the complement of the other which has preceded it, and as its presence serves to correct the excesses, or to supply the deficiencies, of that which has gone before.* Thus we have seen virtue, or practical excellence, to be required as a remedy and counterpoise against the exaggeration of a barren and notional faith. Knowledge is next demanded, to rectify the rudeness of what some would represent as all-sufficient, an un- taught and unreflecting and unprincipled Virtue. By an unprincipled virtue, we mean, of course, not a * See Appendix, Note E. 136 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. virtue reckless of all moral principle, but one not guided by intelligent and definite principles. For a man's views become soon the man's acts. Principles, ignorantly and vaguely held, are not permanently efficient either to incite or to control. His theory becomes soon the discipline of his life — " as he thinketh in his heart so is he." Thus the intellectual passes over readily into the practical. A man's knowledge or misconception of some great truth becomes a blessing or a curse, not only to himself but to all his neighbors, who may pass within the range and wind of his influ- ence. Thus Rousseau's eloquent theories of the dig- nity and purity of man unsophisticated, in his state of Nature, became soon a law of education and revolt to his own France not only, but to all the republicans of Europe. Knowledge, then — (or right views and large views of things as they are) — knowledge, we say, is needed as the stay of virtue. And, then, comes Temperance, to balance the excesses of a perverted and self-indulgent knowledge. And now, in our text, we see it enjoined, as if to correct the acidity and acridity of a sour and eccentric temperance, that it should be grouped with patience. How it is, and why it is, that the disciples of Temperance, or self-restraint, are immediately com- mended to the cultivation of a gentle and forbearing spirit, will, as we think, appear, if we but advert to the petulance which all rigorous and abstinent self- control is apt to foster. The man who succeeds in denying, within himself, the promptings of Indulgence and Voluptuousness, is prone to become in the inter- PATIENCE. 137 course he holds with the world without, harsh in imposing on his less guarded neighbor the law of his own example ; and thus becomes, whilst shutting out the pleasurable, but too ready to let in the irritable. Thus, during the great fast of the Mohammedans, the Ramadan, observed by severe abstinence from food through all the hours of daylight, travellers have noted the querulous and contentious spirit that seems for the time to reign through a Turkish city. And it was, j)erhaps, not without alliance to the same great law of human weakness, that after the forty days of fasting which Jonah, in common with the Ninevites, probably had observed, that he is represented by Scripture as becoming at the sight of Grod's mercy to the doomed heathen, " greatly displeased" and " very angry." He gave vent to fretfulness even in his devotions, and pro- voked from his G-od the question, " Doest thou well to be angry ?" Those who closely and vigilantly curb their own natural impulses to indulgence, are easily made impatient by the spectacle of the reckless follies and ungoverned sins of those around them. A recent British Missionary* speaks of the devotees of Hindooism, whose austerities are most rigid, and who proclaim superiority to all passion, as being notorious for "a general irritability." The ascetic, of all times and of ill forms of faith, has been subject, and not without some plausibility, to the imputation of sourness. Turn over the monkish illuminations, preserving the features of some Romish worthy, eminent for his macerations and fastings, as the saint of his diocese or of his age, * Buyers' Recollections of Northern India, p. 270 138 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. and how often do the lineaments bespeak a stem violence or a querulous discontent. The austerity of an habitual self-restraint was seen in Jerome, among the Fathers. So in Calvin, as compared with Luther among the Reformers, there was more of abstinence from what are accounted allowable relaxations and from all genial enjoyments ; and there was also more of severity of temper and of an iron inflexibility of character. Calvin's immense and astounding industry required a singular temperance to sustain it, and hence, from the spirit and temper thus fostered, he was ever, even by his most admiring disciples and his most attached inmates, rather revered than beloved. Richard Baxter and Andrew Fuller, each eminent for devotion and assiduity and usefulness, and for a con- sequent abstinence from much that to others seemed needful relaxation, had, as the result of this jealous abnegation of pleasure, at least occasional manifesta- tions of an austerity, that cut short the fruitless visit, and denied remorselessly to mere ceremony, or to idle curiosity, any large share of the time, which they so valued and so redeemed. When summoned to reprove weakness or folly, the Kettering pastor was said to be often overwhelming in his severity. But patience, here and elsewhere so earnestly en- joined, is at times travestied and counterfeited. It is not a supine indifference to truth, or a tame subser- viency to arrogance, that the Scriptures enjoin. Let us then, imploring of Him who is its great Teacher and Exemplar His aids, to know and practise this grase arig-ht, consider PATIENCE. 189 I. "What christian patience is not ; II. Wliat it is ; III. Its relations to other graces of the religious character ; IV. The motives which should induce us to culti- vate it ; and V. The means of its attainment. I. The patience of the disciple of Jesus is not, then, stoical apathy, nor acquired or affected obduracy to all physical suffering. The old sophists of G reece, who denied the existence of pain, in order thus to pro- claim their own superiority to the sensitive and com- plaining around them ; — the Hindoo Yogee, swinging suspended by his feet from a tree, and with his hair trailing downward over a smoking fire ; — the Simeon Stylites, who to the wonder of his contemporaries in the early, but already corrupted, ages of Eastern Christianity, held amid the sultry heats of summer, and the storms of winter, in the noon-day blaze and in the gloom of midnight, his place unmoved on the narrow summit of a tall column for successive years, as an act of exalted piety ; — and the monkish inmate of La Trappe, denying himself the exercise of speech, and the indulgence of converse even with his brother recluses, until, as was said of one of them, after attend- ing for a time in the infirmary of their edifice, on the death-bed of a younger brother of the order, he dis- covered for' the first time, his own relationship — the tie of kindred binding the silent watcher to the silent ■ sufferer, only when, days after, he read on the grave- stone the name and age of his patient in the hospital, 140 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. and found him to be his own son : — none of them all (according to our views of evangelical patience,) can claim the honors of that real and celestial grace. It is not affected or studied insensibility to pain, if that pain be self-inflicted, rather than sent and apportioned of Grod ; or, as Paul describes it, if it be the " bodily exercise which profiteth little," — an uncommanded cross, and therefore a cross caricatured and unblest. 2. Nor, much less, is christian patience a meek in- difference to all error and wickedness in the world around us. Such tolerance is often connivance at sin, and confederacy with Hell. If that were requisite to spiritual meekness, the apostles were the least meek of mankind ; for their indignant denunciation of idol- atry and sin made them to be charged with having turned the world upside down. But yet some Chris- tians form to themselves an idea of christian patience, that swallows up all christian boldness, decision, and constancy. The old law required love to be shown to a brother by not suffering sin upon him, and in the new dispensation the churches were commended -that would not suffer the doctrines of Jezebel, or the claims of false apostles. It was not a pious patience that Eli showed when he left unrestrained the profligacy of his sons, Hophni and Phinehas ; nor does the Bible praise, as godly forbearance, the false tenderness and the guilty tolerance that David, in like manner, showed to the brutish Amnon, and to the plausible and heartless Absalom. The standard of christian piety adopted by some, which is all softness and re- pose, w uld have no room for men like the lion-hearted PATIENCE. 141 Knox, who did, under God, so thorough and good a work, before a licentious court, and a frowning nobility, an! a raging priesthood, for the Scottish nation. It would show no sympathy for the bearing of the noble daughter of that groat reformer, Knox — the child of one man of God, and the wife of another — Mrs. Welsh, when she went to ask from that profane and arbitrary sovereign, James I., the liberation of her eminent and devout husband, John "Welsh. On being told by the King, that if she would persuade her husband to de- sist from his rebellious preaching, her request should be granted, the Christian woman, indignant at the thought of such treason to a higher monarch, is said to have raised the apron she wore, and holding it up, replied : " Please your Majesty, rather than ask him do that, I would catch his head there." She rather chose to witness his decapitation, a martyr like the Baptist, than to see him for life and freedom selling the Truth and Heaven. To the silken views of chris- tian patience which some favor, here would seem to have been no patience. To us, on the contrary. Pa- tience shines forth in such a spirit at such a time, triumphant. It is the patience that dares brave all anger, and loss, and suffering ; but that dares not sac- rifice truth or duty, or make the fear of God to vail to the fear of man. And, if we derive our views of this grace from the apostle of the Gentiles, or from his Lord and Master, it will seem that true meekness may coexist with the utterance of sharp reproofs, and may })our forth the most lofty and indignant denuncia- tion. The same Paul, who among inexperienced dis- 142 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. ciples was forbearing, and as he describes it, showed himself " gentle, even as a nurse,"* could, in other scenes, take the tone of injured innocence and insulted majesty, and bid the Philippian magistrates come and release him, and resolutely appeal to Caesar, where his own rights, — those of a despised apostle, — were about to be remorselessly crushed between the two mill-stones of an intriguing Jewish priesthood on the one hand, and of a Roman praetor's love of popularity on the other. And when duty required it, he could denounce Ely mas, and resist a fellow-apostle, Peter, though that honored man had been in the Lord before him. He left it in charge to christian ministers, on the one hand, that they must not, as the servants of the Lord, strive, and yet on the other, those who sin these pas- tors must rebuke, before all ; and reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all authority. In his Master's example, the meekness that hid not its face, as a victim, from shame and from spitting, was yet blended with the authority and fearless truthfulness that branded Herod as a " fox," and Judas as a " son of perdition," and the Pharisees as whited sepulchres, and a generation of vi- pers ; whilst two of his parables painted them as fraud- ulent and remorseless husbandmen, that had murdered the heir to seize the heritage of which they were justly but the renters. In the temple he wielded the scourge against those who had made that sacred ed- ifice a den of thieves, and blasted the fig-tree, as an acted parable of warning to fruitless pretensions in religion. Follow Him throughout His career, from his * 1 Thess. ii. 1. PATIENCE. 143 first to his second Advent. As a Lamb he bleeds and is passive, in the atonement, under the wrath due to our sins. But wait for the Second Advent ; — and then, as Prophecy paints the scene, nations and their kings quail before the wrath of the Lamb, come the second time " without sin, unto salvation^' and unto judgment. Now some, in their portraitures of chris- tian gentleness, forget all this. They would wrap up and bind close, in that soft, lamb-like fleece of an un- complaining gentleness, both the rod of apostleship with which Paul proposed to visit the erring Christians of Corinth, — and the sword of the magistrate, God's min- ister waiting on his appointed work of restraint and retribution ; and going yet farther, they would dis- card, as obsolete, or unreal, the thunder-bolts of the avenging Grod. More tender than is the tenderness of Jehovah himself, and in their mercy unmerciful to the letter and spirit of Scripture, they would (savage in their mistaken defence of mercy) throttle and strangle, in the gripe of their rude criticism, the worm that shall never die. They would let in an ocean of false sympathy and false exegesis, that should extin- guish the unquenchable fires of the pit. " God is not slack," says an apostle, " as some men count slack- ness." But these reasoners confound patience with slackness, and leave to the Monarch of the universe the character of the Drone Kings of early French his- tory ; as if He were a mere Do-nought, too slow, in- different, and feeble to awe by his frown, or repress by his justice, the transgressors and troublers of his Uni- versal Dominion 144 REMGIOUS PROGRESS. II. "What, then, is Christian Patience? We un- ^ierstand by it, "A calm endurance of evil for God's sake." Now, evil is both physical and moral. Phys- ical evil, coming either by G-od's appointment or by man's act, is that falling especially on the body. Moral evil is that occurring by God's permission, and affects chiefly the soul. Physical evil includes pain, want, disease, and death: moral, errors, sorrows of soul, and wickedness, in all its varying shades, and in all its hideous shapes. Now, some evil may thus be occasioned directly by the act of God, and other evil may be merely the act of wicked and unreason- able men, only permitted and overruled by God. Far as the moral evil is an error affecting general happi- ness, or a wickedness perilling the individual soul, true piety may sternly denounce the wrong, whilst it bears patiently the personal suffering which that wrong occasions. Taken in this largest sense, patience includes the grace of meekness, from which however, in other portions of Scripture, it is distinguished. Meekness is the quiet endurance of wrong from man, and Patience (when thus considered apart from meek- ness) is the endurance of woe appointed of God. Moses was the brightest example of one grace, in the Scripture, which pronounced him the meekest of men, because of his great serenity under the many contra- dictions, that he endured from the perverseness of the chosen tribes. Job, in his unequalled afflictions from God, and in his unmurmuring submission to them, at least in their first stages, is called the brightest ex- hibition of the other — the most patient of mere men. PATIENCE. 145 But in our text, we suppose the word patience to in- (ilude both meekness and patience strictly so called. It is the quiet endurance of evil for God's sake. That it is endured, implies that the evil is not self- invented and self-inflicted. The self-torturing Flagel- lants, who went through Catholic Europe in the mid- dle ages, rending their flesh with scourges, were not Christian penitents ; for it might be asked of them in Christ's name, " Who hath required this at ^our hands ?" Or if the physical evil be the effect of our own utter neglect, the passive endurance of it is not sufficient to make the sufferer a patient Christian, in the truest sense of those terms. The cottager, quietly bearing the showers that beat upon him through the rents of a hovel, which his own slothfulness has left to decay and ruin, is deserving of censure quite as much as of commiseration ; and the husbandman, gentle and unrepining under the pressure of a famine which his own shiftlessness has produced, is a kindred instance of sluggishness rather than saintliness. Such sorrows, so incurred, are borne, it is to be feared, for sloth's sake, rather than for God's sake. Christian prudence requires the patient and confiding disciple, whilst submitting to inevitable evil as God's appoii t- ment, yet not to invite or endure causelessly what may honorably and uprightly be avoided. It bids the persecuted of one city to flee to another city. It does not authorize escape, or peace, as purchased by col- lusion with godless errors or by submission to any im- pious laws of a human magistracy ; and here christian patience must obey God, rather than man, and shews 7 146 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. itself, not by obeying the wrong law, and thus evading the penalty, but by breaking the law to obey God, and then braving for man's sake the penalty of con- fiscation, incarceration and death, if exile cannot re- lease from it. * Against moral evil it must bear patiently its bold protest ; but the want of immediate effect to that pro- test, and the presence of that evil in the world, and its apparent and temporary triumph, must not shake the Christian's patient reliance on the wisdom and jus- tice of the Divine Providence. For Christian patience is essentially hopeful. It must quietly wait for the salvation of God. The New Testament presents, therefore, hope and patience, as closely entwined. So is it also, in the New Testament represented as bound up with christian diligence, or industry. The Bible tells us of "patient continuance in well-doing," and sends the pleader of the promises and the keeper of God's precepts to learn of the husbandman, who, hav- ing sown the seed, must have long patience for the harvest. Christian patience, then, it will be seen, in- cludes meekness under injury, submission to adver- sity, hopefulness in seasons of darkness, perseverance amid difficulties, and constancy in times of sore trial. It requires a subjugation of our native fretfulness, re- vengefulness, distrust, and rashness. It shows us heroism as possible, not only for the martyr, grappling, as a doomed man, with some great error or wrong ; but also amid the petty annoyances and daily discom- forts of the workshop and the exchange, the mother's nursery and the teacher's school-room. It shows like PAT FENCE. 147 conflicts, here too, possible, and a like crown, here too, attainable. Superior strength in the brute race is generally attended with superior gentleness ; the ox and the elephant are less quarrelsome than the cur and the scorpion : and Christians are to show in like manner, the superior might of their souls and of their creed, by longer endurance. III. We have seen its needfulness to fill out chris- tian temperance. Let us observe, now, its relations to other graces of the religious character. All those graces which in our text are made to precede it, — faith, virtue, and knowledge, — are, together with tem- perance, made more or less to depend upon it ; and so is it also with the graces, which in the apostle's enu- meration follow it, — godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity. Ours is a day of religious effort, for reform at home, and evangelization abroad. Look at the need of patience to preserve the spirit of the laborers in work- ing order, and to render their endeavors successful. Mackintosh praises Wilberforce as being a model re- former, because of his immoveable sweetness, as well as his inflexible persistency. But many good men assay, without this patient sweetness, to reform others by the virtual tyranny of harsh and unreasoning criminations. They resort to moral coercion, where they should use moral suasion. There are indeed social reforms which, besides mere moral persuasion, may, at the fitting time, invoke the aid of the statute and the penalty against the troublers of the common- wealth. But each method, the gentler and the sterner, 148 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. is beautiful in its fitting season. In a republic, laws must, to be abiding, have more or less a basis in the precedent efficacy of moral argument and appeal in informing and arousing the public conscience, and in creating a sound public opinion. And as the farmer plucks not the half-grown and acid fruit, but waits for time, and the sun-beam and the rain-drop, to round and mellow and ripen it ; — nor puts his sickle into the field where the stalks are yet green, and the ears moist and unfilled, so must social reform patiently adjust its measures and bide its time, and do everything in its own order. It must prepare the soil and scatter the seed ; and, then, wait and pray for sun and shower, ere it raises the sickle, much less lifts the flail. It is so in individual amendment, or the conversion of the solitary inquirer and penitent. When Scott, the com- mentator, was groping his sincere and prayerful way from the dread errors of Socinianism, towards those evangelical views, of which he was in later life so distinguished an ornament and champion, John New- ton avoided, in the early stages of the correspondence opened between them, the controversy which the learner would fain have invited. It was not the time. He waited — was patient and hopeful, and gentle, — and Scott, one day to be the commentator, was born into the church of Christ, a fellow-witness for the great truths that Newton loved. It is so in moral and political reform, as dealing with large masses of men. France in her first Revolution began, too early and precipitately, the propagandism of Democracy among nations who were as yet unfit for it. The patriots of PATIENCE. 149 OUT own country, have they never hoped too soon an J hoped too much for other lands, when as yet the peo- ple of those countries had not the moral culture and religious principle, that should precede and sustain free institutions ? The wise reformer is a patient man. And not only does he allot the required time, and await the natural order of the changes which he desires ; but he estimates soberly the relative value of the alterations which he is seeking. He would not hazard political convulsions, involving certain evil and uncertain good, for the removal of lighter and tolerable evils, nor risk the setting all the forests of a mountain- range on fire, in the simple endeavor to scorch one poor snake in his den. 2. Again, as a preservative of faith and knowledge and godliness, patience is indispensable. It was said by the illustrious philosopher Newton, that, if he had accomplished anything in science, it had been " by dint of patient thought." The believer in Scripture, who would feed, from its full pages, his faith and knowledge and piety into richer development and greater vigor, must be patient in searching — patient in pondering and comparing, — and patient in praying over those sacred lines. Injury has at times been done, and that by truly good men, to the honor of the Bible, by attaching the precipitate interpretations, which their over-hot and impatient haste had made, to the pages of unfulfilled prophecy. They have mis- reckoned the calendar of the Divine dispensations, and, then, because He did not appear at the unwarrant- ed appointment which they in their temerity had 150 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. undertaken to make for Him, some at least of tHeir precipitate and impatient disciples have, on the fail- ure of the expected era to dawn when it had been predicted, renounced impatiently the verity of the records thus impatiently interpreted ; and the head- long interpreter became thus the sudden convert to infidelity. So, the followers of Sweden borg, weary of awaiting, with due and Christian patience, the last judgment, and the general resurrection, as the Scrip- ture promises them, have professed to find in the poor and petty incident of their leader's illumination, in a certain year of the last century, the accomplishment of all these vast and glorious predictions. The world was judged when the Swedish noble received his spiritual enlightening. Tired of waiting till the ful- ness of God's times permitted them to hear along the heavens the wheels of His descending chariot, and to catch the gleam of His approaching throne, they have set themselves down, in their unscriptural impatience, to belittle and antedate and precipitate the great Fact on which, as on a hinge, revolves all History, — ^the last audit of the race before its Maker and Judge. A similar spirit of impatience leads others to set themselves prematurely to the task of reconciling the statements of Scripture with each new fashion in Natural Science. Much was said but recently of As- tronomy and its galaxies, and the star-dust, out of which new worlds were even now in process of crea- tion. Some would, perhaps, among Scripture inter- preters, have set themselves down on this assumed fact to hew Revelation into harmony with it, alarmed PATIENCE. 151 lest the 0-ospel should not keep itself abreast ol the last philosophical hypothesis. But a little patience has dispersed the fancied fact. It proves a mere figment, and the Rosse telescope has saved impatient exegetes from the necessity of volunteering, as some perhaps would soon have done, to serve on the forlorn hope of finding star-dust in the Old or New Testament. So Phrenology, a few years since, in the hands of some of its champions, was held to have disproved the Scrip- tural doctrines of Human Accountability and Deprav- ity. A man was not answerable for the shape of his skull, or the character, morally, of his soul. In short, new and yet immature sciences, or transient theories, are perpetually assailing the Scriptures and the pulpit, because the pulpit and the Scriptures do not lend themselves as advertising journals to the newest fan- tasy, and because they will believe, in their stolid ig- norance, that Grod understood the nature of the race and the history of the world which He himself had made. Yet each score of years almost a fresh assault is made on the verity of Scripture, by some critic or sciolist, who cries out, to use the image recently em- ployed by a French statesman, that he is encountering the persecutions of a Galileo, when in fact he is only attempting to repeat the frenzy of an Erostratus.* Let Science become only mature, and modest in its maturity, and it will be found, as it has eventually in ages past been evermore found, that none of its true discoveries have shaken, by one hair-breadth, the state- ments of this volume. Let Science delve, it will not * M. Thiers in the Constit. Assembly. 152 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. jar the integrity of our foundations ; let it soar, it can- not go past the visions of Prophecy, and the state- ments of the Griver and God of Prophecy. It is an error, to sit down at the call of every apprentice-sci- ence, yet raw, and imperfect, and impertinent, to rec- oncile Revelation to it, before the science has become reconciled to, and consistent with itself. 3. Again, virtue, and godliness, and charity, — all practical christian excellencies, need patience for their development. " Confidence," said a British statesman, " is a plant of slow growth." True, consistent piety is also such, and needs long and meek study of God's providence and Word to refine and perfect it. " Pa- tient continuance in well-doing," is urged by the apos- tle. In the shape of perseverance, it is a most im- portant element in national and individual character. How much is possible to this, the missionary history of Carey and Eliot may show. We see the latter in his old age reducing to letters a barbarian language, before unwritten, and after having mastered its seem- ingly intractaWe elements, at the close of his Indian Grammar writing, " Prayer and pains through faith in Jesus Christ, can do anything." In nations we see how much the Celtic races have suifered, compared with the Teutonic, from their lack of persevering and patient energy in active enterprise. In the patient persistence in matters of sentiment and of hereditary custom, they are indeed not defective, but eminent. In active effort, however, those of the other race have outrun them, by more resolute perseverance in follow- ing up the course of exertion, upon which they have PATIENCE. 153 onco entered. Carey said, modestly, in his old age, when his grammars and versions of Holy Scripture were almost a library in themselves, " I can do one thing — T can phd." Men, families, nations, have pined and dwindled because they could not plod. They were ardent, impulsive, and adventurous, but lacked the persisting patience that mocks at difhculty, and that, under God, commands success. A want of patience, in the slow, toilsome study of truth, prefer- ring the discovery and announcement of mere novelty, as a more compendious road to fame, has been the secret origin of many of the extravagancies of Ger- man Neology. And, in the mart, as in the schools, " a making haste to be rich," the impatience that spurns slow gains, and sneers at plodding industry, has kindled in individuals, and in whole communities, a rage for speculation, that, like some fiery fever, has ruinously exhausted, whilst it most fiercely excited its victim. And even thus is it, in the highest interests of the Christian. In the soul's struggle heavenward we do well to recollect that he " who endureth to the end" shall be saved, and that by faith and patience we in- herit the promises. IV. More briefly, let us now consider the motives that should persuade us to be patient, as Christians. Far as patience inclules meekness under wrongs of our fellow-men, we must forgive, or we may not hope ourselves before God to be forgiven. Christ laid the axe where no earthly reformer would have dared to place it, at the root of revengefulness. The christian law of morals gropes in the heart of every petitioner, 7* 154 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. oft as lie prays, and it bids him pray without ceasing. We arc warned again, that in yielding to impatience and anger, we cease to possess our own souls ; and as is darkly intimated, Satan takes hold of the deserted rudder and wields the ungoverned helm, and drives before him the infuriated and imbruted man. Cain, had he but curbed his impatient envy, need not have bequeathed his name and warning to all times, as the first murderer and fratricide ; and Christ told us that he who hates his brother in his heart is already, in the germ and e'-'once, a murderer ; — the first act of Cain's sin is begun within him. Far, again, as patience in- cludes submission to the Divine appointments, let us remark, that our trials are lessened by serene meek- ness and resignation. God lightens and removes them more early, and they do not so deeply wound and em- poison the soul. But he who frets and fights against God, in the language of ancient prophecy, like a bul- lock unaccustomed to the yoke, drives the deeper into his own flesh the goad against which he vainly kicks. We are to remember, too, the necessity of this grace to success and influence with our fellow-men. It is the patient perseverance in well-doing that builds up consistency, and influence, and weight of character. We are, again, all to remember our own unworthiness before God, and our liability to pay ten thousand talents, fo» which infinite and endless torments would be no sufficient amends ; ere, in our fretfulness, we chide man harshly, or murmur bitterly against our God and His Providence. Nor is it unfitting, that we remem- ber how much of mercy and kindness there is in PATIENCE. 155 God's allotments ; — and how, by the general presence of afTliction, God has provided, in every sphere, the most obscure and secluded even, a scene where He may be glorified, and where the power of His religion and grace may be illustrated ; — and how, out of such trials meekly borne. He weaves the confessor's wreath, and the martyr's crown, and makes the blood of his slain servants the seed of his Church, whilst the wrath of man is forced to praise Him, and the re- mainder of wrath is restrained. Are we tempted to impatience and anger with some erring and injurious fellow-mortal ? Let us test the old Puritan dilemma in such a case. The offender is a Christian, or a child of Hell. If already, or yet to become, the first, we shall in Heaven not remember with pleasure, re- vengeful and retaliatory wrongs against one of our brethren and of Christ's people. If an enemy of God, and an heir of His wrath, he is soon to endure more than man can inflict, and the bar to which he is rush- ing is one at which strict Justice and unforgetting Memory preside. Let us dread snatching into our hands the sceptre of Him who has said, " Vengeance is MINE," and then pronouncing rash and false judg- ment, rooting up the wheat with the tares, and mak- ing sad the heart of the righteous, whom God has not made sad. The question of the Judge of all the earth to the over-fretted patriarch, has much of dread significance : " Wilt thou also disannul my judgment ? Wilt thou condemn me that thou may est be right- ous ?"* Much of our impatience is a virtual disan- * Job xl. 8. 156 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. nulling of God's decisions, and a distinct intimation that his forbearance is wanting in righteousness. Y. "We see why patience is to be desired, but how is it to be attained ? "We answer, by the Scriptures, — and prayer, — and communion with Christ. — By the study of Scripture. We see there glorious examples and inspiriting promises, and the most solemn warnings, and the most apposite models and precepts. We see the kind and gracious end of the Lord in the trials of Job ; and how it was not in vain, that David bore the railings of Shimei ; and that Heze- kiah spread before the Lord the letter of Rabshakeh, the spiteful and blasphemous emissary of the Grentile king. We see in Moses, forbidden to enter Canaan, the effects of a rash word upon a career otherwise lustrous with its eminent meekness ; and are warned by an apostle how great a matter a little fire kindleth, and how untameable an evil is the tongue when once set on fire of hell. Scripture is thus a gallery, rich with the most animating portraitures and vivid battle- pieces of those who by faith wrestled and conquered. It is an armory all hung with the shields of the promises, that in the hands of earlier combatants foiled every arrow, and quenched the burning dart, and sent Satan back frustrated and shamed and spoiled of his prey. — Let us pray. Does the spirit in us lust to envy ? And would envy swell into wrath, or blasphemy, or murder? The apostle's reply is, "He," our Grod, " giveth more grace." And he gives it in answer to prayer. The apostles, when bidden by their Lord PATIENCE. 157 often to forgive the offending and injurious, prayed, " Lord, increase our faith." Repeat the petition. For its teacher yet lives to be its answerer. Seek also a just and lively sense of your own provocations and inconsistencies ; and sin, thus felt as a burden before Grod, will make the burdens imposed by the sins of others and your own adversity, to seem of less weight and grievousness in their pressure upon you. — Above all, be in communion, much and habitually, with Christ, You see your Saviour in Gethsemane unwilling to decline the cup which the Father had appointed Him. You hear on the cross his dying breath expended in intercession for his murderers. As even a Rousseau in his infidelity looked on that scene, and contrasted it with the death of Socrates, he saw in the departing moments of Jesus " the death of a Grod." Stephen saw it more perfectly and nearly, and it was to him a mantle of conformity, and he prayed like his Lord for those who wrought his own death. The mantle of Elijah passed long since from the earth. But the mantle of Jesus yet floats over each praying discigle. "Win it and wear it. For his sake and for the honor and love of his Spirit, be meelc and lowly, and patient, much-enduring and long-forbearing, not easily pro- voked, and avenging not yourselves. Are you zealous for Christ's house ? Let your zeal be tempered with patience. Else like Uzzah, you may profane the ark you would steady by too rash a hand. Some, in their impatient and frenzied zeal, would seem to count it a sacred duty, not only to jostle but to overturn that coffer of the divine testimony, and to 158 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, drive and goad even to madness, the oxen that draw the sacred vehicle. If the law of forgiveness of injuries be inwrought by Christ's command into every Christian prayer, im- plicitly or expressly, as a necessary condition to its success ; — if patience be thus scriptural and blessed, having the sanction of Divine precept and Divine example ; — what shall be said of the law of honor, though prevalent in lands nominally Christian ? Do not its votaries, though calling themselves men of honor, herein " glory in their shame" ? In the duel, that baptism of blood, an incensed Honor professes to lave away its stains, petty or grave, in the gore of a brother. But shall God hold guiltless those, who by resorting to this rude and bloody vengeance virtually condemn as insufficient and unsatisfactory the law of the land as not reaching or remedying their case, and the law of G-od, as not entitled to stay their murderous hand ? What shall be thought of the prospects at the Judgment day, of the man who virtually says; My reputation is worth more than the life of my neighbor ? God guards that life with His dread sanctions. Society and human law hedge it round with all securities. But from me and my just rage, and the avenging of my quarrel, nor God nor man shall shield that forfeited life — the object of my just reprisals. Has that man a safe conscience, who goes into the field intending to be a suicide or a murderer, and perhaps to unite both crimes in the one rencontre? Is he the friend of Order and Freedom and Virtue who puts his endorse- ment upon the reputation and practice of professed PATIENCE. 159 duellists — men who, from steadiness of nerve and re- morseless assiduity in practice, have become dexterous in the massacre of their fellow, and in consequence are comparatively unpunished in their profligacy and fraud and falsehood? Every duellist, however pro- voked, and though but for a single hrar entering the field, or even but sending a challenge to invite mortal combat and which in fact ends without blood-shedding, yet aids to sustain this guilty class of professed assas- sins, and to hold back from their Cain-like heads the storm of general contempt and indignation, that would else pierce even their shamelessness and compel their exile into some land of Nod, like the refuge of the first murderer, where their presence would be less a nui- sanc<^/ and a curse to society. Above all, may any man trifle with the lives and earthly prospects, and perhaps the spiritual destinies, of the widow and orphans whom his rash, brief rage is to sentence to years of bereavement, and want and temptation ? How will he encounter the eye of that Judge who hath declared that no murderer hath eternal life ? The sinner who denies thus forbearance to his fellow, may expect from a just God that judgment without mercy of which his own conduct is an example. To the laborer and the sufferer, to the student of prophecy and the perplexed investigator of G-od's mysterious dispensations in Providence ; to the Chris- tian offering prayer the answer of which seems long delayed ; to the youth aiming at high usefulness, and the saint groaning after higher holiness ; the precept is alike applicable and important; "In your patience possess ye your souls." LECTURE YIL GODLINESS. « AND TO PATIENCE, GODLINESS." 2 Peter, i. 6. It was a beautiful saying of one of the old Fathers, when, addressing himself to God, he exclaims : " Thou hast formed man, thy creature, for Thee, and he can- not be at rest until he have come again unto Thee." True piety, by which we mean conformity to God, and communion with God, is indispensable to man's hap- piness, and it is, too, as inseparably necessary to man's highest virtue. We see those who mistake here, and overlook this great essential principle of virtue. They imagine, that a trampling down of low and sensual appetites, and a checking of fierce and vengeful passions : — a self-control, that shall give the man dominion over the violent and malevolent aifections of his nature, on the one side, and over the luxurious and self-indulgent ap- petencies of his nature on the other side ; — a temper- ance and a patience, that render him amiable, tolerant to others, and himself not intolerable, in human soci- ety, must, in their union, constitute him a finished paragon of moral excellence. If a man have, then, GODLINESS. 161 attained these, or, in other words, have achieved the temperance and the patience, which precede the grace enjoined in our text, these moraUsts imagine their dis- ciple to stand, thus temperate, and thus patient, — self-controlled, and self-possessed, on the pinnacle of human perfection, where further advance in goodness is well nigh impossible. But, as Augustine exclaims, man, formed for his Maker, needs the favor, and the society, and the moral image of that Maker,, to be truly blest or truly good. He must add '■'■godliness ;''^ or else the first want of his being is left ungratified, and the first law of his creation is rudely violated. .Framed at first in the likeness, spiritually, of his God, he has, by the fall, lost it, yet like a crystal vase shattered into fragments that retain no more the sym- metry of its original form, and of which the pristine lustre is obscured and bemired by the slough into which it has dashed ; but of which the splinters may yet glitter, and the very shreds yet witness of a har- mony and proportion now destroyed : — so, there are in man's wishes and aspirations, in his dim hopes, and in his haunting fears, traces of what he was, and omens of what he needs yet again to become. To use the language of Leighton : " The mind of man retains a sort of shadow,— confused notions, as it were, of the good which it has lost, seeds of its kindred skjj.''^* The temple, in its ruins, bears yet traces of the divine Architect, and of the plan on which that Architect wrought. A class of ancient philosophers, some of whose disciples Paul met at Athens, the Stoics, taught * Praelect. ii. p. 9, ed. Scholefield. Quoted in Knox's Remjuns, i. p. 325, 162 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. men to aim at moral perfection, in the entire subjuga- tion of the passions. This would not be possible, were it desirable ; — for, our Creator implanted them, and thoy are ineradicable. It would not be desirable, were it possible ; for, that Creator, good and wise, im- planted them for ends, like Himself, both wise and good. It would be as safe, that we should attempt to dispense with the bodily organization, — and to see without the eye, or to hear without the ear. God sees and hears without such organs as ours. But man must see and hear by them, fi'om the law which his Framer imposed upon him at his first creation. A stoical indifference would ill qualify man for the place which his Grod assigned., him, as lord of the meaner orders of being. Desti- tute of all passions and likings, he would be a mere King Log, odious, and useless, and contemptible. Or, the endeavor to extirpate passion might, as in the case of some of the Stoics it did, teach man a posi- tive ungodliness. Some of these men, in their fancied superiority to all change and woe, believed themselves to be equal or superior to their gods. Some of the ascetic and mystic writers, in later and christian ages, have fallen insensibly into a similar error. They would, — instead of teaching man, by the wise and godly con- trol of the senses, to secure knowledge, and goodness, and happiness, and usefulness, — teach him to cancel and extirpate those senses. As if these steeds, which God himself has provided and yoked to the human soul, as its motive power, in its present state of exist- ence, ought to houghed, rather than harnessed. It is Boodhist, rather than Christian theology, which GODLINESS. 163 teaches men to look for excellence, in this moral NiGCAN, this state of dozing and misty apathy. It would leave the aspirant after goodness, but to be like Gallio, — when Christ's apostles were before him, and their life at stake, — in stately indiflference, " caring for none of these fhing-s.^^ Or, it would render its disci- ples, like Nabal, stunned into senselessness, " when his heart died within him, and he became as a stone." True virtue is not insensible ; and true patience is not apathetic ; but, on the contrary, full of. all feeling, though this, feeling may be as quiet as it is strong. And true godliness teaches not the renunciation, but the consecration of our aflfections to Grod's service and glory, like an Isaac, dedicated indeed on the altar, but not slaughtered there. I. What, then, is the godliness here commended ? Looking, then, to the sense of the term here employed in the Greek original, it is piety or the fear of God, — that veneration of the Most High, which leads to homage and obedience. Or, if we look to the ele- ments of the English word, which our translators have here employed, and most happily, to render it, it is godlikeness : a resemblance to, and sympathy with Him, the Greatest, Purest, and Best of Beings. As we have before seen, the apostasy of Eden has shat- tered, and defaced, and obscured this likeness and portraiture of ^haddai within the soul. It must be restored : the end of Religion is such restoration. As the moral quality in His own nature, on which God, in His appeals to us, ever lays the chiefest stress, is His Infinite Purity and Goodness, and he delights to 164 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. proclaim, as his title, that He is " The Holy One of Israel," our chiefest aim should be a renewal unto holiness. It is one of the affecting proofs of our estrangement from Him, and from all right views of Him, that when, even in christian lands, we speak admiringly of a fellow-man as the Godlike, we mean to ascribe to that fellow-mortal, rather majesty of carriage or splendor and power of intellect, than purity or goodness of soul. "While the term saint, — the word which, borrowed from the Roman tongue, our version of the New Testament employs to describe the men, who as Christians are partakers, in some measure, of evangelical holiness, — has been used in christian Britain and in our own country, by many who profess to believe this gospel, only to express intensest con- tempt for those to whom they apply it ; as if the en- deavor to become holy Christians, were itself proof of sanctimonious hypocrisy, and as though all godliness must be, and is, on the part of man, but hollow pre- tence, — a mask, the very use of which betokens de- ceit and guilt. Yet, the Grod of the Scriptures reveals Himself almost on every page, not as claiming merely loyalty and distant reverence from His people, but as inviting them to near and free access, and installing them into the place of children, and clothing them with a distant resemblance to Himself by virtue of their new and filial communion with Him. Let men, if they choose, deem it impossible, or deride it as fanatical ; — yet, as surely as the Bible is truth, so certain is it that God enjoins it on man to become again the godly, and that without this holi- GODLINESS. 165 nes3 no man shall see the Lord, in the heavenly world. The godliness of our text is, then, communion with God and conformity to Him ; and that conformity is two-fold, and implies not only the imitation of His character, but the acceptance of His testimonies ; not only zeal for holiness, but zeal for truth. If I come to my kingly Father in Heaven, I credit, His histories and accept His statutes ; as well as copy His imitable attributes, and gratefully receive His proffered pardon and fellowship. Faith, indeed, as grasping the truths of God, is in Scripture made the root of the moral graces received from God ; and the holiness or godli- ness of Scripture must therefore proceed from faith, or assent to God's true statements and edicts. On this side, it will be seen, that godliness necessarily is allied to and inclusive of evangelical faith. Godliness, then, has its three sides. It is communion with God, or the society of our Maker is enjoyed in true worship of Him. It is intellectual and spiritual assimilation to Him, in the cordial admission and love of His . truth ; and practical assimilation to Him, in the en- deavor to reflect on the world, dimly and narrowly in- deed, but as we may, the lustre of His graces and some broken, distant beams, at least, of his moral ex- cellencies. To make this possible — to raise the fallen, and re- build the down-trodden and polluted shrine, God him- self has come amongst us. He has, in the person of His Son, assumed human nature, and not only borne our sin, but shown us a perfect pattern of our own nature, as that nature was in Him uplifted and sane- Ififi RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. tified, and made perfect in excellence. Through Christ as tlic Advocate, He invites the communion of prayer, alike from the solitary worshipper in the closet and on the mountain side, and on the death-bed ; and from the assembled family at the social altar ; and from the christian congregation gathered on His Sabbaths into His sanctuaries. Through the Son He gives to us the blessed and renewing influences of the Spirit, changing the unregenerate into a new and holier na- ture ; and restoring the regenerate from their daily lapses, and preserving the life and growth of their chris- tian graces amid all the influences from without, which tend to tarnish, and corrupt, and extinguish that holi- ness. And as godliness is, as we have already seen, three-fold ; Christ, in the influence of His Spirit, re- veals Himself in His three-fold office, as the Way, through whom we have the required communion, — the Truth, in whom we obtain the requisite teach- ings, — and the Life, in whom is given us the new and better existence that quickens our moral death, and makes us alive unto God, and conformed to Him. Hence, when the apostle John, who had leaned on Christ's bosom, describes the divine life of godliness, he sums it up in the knowledge of Christ. " We are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is THE True Gtod and eternal life."* Such is godliness — communion with our G-od, con- formity in Practical Obedience, and conformity in Spiritual Character and Intellectual Belief to God ; and all these freely and only attainable in the knowl- * 1 John, V. 20. GODLINESS. 167 edge of one Christ, — the one Bringcr and exhaustless Fountain of all grace. But when, at the close of his ftrst epistle, the beloved disciple thus grouped all the constituent principles of godliness around the knowl- edge of Jesus, we see that he followed it by the significant words, which afterwards succeed, and which close the epistle: '■'■Little children, keep yourselves from idols.'''' II. There are foul semblances of godliness, mere idols, that delude many. Let us keep ourselves from them. True godliness is not what some regard it. It is not fantastic and unscriptural revery, for it grasps and conforms to God's revealed truth : and one and the same Spirit, working in the renewed heart, coalesces with its own utterances, preserved on the inspired pages. It is not mere outward ceremonies, and cum- brous rituals. It is a life of assimilation to G-od. It is not mere remote and terrified homage, as of a bondsman, crouched at a great distance from the dread and tremendous throne. It is communion, by " a new and living way," that enters the most holy place, rends the veil of parting, and lifts us from the prison-house into the family and arms of G-od as of a reconciled and adopting Father. 1. It is a mistake, then, to suppose, that mere veneration for some higher existence, however imagi- nary and false our views of this existence, — that such vague veneration is godliness ; that God hears, alike with delight, those who call him Jehovah and receive the Bible, and those who call him Juggernaut and who swear by the Hindoo Shaster. Baal's priests, 168 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. lacerated and slain by the Lord's Elijah, were godly, if such veneration for a higher object were enough to constitute godliness ; and the mothers who flung of old their babes into the fiery arms of Moloch, or who beside the streams of India or the sea-shore of Western Africa have cast, on this blessed Sabbath, their children to the crocodile or the shark, were godly ; if mere awe before an imaginary Grod of their own devising be enough to constitute it. Then, the votary of Tibet, whirling his written prayers around on a wheel, whose every revolution counts in his view for a renewal of the petition, is a devout man and accepted of God. According to this theory, the daughter of Pharaoh who became the queen of Solomon, was alike, a true, and accepted worshipper, when adoring the garlic or the viper in her native Egypt, as when afterwards she had been taught to bow on Jehovah's own chosen mount, within his own shrine. In this vague and unscriptural sense of the term, the Atheistic poet, Shelley, and the Pantheistic philoso- pher, Spinoza, have been called men of piety, because of a spirit of tenderness and awe that was attributed to them. But Atheism, — the ungrateful and irrational dethronement and denial of any God, — is that, to be by any apothecary's art of liberalism made to coalesce with the love and worship of the true God, as forming the same incense of accepted adoration ? As to Pan- theism, it is opposed to piety or true godliness, radically and throughout. True godliness begins in humility and penitence, and is sustained by prayer and adora- tion. But Pantheism begins in Pride. It makes us GODLINESS. 169 ourselves, part and parcel of God. It abjures prayer, for there is no being to need, and none to hear, it. It cannot worship, for all is alike worthy of receiving worship, from the ashes on which Job sate to the God whom his wife bade him curse. It is the most impious and ungodly of all systems, for it makes God the author and doer of all sin, and thus annihilates the eternal distinctions of Right and Wrong. Confounding the Omnipresence and Agency of God together, it makes creatures, unorganized and organized, brute and human, angelic and fiendish, all but efflorescences and parts of the Almighty ; and all action whatever, from Abel's offering of sacrifice to Cain's lifting the fratrici- dal arm, were alike God moving himself, and honoring or murdering Himself. The damsel with the spirit of divination, and the apostle who ejected the demon within her, were, on this scheme, alike inspired. It annihilates Conscience, and Responsibility, and Individuality, Re- pentance, and Temperance, and Patience, and flings around man the sinner, when most sinning, the immuni- ties and honors and rights of Divinity. It is an awful proof of the deep and damning hatred of the unrenewed heart to Truth and God, that in christian Europe and America after the blaze for nineteen centuries which has illuminated them from the heights of Calvary, the doc- trine that Braminism, with its priestly despotism, its foul impurity, and its most degrading idolatry, has been teaching for more than twenty centuries in India, should be transporting itself into the lands long blesseii with the light of the Cross, there to be hailed as a higher philosophy and a deeper piety. It is as it 8 170 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Satan, desperate and maddened with the wounds of missionary zeal on his ancient empire in the East, were determined to revive in the universities of Europe and America what had become too offensive and ridiculous to find longer universal credence among the besotted Hindoos, or the dozing Sufis of Persia. And upon the young in their indiscriminate admiration of writers, British or American, who have caught from Grerman philosophy more or less of this foul taint, it may have a fatal influence. To credit it, in the face of its moral fruits as India shows them, and in com- parison with the gospel and Saviour whom it would banish from amongst us, is as if the Hebrews had turned from the mightier miracles and the heavenly attestations of Moses their emancipator, to the juggleries of their old taskmasters, Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of the land where their fathers had long witnessed only oppression and woe, — the land, whose gods the God of their fathers had humbled and foiled, amid their own proudest monuments, and in their own most sacred shrines. 2. It is a mistake, again, to look, as some seem now disposed to do, upon the austerities and ceremonies of a superstitious and apostate church, the Church of Rome, as the fairest exhibition of godliness. True piety has been found there of old, and may yet be found in many of the adherents of that anti-christian commu- nion. But the artistic piety of some, — who would make a sentimental admiration of the ancient and imposing, in music, and art, and architecture, to be identical with religious feeling, — will not be found to meet GODLINESS, 171 long the exigencies of life, and the arts of the tempter ; nor does it at all consider the claims of the Scriptures respecting true and acceptable devotion. Traditions for Grod's truths ; — external ceremonies, for an inward and spiritual experience ; — penance for penitence ; — human merits, instead of Christ the Lord our Righte- ousness ; — and sacraments, as the vehicle, made a suf- ficient substitute for, or infallible warrant of, the Di- vine Spirit ; — present a series of substitutions, against which the word of God has- already warned us, and most significantly protested. 3. Yet another school to be found in that church, but with tendencies quite opposite to those of the class just described, are the Mystics. They are not met exclusively in the Roman communion. There have been among them men eminently spiritual and of deep piety. But the system, as such, is dangerous and unscriptural. It teaches men to judge falsely both of sin and of grace. Of sin, it takes false and inade- quate views, representing it to consist too much in the existence and action of the passions, as if the extir- pation or quiescence of these were true virtue ; and confounding self-love with selfishness, it teaches a sort of abnegation which Revelation has not required, and which our Creator has not^ made possible. Of grace, it teaches us to expect the bestowal, rather in quiet contemplation than in the active study and meditation of G-od's truth, and in energetic obedience to God's commands. And its chiefcst sin is, that it often ob- scures the cross of Christ, by turning the eyes of the man who would attain godliness to his own spirit and 172 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. God's Spirit, first, rather than to the Atonement, and Righteousness, and Advocacy of Christ as the price and channel of the Spirit's influences. In the writings of Fenelon, and Madame Guion, excellent as the saintly authors were, may, we think, be found traces of these false views as to what godliness is, and as to the mode in which it is to be obtained and cherished. True re- ligion is spiritual, and true worship is eminently, as an old scholar described it, " the flight of one alone to the Only One ;" — the soul in its loneliness betaking itself, apart from its fellows, to God, as the one and the sufficing Refuge. But that Refuge, Christ is, and God only as seen in Christ. He is the way along which that flight must travel, and none cometh to the Father but by Him, the Son. The true Spirit wit- nesses of Him. In some offshoots of the Quietist and Mystic school, the Holy Spirit has also lost his honors, as well as the Saviour, being confounded with the unaided reason of man. III. [n what mode, then, may we safely and suc- cessfully attain the godliness, which the apostle here enjoins ? Far, then, as it is a life, God must give it. Far as it is a truth, He in his Scriptures, and by the Spirit of His Son, must teach ; it and far as it is a communion, it must be sought in the one way, Christ, " — the king's highway of holiness," as the good Cennick, the coadjutor first of "Whitfield, and afterwards the convert of Moravianism, in his hymn describes it. To be godly we must be with (■rod, and he is approached through Christ and by GODLINESS. 173 prayer. Daily, and earnest, and effectual supplication is necessary. This mast, again, seek God's teachings in the study of His revealed Truth. Here he has mani- fested Himself, his purposes, and character ; and this, his book, he delights to honor, and to transcribe afresh into the experience and hearts of his devout people. Hidden in the heart, it becomes guidance, and impulse, and gladness, along our intricate and varied pathway. But the volume teaches us, as another help to seek the society of God's people, that we may be profited by their vigilance, and sympathy, and experience. In the sanctuary, and in other and occasional interviews, the friendship and converse of these, " the excellent of the earth," minister to the truly devout, some of his richest enjoyments. Yet even their society and counsel can- not replace the visits of his solitary spirit to the mercy- seat of His Father ; nor the visits of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, the Messenger of the Father and the Son, to his waiting soul. Thus maintaining a double communion with God on high, and with the people and with the book of God here below, the disciple walks, what is to the world, a hidden path ; and the root of his principles is continually enriched with the river that maketh glad the city of God. The fruits are visible. The life that' produces them is invisible and divine, hidden with Christ, in God. But, in addition to the society of God's saints, yet remaining and warring on the earth, a man, in their writings, and in the memorials of them preserved in religious biography, may maintain a delightful and edifying association with those who have gone before 174 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. him. The heart of David, and of Paul, yet sends a glow and pulse to his heart, in these remote times, from the pages that preserve their experience. He takes counsel with Augustine and Bunyan, as they magnify in their " Confessions" the riches of Grod's for- bearance toward them, and as they tell of the great waters and fearful pits, out of which the " G-race Abounding" of their Father and G-od lifted them. The diary of Brainerd, and Martyn, and Pearce, and Carey, and Payson, and Judson, — each, is profitable to him, and out of their scattered urns, they being dead, like Abel, yet speak. The cloud of witnesses, like a belt of light, girdling and kindling all the heavens, all points in one direction. Of various countries, and ages, and communions, they were one in Christ, — one in their distrust of self, and love of prayer, and study of Scripture — one in spirit, and soon to be gathered home, one in abode and inheritance forever. It is de- lightful to keep up, in this manner, the communion of saints with the departed, and to catch in it a pledge and image of that communion, as it shall be extended, purified, and made perpetual, in the world of light. And it is as profitable, when used in subserviency to the study of Scripture, and with prayer for the Spirit — it is as profitable as it is delightful. The companion of the wise becomes, himself, wise. We catch the sweet contagion of their piety. True godlin3SS, then, it will be seen, requires, at least, that a certain por- tion of our time be spent in solitude. Even religious occupation may usurp on the right of the closet. We may forget, in the care of the vineyard of others, the GODLINESS. 175 due tillage of our own fields. But, to be happy, to be long or widely useful, to foil the tempter, and to grow in grace, hours must be given to solitary meditation, and to individual and secret prayer. IV. And now, having seen what godliness is ; having dwelt on some of the delusions that are made to stand for it ; and on the manner of its attainment and cul- ture, in its reality ; is it needed, that we further urge ourselves, earnestly and incessantly, to seek it ? Every inducement of interest and duty, of honor and safety, of benevolence to man and piety towards Grod, requires each of us to become the friend and child and follower of the living Grod. 1. Remember that it is the hig-hest style of human nature. The scholar, the sage, the discoverer, and the hero, what are they, before God, to the saint ? He is the hero of the world's noblest conflict, and the dis- coverer and colonist of the better country than all those lands which Earth washes with all her seas, or girdles beneath her brightest skies. Already the charge of angels, he is, one day, to be for evermore their com- panion and fellow-heir. Look in on Bunyan in the dungeon. It is, perhaps, an hour of solitude and sad- ness. He sees, through the grating, the quivering leaf, and the green hedge. They are free to breathe the unfettered air, and to bask beneath the open sky. He is shut up. He sees the herds roaming at their will unconfined, and hears the call of the bird as it soars and sings, and sees perhaps some godless sportsman whom he knows, amongst his scorners and persecutors merry and unquestioned, on his way afield. Equipage? 176 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. roll past. Rank and Beauty and "Wealth and Learn- ing adorn their tenants. Does he envy the quivering leaf, and the air-swept hedge, and the uncaged lark, or begrudge the hunter his sports, or the rich, and gay, and wise, their enjoyment of life ? They have the goods of earth. Some have vegetable life, and the others animal life, and the others intellectual life, but he has spiritual life. In his dungeon he is the Lord's freeman-. In his oppression, and penury, and lowly ignorance, he is visited, and taught, and comforted of God. And in that lonely prisoner, tagging his laces, or thumbing the martyr's sad, glad story, or bowed over his Bible, you have seen the happiest, greatest, wisest, and safest man of them all. What made him such ? His holiness. 2. Holiness is, again, the master-key of the universe. Born to die, you are fated to travel hence. You are but a sojourner here, as all your fathers, before you, were. Earth is not your home. The summons of death comes, and you must go forth. But whither ? Become G-od's charge and child. Be a renewed man by Grod's grace; and you are^ gifted, virtually, with the freedom of the Universe. In traversing our lit- tle narrow earth, there is much gained for the con- venience and ease of the pilgrim, when he has a circulating letter of credit that will secure him funds at any great town which he visits ; and when, by his knowledge of the language, he can converse with the natives of all the lands that he may enter. He has thus a sort of universal pass-key, alike to resources and to intercourse. He is everywhere at home. But GODLINESS. 177 did you ever reflect, that, whilst the knowledge of the schools may be comparatively useless after death, and the lore of this world become but an unavailable burden to the disemljodied spirit, — the knowledge, and love, and likeness of your God furnish a portable wealth, which Death only makes more valuable? Did you never remember that sympathy with Jehovah is the language of the spirit — a celestial dialect, intelligi- ble to all holy intelligences in all worlds ? Go where you may, — be your journey far into the azure depths of space, till our poor planet becomes but a dim spangle on the outermost hem of the robe of Night, you are, if truly godly, nowhere a stranger, for everywhere your Father's sceptre is over you, and your Father's grateful and loving subjects encounter you. Schemers have toiled to invent a universal character, that all people of the earth might use in common. Let there be graved on your soul, regenerate and sanctified, the characters of true holiness, and of Divine sonship ; — and they are recognized by all the hierarchies of heaven ; and angels and principalities and powers welcome and cherish, in you, a fellow-heir and a younger brother of their Sovereign and your Redeemer. Soon the hand of the Destroyer will have torn you from earthly home, and kindred, and friends. But if you are the godly, it is the exchange of a perishable, for an imperishable abode ; of a family^ small, and erring, and mortal, and soon to be scattered, for the general assembly and church of the First-born, a count- less host, and all immortal, and impeccable, and indi- visible. In that great gathering, think you the swarth 8* 178 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Karen, whom Christ's gospel found in the jungle, will be at any loss, because of the difference of their earthly dialects, to greet and hold fraternal intercourse with the American back-woodsman, who knowing but our language, and that but uncouthly, sent by the mis- sionary his sympathies and alms to this the missionary convert ? Think you, the Sandwich Islander, renewed, sanctified and glorified, will be at a loss to address him who was, once, his unknown patron and brother on these western shores ? No. Their prayers, long since though it was, that they were offered, — this, in Karen, and this, in Hawaiian, and that, in English, — blended in the ear of their common Lord, and returned to earth in mutual and intermingling blessings. Shall not, think you, their love and likeness to that same Lord, — a Lord now near, and now visible, — make them capa- ble of full sympathy and of freest intercourse ? 3. Remember, again, that it is the one thing need- ful. Send bread to the famishing, — give sympathy to the oppressed, struggling towards the dawn of free- dom, as its first faint gleam enters their prison-bars, — give healing remedies to those who are sick, and ready to die, — give education to the ignorant. — But, before the school, or political emancipation, or health, or even bread, the tribes. of Adam need true godliness. They need the termination of that estrangement from their Maker, in which began their misery and their sin. They need the restoration of that holy image, lost in the Fall, and recoverable only in the Redemption and the Regeneration. It is your duty to aid in its dis- semination, by being more godly, if you are already GODLINESS. 179 converted ; and, by becoming the servant and child of Jehovah, if you have remained till this hour ungodly. If you neglect this duty much longer, the one season of x)pportunity may close forever, as suddenly, as irre- vocably. If you continue till death thus neglectful, your children, however tenderly nurtured and richly dowered, — your neighbors, however kindly treated, and however much admiring you, — your friends, the most intimate, and the most attached, — dying impeni- tent, and confirmed in their irreligion by your baleful example, will accuse your sin in the day of judgment ; and God will not hold you guiltless of their perdition, as well as your own. Sabbaths, for what did they shine ? The Bible, why did it come to you ? Apos- tles and prophets, and Christ himself, why did they come, and witness, and toil, and die ? That you should be still, stubbornly, and to the last, an ungodly man ? Perhaps, for you, tears and prayers have been offered. The dead have interceded for you. Remem- Jber, if death and the judgment-day finds you G-od's enemy, eternal separation will be between you and these, your pious friends ; and the godly mother herself, who bare you, will cling to her Saviour, and abjure, then, the godless son who scorned that Saviour, too long, and to the last. 4. The last consideration is, that, as godliness is the bond and crown of all the virtues, so it is, on the other hand, the one and sufficient remedy for the sub- jugation and removal of all the vices. Other reforms are of limited application. This is the only radical reform, whose effects branch out over all G-od's uni- ISO RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. verse. Other remedies are but specific, for single maladies. This conversion to God, — the grace of G-od in the gift of his dear Son, — is a catholicon that has healed, and can again heal, to the world's end, de- pravity the most foul and obdurate. " The bloor" of Clirist cleanseth from all sin." Look at the foul, seething caldron of Roman society, in Paul's times. Think of a Tiberius and Caligula and Nero, on the throne of absolute sovereignty, giving tone to all that vast empire. See what inveterate profligacy, and loathsome corruption, made the eternal city, as a very witches' caldron of all detestable and unnatural things. What drug of your moral me- dicaments, — what power in your philosophy, — what strange energy of your civilization, could reach, and cure, and renew such iniquity ? What gods they have chosen; and how have they become like the objects of their idolatry ! With Mercury the thief; — Apollo, the god of music, flaying in jealous revenge an unsuccessful rival in art; — Jupiter the profligate, and Saturn the cannibal ; — and Yenus the harlot, — all in their shrines, what must be — what were, the worship- pers ? But Christ's gospel is cast into that simmering mass, and even, out of that horrible abyss, come forth renewed, and pure, and upright, and true men. Grod is in the gospel, and its fruits are the godliness that is profitable to the life that now is, and that hath promise also of the life to come. The decree and provision of God, for the relief of earth's wickedness and woe, it must go forth " conquering and to conquer," and bear- ing down, before it, all opposition. For you, the only GODLINESS. 181 question is, whether you, in ungrateful and unavailing strife against it, shall be crushed beneath its victorious and irresistible wheels ; or whether, for your own sake, and the sake of your race, and the sake of your God, you consent to accept, and share and speed onward its fated and universal triumph. God make yours the just decision ; and grant it be speedy, as well as just. LECTURE VIIL BROTHERLY KINDNESS. " AND TO GODLINESS, BROTHERLY KINDNESS." 2 Peter, i. 7. This same apostle has, in his earlier epistle,* en- joined it upon the disciples of Christ to " love the brotherhood." And whom has the Saviour taught us to regard as being thus our kindred and our brethren, to be cherished with every feeling of fraternal tender- ness, and to receive from us every office of " brotherly kindness ?" We turn to the gospels, for the needful light in interpreting the epistles. When our Lord was celebrating with his apostles the dread, and yet the much-desired, Passover, the last religious ordinance of his life on earth, he said to them, whilst the imminence of a fearful peril, and the nearness of his own departure, would make every sen- tence that fell from his lips, weighty and memorable with that mourning band : " JL neiv commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another : as I have loved you that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another."! Were he less than a God, would it * 1 Peter, ii. 17. f John, xiii. 34, 35. BROTHERLY KINDNESS. .• 183 be fitting for him, as he looked off into the eternity ho was so soon to enter, to talk of giving commandments, and new commandments ? We answer, it was the same Legislator that had spoken amid the fiery tem- pest, and clad in all the terrors of the Lord on Sinai, that was speaking now, as he was soon to endare on Calvary the terrors he had but dispensed on Sinai. It was a new commandment, because the precept was new in its scope. Glancing over the barriers of tribe, and land, and century, it embraced the believers of all races and countries and dispensations, overriding all the distinctions on which men lay such stress, of rank, and office, and wealth, and culture and hue, and lin- eage, and sect. Far as men loved Him, they were to be loved by all that were His. There was to be neither Jew nor Grentile, Grreek nor Barbarian, bond nor free, in their common Redeemer and Sovereign. It was new in its authorship. The Decalogue on Sinai had been given indeed by this same legislator, but it was mediately, and through his servant Moses, Thrusting aside all intervention, He, the Son, himself, seeing whom men saw the Father also, was now come to speak, face to face, and a§ with open vision, that law of Love, which crowned and solved all the earlier commandments. The new and better dispensation he brought in, as it rested, with regard to its heavenly relations, on better promises, than the old, so it pro- olaimed, as to men's earthly relations and duties, a nobler and better commandment. " Love is the ful- filling of the law," and he who loveth, " worketh no ill to his neighbor." He who, in Christ's spirit, loves his 184 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. neighbor, has the Decalogue, in compend and essence, ah-cady transcribed on his heart. It was, again, novel in its motives. To intimate his full and equal Deity, the Son here makes Love to himself, the motive of holy obedience. Were His services and His love to us less than those of a God, would such motive be aught else than insufficient for man and derogatory to our Father in Heaven ? And it was new, too, in its evidence. It would become, before the world, the badge and public pledge of christian discipleship. And of the early Christians, it is said, that the heathen were wont to exclaim, " See how these Christians love one another." Is there not here at least, something to be lamented and to be amended, in regard to the fraternal sympa- thies of the churches of modern times ? Have not meaner and baser distinctions become the chief evi- dence and proclamation to the world of our christian discipleship ? All who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity ought to come, evidently and of right, within the brotherhood of whom the apostle here speaks. 2. But whilst I am required to cherish and display a brother's warm and ready regard for these, are none but these my brethren ? We answer to this question : The law of christian fraternity, as promulgated in ■Christ's new commandment, was intended to over-ride, but not to obliterate and annul the law of an earlier and inferior brotherhood. If I am to be the kinsman, by spiritual allegiance to a common Saviour, of all who hold Him as their head, I do not therefore forego or escape the law of my natural kinsmanship to those whom Grod has made my brethren in blood. BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 186 Oar Lord himself taught the higher and paramount obligation of the spiritual and celestial brotherhood, when his mother and brethren, by natural tics, would have hindered his ministry, and imputed to Him, the Divine and Infallible, delusion and madness. In com- parison with them, he called rather those his mother and his brethren who heard and obeyed his teachings. But, still, he did not abjure utterly the ties of earthly kindred ; and, when hanging on the Cross, with the weight of a world's iniquities crushing his soul, he had the eye and heart of a son for his human parent, and bequeathed the bereaved mother to the care and home of his best beloved disciple. Spiritual ties, whilst overriding, then, do not annul and efface all natural bonds. And who are our brethren, by these earlier and human ties ? We suppose all who are near to us — those attached and grappled to us by the domestic charities, our kindred in blood, and those connected by the ties of affinity as well as those of consanguin- ity ; — those, again, with whom we are united of our free choice by the bonds of friendship ; and those, lastly, who are our countrymen, one with us by the law of patriotism. When David lamented the fall of Jonathan, his friend, who had found, on the high places of the field, an untimely but glorious death, he cried, " I am distressed for t] e, my brother Jonathan — very pleasant hast thou been unto me."* We sup- .pose that it was not from the ties of affinity, as the hus- band of Michal, the sister of Jonathan, so much as from their close and endeared friendship, that the Psalmist * 2 Sam. I 26. 186 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. held the son of Saul as being thus his " brother." And our Lord himself, in whom no human affection had its error of excess, or error of defect, cherished for one of his apostles a special friendship, and by committing to him as a son, the charge of the mother whose heart had been deeply pierced as well as richly blest, he did treat this his friend, as a brother, in another sense from that in which the other apostles, and all Chris- tians, are in common his brethren. As to the relation- ship of blood and common descent, the grace and the gospel of Jesus did not extinguish these ties and claims. The gospel speaks of the sons of Christ's mother, or of Joseph his reputed father, as being his brethren, when as yet they did not believe on him ; and the Lord pronounced a promise and blessing on those who had forsaken children or brethren for his name's sake, as he uttered also a warning that in the times of persecution yet to burst upon the infant church, brother would, from hatred to Jesus, give up brother to death. Again, in that family of Bethany, all whose members were believers, and were loved by Christ, he spoke still of natural, rather than of spirit- ual kindred, when he said to Martha, one of those sis- ters, " Thy brother shall rise again." And when the apostles are enumerated, the ties of natural brother- hood that bound James to John, and Peter to Andrew, are recognized in the titles given to them, and in the order in which the Holy Grhost arranges the roll of Christ's apostle family. But, beside this recognition of fraternity as consti- tuted by domestic ties, and by the voluntary and self- BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 187 assumed bonds of friendship and sympathy, the New Testament recognized in the impenitent Jews, the brethren of the apostles, because these Jews were their countrymen. Under the Old Testament dispen- sation, this style of appellation had been used. When Moses rebuked and would have parted the two He- brews whom he saw contending in Egypt, he said, " Ye are brethren ;" and he forbade one Israelite from tak- ing usury of another because of this fraternal rela- tion. " Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury."* And, after the descent of the Spirit on the day of Pen- tecost, we find Peter and Stephen addressing the hardened haters and murderers of Christ, as " Men and brethren," because they were of their country and lineage. Paul used the same form of speech to the Jews, yet impenitent, when addressing them in the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia;t — when thrust upon the stairs, before the riotous crowd who howled for his blood in the courts of the temple ; t — when pleading before the council of bigoted and unbelieving Phari- sees and Sadducees, in that same Jerusalem ; § — and when he addressed the chief of the Jews, whom he convened in his hired house on reaching Rome. II To others, not his countrymen, if they were not believers in Christ, he seems to have sedulously avoided the use of this fraternal appellation ; and hence amid the shrines and statues of Athens, he opens his address with the words, " Men of Athens,"! whilst, in urging * Deuter. xxiii 20. f Acts, xiii. 26. J Ibid. xxii. 1. § Acts, xxiiL 1. 8 Ibid xxvLii. 17. T[ Ibid. xvii. 22. 188 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. his Gentile fellow- voyagers to cast off their despair, and partake of necessary food, he calls them " Sirs." * The law of Christian and spiritual brotherhood, whilst it does override, then, and justly should, the law of earlier, and earthly, and inferior brotherhood, or the ties of nature, does by no means, as some sup- pose, efface those ties. It did not in Christ's own practice, or in that of his apostles. The friend, the kinsman, and the countryman, were still, in this sense, and apart from religious sympathies, " brethren :" though the word was the more frequently employed in the New Testament to describe the bonds of mutual attachment, of a common duty, and a common hope, and a common Lord and a common home on high, that made all disciples one family in Christ, and one house- hold of faith. But, just as in the law of marriage, the husband, though forsaking his father or mother to cling yet more nearly to his wife, does not thereby lose, from this controlling relation, the heart or the ties, the feelings or the duties, of a child to that father or mother : so in the new and spiritual bonds which attachment to Christ brings upon His people, — the ce- lestial obligation superinduced upon the earthly rela- tion, — ^they cease not to keep and to owe all rightful allegiance to friendship, and the family, and the country. We have thus seen, then, as the first branch of our subject, who are our brethren. — Spiritually, all are such who love Christ : naturally, we recognize as such kindred, friends, and countrymen. Our rela- * Acts, xxvii. 21. BROTIIERLV KINDNESS. 189 tions to these two classes are not necessarily conflict- ing and adverse. The new convert will be, for his piety, all the better, as a son, and parent, and hus- band, and friend, and patriot. But these two classes of obligation may, by men's hatred to, and persecu- tion of the truth, become adverse. In such case, as we love our souls, and as God is greater than man, the ties of our brotherhood to Christ are paramount. No man can enter Heaven who does not, in such case, and in such sense, hate father and mother, yea, and his own life, if it would interpose between his soul and obedience to Jesus, his best, truest, and surest of friends. Let us, imploring the aids of Grod's good Spirit, now consider, II. How godliness needs the addition of brotherly kindness. III. How this christian grace is to operate, in the sphere of worldly and natural brotherhood. IV. How the same grace of brotherly kindness is to affect us, in the sphere of the spiritual and christian brotherhood. II. How, then, is it that godliness needs the addi- tion of brotherly kindness ? The grace of true conse- cration to God and to His glory requires, we reply, to be reinforced and illustrated by the grace of tende)- ness and fraternal sympathy for man. 1. Far as the range of worldly brotherhood extends, in our relations to the home, to the circles of friend- ship, and to our countrymen generally, godliness should be guarded by this grace of human sympathy, 190 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. to counteract an unjust, but common imputation against true piety. To some minds godliness seems to require the utter contempt and disregard of these worldly and natural ties. They read of Abraham, at God's call, forsaking his kindred and the place of his nativity, Ur of the Chaldees. They see Levi honored, because, in the work of avenging the outraged law of his Lord, " he knew not father or mother," but with even-handed severity cleft down all the idolatrous revel- lers, however near to himself they might be by ties of kindred. They hear the Saviour refusing permission to the disciple, who would return home from his ser- vice and errand, to bid farewell to them at his own home ; and another, who pleaded a desire to inter his deceased friends, is dismissed sternly, with the warn- ing : " Let the dead bury their dead." And so should we break through such feeble ties, if a like emergency, and the same great errand, and the same indubitable and sovereign command, come upon us. But, does the godly love of Christ involve, in all times, and to all persons, such estrangement from ordinary duties, and such prompt disruption of all social bonds ? Some make the mistake here, which renders the apostle's caution in this classification of christian graces, neces- sary. Piety is not necessarily unbrotherly and un- kind. To others, godliness seems to involve a disowning of all their old associations and bonds, because they see the dominion of error and iniquity in the world around, and they believe it the readiest way to disen- tangle their own feet, and rid their own souls of bur BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 191 (lens and perils, by doing, what Paul says they need not, and should not do, — they " go out of the world." Duty to Grod may require us not to be of the world, indeed : and, yet, duty to God and man may quite as distinctly require us to be in the world. The monk, fleeing to the wilderness, — the spiritualist, overlooking his en- gagements to society and the household, in the care of the closet and his soul, — are answerable for an error here, against which our text, as by anticipation, protests most clearly and fully. Their godliness lacks brotherly kindness. So, too, the hostility of the worldly to true piety, venting itself of old by statutes, and penalties, in- carceration and martyrdom, and all the forms of vio- lent persecution ; — venting itself in our times, rather in derision and cruel mockery, and ready falsehood, may easily provoke in the minds of the truly godly, a strangeness and an alienation that would, unchecked, issue in utter isolation. But, this is rather natural than justifiable. It is not so much the strength of the Chris- tian's godliness, as the human weakness intermingled with, and diluting that piety, which thus teaches him to withdraw, because he has cause of complaint. "When a man's enemies are thus in his own household ; or when the literature of a country travesties and belies the truly pious, as Hudibras travestied the Puritans, or, as the buffoonery of Foote belied the early Meth- odists, it is easy for the man to yield to the temptation of abjuring the ungodly, who so wrong and misrepre- sent him. AVhen the Psalmist became, as he said, '' the drunkardh son^" he might be easily moved 192 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. to shun all acquaintance with the reveller, and to re- nounce even poetry and music, because they had been, in the godless ballad, so prostituted and desecrated. Again, even when the righteous man feels no such spirit of retaliation for cruel mockery and foul slan- ders, the worldly, hating where they injure, stand aloof from their victim, and then impute to him the isolation, which is not the result of his choice, but their own. Thus, Joseph Milner, the pious historian of the church, in the early days of his ministry, when Methodism was yet a word of terror and horror ta multitudes, speaks of a long season in his own pasto- ral relations in the English Established Church, in Hull, the very place where, afterwards, he was so honored, when of his townsmen " no man wearing a good coat would recognize him in the street." And a similar shyness and absence of all friendly greetings, marked the earlier ministry of Charles Simeon, in that University of Cambridge, where afterwards he was so crowned with favor and honor of God, and of man also. 2. But not only may the bonds of worldly and human brotherhood, thus, with or without the Chris- tian's fault, be seemingly sundered by his godliness : a man's piety may seem to hinder his recognition at times of the ties of spiritual brotherhood also. If it be asked, how this can be, let it be remembered in reply, that a man of eminent devoutness may eagily become absorbed and abstracted in manner. It was a matter of complaint, against one of the most eminent Chris- tians of our own country, whose life was as eminent BROTHERLY LOVE. 193 for pastoral fidelity, as was his death-bed for its tri- umphant raptures, that his brethren found him at times unsocial. The ordinary associates of Calvin thought him, some of them, not duly afflicted and sym- pathizing, when his only child sunk in early infancy to the grave. And as to the early Christians, we find the Roman historian charging them with " hatred of the human race," probably on the mere ground of their conscientious abstinence from the amusements and associations around them, — all contaminated and con- taminating as these were, by the sedulous infusion of idolatry into them. Their piety made them, to a careless observer, seem shy and sad and misanthropic. And, in our more peaceful times, goodness may be- come so ethereal as to be comparatively unearthly. Like the bewildered disciples on the Mountain of Transfiguration, the rapt worshippers of God may scarce know what they are saying or doing, as they return to less solemn and less glorious^sceiles. 3. But a more disastrous barrier to this brotherly kindness, is the existence and rage of controversy among Christians. It is well that they should love the truth, and all the truth, for it is a deposit from God, which they may not relinquish, or hide, or divide and modify. Truth, too, is the very support of holiness, and must become the ultimate platform and basis of a common union. Yet their zeal may not be godly, and with imperfect sanctification, and imperfect enlightenment, they may hold the truth dispropor- tionately, and defend it unworthily, and with unchris- tian fierceness or levity, or even unfairness and evasion. 9 iM RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. Thus divided and jarring, it is hard even for an Owen and a Baxter, eminent as each was for godliness, to do full kindness and jxistice to his dissentient brother in Christ ; and Wesley and Toplady, and Fletcher and Hill, in later times, would each find, in their zeal for the truth as they held it, excuse for disliking or de- nouncing a true brother whose views of that truth were not their views. 4. But especially has the acceptance by Christians, from the state, of the snare and fetter of worldly endowment, and of legislation for the Christian Church, made it difficult for the godly to be also the brotherly. Treating the Church, so fettered, as a tool, rather than as a queen, statesmen have corrupted her discipline, and doctrine, and morality ; and whilst the pious have been found adhering to her, others equally or more pious have been amerced and defamed, imprisoned or hunted into exile, or chased through martyr-fires from earth to Heaven. Hard has it been for the true breth- ren of Christ, thus within and without the pale of a national establishment, to recognize and love each other. Yet it has been done. Sir Matthew Hale, in the Estab- lished Church, was the friend of Baxter, the persecuted Non-conformist, and was k ind to the wife of the maligned and oppressed Bunyan, another glorious name in Non- conformity. But in the days when Scotch Episcopacy persecuted the stern Covenanters with fire and sword, it was not to be expected that the saintly Leighton, even, on the one side, should aright know and love his brethren, the martyred Renwick, Cameron, and McCail, on the other side. BROTHERLY LOVE. 195 Godliness, in its estrangement from earth, and in its controversies, and in the treacherous and crippling alliance of the state, may seem to be unfriendly to brotherly kindness. And yet without fraternal affec- tion to those bearing Christ's likeness, godliness cannot be perfect. It needs the brotherhood human and the brotherhood divine — the field of the church not only, but of the friendly band, of the household, and of the country, to develope its powers of good and to display its genuineness and celestial loveliness. Kindness to our brother man, again, needs for its own culture and control, for its perpetual spring and exhaustless source, the love and the fear of Almighty God. "When we love our fellow-man, but for our own sake, and for his sake, disappointments weary, and in- gratitude worries us ; and we are prone, as death removes friends, or change alienates them, to exchange sympathy for selfishness, and friendly diligence for indolent apathy. The English poet, in lines often quoted, compares friendly and benevolent feelings to the ripples of a lake stirred by a falling pebble. The circle widens anS spreads till all the body of water is moved and the shore is reached. But in the human friendliness that proceeds from earthly and inferior motives, who can insure the continuance of sympathy in its energy ? Where, we ask, if a man's benevolence is only from kindness of temper, or from love of fame, or influence, — and change and Death have removed the old friends, and age is saddening the spirit and chilling the sympathies ; where are you to find fresh pebbles to keep up the play and spread of the circling 196 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. waters ? But Christianity, beginning in the Love of God, finds in His nature and love, his everlasting tenderness and changeless excellence, in his renewed pardons and brightening hopes, as they multiply along our pilgrim way, not an occasional excitement, but a steady and growing fountain ; — not the falling pebble, but the upbursting spring — a G-eyser of hope and love and zeal, " springing up into everlasting life." And when men lose their regard for God and godliness, they are not likely to preserve long and generally their active sympathies for man. The first murderer, when he began by doubting God's rights to the claim of a bloody sacrifice, soon learned, in renouncing godliness, to untwist the bond of fraternal charities that held him to the more righteous Abel, and to ask insolently, whilst his hands were yet red with the gore of a less innocent sacrifice than that which he had refused to his God, " Am I my brother's keeper ?" Piety needs human kindness, to render it lovely before men, and obedient before God ; and human kindliness needs piety as its guide and perennial source. III. We now reach that division of our subject in which we consider how the christian grace of brother- ly kindness is to fill up the sphere of worldly brother- hood, embracing as that does, friendship, kindred, and country. 1. As to the power of religion to adorn and cement friendship, the history of the Church speaks emphati- cally. In the generous sympathies of David and Jon- athan, when the one renounced a throne, and the othei ^rusted and leaned on the heir whom he saw himself BROTHERLY LOVE. 397 called in God's purposes to replace, each seeking to ex- cel the other, in tenderness, and truthfulness, and magnanimity ; in Luther and Melancthon, bringing their combined strength, and prayers, and studies, to the helm of the church, in times of fiercest tempest and revolution ; in the love that bound Calvin and Beza, and in after days, Edwards and Whitfield; and in our own times of reviving missionary zeal, in the threefold cord not broken, of Fuller, and Carey, and Ryland, seen binding the heathenism of India to the heart of Christian Britain, — as the prophet attached himself to the dead son of the Shunammite, — not to imbibe its corruption, but to impart their better life, till the dead awoke ; in the friendship of a Simeon and a Martyn, and a Corrie, and of others whose names time fails to tell ; — is it not seen that Christianity, in- stead of annihilating friendship, really ennobles, puri- fies, and perpetuates it ? In the relations of the family, apostles were patterns of brotherly influence, made to aid in the advancement of mutual piety ; and the Erskines of Scotland, the "Wesleys of England, and the Tennents of America af- ford similar instances of God's taking one of a city and two of a family to honor him. In the conjugal and parental relations, Scotland owes the order and purity of her homes confessedly to the Reformation ; and in the households of Philip Henry, the Non-conformist, and Edward Payson, the American Congregationalist, and of Wilberforce and of Leigh Richmond, the En- glish Episcopalians, did not Religion lend and receive new lustre, in its influence on the domestic charities ? 198 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. True, tli(5 ties of natural kindred may bind together those who have no spiritual affinities or sympathies. The devout Edwards was the ancestor of the profligate and thrice-hardened Aaron Burr. Divine grace is not a hereditament. And, from the want of due rehgious sympathy, the intercourse in this world, of the irre- ligious and religious kinsman, may often be, to use the metaphor of John Newton, like the discourse of strangers gathered under the same pent-house by a sudden rain-storm, wanting in cordiality, and inter- rupted soon as the stress that commenced it will per- mit ; yet many will through eternity bless God for the ■ filial, and parental, and fraternal influence of christian kindred, that at one time but saddened and wearied them, but won them at last to Christ and Heaven. As to the effects of religion on those who are our brethren because our countrymen, the topic of Christi- anity in its relations to the nation is too vast and com- plicated to be at this time discussed. Without becom- ing the pensioners, and so the dependants of the state, the churches may leaven the nation with their princi- ples of order, and virtue, and benevolence — may edu- cate the national conscience, and denounce and stem the nation's transgressions. Happy the land girdled around by thousands of christian sanctuaries, and closets. It is evidently a duty of christian patriotism, to urge thoroughly the work of Home Missions, and to send the Bible and Sabbath-school and ministry on the very crest of the westward waves of emigration. And in a country like our own, where not, as in Palestine, BROTHERLY LOVE. 199 a single rane are the rightful citizens, but where Prov- idence has gathered into a common asylum the men of many and discordant races, fusing into one mass those long and far dissevered from each other in their original homes and in their earliest training, how bless- ed may be the influence of that gospel which is for all .nations, and which teaches them that "of one blood" God hath made them all. Receiving as our shores have done, the victims of religious persecution, the hunted and maligned Puritan, the Huguenot ex- patriated from sunny France, the Hollander mindful of his country's old woes from the relentless Alva, the Baptist and the Quaker fleeing from intolerance in Britain, and intolerance yet more inexcusable in New England, the Waldensian colonists and the Moravian, of some of our Southern States ; and the Saltzburgher exiles of Germany, for the sake of religion, driven from home and country ; it is to be hoped, that no return to mediaeval usages, and no growth of anti-christian error can plant here the persecuting principles and hierarchies of Europe, or make Dominic, the founder of the Inqui- sition, a patron saint amongst these free-born men. Of the slavery that afflicts a large portion of our terri- tory, let us hope that the gospel will work the quiet and universal subversion : whilst against a wild spirit of conquest, and lust of territory, and avidity for plun- der and military glory, let us trust that christian zeal and principle in our citizens, and christian fidelity iu our pulpits, and christian enterprise in our homes and sanctuaries will yet preserve us. But if the nation should ever enact the wrong, and 200 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. frame iniquity by a law, — if superstition should ever become here dominant and persecuting, let us rejoice in the hope that the law of Christ will have here, as in like scenes it elsewhere has had, its fearless and faith- ful confessors, who knowing and fearing God rather than man, will see in the pleadings of friendship and the claims of home and the laws of the country but inferior and subsidiary influences, and dare to spurn all or either, when either or all would usurp on the claims of Conscience and the G-od of Conscience. For Patriotism, and Friendship, and Home, as they have in the gospel their surest support and guard, so do they owe to it as a paramount authority, their sub- mission. In the histories of ancient martyrdom, we see christian women resisting the tears and prayers of parental and conjugal tenderness, that they might follow Christ and escape idolatry. We are to love our brethren by ties of nature much, but we love them wisely only as we love God more. IV. And, now, have we reached the closing division of our theme — the manner in which the christian grace, which the apostle here enjoins, should be dis- played in the distinct sphere of spiritual brotherhood. Within the same church, then, the disciples of our Saviour need to be more and more given to mutual intercession. It is animating, and yet as contrasted with our prevalent remissness, humiliating, to read how Baxter and his people held days of fasting and prayer for each other ; or to turn to the pages which describe a christian matron at the South, — the wife of Ramsay, and the daughter of Henry Laurens, the BROTHERLY LOVE. 201 President of the Continental Congress, — praying over a list of her fellow-members, name by name, and re- membering to the best of her knowledge the cares and wants of each before the throne of grace. Christians in this day need, again, to ponder the warnings of James, as to social and terrestrial dis- tinctions, unduly dwelt upon in the intercourse of fel- low-disciples. The honor given to worldly pomp and wealth, and the mere formal and fluent sympathy of words without deeds shown to the needy Christian, are not obsolete evils. Those of the poor indeed who com- plain that they are not made more the companions and visitants of the wealthy, may show quite as much, in their complaints, a carnal spirit, as does the wealthy disciple, who is shy and distant towards his truly pious neighbor because of his poverty. The church is not to be made, on one side, a mere stepping-stone to re- spectable acquaintance ; nor, on the other side, is the condition in worldly wealth or culture, of a fellow- disciple, to be made an excuse for shutting against him the heart of christian sympathy. There is a fault, here, to be lamented and removed. In the churches of converts in India, Bishop AVilson and oth- ers have labored faithfully in endeavoring to break up the law of caste, or of proud, social isolation, to which the Hinduo so obstinately clings. He is retaining it from his old Braminism ; but we are inexcusable if we graft it, from the code of Fashion, as an unseemly and ulcerous interpolation, on the law of Christ's house- hold. Fraternity among Christians, again, requires that we do not abandon merely to the care of the 9* 202 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, State, the poor and dependent of our fellow-disciples. They may, in the case of poorer churches, receive the aid ; but the churches owe to them something more and something better. It- is not obedience to chris- tian discipleship to dismiss our poorer brother through the cold mediation of the collector of the town taxes ; and having paid our apportionment, as the civil law exacted it, for the support of alms-houses, and having secured the receipt of the official tax-gatherer, sup- pose ourselves to have done all that the Redeemer asked, when he said, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Christ has higher rights in his ransomed and vowed people. The law of brotherly kindness, again, extends to offences. As the sanctifi- cation of Christians is yet but imperfect, there are in Christ's true people remains of Evil. Some of these are venial, and it is the office of Christian Charity to cover them ; others are grave and deadly, and a true kindness will accuse and reprove and discipline them. But to avail, it must be done in the spirit of meek- ness. Christ never authorized his ministers or his churches to anoint the wounds, and the ulcers even, of the most unworthy with the corrosive and the poi- sonous, in our language and in our temper. Even " the sharp rebuke" and stern, which some offences may require, and of which in the reprimands and de- nunciations of Christ himself we have the example, should be kindly in its severe fidelity ; and if there be needed at times vehement utterance, yet we must cherish purest motives and a benign spirit. BROTHERLY LOVE. 203 But, beyond the precincts of our own church, are others of our own denomination, and yet others, not of the same sectarian badge and banner with that borne by ourselves. Far as they resemble Christ, they deserve our love. We should seek their sym- pathy and fraternal cooperation, though not by the sacrifice of any truth, indeed. There have been en- deavors to unite dissentient Christians, but on some wrong and ruinous basis ; — the sacrifice of some prin- ciple, the holding in abeyance some portion of Scrip- ture, or the adoption of some human and imaginary basis, instead of Christ's platform, — the truth, — suffi- cient, eternal, and one. Such endeavors after union have failed, and must fail, and ought to fail. Far as Christians, in our times, seek alliance on other and safer principles, let us rejoice ; and, when, as yet, their plans seem rather a vague wish, than a settled scheme, let us rejoice at the desire, where we may not be able to subscribe to the method. The church has now, beside her pulpits, her religious journals. How needful and becoming, that these should be gentle, and truthful, and healing, and devout, whilst preserving all fearless fidelity. But, in other lands Christ has his people, speaking other than ours of the earth's many dialects, and trained under another ecclesiastical regimen. Shall we disown them, or forget them ? No. Let us grap- ple heart to heart across intervening seas, and spite of discordant shibboleths. Is not Tholuck ours, and Neander, though on Grerman shores, and surrounded by other usages ? Was not Vinet, and is not yet 204 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. D'Aubigne in Switzerland, laboring in our cause, if only, tlirougli them, Christ's truth be vindicated and diffused? Yes, — the missionary, and the missionary convert ; — the witness for forgotten truths amid old formalism ; — the advocate for Christ's grace, as the one hope of man, amid the votaries of rituals and state-creeds — all — far as they breathe Christ's spirit, and do Christ's work, are our brethren and fellow- laborers ; and to them, near or remote, we owe our sympathies and prayers, which no distance, territorial or denominational, can intercept, or defeat. The theme is wide. It spreads far as the gospel tracks the race, through all climes. It spreads into coming times, and the endless world. One with Christ, we are one in heart, with the church triumph- ant, as well as the church militant, and we rejoice in those who have gone before us, as we do, in dim and vague prospect, in those who are to come after us. How glorious is Christ's philosophy ! And, were it but an invention of the schools, how loudly, and widely, and long, would it have been extolled, for its simplicity and comprehensiveness, its reach of benevo- lence, and its power of endurance and achievement. It shall endure when philosophers that have scouted and blasphemed it, have gone by. It shall reconcile the race, and heal all earth's woes and wrongs, by fix- ing, first, the eyes and hearts of men on the great WTongs of man against his God, and on the one great Remedy of that wrong in a Grod incarnate, dying and atoning for our sins, and giving freely, as the boon BROTHERLY KINDNESS. 205 won by his bitter agonies, the renewing Spirit, and, among its sweet influences, brotherly concord here, the earnest and the emblem of a firmer concord, in the larger brotherhood that shall, hereafter, form the family of Heaven LECTURE II. CHARITY. " AND TO BROTHERLY KINDNESS, CHARITY. 2 Peler, i. 7. The word rendered " charity" is, in the original, the same term which is, in many other parts of the New Testament, translated " love." It is here placed as the key-stone in the arch of the christian graces, at the same time crowning, towering over, and binding to- gether all the rest. But its honors are often usurped by other and meaner, and even by opposite principles. Of old, when G-od wrought wonders, to extort from Egypt and her reluctant king the liberation of His own chosen tribes, the magicians of the land would parody and thus rival the miracles of the Hebrew prophet. And thus it has been often since. The policy of Satan has still been to travesty, and, in that mode, to discredit the won- drous works and the illustrious benefits of Grod. When Christianity, in her fresh youth, startled the nations by the splendor of her moral miracles in the reforma- tion of character and in the relief of sorrow, Julian, the apostate, an envenomed persecutor of the gospel, would reanimate the Grod-smitte.i corpse if ancient CHARITY. 207 Paganism, by teaching the Pagan priests to imitate the moral blamelessness of christian ministers, and the Pagan worshippers to show the liberality and sym- pathy for the poor and suffering which were shown by the votaries of the cross. He would imitate and emu- late certain effects of the gospel, in order to disparage and replace it. So in later times, when Satan found Christianity overrunning the earth, he brought forth, in Antichrist, the fearful imitation and counterfeit of the true Christ. Popery was a resuscitation of the old Judaism ; — a local and ritual religion, with great truths retained on its creed, and worn as on its frontlets and phylacteries, but all of them interspersed with a more than Pagan sensualism, and a more than Pharisaic formalism ; and bringing into the temple of G-od another gospel, which is not another, and another sal- vation than that by grace through the Redemption that is in Christ. And so, what Pagan and Papal rivalry did in earlier times, we see Scepticism repeat- ing in these modern days. Under the name of Charity is installed mere Liberalism by many modern Reform- ers ; and by them and their disciples, Christ, instead of being a spiritual Emancipator, whose main work is with the soul and his greatest gifts for eternity, is represented as being but a Tribune of the people, aim- ing at and sacrificed for the political enfranchisement and the secular elevation of the degraded and sufFering and down-trodden masses. But, as of old the coun- terfeits of Egyptian sorcery were soon exhausted, and sunk away, eclipsed by the brighter and vaster mira- cles that God's own hand wrought for his Israel, so 208 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. will it be seen in tlie progress of the trial, between Christ as against the old Antichrist of Papal superstition, and the newer Antichrist of Modern Infidelity, that the rod of power, and the balm of healing, and the palm of victory, are all in the hands of the one Christ, — Infi- nite, All-sufficing, and Unchangeable, — the only Re- deemer and only hope of the race. And what is Char- ity in HIS Scriptures, and what are its relative honors, and its appropriate results ? I. The place Charity occupies ; II. Its real nature ; and III. Its Scriptural fruits, are the divisions under which we would group our present remarks. I. As to its place, the apostle here ranges it last, as the final and crowning grace. All those indeed which in his enumeration precede it, do also presuppose this, as necessary to their own existence, and are in the eyes of Grod hollow and worthless without the presence and power of this, as being the informing soul, the pre- dominant motive of them all. Love is the fulfilling of the Divine Law, as guiding and inciting faith, and virtue, and knowledge, and temperance, and patience, and godliness, and brotherly kindness. It is brought forward last in our text, not as being in itself inde- pendent of, and in order of time, subsequent to those which the apostle has before recounted ; but here, as elsewhere, it is exalted, because of its power to keep in unison all the other graces, as the knot completes and holds together the garland ; and therefore, it would seem, it is last named. Thus, Paul in his epistle to the Colossians,* bids them " above all these things put * Coloss. iii. 14. CHARITY. 209 on charity, which is the bond of perfectness ;" or, in other words, not only binding but perfecting, it is like the master rivet that holds together the chief beams in the framework and roofing of the edifice. And Peter, the writer of our text, has in his first epistle used almost the same language :* " and, above all things, have fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall cover the multitude of sins." Like the uppermost mantle flung over all the other robes of the oriental dress, it adds the crowning dignity, and pre- serves them in their appropriate position. This its high and completing office, Paul elsewhere intimates in yet another form of language, when he describes it in his first epistle to Timothy :t " The end of the com- mandment," or its last, highest, and consummate re- sult, " is charity out of a pure heart and of a good con- science and of faith unfeigned ;" or as in his letter to the disciples at Rome in yet other words he states it : " Love is the fulfilling of the law."| It is in his ad- dress to the Gralatian Christians represented as the secret source and band of all kindly offices among Christians : " By love serve one another ; for all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, ' Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' " k And Paul's Master, before him, had in like manner analyzed the law and resolved its varied requirements into the one great principle of Love ; Love supreme to the Supreme God, and to our fellow an equitable love, equal to that cherished by us for ourselves. * 1 Peter iv. 8. f 1 Timo. i. 5. X Romans xiii. 10. § Galat. r. 13, 14. 210 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 2. But as if to guard against all possibility of any de. rogatory inferences, — as though love came in rank after faith, or as though it were a mere separate appendage, without which saving faith might exist, — the Holy Ghost, which in our text has ranged it last, has in other passages enumerated it as the first of the graces that combine in one harmonious group, to constitute chris- tian character. So Paul in his letter to the G-alatians, and in that same portion of it just quoted, in indicating the cluster of graces and virtues that the Spirit pro- duces, says : " The fruit of the Spirit is Love, joy, peace."* So when Christ describes true piety, as in the darker and perilous days of the Christian Church it should suffer eclipse and decline, he sums up that piety in this one sanctified affection : " The love of many shall wax cold."t And Paul, on the other hand, when painting his own character, and stating the radical principle of all his lofty services and costly sacrifices, indicates this : " The love of Christ con- straineth us." X And when writing to the Hebrews, he gives it a station and rank before all other good works : " Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works." § And Jude, when delineat- ing the disasters and snares of an evil time, bids Christians hold to this, for their safeguard, and the talisman of their spiritual life: "Keep yourselves in the love of Grod." II The text, then' in itfe order of the various graces of the true Christian, does not give their chronology in the renewed heart, or the order * Galat. V. 22. f Matt. xxiv. 12. % 2 Coria v. 14. § Hebrews x. 24. || Jude 21. CHARITY. 211 of time in which they spring to birth. The regenerate soul loves God in the first pulsations of his new-found spiritual life ; and gratitude to the Redeemer who has bought him, prompts, early and continually, all his acts of obedience to God, and all his acts of kindly service to his fellow-man. 3. But how is it related to, and distinguished from brotherly kindness ? "We endeavored, then, in our last lecture, to show how Christ creates in his church of the regenerate a new spiritual brotherhood, and to show how this, though overriding, did not efface and extin- guish an earlier and natural brotherhood, combining together, in one confraternity, those who were espe- cially near and dear to us by the ties of friendship, kindred, and country. The principle of brotherly kindness, we supposed, was to find its scope in these two regions, — the sphere of the Christian, or spiritual fraternity, and the sphere of worldly, or natural broth- erhood. But are there none of our fellow- men found even beyond these spheres ? Ancient Paganism, indeed, scarce recognized the rights of such dwellers beyond the charmed circle of country and home, to any sympa- thy. In the old Roman tongue, the word for stranger and that for enemy were originally one, and, in the ancient British laws, the alien wrecked on their shores was regarded as bearing a forfeited life, and as being one that the first native who should meet him might butcher. Their hapless guest, made such by calamity, was to be their victim. Even Judaism, by its prin- ciples of isolation, (the fitting principles for the preser- vation of Divine Truth when that truth was yet a 212 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. deposit to be guarded, rather than a message to be published,) was a dispensation which led many of its votaries to shut up their hopes within the sea-coast and mountains of Palestine. Christianity came to lift off from the human heart the narrow horizon of the coun- try and the household, and the church, far as they crushed and confined that heart; and to enjoin not only sympathy and regard for the friend, but for the enemy ; not only for the kinsman, but for the stran- ger ; not only for the countryman, but for the alien ; not only for the fellow-disciple in Christ's church, but it taught even the deeply- wronged martyr, forgiveness and prayer, for the persecutors that hated and wasted Grod's heritage and church. And the love or charity, thus broad in its wide horizon of human sympathies, was derived from love and likeness to that Saviour whose expiring breath remembered his murderers. It was a love for the two-fold family of Grod : the family of mankind, of whom it is said, and " We are all his children ;" and the family of Christ, all named from Him their one Elder Brother. A true, though not a like regard, to each of these two households, — the one the lineage of the first Adam, the other the household of faith, and the lineage of the second Adam, — is re- quired of all Christ's followers, as based on love to the common Father and Creator of that two-fold household. But the chief distinction between the preceding grace of Brotherly Kindness, and the crowning grace of Charity, yet remains to be stated. Whilst the for- mer regards mainly the principle of fraternal obliga- CHARITY. 213 tion to human nature, the latter finds its chiefest scope, and its highest object, in the filial ties binding man to his Father and God. Whilst the earlier grace bows down over the second table of the two given on Sinai, that bearing on its face man's duties to his neighbor ; the later, and nobler and mightier grace, stoops intently over both, but fixes its regard, most and longest, on that first table, the weightier of the two, whore stand inscribed man's vast obligations of love, homage, and fealty to his Maker and Judge. And as Faith, the first named of all this choir of sis- ter excellencies, has its home and aim in Heaven, and fastens on the Veracity of the God of Heaven, as its warrant and sustenance ; so Love, the last named asso- ciate in the same band, knits hands with Faith, in find- ing, also, its chiefest aim and its chosen home in Heaven, attaching itself to the Excellency and Loveliness of the Divine Character, as does Faith to the Divine Truthfulness. Wlien the Psalmist described the harmo- ny of the attributes of the Godhead in man's wondrous redemption, he saw Mercy and Truth met together.* When the twain descended earthward, Truth found shelter in the home of Faith, and Mercy was lodo-ed in the abode and heart of Love, or Charity, as she is variously called. Gratitude, and paramount love to God, coalesce, therefore, with love to man, in the es- sence of Christian Charity. And as God is before man in existence, and above man in worth and rio^hts, attachment to Him is the predominant element of this grace. The Love of God subordinates and regu- * Ps. IXESV. 10. 214 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. lates all the outgoings of attachment in the renewed heart. II. We have thus prepared the way to discuss the true nature of Christian Charity, as distinguished from the semblances that usurp wrongfully its titles and honors. It is not, then, as the popular usage of the word would often make it, — bare almsgiving. This the Phar- isees practised with sound of the trumpet and at the corners of the streets, and yet had not true love either to Grod or man. And Paul declares it possible to give all our goods to the poor — not merely the tithe of the field, or the prunings of the vine, but the entire vin- tage of our means, to feed the impoverished ; and yet to lack true charity. When Romanism, then, teaches, as in some ages she has done, that bounty, in the form of large endowments for alms, might atone for sin, and was evangelical charity, the teaching was in plain oblivion or contradiction of an apostle's testi- mony. It was virtually Simony, proposing to purchase Heaven with silver and gold; an endeavor which, when made on the part of Simon Magus, was so sternly denounced and rejected. And as the poor-box, though our bounties should fill it, cannot contain all of a true Christian's charity : so, neither is this grace, as some other forms of error teach, a mere magnani- mous disregard of all doctrinal variances, and a fond and baseless assurance that all forms of faith are, if sincere, equally acceptable to God — and that He who is on high, hears, with equal regard, the praises that go up to Him as the Jehovah of the Christian Scrip- tures, and as the Juggernaut of Hindoo shrines of de- CHARITY. 215 filement and butchery. No : the charity of the Scrip- tures loves the True God ; and as He is the God of Truth, it loves, ardently and without compromise, His truth — pure and one, and unmitigated and unadul- terated. Nor is evangelical charity connivance with sin. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him, but in any wise rebuke it," said the law. "When Eli dozed over this forgotten canon, and left the iniquity of his sons uncorrected, God awoke to vengeance, and the curse, long hovering, came down heavily on his descendants, in the day when the sword of Doeg devastated Nob, the city of the priests, bereaving it of all its inhabitants. The seraphim be- fore the throne flame with the love of God. But their charity, when they came down, the commissioned mes- sengers of Heaven to the cities of the plain, was not Indifference to Sin, It was fiery Vengeance. " Charity rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth," is Paul's language in his matchless portrai- ture of this grace. And, as in the nature of God, love to truth and holiness, is an attribute, having as its op- posite pole, hatred to falsehood and unholiness ; so, in holy David, and in each other true servant of God, the love of piety is necessarily detestation of impiety, and hatred for the workers of iniquity — not indeed detes- tation of their persons and souls, but of their practices, and principles, and influences. Paul, thepefore, has his Anathema Maran-atha for those not loving Christ. He loves what God loves, and as God loves it ; and, as the love of God in Christ becomes the wrath of God against those rejecting Christ, so, the charity of 216 *RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. true godliness is terrible, as well as lovely. It does not persecute ; it does not imprecate. It compassion- ates, and intercedes, and warns ; but when G-od's mercy is exhausted, and the misspent term of proba- tion closes in sudden and lasting night, charity breathes its A men to the edict and sentence, as it goes forth from the lips of the Holy and the Good, — bidding that his ene- mies go into the exile which they have chosen, and in- herit the ruin and perdition, deep and endless, which they have willingly and laboriously earned. For, the charity of the Scriptures is, first, love to Grod, the Creator and Source of all goodness, — to the good amongst men, as bearing his regenerate image, — and to the evil of our race yet on the earth, as bearing still the marred image of God, given in creation, but defaced in the Fall, and which may yet be created anew, in holiness, and righteousness, and truth. To the unre- newed, its love is that which we might imagine a friend to bear to the child, long lost, and far wandering, of some friend's household, whom he finds disguised in tatters, and corrupted in morals, among the strangers who have stolen him. It is a charity, that seeks to reclaim and restore ; that is not content with present degradation and estrangement, but seeks to win the prodigal from his captors, and to consign him again to a Father's home and training. It is, then, not irreligious, nor indifferent to all doc- trine, nor careless of revealed truth ; but, on the con- trary, springs from, and clings to, the truth as God re- veals it. It is, as Paul so significantly paints it, " Charity, out of a pure heart, and of a good con- CHARITY. 217 jwience, and of faith unfeigned." The world would, on the other hand, confound with this evangelical grace, i spurious charity, that germinates from a heart not pure, a conscience not made good by the righteous- ness of Christ ; a counterfeit charity, that, instead of proceeding from " faith unfeigned," fraternizes with " faith derided and blasphemed ;" and that, instead of " rejoicing in the truth," simpers over error, and smiles complacently on the falsehoods that delude the world, that would discrown Christ, and people Tophet. Such, then, is Charity, — the love of the Father, and, in Him, of his creatures, embracing especially those that love Him, and resemble Him ; but also extending its kindnesses, like that Father, " to the unthankful and the evil," for he sendeth his rain upon, and doeth good to, " the just and the unjust." HI. And now, let us dwell upon some of the fruits,- which Christian Charity (thus exalted in its place among the graces, and thus distinguished from the counterfeits and forgeries which would borrow its name.) might, and should display in the field of human society in the nineteenth century. Its root is, then, in another world. It is, first, filial towards G-od ; and then, frater- nal towards man, as the creature of G-od. G-ushing from the Spirit of God, as received by the believer on the Son of God, and guided by the Scriptures of God, it flows forth over the race. As Hooker beautifully says of this charity : " The final object of which is, that incomprehensible beauty, which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the living God." Basking in that light, it beams its reflected glory on the 10 218 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, race whom Christ came to ransom, and to enlighten. And, as " good-will to ?new" was proclaimed by angels in announcing his birth, the banners of the gospel and the church bear that glorious motto to the end of time. Over the barriers, then, that hedge around the regions of spiritual brotherhood in the church, and of natural brotherhood, in friends, families, and nations, this charity finds its unchecked course ; and it is not indifferent to the distant, or the degraded, the unlovely and the ungrateful of the race. .Human nature left to itself has much of the spirit of the clan. It would husband the golden talent of its sympathies, and " wrapping them in the napkin of caste, or sect, or tribe or country, bury them to prevent their being lost or worn away, by rude attrition, by going forth into the open market of the world. True Christianity does not, on the one hand, with a false cosmopolitanism, once so fashionable, proclaim utter disregard to the claims of the nation and the home. It honors the domestic charities, the ties of kin, and the love of country, and the fond attachment of those like-minded in Christ, and set for the defence and diffusion of the same great truths. But, rising above these limits, it shows on the other hand, a true citizenship of the world, by hailing the needy, and the wicked even, as the subjects of its sympathies, and of its restoring tenderness, and of its availing and unceasing intercession. Much has, in our times, been said, and not unprofit- ably, of the distinctions physical and moral, which mark the several races into which Providence has per- mitted the descendants of one Adam and one Noah to CHARITY. 219 be separated. These races have their marked peculi- arities. But it is a selfish and unchristian feeling that would dwell on the peculiar and divisive features, to the forgetfulness of the more numerous and more important features, in which all, — the Grreek and the Barbarian, — the Celt and the Saxon, — the white and the black, — are alike ; manifesting a community in sin, and condemnation, and susceptible of a common and effectual recovery by the one great remedy. And especially does it seem unsuitable, to lay earnest emphasis, and an impassioned stress, on these differ- ences of national descent in Christian America. In a land, whose ancestral colonists were the emigrants of so many various races — and whose Continental Con- gress, 'in the war of their emancipation, met in a city dedicated, by the name which its founder had bor- rowed from the New Testament, to the memory of " brotherly kindness,"* — it seems unfitting, that the varieties of our lineage and ancestral stock should be made an argument for alienation and discord. Our colonial history and multiform origin seem rather a protest, as by anticipation, on the part of Providence, against aught which would part the Celt and the Saxon, or the Norseman and the Roman. In that variegated original, God seems to have pledged us to a wider sympathy ; — to a charity broad as the waters which our colonist forefathers crossed, and coextensive with all the climes where they had found their natal seats. But, besides these divisive tenden- cies, in the diversified lines of our descent, there * Philadelphia. 220 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. are personal causes of isolation in our infirmities and sins, as well as in our varied education and tastes. We find it hard to keep the milk of human kindness uncurdled, when there is poured upon it ingratitude, or contempt, or injustice. To love the unamiable, and to feel a sustained interest in the brutish and degraded, is difficult except to confirmed and Christlike piety. An Eastern missionary, eminent for devotedness, once spoke frankly of the difficulty he found in repressing disgust at the personal filthiness of the forlorn and de- graded Pagans, with whom his missionary toils must daily associate him. And when wickedness becomes fu- rious, and Persecution repays with death the bearers of the word of life, can aught less than a Divine principle keep alive in the martyr and the martyr's friends, love and compassion for those who hate the truth, malign its friends, and would fain tread into the funeral ashes of their victim the faith which he professed ? Distance, and Dissonance, and Degradation, and Barbarism, and Persecution, how do they tend to cut off" the currents of christian sympathy, and to chill the warmth of the heart once glowing with kindness, and to smite, as with ague and palsy, the outstretched and ministering hands of christian diligence and tenderness. But, over all these adverse tendencies, Charity tvipmphs by the grace of Christ, and continues seek- ing the good, temporal and spiritual, of those whose obdurate insensibility maligns and spurns her kindest offices. 1. And, first, let us, among the appropriate fruits of "hristian Charity, enumerate Foreign Missions. The CHARITY. 221 Home Missions of the church were, in our last lecture, the subject of allusion, as being demanded by the laws of human brotherhood, in our obligations binding us to our neighbor and to our common country. But, as to those more remote, and the inhabitants of other lands, which are burnt by the tropical sun or glazed by the eternal ices of the Pole ; owe we nothing to them ? Christ, our brother, and the brother, as the second Adam, of the entire race, said as He paused, with his face yet turned earthward, whilst His form already mounted heavenward ; " Go ye out into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, and lo, I am with you." Against such a charge and such a pledge, what avail all the objections, and excuses, and doubts, of those who disparage the modern missionary enter- prises of the Church ? Shall we live upon Him, and in Him, and yet refuse to obey Him ? Trust we in the pledge of His presence to the world's end, and yet do we hesitate to follow His leadings to the remote, the uncouth, and the barbarous ? Some deride the work, under the plea, that it is all sheer hypociisy to profess sympathy, and gather contributions, for the idolater of the Antipodes, whilst here are shivering around us, the untaught and unfed, the ignorant and destitute, — the heathen of our own christian homes. The one work, indeed, should not be left undone ; but, should we never go forth to the Karen, whilst a hamlet or family remained yet unconverted in these United States? Then we might never go. For we suppose, that even Millennial times do not imply the conversion of every individual then tenanting the earth, here or in other 222 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. lands. The principle of such an objection would have forbidden David to compose one psalm for the great congregation, long as there was left in his own house- hold, and beneath his roof, one unregenerate Absalom. Others murmur, that our missionaries carry to the heathen metaphysical doctrines instead of practical lessons, and that they would Christianize where they ought first to civilize them. But all experience has shown, that the readiest and surest — and in fact, the only ready and sure — way to civilize the savage, is to awaken by the truths of the gospel, and by its visions of eternal realities, — to awaken hopes and aspirations, that will fnake a change, in his temporal condition, seem to that barbarian both desirable and possible. And if the doctrines be, as you term them, metaphysical ; so is patriotism ; so is truth; so is your own individuality, and your conscience, and your reason, — metaphysical. The G^od, who made the soul else than mere brute mat- ter, made the doctrines, that shall pierce and renovate that soul, something more than those material and physical truths, which you may tell on the fingers. As to waste of time, in communicating these great spiritual facts to the heathen ; it is no more a waste, than the roots of the tree are wasted and lost to it, — or the secret foundations of a house, idle expenditures to the builder and tenant, — because they are both under the ground. Your tree cannot have fruit or branches ; nor can your house stand against the wintry storms, without these sunken supports. And so the practical reforms which you require in the savage, must rest on these princi- vles of truth, — metaphysical as you choose to call CHARITY. 223 them, but revealed as we believe them, — tliat, rooted in the hidden soil of the heart, bear up the hal)its, and fruits, and framework 'of the outer life. But the objector has heard from some tenth transmitter of an uncertain rumor, that your missionaries are luxuriating in ease and princely splendor. If it be so, why are not more going out to share the spoil ? But, is it so ? Look at Williams, dying by cannibal violence in the South Pacific. See Jonas King threatened but recently with death by the violence of the rabble in Republican Greece. Read the story of the massacre of Whitman among the ferocjpus savages of Oregon ; and call you such sacrifices as these, — a living in ease, and splendor : and dare you impeach the martyr, of being but an im- postor, who subsists luxuriously on the gifts of the credulous ? No. The day has gone by for such re- proaches. Science, Commerce, and Freedom, all re- joice in the fruits of Foreign Missions. The Sandwich and the Society Islands are comparatively renovated. India's old idolatry totters. China has flung, reluc- tantly, the gates of her vast prison-house open to the feet of these pilgrim heralds of Charity, the mis- sionaries of the Cross. The world is their debtor. 2. But how shall we resist, there and in the home field, the rivalry of Romish error, and other forms of grave delusion? Charity, here too, has her scope. She must defend the truth and scatter it ; but she may not persecute, however persecuted. She may rightfully ask in other lands the general toleration which she yields here. She may protest against the butcheries of the Inquisition, and the terrors of proscription and exile 224 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. which Rome, in various laws, imposes on those con- verted from her. So, against each form of religious delusion, like Mormonism, — against a rampant infidel- ity like that of Paine, — or a lambent and concealed scepticism like the philosophical liberalism of the times, — the Charity of Truth may and must witness, frankly and fearlessly ; but without hatred of the de- luded, without railing, and without revengefulness. The Christian Church, and the synagogue of Satan, mis- calling itself also the church of Jesus, cannot symbolize together ; but, the weapons of the inevitable warfare must be spiritual, and be wielded in Jove and prayer. 3. From the victims of religious error, we pass next to the victims of want. Pauperism is a vast and com- plex theme. Some of the theories for its removal de- mand most grave changes, and social revolutions more thorough than any political revolution at which the nations have stood aghast. We believe it true, and that christian thinkers will yet generally admit, that the Political Economy even of christian nations, needs to be converted and baptized from its present irreli- gious state ; that the great principle of "Let alone," which many have proclaimed as a First Truth in Politi- cal Economy, is in some of its applications to the ac- cumulation and distribution of wealth, and to the re- lief of the impoverished and proletary classes, " a First Lie," that must be recanted, if there is to be safety for governments, or union and cohesion and sympathy in the various classes of the nation. It is, as some use it, but a metaphysical statement of Cain's argument : ^' Am I my brother's keeper?" We believe that the CHARITY. 22d notion that wealth is in itself prosperity, and that cap- ital has no other duties than self-preservation and ac- cumulation, are unchristian errors ; and that wealth needs other guards and restraints than it can buy, to he either safe for its owner or a blessing to society. But, on the other hand, it seems plain that some of the remedies proposed for the removal of Poverty are chimerical and ruinous. Far as the Socialists and Communists of our time would obliterate the family, they seek to abolish a law of God which cannot be sac- rificed, without the wreck of Happiness, and Order, and Virtue. Far, again, as they teach men to over- look moral in their attention to material and phi/sical wants, they wrong and degrade human nature, and must miss the happiness which they undertake to guaranty. For even a king on his throne — an Alfred amid fame and power and wealth, — needs something more than these earthly and transient goods, for the enjoyment of true happiness. He needs, as that great king confessed, pardon for sin, and hope in death, and a home in the eternal world. And if even monarchs need these, how much more does the poor man, amid his sufferings. If you fed and gorged him with the fullest supply of his bodily wants, and left him with a, burdened conscience, a Saviour unknown, and Heav. en missed, he would be but a wretched and brutisl Sybarite amid your plenty. The true Reformer musi still, as Christianity does, look first to the soul and iti wants ; and in relieving man, the fallen and discrown- ed king, remember his former glory in holiness, and seek its restoration. 10* 226 REx^IGIOUS PROGRESS. But, on the other hand, christian charity requires that the body should not be overlooked. Christ him- self, while his first care was the Bread of Heaven for the immortal mind, cared for and wrought miracles to feed the hungering body, healed corporeal disease, and amid the tremendous and absorbing agonies of a world's atonement, this, the Redeemer of the world took thought, even on the cross, to secure for his be- reaved mother the earthly comforts of a home. It is not christian then, in our attention to the soul, to jverlook utterly all provision for the wants of the Dodily frame that shelters this soul. As to the proposal to abolish the household, we be- lieve that the yearnings of humanity, and the law of our Maker, have made the family as much a matter of Qecessity as is gravitation to the body. The mind and heart morally gravitate towards the household, and its isolation, and its repose, and you cannot extir- pate and strip off this moral necessity. As to the pro- posed communities, we do not see how they could avoid, within them and around them, the necessary destruction of individual independence. Those who would prefer separate and independent labor, would find themselves crushed by the competition of the com- munity ; whilst the community could not keep its members active and diligent unless despotic power re- sided in its chief, trampling down the independent ac- tion of the several dwellers in his domain. Again, were society all so gathered into communities, we see no possible provision for destroying inequality, compe- tition, and animosity as among these several groupes CHARITY. 227 or communities. They could not be all alike pros- perous, and content, supposing that any of them wore so. It seems to us a surrender of personal freedom, and a wild endeavor to evade the inevitable and achieve the impossible. Inequality and emulation are inseparable froTi individuality, and any attempt to remove them, on the principle of the Community or Phalanstery, seems to us as hopeless as would be the attempt, to unlock the moon from its inferiority and dependence upon the earth and sun ; or like an en- deavor to create perfect equality of splendor among those starry worlds, which the will of their Maker formed unequal, " for one star difTereth from another star in glory." 4. We would observe, again, on the bearings of Christian Charity on the repression of Crime, and the reformation of the criminal. "We believe, that all or- thodox Christianity has been greatly maligned, by some now active in the amendment of the vicious, and the amelioration of the criminal code. The initi- ative was given, and the superiority in devotedness and usefulness has been always retained, by evangeli- cal Christians. John Howard, and Elizabeth Fry, and the humbler name of Sarah Martin, less famous, but not less devoted, may be quoted as proving this. But the views of some, who would fain persuade the prisoner that all his crimes are either the fault of so- ciety, or the result of his own cerebral organization, and that he is therefore more the subject of compas- sion than punishment, are most erroneous in principle, and have already borne their baleful fruits. Let us 228 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. pity our fallen brother, but in playing the good Samar- itan, we need not flatter him. Crime is not misfor- tune or fate. It is voluntary transgression, and self- chosen, self-created guilt ; and as such must be repressed. To make the penal code as little sanguinary, as will consist with the safety of society, and the sanc- tity of human life, we suppose to be required by the benevolence of the gospel. But, the abolition of all capital punishment, and the denial of right to war in any case whatever, are not to our minds scriptural truths. Crime needs the governor, and banded crime, if not otherwise to be subjugated, needs war to sub- due it. What the reading of the Riot Act is to a British mob, such we suppose the declaration of war for sufficient cause, to be to a nation — a resort sanc- tioned by the law of Heaven, and indispensable to the existence of human government, when all other reme- edies fail. Christian charity will abolish war, by les- sening in the hearts of individuals the love of wrong, that if found pervading multitudes makes war neces- sary. But, that war is in itself unchristian and sinful, we dare not say, when our Bibles say of the very Founder of Christianity : "In faithfulness doth He judge and make war." If war be sin, this is the blasphemous absurdity of saying, in effect, " In faith- fulness doth the sinless and Holy One sin." 5. But the greatest fruit of the charity that Scrip- ture inculcates, is habitual love to Grod. The greatest of Beings, he deserves, as well as requires, the highest rank, and largest share in our affections. And, the presence of such supremest love to our Creator does CHARITY. 229 not abridge, but rather advances, exalts, and sustains our benevolent regard to our fellow-creature. God re- jects indignantly, as hollow and unreal, the professions of attachment to himself, that bring with them no feelings of kindness to man. " "Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shuttetli up his bowels of compassion from him, how DWELLETH THE LOVE OF GoD IN HIM ?" " He that loveth not, knoweth not God : for God is love." " He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now." " Pure re- ligion, and undefiled before God and the Father, is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their afflic- tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." An Abel's offering, however regular and devout in its compliance with God's requirement of a bloody sacri- fice, would have been valueless to himself and unac- cepted before his God, had he brought it with the same ranklings of enmity at heart towards his brother, as filled the bosom of Cain towards himself. Some religionists forget, or seem to forget this, and the world, taking advantage of their inconsistency, discredits the worth of piety, and the sincerity of those who make profession of it. But, on the other hand, it is a wrong, yet vaster and yet more irrational, to make kindly offices to man a substitute for all devotion towards God. Had an Absalom been the kindest of brothers, foreseeing, and in his quick sympathies, anticipating with the fullest liberality, and the most winning gentleness, every want, and every wish even, of the brethren and sisters 230 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. whom Grod had given him, all this fulness of fraternal affection would not have constituted his character one of finished and symmetrical virtue, whilst towards the parent, David, the generous and fond father of himself and the entire household, his heart remained that of a callous and parricidal ingrate. Nor may we play the Absalom thus, with impunity, towards a better Father in Heaven, and then, turn to our human charities and sympathies, as a full discharge of all our moral obligations. Piety is essential to Virtue, and is the chiefest constituent of a truly virtuous character. And Godliness, as we have, in an earlier lecture, said, is essential to Happiness ; and man cannot, formed and endowed as he is, be at rest until he have ac- quainted himself with his God. Is Charity, in this its highest scope, and largest sense, but another name for Godliness ? We answer : though allied and even inseparable, there is a distinc- tion between them. Godliness is the practical result, on life, and intellect, and Divine communion, of this Love of God, or highest Charity. The latter is the controlling motive ; the former, the resulting action and fruit, which the energy of that motive produces. The Love of God, " shed abroad within the heart," assimilates the life to His will, imbues the spirit, read- ily and delightfully, with His truth, and gives to the worshipper filial access, and intercourse, and confi- dence, in his approaches to his Father. And here we are again met with evidence, that the relation of the several graces, enumerated and commended by the apostle Peter, in the text before us, is not a rela- CHARITY. 231 tion of succession in time and date. Some measure of this Charity, or true and grateful love, must spring up, in the renewed heart, coeval with the first exer- cises of Faith. Grod, truly seen, is, to the unsealed eye of the regenerate soul, a God really loved. The Sun of Righteousness carries life-giving loarmth^ in the beams of his lig-Jit. Of him, as of the natural orb of day, it may be said : " There is nothing hid fro7n the heat thereof.'''' The heart is made wakeful and glowing, when the intellect is thus truly illumin- ated ; and he who really discerns the Saviour, ardently loves Him. And this makes the doctrines of the Incarnation and Atonement so infinitely dear to the Church. They are not mere bodiless abstractions of the schools. They are the nutriment of the closet, and the sanctu- ary, and the death-bed. It is in them, that a God of awful and ineffable purity becomes accessible to a race revolted and corrupt. It is in the gift of His Son, that God commended his love to the world ; and Heaven itself, on the bestowment of a Redeemer, left in its own infinite and exhaustless exchequer, no richer boon. He is "the unspeakable gift," as Paul entitles it. And the argument, that above all others cheers the desponding heart, is that God having freely given Christ, the greatest and richest benefit, shall He not with Him, " freely give us all things?" In Him, the embodied and incarnate Deity has humanized itself, and made itself, so to speak, tangible, and intelligible, and approachable to humanity. We have, in the High Prie?t, one who can be touched with the feeling of 232 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. our infirmities. And in this Christ, this divine embod- iment of Infinite love within a mortal tabernacle, the philosophy of the skies makes its direct and palpable appeal to the dullest and feeblest intellect. The child and the savage may not have the grasp of mind, and patience of attention, to follow out any long chain of argumentation ; but bring the story of Calvary before them, and every dormant power of the soul is aroused, " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He first loved us." And stooping thus low, and coming thus near, why should He be refused the heart He claims, and which He claims only that he may flood it with peace — "the peace of Grod, that passeth all un- derstanding" ? And if we scorn and repel such ten- derness and benignity, pluck we not down on our own heads all the storms of a just, and implacable ven- geance ? "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha." And, as this Charity, or flame of Divine Love, kind- ling itself from the Altar on Calvary, is adapted to open and win all hearts ; so is it also, above all other motives, and principles of action, adapted to sustain an untiring zeal, an universal holiness, and an un- quenchable benevolence. Other and inferior objects cease, ultimately, to retain over us their original power. Ambition sits down, frustrated or sated. Avarice is disappointed of success, or finds himself as bitterly disappointed in his success : it does not bring con- tent or security. Pleasure palls on us, and, it may be, corrupts us. Knowledge perplexes ; and Fame dazzles, but bewilders us. The most prosperous of c H A R I T y. 233 earth's most indulged children, are the victims of sa- tiety and weariness. An Alexander, amid conquests and renown, and power, and luxury, sighs for the joy of past conflicts, and for the task of subjugating new empires and worlds. So, in old age, how do earthly goods lose their capacity to fill the yearning and wea- ried heart. With dullened ear, and failing eye, we find that old recreations and delights have spent their power to refresh and to excite us. But the love of God is a spring whose elasticity is never lost ; and Calam- ity, and Sickness, and Age, and Death, leave this mo- tive power, but the stronger, unimpaired and fresh, amid the wrecks of earth and man. Ingratitude, and Failure, may chill the philanthropy that looks but to man for its reward : but he who, like Howard, kindles his torch at the flames of the sacrifice on Golgotha, and opens his heart to the ingushings of Divine Love, may carry that torch, with unwasted brilliancy, and even with still augmented brightness, through all the fierce blasts of human scorn and ingratitude, and down into the darkest, dampest recesses where human wickedness and misery assume their most revolting and loathsome forms. And as this love is, in strength and duration, the mightiest of agencies on human character, so is it, also, the simplest. It throws dignity and splendor around any task, however lowly, and any station however obscure. As Luther was fond of saying : the maid- servant who sweeps the house, with God's love in her heart, as its controlling principle, is as really serving Him, and as surely accepted of Him, as the preacher 234 RELIGIOUS PROGRESS, dispensing His gospel, or the martyr defending His truths. Jesus, the Son of the Father, was as great when stooping to wash the feet of the frail, erring disciples, who were so soon to forsake him, as when, with troops of attendant angels, he rose, majestically, from the earth he had ransomed to his native heavens. And here is the grandeur of the morality of the New Testament. It brings the motives of the heavenly world, and the view and love of an Omnipresent God, to bear on all the petty details and wearisome task- work of life. It circumfuses Paradise, if we may so speak, around the beggar Lazarus, lying in sickness and neglected need, on the highway. Be I what I may, — poor, unknown, reviled and wronged, if I but love G-od : do I what I may, be it but the duty of my Grod-given station, performed with a G-od-fearing heart, — it matters little, what man may say, or think or do towards me. I am G-od's charge and child and heir. My prayer scales His heavens ; His eye marks and guides my weary path ; and this path leads me, through the tomb, up to His throne and home. Where is the philosophy that is thus sublime in its aspirations, and yet thus simple and practical in its hourly applica- tion ? Looking back on the way through which these sentences of the apostle have led us, how evident is it that the gospel has principles of permanent and uni- versal good, which need to be yet more evolved and illustrated, in the experience of the churches and in the character of each individual disciple. CHARITY. 235 And in the sublime generalization of Scripture, which makes Love the fulfilling of the law, and from the contemplation, first, of God, the loving, redeeming, and all-lovely One, brings down our hearts to the wants and woes and sins of our race ; — and makes Heaven, the seat of sovereignty, to which Earth must look up, and the point of aspiration, towards which all life, all care, all joy, all fears and all hopes should be directed ; — how grand and yet how clear is the scheme of the gospel, in its provision for the wants, present and future, of man ; — and this, not only for man, as the suffering, sinning, and dying — but also for man, as the immortal, the heir of the resurrection, amenable to the judgment seat, and invited to, and capable of the bliss and glory of an endless Paradise. Till we love Christ, the first duty and interest of our nature is neglected. Do we love Him ? We are, then, pledged to the good of the race and the glory of God, not only in the world beyond the grave, but here in this world, the wayfarer's lodge of our pilgrim years. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the greatest of these is charity. ^31 p p c n & i jr. APPENDIX. Note A. — Page 37. The language of P. Q^uesnel upon 2 Peter, i. 3, is : " La Fai est la premiere grace, et la source de toutes les autres." This was extracted in the celebrated Bull Unigenitus, (so called from the opening word of its first sentence,) condemna- tory of liis work and doctrines ; and for the refusal to receive which, so many thousands of the Jansenists suffered deprivation, imprisonment, or exile, or were denied the ordinary com- munion, and burial at death. This sentence of the comment forms the twenty-seventh Proposition of those one hundred and one, enumerated and branded by the Bull. How the Pontiff, claiming as he does to be the successor of the Apostle Peter, could place Gluesnel under the b^-n, and yet leave untouched the apostle, whose chair he himself assumes to fill, seems to us a mystery. Less even than an expositor's inference, — the comment thus condemned, appears to be, in this case, but a mere paraphrase of the apostle's text. In the " Traile TJieologique sur les cent-une propositions condamnees par la Bulle Utiigenitus. 1720," forming two large volumes in quarto, an attempt, with much patient eru- dition, is made to defend the positions of the Bull against the strong arguments and censures, which, aUke from the Scrip- tures and the Fathers, the Jansenists had brought to withstand the Papal Edict. When we find these last adducing, in sup- 240 APPENDIX. port of duesnel's sentiment, texts like that from the Epistle 1o the Hebrews : " But without faith it is impossible to pleaso him : for, he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and" that he is a re warder of them that diligently seek him," it wo\ild seem difficult for any ingenuity to parry their force ; yet it is, through weary pages, attempted. And when, in ad- dition to the scriptural argument, the Jansenists brought theii quotations from the Fathers, on whose authority Rome has laid such stress, as from Ambrose, (lib. de Cain) " Faith is the root of all the virtues ;" from Augustine (epist. 194.) " It is from faith that all righteousness takes its beginning : all merit owes to this its birth, and of it this is the principle and the root" (Tr. Theol. t. I. p. 559 ;) and from Gregory the Great, (Moral, lib. 2, cap. 46.) " The other children feast as at the house of their elder brother, whensoever the other vir- tues feed on faith ; for if faith be not the first-born in our heart, nought else that is found there can be good, however it may seem so" (Ibid. p. 562 :) it would seem to an unbiassed reader, as if dexterity were hopelessly employed, in endeavor- ing to reconcile such unquestioned testimonies of the Fathers, with the condemnation of kindred sentiments and language from the page of the good Jansenist. But the chief ground of apprehension to Rome, was, that such views of the precedence and necessity of Faith, were in conflict wdth the doctrine for which Jesuitism contended so earnestly, — that of sufficient grace, supposed to be given to all men, even the heathen never receiving the gospel ; — a doctrine to which Pascal alludes so often and happily, in the Provincial Letters. The impugners of Ciuesnel, and apolo- gists of the Pontifical Bull, held, that in the case of these we must suppose the presence of grace sufl^icient for their sal- vation, and yet we could not imagine the existence of Faith, where the gospel was not. They quote from Thomas Aqui- APPENDIX. 241 nas, " the angel of the "Schools," as they call him, the argu- ment, " Now it may be that a man shall be brought up among wild beasts in the forest, and this man, in such a case, could not beUeve ; and consequently must fall of necessity, imder sentence of damnation. This would be absurd :" he thence concludes that faith is not absolutely necessary. (Tr. Theol. ibid. p. 545.) But is not Faith more than a reception of the mere gospel ? Is not the acquiescence in any or all light coming from God, whether it be by Nature, Providence, or Scripture, of the character of Faith ? Would not one so disadvantageously reared as the person described by Aquinas, — if the mind were at all expanded — be, as his mind opened to the notions and ghmpses of a God, manifested in any way, or in any degree to him, in his narrow and dark sphere — so far a believer ? And might not the Spirit, on a mind so situ- ated , work without the Scripture ? The cases, we beUeve, of such docility to truth in the Pagan, to be most rare ; but we camiot see their impossibility. And whatever the acuteness and depth of Aquinas, his inference from his illustration, seems in irreconcilable conflict with the language as to Faith, already quoted from the Hebrews : Can any mind, in any dispensation, approach God or receive his teachings, except in the exercise of Faith ? He supposes his savage possibly saved, and salvation implies " coming to God :" is not the sentence from the Hebrews decisive, that from such " coming," Faith is inseparable ? For the principle of Faith leans to God — ex- pects from Him — implores of Him — trusts in Him ; the lean- ing may be blind, the expectation vague, the prayer broken, and the trust feeble. But it is, at least, a going of the hu- man soul out of itself for help to a God more or less distinctly discerned. To the Romish condemnation, on such grounds, of the Jan- senist proposition, we have, therefore, these two objections. It 11 242 APPENDIX. ^ assumes for Grace a wider sense than that in which the New Testament employs the term ; apostles, it seems to us, using that phrase rather to describe God's gifts accompanying sal- vation, than the general bounties and lights of providence and conscience, granted indiscriminately and apart from the gos- pel. On the other hand, it assumes for Faith, a narrower meaning than that ui which it is used by inspired writers, es- pecially in the instance already cited from the Epistle to the Hebrews. There it seems to take in all approach to, and trust ia God ; whether, as He is sought, without revelation in the char- acter of the God of Providence, or, as sought with the aid of rev- elation, in the character of the God of redemption ; and whether the soul so trusting in and seeking him, come in lands and tribes unevangelized, by the darkling paths of nature, reason, and conscience ; or, in the broad daylight of the Bible, and along the opened pathway presented in the sacrifice and intercession of Christ, as by that Bible it is fully manifested to the inqui- rer. Christ would be in either case, the only Saviour ; but in the one, a Christ unknown, in the other, a Christ known. So, the heathen, perverting and rejecting the light wliich they have, are condemned for this. They " like not to retain God in their knowledge." This is their form of unbelief — the shape in which they refuse Faith, and perish by the lack of it, choosing to reject " what might be known of God," — in his ordinary works, and in the career of his providence. Taking the words Grace and Faith, in the proper and apos- tolical signification, we deem Gluesnel's position that of the Bible, and the impeaclnnent of it by the Bull Unigenitus, and by its defenders, to be one of the many and sad instances in which the Roman Pontiff, sitting " in the temple of God," contradicted his oracles, and thus, in the character of Anti- christ, " opened his mouth against God."*' * Rev. xiii. 6, APPENDIX. 243 Note B. — Page 56. Bongel, in his commentarj^ the Gnomon Novi Testamen- Ti, upon 2 Peter, i. 5, having traced the hond of connection, which unites the several graces enumerated hy the apostle, as they lie in their direct order, then proceeds to illustrate the same mutual dependence between these several graces ol' the Christian character, as retraced in their /crerse order. Thus, as he proceeds to remark, the man having cliurity, will, in the manifestation of his brotheiiy-kindncss, display it without partiality. And he who has brotherly-kindness will perceive clearly that godliness is necessary. The godly wiU not alloy with the debasing intermixture of stoical apathy, his patience. To the truly patient man, again, temperance will be easy. The temperate brings to every subject a calm, clear mind, and thus gathers knotcledge. And knowledge guards virtue from being hurried away by unconsidered impulse ; Bengel using virtue in the sense of christian boldness or energy. With that condensed, epigrammatic brevity which so char- acterizes his memorable work, he then proceeds to intimate, rather than to unfold at length, the mode in which Unbelief, the opposite of Faith, has its train and banded company of at- tendant evils. " A similar relation of the opposite qualities prevails in the wicked. Unbelief hegets Vice, &c." Com pleting the series of which he thus indicates but the first links, we suppose that the sentence would proceed, somewhat in the order following. Unbelief begets Vice, and vice begets spir- itiial ig7torance ; spiritttal ig7iorancc fosters all intemper- ance and license, as the last produces a fretful and -selfish im- "patience, wliich in its turn, chiding man and murmuring against God, begets a hardened 2ingodUncss. Ungodlitiess, releasing itself from the Supreme Parent, soon disowns the 244 APPENDIX. human brotherhood, and becomes inhumanity ; and iyihu nia.nity spreads and deepens into an inveterate and absorbing selfi&hiiess, " hating and hateful," that " fears not God nor re- gards man," constructing for itself out of the wreck of the uni- verse, a throne for the installation and apotheosis of its own .'onsumuig and destructive egotism. Or, in other words, it would seem that the man who with- holds a reasonable and filial Faith from God's statements and commands, enters upon a course, the legitimate and final de- velopment of which is, — isolation from society and mau, as well as from Providence. Refusmg God's truth, he claims ultimately for self, the prerogatives and rights of a God. The only possible alternative for us, therefore, is to allow the rule of his creation to Jehovah ; or to claim it for our frail and evil selves. If we choose the latter-, we usurp, to be wielded by our own mortal incompetence, Jehovah's sceptre : — not only to his wrong whom we defy, and to our own wrong, whom we thus disinherit, but to the sorrow and injury of our fellow-man, and of the lower creatures, and of Nature itself — all which we necessarily learn to maltreat, and oppress, and pervert. With this train of consequences, it will be seen how " he that be- lieveth not is damned," not only by the righteous sentence of the Maker, Sovereign, and Redeemer, whom he scorns, but he is condemned, as well by the consciences of his fellow-sin- ners, whom he wrongs and degrades, and by the suffrages of the lov/er orders of creation, over whom he constitutes himself a reckless and selfish tyrant. " The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together," in the sublime language of the apos- tle, against such an offender. In casting off his own celestial allegiance, he forfeits, of right, and is sure to abuse, in fact, his terrestrial dominion. The " tmjust steward" learns soon " to smite his fellow-servants," and embezzling from his lord, becomes cru';l to his equals and dependants. APPENDIX. 245 Another wide field of thought is opened in the suggestive pages of " Saturday Evening," one of the profound and elo- quent works of Isaac Taylor.* DifTering, as we feel ourselves compelled to do, from some of the minor expositions of this very able writer, Ave must yet regard his observations with deepest respect. He has said of the passage in Peter, which forms the theme of these lectures, and to which he devotes four brilliant chapters of the work above named :t " We might well seek our illustration of the apostolic injunction by taking a view at large of Church History, and then wq shall find, beneath the significant phraseology of the passage, a comlcnsed but comjn-ehensive caution against each of these prominent coi'ruptio7is that have developed themselves in the course of eighteen centuries. They are readily enumerated, and may be thus designated : — 1st. Pusillanimous or inert faith; — 2d. The licentious abuse of the gospel ; — 3d. A fa- natical or haughty S7(bjugation of animal desires ; — 4th. Anchoretic pietism ; — and 5th. Sectarian or factious social- ity. Thus our apostohc canon is seen to hold up, as in a MIRROR, THE HISTORY OF THE DEGENERATE CHRISTIANITY OF ALL AGES." X Whilst the devout Bengel, therefore, guides our thoughts to the influence of the absence of these traits, on the individ- ual character and well-being, the British Christian directs us, on the other hand, to the bearing which neglect, as to these apostolic graces, will have upon the welfare and virtue of Christian communities and churches, in their collective ca- pacity. To follow out either train of thought, at the length which the stores of individual biography and the annals of the * " Saturday Evening. By the author of Natural History of En- thusiasm." New York: 1832. f Chap xiL xiv. xvii. xviil J Page 180. 246 APPENDIX. secular or ecclesiastical historian would easily allow, would require another volume equal in size to the present. As in a later note we shall have occasion to remark, we cannot apply the terra "virtue," in the limited interpretation which our gifted author has attached to it. Taken in the larger sense, which, as elsewhere, so here also, we believe, belongs to it : — ^Virtue apart from Faith, or Faith severed from Virtue ; Virtue without Knowledge ; Knowledge with Dut Temperance ; Temperance without Patience ; Patience without Godliness ; Godliness without Brotherly-kindness, and Brotherly-kindness without Charity, would each furnish chap- ters on the history of the individual man, — on the workings of national character, and on the annals of the Christian church- es, that, we can conceive, would be full alike of interest and instruction. For " Godliness," both in its own essence, and in its first constituent principle, "Faith," and in its last consummate and crowning result, or " Charity," is profitable for all things, and hath " the promise of the life that now is." Any just estimate of this "life that now is," and any close analysis of that " life," either in the isolated person, or in the societies of the world and the church, would bring out, to a Christian ob- server of any philosophical insight, the most abundant and irrefragable testimony, that the Maker of man's heart, and the Ruler of the world's history, had been also the Legislator and Author of the Scriptures : in that volume requiring as in- dispensable to holiness, what all the experience of the race has shown to be indispensable to happiness. APPENDIX. 247 Note C. — Page 62. It is the remark of the Rev. S. T. Bloomfield, in his "Greek Testament with Enghsh Notes," upon this portion of Peter's Second Epistle, that " the best commentators are justly agreed," in giving to the term here rendered, in our Enghsh version " virtue," the sense of " courage and constancy in professing tlie faith, amidst persecution ami temptation. A signification frequent in the classical writers, from Homer downwards, and found in the Latin, virtus." This limited sense of the term is the one adopted also by Isaac Taylor, in his " Saturday Evening," who heads the chapter of his work founded on the apostolic injunction, — " Add to your Faith Virtue," by the title, " Piety and Energy,"* and defines the virtue as being " manly energy, or vigor ;"t or, again, as " the constancy and courage of manly vigor," the Greek word hav- ing, as he holds, " this specific sense. "t In favor of a like interpretation of it, are the high and earher authorities of Hammond, and Doddridge, and the elder Rosenmuller ; and above all, of that acute critic, and most devout Christian, the great Bengel, who defines the word, as conveying the sense of such tone and vigor of soul, as the apostle in his First Epistle inculcates, whan bidding the disciple to " gird up the loins of his mind." For deserting, however, tliis interpretation, and reluming to that of the earlier commentators, there are various consid- erations. Dr. Bloomfield himself, in his larger exposition, the " Recensio Synoptica," has held an opposite view to that adopt- ed in his other and briefer work ; and this he sustains in the following remarks : — " Most modern commentators from Ham- mond to Pott and Rosermiuller, considering that several partio * Page 174. f Page 178. X Page 189. 248 APPENDIX. ulars included in the general sense of the term, are just after added, take in the more special sense, courage, Hke the Latin virtus. But this signification is unexampled in the Scrip- tures ; and the apostle elsewhere shows too little attention to logical regularity to allow us to lay much stress on the argu- ment adduced. Therefore, though this interpretation is ably supported by Hammond, Doddridge, Benson, Wall, Macknight, and Rosenmuller, I cannot consent to abandon the common one, Christian virtue, which is retained and well illustrated by Schleusner, (Lexicon.)" * And not only is Bloomfield thus inconsistent and wavering in his construction of the terra, but the excellent Bengel, notwithstanding all his clearness of vision, and his characteristic strength of convictions, seems here to retract, in another portion of his commentary on the chapter, his adhesion to the sense of energy or courage. Li enumera- ting the virtues that attend Faith, he takes occasion to allude to the opposite chain of vices that accompany unbelief. And out of the latter, or unbelief, he makes "■Yice''' to spring, just as the corresponding outgrowth of Faith is Virtue. Now, in consistency with his interpretation of the Greek word that follows Faith, the correlative term here to describe the first- fruit of unbelief, was '■'Fear ofman,'^ or the scriptural phrase for that weakness, which is the opposite of holy boldness in God's service. " T^ce" is the opposite and correlative term to "Virtue," taken in the ordinary English sense of the last word, and with the idea attached by the older commentators and critics to this Greek term. Nor do the moderns go, universally, into the views of Hammond, and Rosenmuller. Besides Schleusner above quo- ted, Bretschneider also, in his Lexicon of the New Testament, is found giving to the word in the present sentence the sense of " Probity, Uprightness." And Semler, who wanted neither * Rec. Synop. voL viii. p. 698. APPENDIX. 2^ ftcuteness nor erudition, nor, on the other hand, leaned with any fondness of reverence to old interpretations, yet says, in his comment on 2 Peter,* — " Some explain it as being Forti- tude, to wliich I carmot agree : I should prefer the internal impulses and emotions of holiness, {intermim motum ct se?i- stini quasi sanctitatis.) This I prefer, to the exposition of Beza, holy and virtuous conduct : for conduct has reference only to the mode of using outward objects ; but Peter speaks of the mind itself, and of its higher (moral) attainments." So too Wolfius, in his Curse Philolog. et Crit. in N. Test., wliilst referring to some who prefer the sense of constancy and mauly vigor, himself chooses rather to retain that of Virtue, or the love of Virtue, in the general sense of that term. Calvin's remark, in unison with the interpretation already quoted from his great disciple Beza, is : "I take Virtue to mean an up- right and well-governed life, for the term here is .^(jsitj, and not EisQyeia." The authors of the English Geneva version, accord with these their revered instructors evidently, when, in their note on this passage, they explain Virtue as " Godly maJtfiers." Adams, the quaint Puritan expositor of this Sec- ond Epistle of Peter, makes the Virtue here commended, to be in its general sense, or " in the latitude," to use his phrase, in- clusive of " all graces and good erulowinents.^' t To return, in tliis matter with Wolfius, Semler, Schleus- ner, and Bretschneider, to the more ancient interpretation, we find ourselves compelled by various considerations, that seem of preponderating and overwhelming force. The first is, that even in a Pagan writer on morals, the word would from the nature of the theme, receive the larger and more general sense. Much more would such seem the natural and necessary sense, in a book so essentially ethical as the New Testament. Again, the scriptural usage is against the more * Halae. 1784. p. 17. \ Adams on 2 Peter. Lend. 1839. p. 64 11* 250 APPENDIX. modern and limited explication. Apply that sense to the same word as used by Paul in his magnificent adjuration :* " If there he any virtue, and if there he any jn-aise, think on these things." Would not the substitution of " Courage," here, lamentably and manifestly weaken the force of the ap- peal, and mar the harmony of the sentence thus closed, with its introductory strain, — " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good I'eport ?" These instances in Paul and Peter are the only cases in which the New Testa- ment uses the word as descriptive of human character.! Pass from the New Testament to the Greek of the Apocrypha, in the book called the Wisdom of Solomon : " Better is it to have no children and to have virtue ; for the memorial thereof is immortal : because it is known with God and with men."$ Its immortal record with God, decides in what sense the Greek word there was used. The definitions in Greek of the word by Hesychius, and by Cyril, in a MS. Lexicon at Bre- men, as quoted in Schleusner, Lex. Vet. Test., are of the same tenor and efTect. And the contexture which we have endeav- ored to trace out between the various graces as arranged by Peter in the passage before us, also forbids our acceptance of Energy or Boldness, as the fitting sense here. Between Vir- tue and Faith on the one hand, and between Virtue and Knowledge on the other, we see a close and natural sequence. But why Boldness should especially need Knowledge, or be espe- cially needed by Faith, does not seem to us, even with the ex- position of the excellent Bengel before us, as clearly made out. *PhU.iv. 8. f Other passages of the New Testament apply it to the Bivim character and operations, in the sense of Energy. X Wisd. of Sol. iv. 1. APPENDIX. 251 The later English expositoi-s seem to have been, in this mat- ter, led astray, by the autliority of" Hammond. And his opinion of the passage would appear to furnish anotlier proof of the jus- tice of the charge, which his Puritan and Non-conformist con- temporaries and successors brought against Hiimmond, — that of being dazzled and bUnded by an overweening admiration for Grotius. This great scholar gives his candid acknowledg- ment that the word in Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, and in the Pagan writers on morals {ajnid Pkilosoplios) must be taken in its general sense, or rendered " Virtue.''' But lie ar- gues, that here it cannot bear this larger sense, because many names of specific virtues, as temperance and patience , follow. And, therefore, Grotius thinks it must here be understood of Fortitude in the faith.* He would thus distinguish it from its accompanying and subsequent graces. But would not the same argument require him to devise some newer and more restricted sense for Godliness, also, which, in its large, scrip- tural meanmg, includes all the precedent and subsequent ex- cellencies of the christian character ? But if, as we thuik that a careful student of the passage must allow, various other of these traits, quite as much overlap each other, and Faith and Knowledge must, to a certain extent, include one anoth- er ; and so also Godliness and Charity, (in the highest sense of that last term, as the supreme Love of God along with an equitable Love of man,) do cover, both, a portion of common territory ; then, as we suppose, the argument of Grotius must fail. It would lie against other graces as well, whose defini- tion he does not attempt, on that account, to alter. And that it cannot be carried out uniformly, is a reason why this pro- cess of restriction and close isolation of each grace, should not be even commenced, by the interpreter. We adhere, therefore, to that opinion of Bloomfield which * Grotius. Annot. 2 Peter L 6. 252 APPENDIX. is found in the Recensio Synoptica, and which is also that of the older scholars ; because, as it seems to us, the ordinary application of the term, even by heathen philosophers, when writing on morals, its use in the Greek version of the Apoc- rypha, its sense elsewhere in the New Testament, and above all, the comiection of the ideas in the sentence before us, leave no other alternative. Note D.— Page 93. Speaking of the illumination that should attend the latter and happier ages of the Christian dispensation, the elder Pres- ident "Edwards has, in his History of Redemption, these words ; they deserve respect, as those of a thinker, eminently calm and profound, and whose acquaintance with Scripture was intimate. " It will be a time of great light and knowledge. The pres- ent arc days of darkness, in comparison of those days. The light of that glorious time shall be so great, that it is repre- sented as though there should then be no night, but only day ; no evening nor darkness. So Zech. xiv. 6, 7 ; ' And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear nor dark. But it shall be one day, which shall be known to the Lord, not day nor night ; but it shall come to pass that at evening-time it shall be light.' It is farther represented as though God would then give such light to his Church, that it should so much exceed the glory of the light of the sun and moon, that they should be ashamed : Isa. xxiv. 23. ' Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and in Jerusa- lem, and before his ancients gloriously.' APPENDIX. 253 " There is a kind of vail now cast over the greater part of t1ie world, which keeps them in darkness ; but then this vail •shall be destroyed. Isa. xxv. 7 : ' And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations.' Then all countries and nations, even those which are now most ignorant, shall be full of light and knowledge. Great knowl- edpre shall prevail everywhere. It may be hoped that then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, and other now the most barbarous countries ; and not only learned men, but others of more ordinary education, shall then be very knowing in religion. Jer. xxxii. 34 : 'And they shall teach no more ever)' man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying. Know the Lord ; for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.' " There shall then be a loonderful tinravelling of the diffir culfies in the doctrines of religion, and clearing nj) of seem- ing inconsistencies : ' so crooked things shall be made straight, and rough places shall be made plain, and darkness shall become light before God's people.' Difficulties in Scrip- ture shall then be cleared tip, and a\'onderful things shall BE DISCOVERED IN THE WORD OF GoD, WHICH WERE NEVER DISCOVERED BEFORE. The great discovery of those things in religion, which had before been kept hid, seems to be com- pared to removing the vail, and discovering the ark of the testimony to the people, M'hich before used to be kept in the secret part of the temple, and was never seen by them. Thus, at the sonnding of the seventh angel, when it is proclaimed, ' that the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ ;' it is added, that ' the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament " So great shall be the increase 254 APPENDIX. OF KNOWLEDGE IN TIUS TiafE, THAT HEAVEN SH^LL BE AS fl WERE, OPENED TO THE CHURCH OF GoD ON EaRTH." Works of President Edwards, in Ten Volumes ; New York, 1829, vol iii. pp. 405, 406. Note E.— Page 135 The remark of Bengel, as to the bond of connection, and law of arrangement, between the several graces enumerated by the apostle Peter in this passage, is, that " the order is rather that of nature than that of time ;" or, in other words, they are not classed by date and order of succession, so much as by intrinsic character and their consequent relation. He had introduced this remark by the sentence quoted as a motto on the title-page of the present volume : " Each several de- gree induces AND facilitates THAT WHICH IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWS IT ; EACH FOLLOWING ONE, ATTEMPERS AND PERFECTS THAT WHICH HAS PRECEDED IT." The rich and excellent commentary of this great scholar, was not in the hands of the present writer, whilst preparing the course of Lectures now issued ; nor had he, in consequence, the advantage of Bengel's criticisms, in tracing out the fillet, on which these several virtues of the Christian character are threaded together. It is with the deepest self-distrust, there- fore, that the writer would record his doubt, whether the former half of the sentence or motto thus derived from Ben- gel, presents as justly the controlling idea of the Apostle's mind, in the structure of this passage, as does the latter or concluding section of the paragraph. To the writer, at least, it has seemed that the purpose of Peter's argmnent and appeal was, not so much to show how APPENDIX. 255 each preceding grace ongi?uitcd the succeeding one, as to make clear how each succeeding one was required to guard, or as Bcngel has expressed it, " to attemper^' that which has gone before. The soul of the disciple was tempted, — so at h^ast we apprehend the thought of" the apostle, or rather of tlie Infinite and Infallible Spirit through him — to pause at each step of attainment, as though that step were final and con- summate. It was his interest to sec how each virtue, if thus accepted as a resting-place, involved a coming short of the glorious goal ; and how a Christian entirencss and fulness of character required, that to guard the preceding grace from isolation and excess, it should have the addition and counter- poise of the grace next following. Faith, then, being as Bengel remarks, the gift of God, and not therefore, accordmg to him, recounted among the graces which man is here required to " add," " minister," or " sup- ply ;"* there follow seven graces, or fruits of the Spirit, making up a choir or band, of which the circle begins with Faith, and is rounded and ended by Charity. These graces man is com- manded, as the regenerate disciple and servant of the Holy Ghost, to supply, so that the one may carry forward the work, and complete the deficiencies of the other going before it. All human systems of morality have betrayed this inherent weakness, and this immedicable partiality of the unregenerate * If the great theologian and expositor intended to assert that be- cause Faith is a boon from Heaven, it is not therefore a duty required of each rnan, to whom God's truth comes, his sentiment can hardly re- ceive our assent. For each other grace, which the disciple is here bid- dea tc snpphj, is aI?o the fruit of God's bounty. Grace has its very name from the favor or bounteousncss of God. Its origination in the free love of God the sovereign, towards man the rebel, docs not destroy man's obligations to exercise it. But men are condemned before God, because they believe not, at the same time evading thus a duty, and 4pu)ning a favor. 256 APPENDIX. mind, against wliich Peter here cautions us ; and their virtues have been isolated, and havo oAved their prominence and bril- liancy, to use language already quoted from Isaac Taylor, " to the sjjoliation of some spurned aiid forgotten qualities." He has in the following terms illustrated his meaning more at length : "Almost every excellence in the science of morals has been attained by sages — except completeness and consis- tency : the completeness and consistency of its morality is the peculiar praise of the ethics which the Bible has taught. Often, if we might so speak, the strength of the materials of six parts of morality have been brought together, wherewith to construct a seventh part ; and so much of magnificence and elevation has, by this means, been obtained for the single virtue, whether it Avere fortitude, courage, patriotism, or be- neficence, that mankind, in their admiration, have forgotten the cost at which it has been produced."* And this tendency to pamper single virtues on the slaugh- ter and ruin of others, to create what we may call a system of moral primogeniture, confiscating the substance of the sister graces to enrich some single heiress amongst them, has not been at once or entirely overcome, amongst those receiving the full and symmetrical code of morals presented by Divine Rev- elation. The Jew was accused, under the older economy, of being " partial in God's law," or, in other w^ords, of selecting his favorite and easier precepts, and endeavoring to make his exaggerated zeal for these a dispensation from all obedience to other commands, quite as explicit, and often far more import- ant. The Corban vow was to shield an unnatural child in beggaring his parents under pretext of piety. And under tho New Testament, the same fraudulent disposition, — to select, as interest or inclination might prompt, our own favorite pre- cepts and duties, to the utter oblivion or avowed scorn of com- * Saturday Evening, p. 174. APPENDIX. 257 mauds and obligations more unwelcome, — ^has manifested it- self within the enclosures of the nominal Church, and even in the hearts of true disciples. The description of christian sym- metry given by the Apostle of the circumcision, in this text, appears as a solemn protest, on the part of the God of Holi- ness, against this infirmity of man's nature. The lesson opens by requiring Faith, or tliat man should believe all that God has said ; and th.it lesson closes by demanding Charity, or that man should love even as God loves. A christian nobleman of Britain, Lord Lindsay, in a work which, though brief, has evidently cost its author much thought, and been elaborated from the results of a wide range of reading, has presented a theory, in which he sums up the designs of Providence for the race, and the consequent destiny of the nations. To his work he has given a title : " Progression by Antagonism,"* which explains the sub- stance of his theory. He imagines that the diflerent nations and stocks of mankind have developed certain faculties of the mind, disproportionately, and as in opposition or " antago- nism" to each other. Without accepting all the principles or the conclusions of the noble scholar, a christian reader may welcome the main truth, that out of this Antagonism of one imperfect character to another, — imperfect also, but imperfect on some other side, — God has been deriving the " jfvogrcss," and more perfect education of the race. To the main princi pie binding, or to use the expression of duesnel, " chaining" U)gether the graces enumerated by Peter, we should suppose the title of Lord Lindsay's work not an inapplicable one Each new grace is antagonistic to the preceding one in the Apostle's classification, not as intrinsically opposed to it, but as its counterpoise and corrective, supplying its deficiencies, and counteracting its excesses. Between the antagonisms * Progression by Antagonism. London, 1846. 258 APPENDIX. thus supplied, the soul, renewed and God-fashioned by grace from above, oscillates, as does the pendulum between the two opposite ends of its arc ; and this perpetual antagonism supplies the requisite movement or " progress" in which the man goes on, from grace to grace. The moral pendulum has more than its tivo points of contrast, or antagonism, indeed ; and here the comparison fails. Adams, the Puritan, in his exposition of Peter, has endeav- ored to trace a close parallel between the eight graces com- mended by Peter, and the eight beatitudes opening our Lord's sermon on the Mount. It is, however, rudely done, and with some violence, as it appears to us, alike to the language of the Apostle, and to that of the Apostle's Lord and Master. ' All christian excellence is in its own nature homogeneous and one. In the controlling love of its God, and in a grow- ing assimilation to this Divine and Perfect Object of its love, its life — its essence lies. But the relations under which this Author of our souls, — the divine claimant of the highest af- fections of these souls, — has placed us towards our fellow-men, and the other inhabitants of His Universe, are many and multiform. In ascertaining the due balance between the several claims upon us of these varied relations, difficulties often occur. As the Spirit of God, implanting the Love of God, must supply the first impulse and the motive power of the moral mechanism of man's soul, so the Word of God decides the laws of oscillation, within which this impulse works. Those laws are variously stated, according to thfi fewness or fulness of the relations contemplated. THE Ein>. rUnHSIIKD 15 Y GOULD AND LINCOLN, S9 Washington Street, Boston, aOI> Jtr:rEALEI> IX XAXritE AXD I\ CnniST; including a i{efut.ition of the Development Theory contained in the " Vestiges of tlie Nat- iiral History of Creation." By Uev. Jamks 15. 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