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 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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 SAMUEL AGNEW, 
 
 OF PHII. ADELPHIA, PA. 
 
 
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 BR 85 .W58 1850 
 Williams, William R. , 1804- 
 1885. 
 
 Miscellanies i 
 

^^,^!*^ - rn,„ae^ 
 
 HLowu 
 
 MISCELLANIES 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 
 
 141 NASSAU STREET. 
 
 1850. 
 
Entered nrcording to Act of Congress, in the year 1S50, 
 
 BY EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southeru District 
 n«" New York 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 The Discourses, Reviews, and Sermons, composing the present volume, 
 liave, several of them, been already issued separately ; and of the opening 
 article, the present is the third edition; others of them appear now for the 
 first time. It was thought, by some of the author's friends, that the book 
 might find purchasers; and the writer will have been recompensed, should 
 it please " The Great Taskmaster" to give to the desultory pages aught of 
 usefulness, in their influence on the minds of any of their readers. For the 
 sake of its publisher, who is also the proprietor of the copyright, the author 
 would hope for the volume sufficient currency to save him from loss in the 
 venture he has made. W. R. W. 
 
 New York, Nov. 1, 1849. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 The Conservative Principle, ---------.-.. j 
 
 Appendix to the Conservative Principle, ---.-..-73 
 
 Ministerial Responsibility ---.-----.-...91 
 
 The Prayers of the Church needed for her rising Ministry, 111 
 
 The Church the Home and Hope of the Free, 129 
 
 The Strong Staff and the Beautiful Rod, --..-.. 143 
 
 The Jesuits as a Missionary Order, --- 169 
 
 The Life and Times of Baxter, 194 
 
 Christ a Home Missionary, 220 
 
 Publications of the American Tract Society, -..-.. 241 
 
 Increase of Faith necessary to the Success of Christian 
 
 Missions, ---------- 261 
 
 The Preaching of another Gospel accursed, -.--... 2S3 
 
 The Sea giving up its Dead, - 297 
 
 The Lessons of Calamity, ----------...- 311 
 
 The Church, a School for Heaven, 337 
 
 The Prayer of the Church against those delighting in War, 367 
 
 Appendix — The Cagots of France, -....------ 383 
 
THE 
 
 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 IN OUR LITERATURE. 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE HAM- 
 ILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, MADISON COUNTY, N. Y., 
 ON TUESDAY EVENING, JUNE 13, 1843. 
 
THE REV. JOHN S. MAGINNIS, D.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY 
 
 HAMILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, 
 
 SMs ^Dtiress 
 
 IS, AS A SLIGHT MARK OP HIGH ESTEEM AND AFFECTION, 
 
 INSCRIBED 
 
 BY HIS FRIEND. 
 
 W. R. W. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF 
 THE "CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE," &c. 
 
 Other engagements, which prevented the author from preparing this Address for 
 the press, and for a time banished it entirely from his mind, must be, in part, his apol- 
 ogy with the Societies who requested its publication, for its late appearance. Yet what 
 of truth it may contain is not less true now than at the time of its delivery. Some 
 additions made at the commencement of the Address, with regard to the proper defi- 
 nition of literature, and the permanent influence which may belong even to its more 
 transitory productions, will, he trusts, not be found alien to the theme. But the chief 
 cause of delay has been the writer's consciousness how far his treatment of the subject 
 fell below the intrinsic importance of the topic. This consciousness, had he not bound 
 himself to publish, would have prevented his appearance even at this late hour. 
 
 To prevent misconstruction he would add the remark, that a full review of our 
 national literature in all its aspects, the more encouraging as well as the more gloomy, 
 was no part of his design. It was his task to point out certain of the perils, and to 
 indicate the sufficient and sole remedy. 
 
 NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 This Address, origmally delivered before the Adelphian and JJonian Societies of 
 Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, has, from its theme, found more ac- 
 ceptance than the author had at all anticipated. In preparing a second edition, ho has 
 subjected the whole to such hasty revision as his other engagements allowed, and 
 made some other additions both to the text and notes. 
 
 New Yokk, 1844. 
 
 NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 The present edition has some slight revisions, and considerable additions have been 
 made to some of the notes ; but these additions are, from want of leisure, less exten- 
 sive than the writer had wished to make them. 
 
 New York, November, 1849. 
 
"V-* 
 
 i( 
 
«"■' 
 
 THE CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE IN OUR 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 Gentlemen: — In acceding to the request with which 
 you have honored me, and which brings me at this lime 
 before you, I have supposed that you expected it of the 
 speaker to present some theme relating to the common- 
 weahh of hterature ; that commonwealth in which every 
 scholar and every Christian feels naturally so strong an 
 interest. The studies in which you have here engaged, and 
 which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, 
 have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves 
 and its power over others. That love of country, which in 
 the bosoms of the young burns with a flame of more than 
 ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an additional interest 
 in the cause of letters ; for as you well know, the literature 
 of the nation must exercise a powerful influence on the 
 national destiny. Acting as it does not merely on the 
 schools, but also on the homes of a land, it must from those 
 fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of 
 blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our 
 goodly land. You know that it is not mere physical advan- 
 tages that have gained or that can retain for our country its 
 political privileges. You have seen how the physical con- 
 dition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst the moral 
 condition of a people is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. 
 You remember that the same sun shone on the same Mara- 
 thon, when it was the heritage and the battle-ground of 
 freemen ; and when, in later and more disastrous days, it 
 re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his 
 Ottoman oppressor. You look to literature, and other 
 moral causes, then, as determining to some extent the future 
 history of our land. You are aware that literature is not 
 always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise 
 a conservative influence. It is like the vegetation ol our 
 
4 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 earth, of varied nature. Much of it is the waving harvest 
 that fills our garners and piles our boards with plenty ; and, 
 alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the 
 decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the 
 edifice it seems to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your 
 country, you must therefore feel an eager anxiety for the 
 moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. 
 And of your number most are looking forward to the work 
 of the Christian ministry ; and, from the past history of the 
 world, you have learned in what mode the progress of liter- 
 ature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been, in its turn, 
 acted upon ; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press 
 have sometimes been found in friendly alliance, and at others 
 enlisted in fearful antagonism. How shall it be in your 
 times ? 
 
 By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps 
 the place to say, more than the mere issues from the press 
 of a nation. The term is generally applied to describe all 
 the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people as far as 
 they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art 
 of printing. But it may well be questioned whether the 
 term does not in justice require a wider application. Lan- 
 guage, as soon as it is made the subject of culture, seems to 
 give birth to literature. And such culture may exist where 
 the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. 
 Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have 
 acquired the art of writing. Such were the Tonga Islanders, 
 as Mariner found them. Tlie melody and rhythm of their 
 dialect may have been partially developed, and their bards, 
 their musicians, and their orators have become distinguished, 
 ere the language has had its grammarians or its historians. 
 The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its 
 Cadmus has appeared to give it an alphabet. The old 
 Gaelic poetry, on which Macpherson founded his Ossianic 
 forgeries, was a part of the nation's literature while yet un- 
 written. And if, as some scholars have supposed, the poems 
 of Homer were, in the times of the author, preserved by 
 memory and not by writing, it would be idle to deny, that, 
 even in that unwritten state, and whilst guarded only in the 
 recollection of travelling minstrels, they were a glorious and 
 influential literature to the Greek people, a Kmi^a es ati to 
 them, and to the civilization of Europe for all ensuing times. 
 And even in nations having the use of letters, there is much 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 
 
 never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded as 
 forming part of the hterature of the people. The unre- 
 corded intercourse of a community, neither transcribed by 
 the pen, nor multiplied by the press, may bear no inconsid- 
 erable part in the literary culture of that people, and form 
 no trivial portion of their literary products. Of the elo- 
 quence of Curran and Sheridan much was never reported, 
 or reported most imperfectly ; and yet in its effects upon 
 the immediate hearers in courts of justice or houses of Par- 
 liament, deserved the name and honors of literature, alike 
 from the literary culture it displayed on the part of the 
 speaker, and from the literary taste it formed and cherished, 
 on the part of the auditory. Some of the most distinguished 
 among the living scholars of France were, whilst professors 
 in her colleges, eminent for the eloquence of their unwritten 
 lectures. Were not even such of those lectures of Guizot, 
 Villemain, and Cousin as never reached the press, yet really 
 and most effectively contributions to the literature of the 
 land? The departed Schleiermacher of Germany had the 
 reputation of being among the profoundest thinkers and the 
 most eloquent preachers of his time. His sermons, it is 
 said, were never written ; nor were most of the pulpit dis- 
 courses of a kindred spirit, Robert Hall, of England. Al- 
 though many have been published, more must have perished. 
 Yet were not those, which the living voice but published to 
 a single congregation, truly a portion of German and British 
 literature, as well as those which the press published to the 
 entire nation, and preserved to succeeding times ? Thus the 
 arguments of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the float- 
 ing proverbs, or the current legends of the nation, and the 
 ballads, and even the jests, which no antiquary may as yet 
 have secured aud written down, are expressions of the pop- 
 ular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored 
 only in the memory, instead of receiving the surer guardian- 
 ship of the written page, may, with some show of reason, 
 be claimed as forming no small and no uninfluential part 
 of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a 
 land embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, 
 whether that intercourse be oral or written. It is the expo- 
 nent of the national intellect, and the utterance of the pop- 
 ular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises all the 
 intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to 
 the newspaper ; from the body of divinity to the primer or 
 
6 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 the nursery rhyme — the epic poem and the Sunday School 
 hymn — the sermon and the epigram — the essay and the 
 sonnet — the oration and the street ballad — the jest or the 
 bve-vvord — all that represents, awakens, and colors the pop- 
 ular mind — all that interprets, by the use of words, the 
 nation to themselves, or to other nations of the earth. 
 
 This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual 
 advancement of the people at the time of its production, 
 but it exercises, of necessity, a powerful influence in hasten- 
 ing or in checking that advancement. It is the Nilometer 
 on whose graded scale we read not merely the height to 
 which the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, 
 or the degree to which it has sunk, but also the character 
 and extent of the harvests yet to be reaped in coming 
 months along the whole course of those waters. Thus it 
 registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but 
 presages as well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant 
 future. The authors of a nation's literary products are its 
 teachers — in truth or in error ; and leave behind their im- 
 print and their memorial in the virtues or vices of all those 
 whom their labors may have reached. The errand of all 
 language is to create sympathy ; to waft from one human 
 bosom the feelings that stir it, that they may awaken a cor- 
 responding response in other hearts. We are therefore held 
 responsible for our words because they affect the happiness 
 and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips 
 takes its irrevocable flight, and leaves behind its indelible 
 imprint. It is, in the stern language of the apostle, in the 
 case of some, a flame " set on fire of hell ;" and consuming 
 wherever it alights, it " setteth on fire the course of nature ;" 
 as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of 
 salvation, "ministering grace unto the hearers." Reason 
 and Scripture alike make it idle to deny the power of speech 
 over social order and morality ; and literature is but speech 
 under the influence of art and talent. And a written litera- 
 ture is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form 
 than it usually wears. We know that God and man hold 
 each of us responsible for the utterance of the heart by the 
 lips. Human tribinials punish the slanderer because his 
 words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts 
 its reckoning for " every idle word," because that word, 
 however lightly uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and 
 went out to influence, for good or for evil, the souls of others. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 7 
 
 And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, 
 of a man's lips are thus influential, and enter into the matter 
 of his final account, it cannot be supposed that these words, 
 when fixed by the art of writing, or scattered by the art of 
 printing, either have less power over human society, or are 
 in the eye of heaven clothed with less solemn responsibili- 
 ties. A written literature embalms the perishable, arrests 
 the progress of decay, and gives to our words a longer life 
 and a wider scope of influence. Such words, so preserved 
 and so difiused, are the results, too, of more than ordinary 
 deliberation. If malicious, their malice is malice prepense. 
 If foolish, their folly is studied, and obstinate, and shame- 
 less. The babbler sins in the ears of a few friends, and in 
 the privacy of home. The frivolous or vicious writer sins, 
 as on a wider theatre, and before the eyes of thousands, 
 while the echoes of the press waft his words to distant lands 
 and later times. And because much of this literature may 
 be hasty and heedless, ludicrous in tone, and careless in 
 style, soon to evaporate and disappear, like the froth on 
 some hurried stream, we are not to suppose that it is there- 
 fore of no practical influence. The English stage, in the 
 days of the last two Stuarts, was of a reckless character ; — 
 the child of mere whim, the progeny of impulse and license. 
 Many of its productions were alike regardless of all moral 
 and literary rules — the light-hearted utterance of a depraved 
 generation : full of merry falsehoods and jesting blasphemy, 
 fantastic and barbarous in style, as well as irreligious in their 
 spirit. Yet he must be a careless reader of history, who, 
 because of its reckless, trivial, and profligate character, 
 assigns to it but a limited influence. It did, in fact, gre- 
 viously aggravate the national wickedness whence it sprung. 
 
 The trivial and the ephemeral as they float by, in glittering 
 bubbles, to the dull waters of oblivion, may yet work irre- 
 parable and enduring mischief ere their brief career ends ; 
 and the result may continue, vast and permanent, when the 
 fleeting causes which operated have long gone by. Who 
 now reads Eikon Basilike, the forgery of Bishop Gauden, 
 ascribed to the beheaded Charles I.? Yet that counterfeited 
 manual of devotion is thought by some to have done much 
 in bringing back the house of Stuart to the English throne.'^ 
 
 * " Many have not scrupled to ascribe to that book the subsequent resto- 
 ration of the royal family. Milton compares its efTects to those which were 
 wrought on the tumultuous Romans by Antony's reading to them the will 
 
8 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 Who in this age knows the words of Lillibullero ?* Yet the 
 author of that street ballad, now forgotten, boasted of hav- 
 ing rhymed, by his song, the Stuarts out of their kingdom. 
 Thus a forged prayer-book aided to restore a dynasty, as the 
 ragged rhymes of a street song helped to overturn it. We 
 err grievously, therefore, if we suppose that the frivolous is 
 necessarily uninfluential, and that when the word passes, its 
 effects also pass with it. According to Eastern belief, the 
 plague that wastes a city may be communicated by the gift 
 of a glove or a riband. The spark struck from the iron 
 heel of the laborer may have disappeared ere the eye could 
 mark its transient lustre, yet ere it expired have tired the 
 train which explodes a magazine, lays a town in ruins, and 
 spreads around a wide circuit alarm and lamentation, be- 
 reavement and death. Trifles may have no trivial influence. 
 What is called the lighter literature of the age may be even 
 thus evanescent, yet not inefficacious. By its wide and rapid 
 circulation it may act more powerfully on society than do 
 graver and abler treatises, and its authors, if unprincipled, 
 may thus deserve but too well the title which the indignant 
 Nicole gave to the comparatively decorous dramatists and 
 romance writers of France, in his own time ; a title which 
 his pupil Racine at first so warmly resented, that of ^'■public 
 poisoners.''^ 
 
 Of literature, therefore, thus understood, thus wide in its 
 range and various in its products, thus influential even where 
 the most careless, and thus clothed with most solemn re- 
 sponsibilities because of its influence, it is our purpose now 
 to speak. 
 
 You perceive, gentlemen, that amongst ourselves, as a 
 people, literature is subject to certain peculiar influences, 
 perhaps nowhere else found in the same combination, or 
 operating to the same extent as in our own land. We are a 
 young nation, inhabiting, and called to subdue, a wide terri- 
 tory. Youth is the season of hope, enterprise, and energy 
 — and it is so to a nation as well as an individual. Our 
 
 of Caesar. The Eikon passed through fifty editions in a twelvemonth."— 
 Hume. 
 
 * "It may not be unworthy of notice, that a merry ballad, called Lillibul- 
 lero, being at that time published, in derision of the "papists and the Irish, it 
 was greedily received by the people, and was sung by all ranks of men, even 
 by the King's army, who were strongly seized with the national spirit. This 
 incident both discovered, and served to increase the general discontent of 
 the kingdom." — Hume. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 9 
 
 literature is likely, therefore, to be ardent, original, and at 
 times perhaps boastful. They are the excellences and the 
 foibles of youth. We entered, as by right of inheritance, 
 and in consequence of our community of language, upon 
 the possession of the rich and ancient literature of Britain, 
 at the very outset of our national career. As a people we 
 enjoy, again, that freedom which has ever been the indul- 
 gent nurse of talent in all times and in all lands. The peo- 
 ple are here the kings. And whilst some of our sovereio-ns 
 are toiling in the field, others are speaking through the press. 
 Our authors are all royal by political right, if not by the 
 birthright of genius. Providence has blessed us with the 
 Avide diff"usion of education, and the school travels, in many 
 regions of our land, as it were, to every man's door. It is 
 not here, if it may elsewhere be the case, that the neglected 
 children of genius can complain that " chill penury repressed 
 their noble rage." In addition to the advantages of the 
 common school, our writers, publishers, and instructors, are 
 sedulously preparing literature for the use of the masses. 
 The popular lecturer is discussing themes of grave interest ; 
 while the cheap periodical press is snowing over the whole 
 face of our land its thick and incessant storm of knowledge. 
 This knowledge, it is true, is not all of the most valuable 
 kind. The wonders of steam are dragging the remoter por- 
 tions of our union daily into closer contact, whilst a free emi- 
 gration is bringing us the denizens of other lands, and the 
 men of other tongues, until the whole world appears about 
 to be made neighbors and kinsmen to America ; and the 
 nation seems daily melting into a new and strange amalgam, 
 in consequence of the addition of foreign materials from with- 
 out, to the heterogeneous mass already found fusing within 
 our own country. 
 
 All these causes are operating, and must operate long and 
 steadily, upon the character of American literature. It be- 
 comes an important inquiry then, what moral shape this lit- 
 erature is assuming under these plastic influences. You 
 ask, as change succeeds change, and as one omen of moral 
 progress, or social revolution, follows close upon another : 
 " Watchman, what of the night ?" And gazing into the 
 deep darkness of the future, you would fain read what are 
 the coming fortunes of our people and their literature. Allow 
 me then to dwell upon some of the evils that endanger our 
 rising literature, and threaten to suffuse the bloom of its 
 3 
 
10 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 youth with their fatal virus. I would next bring before you 
 the remedy which as scholars, patriots, and Christians, we 
 are bound to apply to these evils, and to which we must look 
 as our preservative against the approaching danger. 
 
 Evils to be found besetting and perilling American litera- 
 ture, and the remedy of those evils, will afford our present 
 theme. I may' seem to dwell for a time, at least, upon the 
 darker shades of a picture, that may, I fear, appear to some 
 of my respected hearers, overcharged in its gloom. I must 
 also from the nature of the subject enter into some details, 
 that will, I must expect, severely tax the patience of all who 
 are listening. I can only cast myself upon your indulgence ; 
 find an apology as to the length of some statements, and the 
 denser shade cast by others, in the wide and varied nature 
 of the subject, and its mingled difficulty, delicacy, and im- 
 portance ; asking the aid of Him whose blessing can never 
 fail those that trust in Him, the author of all knowledge, and 
 the final arbiter who will bring into judgment all our employ- 
 ments, whether literary or practical, social or solitary. 
 
 We would then dwell for a time, on some of the dangers 
 that threaten the rising literature of our land. If the fore- 
 ground of the landscape be dark, we trust to show in the 
 distance the sure and sufficient remedy of these dangers ; 
 and though night be spread on the summits of the nearer 
 and lower mountains, we see glittering on the crest of the 
 remoter and loftier heights beyond, the Star of Hope, that 
 portends the coming day, and under the edge of the darkest 
 cloud we seem to discern already the gleams of the approach- 
 ing sun. Our country may suffer and struggle, but we trust 
 it is not the purpose of Him who has so signally blest and 
 so long defended us, that she should suffer long, or sink far, 
 much less sink finally and for ever. 
 
 First then among the evil tendencies that beset our youth- 
 ful literature, and are likely to thwart and mar its progress, 
 we would name, the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the 
 times. We are as a nation eminently practical in our char- 
 acter. It is well that we should be so. But this trait in our 
 national feelings and manners has its excesses and its con- 
 sequent perils. Placed in a country where labor and integ- 
 rity soon acquire wealth, the love of wealth has become a 
 passion with multitudes. The lust of gain seems at times a 
 national sin easily besetting all classes of society amongst us. 
 Fierce speculations at certain intervals of years engross the 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 11 
 
 hearts of the community, and a contagious frenzy sends men 
 from all walks of life and all occupations into the field of 
 traffic. Fortunes are rapidly made and as rapidly lost. The 
 nation seems to be lifted up as on a rushing tide of hope and 
 prosperity. It subsides as rapidly as it had risen ; and on 
 every side are seen strewn the wrecks of fortune, credit, 
 character, and principle. All this affects our literature. 
 We are in the influential classes, a matter-of-fact and money- 
 getting race. This tends, in the minds of many, to create a 
 distaste for all truth that is not at once convertible into 
 wealth, and its value to be calculated in current coin. In 
 the clank and din of our never-tiring machinery, the voice 
 of wisdom is often drowned, and the most momentous and 
 stirring truths are little esteemed because they cannot be 
 rated in the Price Current or sold on the Exchange. We 
 are impatient to see the material results of every truth, and 
 to have its profits told upon our fingers, or pressed into our 
 palms. So, on the other hand, if any principle, plan, or ex- 
 pedient, be it true or be it false, will eflect our purpose, pro- 
 duce a needful impression, and secure an end that we deem 
 desirable, we are prone to think it allowable because it is 
 effective. We idolize eflect. And a philosophy of expedi- 
 ency thus springs up, which sacrifices everything to imme- 
 diate eflects and to mere material results — a philosophy 
 which, in practice, if not in theory, is driving rapidly against 
 some of the very bulwarks of moral principle that our fathers 
 believed, and believed justly, to be grounded in the law, and 
 built into the very throne of God. 
 
 Now we need not say that where this utilitarian and 
 mechanical spirit acquires the ascendancy in our literature, 
 it must operate dangerously on the state and the church. 
 The prosperity which is built on gain, and the morality that 
 is built on expediency, will save no nation. Wo to that na- 
 tion in which Political Economy swallows up all its The- 
 ology ; and the law of self is the basis of all its wisdom. 
 The declining glories of Tyre and Holland, each in her day 
 mistress of the sea, and guardian of its treasures, may read 
 us an admonitory lesson as to the fatal blight that such a 
 spirit breathes over the freedom, the arts and the learning 
 of a land. 
 
 We are, by the favoring Providence of God, placed under 
 political institutions which more readily yield to and reflect 
 the popular will, than the government and laws of other 
 
12 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 lands. The literature of our nation, more directly than that 
 of earlier times, or of older countries, moulds the political 
 action of the nation. Let but the spirit of expediency and 
 of gain sway our political literature in the thousand journals 
 of our country, and in the myriads of voters Avhom these 
 journals educate and govern; let the same spirit possess the 
 great parties ever to be found in a free nation, and the aspir- 
 ing leaders who are the champions and oracles of those par- 
 ties, and what would soon be the result? A peddling policy, 
 that, disregarding the national interest and honor, would 
 truckle to power and favor, carry its principles to market, 
 and convert statesmanship into a trade. The country would 
 be visited by an impudent, voluble, and mercenary patriot- 
 ism, that shrinking from no artifice, and blushing at no 
 meanness, would systematize the various arts of popularity 
 into a new science of selfishness. The legislation of the 
 land and its intercourse with foreign nations would be en- 
 grossed by trading politicians ; huckstering their talents and 
 influence to the party or the measure or the man, that should 
 bid in the shape of emolument or ofiice, the highest price for 
 the commodities which they vend. The expert statesman 
 would then be he who consulted most assiduously the 
 weather-vane of popular favor, that he might ascertain to 
 what point his conscience should be set. And should such 
 time ever come over our beloved land, could our liberties 
 endure when guarded only by hands so faithless, or our laws 
 be either wise or just, when such men made and such men 
 administered them ? 
 
 Let the same love of selfish gain pervade the pulpits of 
 our land : let the messengers of the gospel learn to prophesy 
 smooth thhigs, and instead of the "word in season," let 
 them substitute the word in fashion — let them retail doctrines 
 that admit no personal application, truths that wound not the 
 conscience and pierce not the heart, and morals enforced by 
 no motives of love to God, but by mere considerations of 
 gain or honor — let them compile unoffending truisms and 
 dexterous sophisms, and put these in place of unpalatable 
 truths — let them listen to the echoes of popular opinion ever- 
 more, that they may in them learn their lessons of duty ; 
 and where soon is the gospel so administered, and where is 
 the church, if left but to such instruction ? The far-sighted 
 law of righi, as God ordained and administers it, would be 
 overthrown, that in its stead might be set up the law of interest, 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 13 
 
 as short-sighted man expounds it ; and a creed by which 
 the world is to be humored, flattered and adored, would be 
 audaciously preached at the foot of a cross which ransomed 
 that world only by renouncing and only by defying it. No 
 — gain is not godliness. 
 
 But man was made for other purposes than to coin or ex- 
 change dollars. The fable of Midas pestered with his riches, 
 and unable to eat because his food turned to gold, is full of 
 beneficial in-struction in such times as ours. Man has wants 
 which money cannot supply, and sorrows which lucre can- 
 not heal ; although cupidity may teach him often to make 
 expediency or immediate utility the standard of his code of 
 morals. Conscience, too, will utter at times her protest, 
 slip aside the gag, and declaim loudly against practices she 
 cannot approve, however they may for the time profit. A 
 literature merely venal will not then meet all the necessities 
 of man's nature. And not from conscience only is the reign 
 of covetousness threatened and made insecure. Mere feel- 
 ing and passion lead men often to look to other than their 
 pecuniary interests, and in quest of yet dearer objects they 
 trample on gain, and sacrifice the mere conveniences to 
 secure the higher enjoyments of life. But here, in this last 
 named fact, is found the source of yet another danger to our 
 literature. Passion is not a safer moral guide to a people 
 than interest. 
 
 2. Let us dwell on this new inimical influence by which 
 our literature may suffer. Our age is eminently, in some 
 of its leading minds, an age of passion. It is seen in the 
 character of much of the most popular literature, and espe- 
 cially the poetry of our day. Much of this has been the 
 poetry of intense passion, it mattered little how unprincipled 
 that passion might be. An English scholar lately gone from 
 this world (it is to Southey that we refer), branded this 
 school of modern literature, in the person of its great and 
 titled leader, as the Satanic school.^ It has talent and genius, 
 
 3 Another English scholar, whose writings may be quoted as aflbrding 
 evidence of a re-action that has tollowed the influence of Byron, holds this 
 language. Speaking of the heroes of Byron, he remarks: "They exhibit 
 rattier passions personified than persons impassioned. But there is a yet worse 
 defect ; Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty 
 materials of knowledge from wliich to construct the ideal ola human bang, 
 but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His 
 heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, 
 weak of mind. They must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no 
 
14 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 high powers of imagination and language, and boiling energy ; 
 but it is, much of it, the energy of a fallen and revolted 
 angel, with no regard for the right, no vision into eternity, 
 and no hold on Heaven. We would not declaim against 
 passion when employed in the service of literature. Inform- 
 ed by strong feelings, truth becomes more awful and more 
 lovely ; and some of the ages which unfettered the passions 
 of a nation, have given birth to master-pieces of genius. 
 Rut Passion divorced from Virtue is ultimately among the 
 fellest enemies to literary excellence. When yoked to the 
 car of duty, and reined in by principle, passion is in its ap- 
 propriate place, and may accomplish a mighty service. But 
 when, in domestic life, or political, or in the walks of litera- 
 ture, passion throws oil' these restraints and exults in its own 
 uncontrolled power, it is as useless lor purposes of good, and 
 as formidable from its powers of evil, as a car whose liery 
 coursers have shaken off bit and rein, and trampled under 
 foot tlieir charioteer. The Maker of man made conscience 
 to rule liis other faculties, and when it is dethroned, the 
 result is ruin. Far as the literature to which we have alluded 
 
 strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions — in whoni all is vani- 
 ty ; tlieir exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and 
 their sutierings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these 
 are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for 
 what is low in sentiment or infirm in character 7" It is not the language 
 of theologians we are now quoting, but the words we have transcribed are 
 those of "a prophet of their own" — of a living dramatic poet — Henry Tay- 
 lor, the author of " Philip Van Artevelde." Elsewhere he uses the aid of 
 verse to pronounce a similar judgment. 
 
 ■' Then learned I to despise that far-famed school 
 
 Who ])lace in wickedness their pride, and deem 
 Power chictly to be shown where passions rule. 
 
 And not where they are ruled ; in whose new scheme 
 
 or heroism, self-government should seem 
 A thing left out, or something to contemn — 
 
 Whose notions, incoherent as a dream, 
 Make strength go with the torrent, and not stem, 
 For '■wicked and thence iccak,' is not a creed for them. 
 
 " I left these passionate weaklings ; I perceived 
 
 What took away all nobleness from pride, 
 All dignity from sorrow ; what bereaved 
 
 Even genius of respect : they seemed allied 
 
 To mendicants, that by the highway side 
 Expose their self-inflicted wounds, to gain 
 
 The alms of sympathy — far best denied. 
 I heard the sorrowful sensualist complain, 
 If with compassion, not without disdain." 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 15 
 
 spreads, it cherishes an insane admiration for mere talent or 
 mental power. It substitutes as a guide in morals, sentiment 
 for conscience ; and makes blind feeling the irresistible fate, 
 whose will none may dispute, and whose doings are beyond 
 the jurisdiction of casuists or lawgivers. It has much of 
 occasional tenderness, and can melt at times into floods of 
 sympathy : but this softness is found strangely blended with 
 a savage violence. Such things often co-exist. As in the 
 case of the French hangman, who in the time of their great 
 revolution was found, fresh from his gory work of the cruil- 
 lotine, sobbing over the sorrows of Werther, it contrives to 
 ally the sanguinary to the sentimental. It seems, at first 
 sight, much such an ill-assorted match as if the family of 
 Mr. Wet-eyes in one of Bunyan's matchless allegories, were 
 wedded to that of Giant Blood)^-man in the other. But it is 
 easily explained. It has been found so in all times when 
 passion has been made to take the place of reason as the 
 guide of a people, and conscience has been thrust from the 
 throne to be succeeded by sentiment. The luxurious and 
 the cruel, the fierce and the voluptuous, the licentious and 
 the relentless readily coalesce ; and we soon are made to per- 
 ceive the fitness of the classic fable by which, in the old 
 Greek mythology, Venus was seen knitting her hands with 
 Mars, the goddess of sensuality allying herself with the god 
 of slaughter. We say much of the literature of the 
 present and the last generation is thus the caterer of passion 
 — lawless, fierce, and vindictive passion. And if a retired 
 student may " through the loopholes of retreat" read aright 
 the world of fashion, passion seems at times acquiring an un- 
 wonted ascendancy in the popular amusements of the age. 
 The lewd pantomime and dance, from which the less refined 
 fashion of other times would have turned her blushing and 
 indignant face, the gorgeous spectacle and the shows of wild 
 beasts, and even the sanguinary pugilistic combat, that some- 
 times recals the gladiatorial shows of old Rome, have become, 
 in our day, the favorite recreations of some classes among 
 the lovers of pleasure. These are, it should be remembered, 
 nearly the same with the favorite entertainments of the later 
 Greek empire, when, plethoric by its wealth, and enervated 
 by its luxury, that power was about to be trodden down by 
 the barbarian invasions of the north. 
 
 It is possible that the same dangerous ascendency of pas- 
 sion may be fostered, where we should have been slow to 
 
16 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 suspect it, by the ultraism of some good men among the 
 social reformers of our time. Wilberforce was, in the judg- 
 ment of Mackintosh, the very model of a reformer, because 
 he united an earnestness that never flagged with a sweetness 
 that never failed. There are good men that have nothing of 
 this last trait. Amid the best intentions there is occasionally, 
 in the benevolent projects even of this day, a species of Jack 
 Cadeism, if we may be allowed the expression, enlisted in 
 the service of reform. It seems the very opposite of the 
 character of Wilberforce, nourishes an acridity and violence 
 of temper that appears to delight in repelling, and seeks to 
 enkindle feeling by wild exaggeration and personal denunci- 
 ation ; raves in behalf of good with the very spirit of evil, 
 and where it cannot convince assent, would extort submis- 
 sion. Even truth itself, when administered at a scalding 
 heat, cannot benefit the recipient ; and the process is not safe 
 for the hands of the administrator himself. 
 
 Far be it from us to decry earnestness when shown in the 
 cause of truth and justice, or to forget how the passion 
 awakened in some revolutionary crisis of a people's history, 
 has often infused into the productions of genius an unwonted 
 energy, and clothed them as with an immortal vigor. But 
 it is passion yoked to the chariot of reason, and curbed by 
 the strong hand of principle ; laboring in the traces, but not 
 grasping the reins. But set aside argument and truth, and 
 give to passion its unchecked course, and the effect is fatal. 
 It may at first seem to clothe a literature with new energy, 
 but it is the mere energy of intoxication, soon spent, and for 
 which there speedily comes a sure and bitter reckoning. 
 The bonds of principle are loosened, the tastes and habits 
 of society corrupted ; and the effects are soon seen extending 
 themselves to the very form and style of a literature as well 
 as to the morality of its productions. The intense is substi- 
 tuted for the natural and true. What is effective is sought 
 for rather than what is exact. Our literature therefore has 
 little, in such portions of it, of the high finish and serene 
 repose of the master-pieces of classic antiquity, where passion 
 in its highest flights is seen wearing gracefully all the re- 
 straining rules of art ; and power toils ever as under the ses- 
 vere eye of order. 
 
 3. A kindred evil, the natural result and accompaniment 
 of that to which we have last adverted, and like it fatal to 
 the best interests of literature, is the lawlessness, unhappily 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 17 
 
 but too rife through large districts of our territory, and in 
 various classes of its inhabitants. Authority in the parent, 
 the magistrate or the pastor, seems daily to be held by a less 
 firm tenure. Obedience seems to be regarded rather as a 
 boon, and control resented as usurpation. The restraints of 
 honesty in the political and commercial intercourse of society 
 seem more feebly felt. In those intrusted by the state and 
 by public corporations with the control of funds, the charges 
 of embezzlement and defalcation have within the last few 
 years multiplied rapidly in number and swelled fearfully in 
 amount ; until, catching the contagion of the times, sovereign 
 states are found questioning the obligations of their own 
 contracts, and repmliating their plighted word and bond. In 
 the matter of good faith between man and man, as to pecu- 
 niary engagements, the wheels of the social machine groan 
 ominously, as if they were, by some internal dislocation and 
 collision, ready to tear asunder the fabric of society. Pri- 
 vate revenge and the sudden ebullitions of popular violence, 
 disregarding all delays and setting aside all forms, seem in 
 some districts ready to supplant the quiet administration of 
 the laws, and dispensing alike with judges and prisons. The 
 laws of God, too, are often as lightly regarded as the laws 
 of human society. In the growing facility of divorce, ihe 
 statute of Heaven intended to guard the purity of home, and 
 lying at the foundation of all society, is to some extent in- 
 fringed upon : while our railroads and canals have run their 
 lines fearlessly athwart the Sabbath ; and it seems a question 
 whether the flaming Sinai should be allowed to stand any 
 longer in the pathway of modern improvement. 
 
 And amid such scenes of disorder and commotion, it is — 
 scenes illustrating so fearfully the depravity, inveterate and 
 entire, of the human heart — it is, we say, amid such scenes 
 that hi en are rising up to remodel all society. In some of 
 these proposed reforms there is a reckless disorganization, 
 and in most of tliem, we fear, scarce a due appreciation, of 
 God's primitive but incomparable institution for the social 
 happiness of the race, the family or household. In its sepa- 
 rate interests, its seclusion and distinctness, are involved, we 
 cannot but think, much of the virtue, the tranquillity and 
 the felicity of mankind. 
 
 At the attempt we ought not perhaps to be so much sur- 
 prised, as at the principles on which it proceeds. On these 
 we look with irrepressible astonishment. They assume the 
 
 4 
 
18 CONSERVATIVE PRINCITLE 
 
 natural innocence of manj and trace all his miseries and all 
 his crimes to bad government, to false views of society, and 
 to ifi^iiorance respecting the true relations of man to man — ■ 
 relations which after the lapse of so many centuries they 
 have been the first to reveal. They would not merely over- 
 look, but deny that melancholy truth, the Fall of Man from 
 his original state, and his consequent native depravity ; a 
 truth never to be forgotten by all that would exercise a true 
 benevolence to their brother man, and by all that would 
 build up a stable government. In denying this truth, they 
 contradict all the experience, all the history, and shall we 
 not add, all the consciousness of our race. A trvith which 
 even blinded and haughty heathenism mournfully acknow- 
 ledged — a truth which Revelation asserts so enij)hatically 
 and so often, cannot with impunity be forgotten by any that 
 would attempt the reform of man's condition. Vague and 
 wild in principle, and comparatively barren of results, must 
 all reforms be that would make all their improvements from 
 without, and feel that none is needed within. It seems to 
 us, in the moral economy of society, much such an error 
 as it would be in medical science to prescribe to the symp- 
 toms and not to the disease ; and to aim at relieving the 
 petty details and discomforts of sickness, while unable to 
 discover and incompetent to treat the primal, radical evil, 
 the deep-seated malady out of which these external symp- 
 toms spring. It is not man's condition alone that needs 
 bettering, but his heart much more. We would honor even 
 the misguided zeal of our brethren of the race who seek in 
 any form to lessen the amount of human misery and wrong; 
 but the claims of our Common Father, and the wrongs He 
 has met at our hands, are to be acknowledged by all who 
 would pity, with an effectual compassion, human sorrow, 
 and remedy with an enduring relief, social disorder and 
 wretchedness. To forget or to contradict these truths, is to 
 reject the lessons alike of history and scripture. All reform 
 so based is itself but a new, though it may be unconscious, 
 lawlessness. 
 
 We have said that proposals of social reform are not causes 
 of wonder. Already human life is less secure in many por- 
 tions of our republic t.'ian under some of the European mon- 
 archies ; and frauds and embezzlements are less surely and 
 less severely punished. In some of our legislatures, in the 
 very halls, and under the awful eye, as it were, of the 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 19 
 
 embodied Justice of the State, brawls and murders have oc-' 
 curred, in which our legislators were the combatants and the 
 victims. And yet in such a state of things, when human 
 life is growing daily cheaper, and the fact of assassination 
 seems to awaken scarce a tithe of the sympathy, horror and 
 inquiry, which it provoked in our fathers' times — it is in such 
 a state of things, that by a strange paradox, a singular clem- 
 ency for the life of the assassin seems to be springing up. 
 In a nation lax to a ftiult in the vindication of human life 
 when illegally taken away, the protest is made most pas- 
 sionately against its being taken away legally ; and the abo- 
 lition of Capital Punishment is demanded by earnest and 
 able agitators. Would that the picture thus dark were but 
 the sketch of Fancy ; unhappily its gloomy hues are but the 
 stern coloring of Truth. Can the patriot, as he watches 
 such omens, fail to see the coming judgment? Can he shut 
 his eyes against the fact so broadly printed on all the pages 
 of history, that anarchy makes despotism necessary ; that 
 men who are left lawless soon fly for refuge even to a scep- 
 tre of iron, and a law of blood ; that a Robespierre has ever 
 prepared the way for a Bonaparte, and the arts of the reck- 
 less demagogue, like Catiline, have smoothed the path for 
 the violence of the able usurper, like Caesar ? Of all this, 
 should it unhappily continue or increase, the effects must 
 with o-rowing rapidity be seen in the injury done to our lite- 
 rature. There is a close and strange connection between 
 moral and literary integrity. Not only does social confusion 
 discourage the artist and the scholar, but disjointed and anar- 
 chical times are often marked by a want of laborious truth, 
 and of seriousness and earnestness on the part of the popu- 
 lar writers. A passion for frivolity, a temper that snatches 
 at temporary triumphs by flattering the whim of the hour, 
 and a science of agreeable, heartless trifling, spring up in 
 such days to the bane alike of all eloquence, and of all truth. 
 4. Another of the perils which seem to us lying in the 
 way of our rising literature, is a false liberalism. To a 
 manly and Christian toleration we can never be opposed. 
 Something of this toleration is required by our free inter- 
 course with many lands. The wonders of steam are melting 
 the nations most highly civilized into comparative uniformity 
 and unity. Our colonists are the emigrants of many shores. 
 In this audience are found blended the blood of the Celt and 
 the Saxon, the Norman and the Roman. We are scions 
 
20 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 alike from the stock of those who fought beneath, and those 
 who warred successively against the eagles of the old Latin 
 empire. Our varied origin seems giving to America, as its 
 varied learning has given to Germany, a " many-sided mind ;" 
 a sympathy at many points with mankind, and with widely 
 diversified forms of society. More easily than the English, 
 the ancestors whom many of us claim, we adopt the pecu- 
 liarities of other nations. And all this is well. But when 
 we suffer these influences to foster in us the notion that all 
 the moral peculiarities, and all the forms of faith, markino- 
 the various tribes from which our country is supplied, and 
 with which our commerce connects us, are alike valuable ; 
 when, instead of an enlightened love of truth wherever found, 
 we learn indifference to all truth, and call this new feeling 
 by the name of superiority to prejudice ; when we learn to 
 think of morals as if they were little more than a conven- 
 tional matter, the effect of habit or tradition, or the results 
 of climate or of the physical constitution of a people, we 
 are learning lessons alike irrational, and perilous, and untrue.^ 
 The spirit of Pope's Universal Prayer seems to many, in 
 consequence of these and other influences, the essence of 
 an enlightened Christian charity. They cannot endure the 
 anathemas of Paul against those who deny his Lord. They 
 would classify the Koran and the Shaster with the Scrip- 
 tures, Some have recently discovered a truth of which 
 those writers were themselves strangely ignorant, that the 
 Deistical and Atheistical scholars of Fi-ance, the Theoma- 
 
 4 It is well that we should cherish an humble sense of our own fallibility ; 
 but whatever may be true of us, God and Scripture are infallible. The Crea- 
 tor, too, so constituted his universe, that there is truth in it, and throughout 
 it; and he has so constituted man as to thirst with an inextinguishable 
 longing after truth. An utter despair of obtaining it, and a general acknow- 
 ledgment that we are altogether and inevitably in the wrong, is alike a state 
 of misery to man, and a dishonor done to God. It may give birth to a sort 
 of toleration, but it is the spurious toleration of Pyrrhonism, a liberality that 
 patronizes error, but that can be fierce against the truth for as the wise and 
 meek Carey complained, skeptics may be the most intolerant of mankind 
 against the truth. They resent naturally that strong conviction and that 
 ardent zeal, which they have not for themselves, but which the consciousness 
 of truth possessed, and the benevolent desire of its general ditTusion, natu- 
 rally inspire in the believer. They envy the votaries of the truth, their calm, 
 immovable assurance. A Christian toleration appreciates the innate power 
 of truth to diffuse and protect itself, and pities error, while resisting it. The 
 liberality of skepticism denies e.xistence to truth, and canonizes error as a 
 sufficient substitute, and sets men aflo.it on a shoreless, starless ocean of 
 doubt. Or as a young poet of England has not infelicitously described it, it 
 prescribes to mankind the task of conjugating falsehood through all Us moods. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 21 
 
 chists wlio prepared the way for its revolution, the men who 
 loaded the Crucified Nazarene and his religion with all out- 
 rage, were in truth Christians, although they knew it not 
 themselves. Just as much, it seems to us, as Nero was an 
 unconscious Howard ; just as much as Catiline was, in mo- 
 dest ignorance of his own merits, " a Washington, who had 
 anticipated his time." 
 
 It is worse than idle thus to confound all moral distinctions. 
 To suit these new and more liberal views of Christianity, it 
 has become of course necessary to revise the gospel, and to 
 supersede at least the ancient forms of the Christian religion. 
 Thus in a land, the literature and religion of which are 
 becoming more and more known to some of our scholars, 
 Strauss has eviscerated the New Testament of all its focts, 
 and leaves in all its touching and miraculous narrations but 
 the fragments of a popular myth — intended to shadow forth 
 certain truths common in the history of human nature in all 
 ages. The nation to which he belongs, and which claims to 
 be the most profound in metaphysical speculation and in 
 varied learning, of all the nations of our time, is revivino- in 
 some of its schools an undisguised Pantheism, which makes 
 the universe God ; and thus, in eftcct, gives to Job and the 
 dunghill on which he sate, the ulcers which covered him, and 
 the potsherds with which he scraped himself, the honor of 
 being all, parts and parcels alike of the same all-pervading 
 Deity. And this is the wisdom, vaunted and profound, of 
 our times ; a return, in fact, to those discoveries described 
 of old in a venerable volume which we all wot of, in the 
 brief and pithy sentence — " The world by wisdom knew not 
 God." The result of its arrogant self-confidence was blind- 
 tenses, and cases, and teaches them mutual forbearance as the result of their 
 common infatuation. 
 
 ' " Let them alone," men cry, 
 " / lie, thou licst, they lie : 
 What then? Thy neighbor's folly hurts not thee!" 
 Error is Freedom ! such the insensate shout 
 Of crowds, that like a Paean, hymn a doubt: 
 Indifference thus the world calls Charity. 
 ********* 
 ' " Battles at last shall cease." 
 
 At last, not now : we are not yet at home. 
 The time is coming, it will soon be come, 
 When those who dare not fight 
 For God, or for the right. 
 Shall fight for peace !' 
 
 From " The Waldenses, and other Poems ;" 
 
 by Aubrey de Vere. Oxford, 1842. P. 127. 
 
22 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 ness to the great fact blazing on the whole face of creation, 
 and deafness to the dread voice that speaks out of all history, 
 the truth that there is a God. And hence, not so much from 
 any singular cogency in his reasoning, as from the palata- 
 bleness of the results which that reasoning reaches, Baruch 
 Spinoza, the Pantheist Jew, is, after a long lapse of years 
 of confutation and obscurity, rising again in the view of some 
 scholars in Germany, Britain, and America, to the rank of 
 a guide in morals and a master of religious truth. ^ When 
 
 5 Of the system of Spinoza it has been said by the acute Bayle, certainly 
 no bigoted adherent to Christianity, and no prejudiced enemy of skepticism, 
 that "it was the most monstrous scheme imaginable;" and again, that "it 
 has been fully overthrown, even by the weakest of its adversaries." In a 
 similar spirit, Maclaurin, the celebrated British mathematician, had remarked, 
 "It does not, indeed, appear possible to invent another system equally ab- 
 surd." {Dugald Steirart's Progress of Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 116. Am. 
 Edition.) Stewart quotes from Colerus, the author of the earliest Life of Spi- 
 noza, the singular anecdote, that " one of the amusements with which he was 
 accustomed to unbend his mind, was that of entangling flies in a spider's 
 web, or of setting spiders to fighting with each other; on which occasions 
 (it is added), he would observe their combats with so much interest that it 
 was not unusual for him to be seized with immoderate fits of laughter." 
 {Ibidem, p. 351.) Stewart, we think, lays too much stress on this incident, 
 when he finds in it a proof of Spinoza's insanity. It was, certainly, not the 
 most amiable trait in the character of a philosopher for whom his disciples 
 have claimed a remarkable blamelessness and even piety. We cannot ima- 
 gine such an amusement as delighting the vacant hours, and such merriment 
 as gladdening the heart of a Christian philosopher Hke Bayle or Newton. 
 Trivial as it was, it betrayed the spirit, and furnished no unapt emblem, of 
 the system he elaborated in his philosophy, where an acute mind found its 
 anmsement in entangling to their ruin its hapless victims in a web of sophis- 
 try, that puzzled, caught and destroyed them ; and grim Blasphemy lay 
 waiting to devour those who fluttered in the snares of Falsehood. 
 
 Yet this system, the product of such a mind, has beert recently, with loud 
 panegyrics of its author, commended anew to the regard of mankind on 
 either side of the Atlantic. Paulus, the celebrated Neologian divine of Ger- 
 many, had issued, years ago, an edition of his works. Amongst ourselves 
 and the scholars of England, such views have obtained currency mostly, it 
 is probable, from the admiration professed for Spinoza by such men as Goethe, 
 and others, the scholars and philosophers of Germany, for whom we have 
 contracted too indiscriminating a reverence. Goethe's course was parado.x- 
 ical. Rejecting revelation as impossible, for the singular reason that if it 
 came from God it must be unintelligible to men, and declaring God as pre- 
 sented in the teachings of Christ Jesus, to be an imperfect and inadequate 
 conception, Goethe held that the Divinity revealed in the Bible involved 
 difficulties which must drive an inquirer to despair, unless he were " great 
 enough to rise to the stand-point of a higher view;" in other words, a higher 
 point of observation than that occupied by Christ. " Such a stand-point 
 Goethe early found in /S';';';iora; and he acknowledges with joy how truly 
 the views of that great thinker answered to the wants of his youth. In him 
 he found himself and could therefore fortify himself with Spinoza to the best 
 advantage." These are the words of Eckerman {Ecberman's Convers. icitk 
 Goethe. Boston, p. 37), who played with Goetho the part that James Boswell 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 23 
 
 such a form of philosophy becomes prevalent, all forms of 
 religion are alike true, or in other words, are alike false ; 
 and room is to be made for a new religion by which man 
 shall worship Nature or himself. So difficult is it for the 
 gospel to suit men's waywardness. It was the objection of 
 the old Pagans to Christianity, as we learn from Origen, 
 that it was too universal a religion ; that every country 
 should of right be allowed a religion of its own ; and Chris- 
 tianity was arrogant in asking to be received as the one faith 
 
 acted to the great lexicographer and moralist of England, recording as an 
 humble admirer, the conversations of his oracle. Of the moral character of 
 some of the productions of Goethe we need not pause to remark. There are 
 principles developed in his writings that needed "fortifying." We would 
 but notice a difficulty which the language of his admirer suggests. Goethe 
 is made to speak of Spinoza as the thinker "in whom he found himself" 
 To us, the uninitiated, it seems hard to reconcile this test by which" he 
 recognized and adopted his master's system, with his passionate words else- 
 where, recorded by the same admiring Eckerman, (p. 309.) " Man is a dark- 
 ened being ; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes ; he knows 
 little of the world, and less of himself. / know not myself, and may God 
 protect me from it J' How the rule of the old Greek wisdom, " know thy- 
 self,'-' might seem folly to the modern German we can conceive : and how 
 the view of his own heart might shock and appal one who would fain idolize 
 his own wisdom and virtue, we can, with as little difficulty, imagine. But 
 how one who shrunk f-oni knowing himself, could, by knowing himself, 
 recognize the truth of a system of Pantheism, is to us inconceivable. A 
 religion that begins in dogmatic ignorance as to our own nature, and ends 
 in dogmatic omniscience as to God's nature, does not commend itself to our 
 reason, more than it does to our sympathies, or our hopes. 
 
 An affecting proof may be gathered from the same volume (pp. 405, 407), 
 how easily the Pantheism of the schools slides into the Polytheism of the 
 multitude. Goethe had received a cast of a piece of statuary. A model 
 from Myron's cow with the sucking calf, was sent him by a young artist. 
 " Here," said he, " we have a subject of the highest sort — the nourishing 
 principle which upholds the world, and pervades all nature, is brought before 
 our eyes by this beautiful symbol. This, and others of a like nature, I esteevi 
 the true symbols of the omnipresence of God." What the omnipresence of the 
 Deity, in the system of Pantheism is, we need not linger to remark. Skep- 
 tics have affected to wonder at the unaccountable perverseness of the ciiil- 
 1 dren of Israel forging and adoring their golden calf at the foot of Sinai ; but 
 here we have the practice palliated by a master-spirit of skepticism, amid 
 the boasted illumination of the nineteenth century. A cow with her calf is, 
 according to Goethe, " the true symbol," of the all-pervading, all-sustaining 
 Divinity, who comprises, and himself is, the universe. Did Pantheism but 
 rule the schools, we can see how easily idolatry in its most brutish forms 
 might be revived among the populace ; and the o.x-gods and onion-gods of 
 Egypt at which even a heathen Juvenal jeered, might, amid all our vaunted 
 advance in knowledge, receive again the worship of our scholars. Pantheism 
 is the philosophy of Brahminism with all its hundred thousand graven images, 
 from Ganeshu with his elephant's head to Doorga with her necklace of hu- 
 man skulls. The men who had outgrown the Bible, and found themselves 
 wiser than the Redeemer, might, under the auspices of Pantheism, return to 
 the worship of Apis, and adore the gods of the dairy and the stall, as they 
 
24 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 of all countries. But now the opposers of this gospel dis- 
 cover that it has the defect of not being universal enough ; 
 and they wish a Avider faith, that will embrace the race, let 
 them think as they please, and worship as they may. Thus 
 would this school reconcile all religions by evaporating them. 
 In Germany, the country that has most cultivated this hid- 
 eous error, it has as yet, we believe, prevailed chiefly among 
 portions of the literary classes, and not reached the peasant- 
 ry ; and the nation thus affected are less prone to reduce 
 their opinions to action, and are both more speculative and 
 less practical than ourselves. But let such a doctrine come 
 amongst us and grow to be popular. Let it pass from the 
 libraries of a few dreaming scholars into our common schools, 
 our workshops, our farm-houses, and our homes. Like an 
 active poison released from its confinement in the dim labo- 
 ratory of the chemist, where it was comparatively unknown 
 and innocuous, let it be sprinkled into every pipkin simmer- 
 ing upon the cottage hearth on either side of the Allegha- 
 nies ; let our newspapers drop the doctrine, as a manna of 
 death, from their multitudinous wings, around every hamlet 
 and habitation of the land, and what were the result ? Where, 
 in one short week, were our freedom, our peace, or our 
 morals? all a buried wreck, submerged beneath a weltering 
 ocean of misery and sin. The soul with no immortal herit- 
 age — crime released from its fears of the avenger — and sor- 
 row stripped of its hope of a comforter; the world without 
 a Governor, and the race left fatherless, with the fact of the 
 
 stood chewing their cud, or suckling their calves. Then the science and 
 taste of the nineteenth century would be required to take, as the emblem of 
 their aspirations, the craven Hebrews of Ezekiel's vision ; " men with their 
 backs towards the ienijile of the Lord, and their faces towards the East."— 
 (Eze. viii. 16.) The Christian missions of our time, assailing eastern heathen- 
 ism, woirld be repaid by an irruption of Oriental Pantheism into our schools 
 of philosophy; the Sufis of Persia and the Brahmins of India would re- 
 tahate on the native lands of their Christian antagonists, and our Careys and 
 our Martyns would be chargeable with having assailed, in the Pantheistic 
 faith they found in the East, a higher truth than they had themselves 
 brought from the West. A living German historian, whose works have 
 found translation and currency in England (Schlosser), in his History of the 
 Eighteenth Century, has intimated broadly, that the most ancient tradition 
 makes Pantheism the original faith of the world. 
 
 Thus does the philosophy that would fain soar over the head of our Saviour, 
 to a higher and more adequate view of the Divine Nature, find itself grovel- 
 ling at last in the very mire of beast-worship. It is, with no impaired rev- 
 erence for his Bible, that the Christian student turns from such spectacles of 
 human presumption and impiety, to muse on the sovereignty and adore the 
 wisdom of Him, who thus "taketh the wise in their own craftiness." 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 25 
 
 redemption and the hope of the resurrection alike blotted 
 out ; surely these are doctrines no false claims of liberality 
 can palliate. And yet to such tremendous results is tending 
 much of the miscalled liberality of our times. 
 
 This false liberalism is aiding the lawlessness of which we 
 have beiore spoken, in rejecting all regard to precedent, and 
 all reverence tor antiquity. 
 
 5 But in the natural antagonism of the human mind to 
 such excesses as these, is seen rising a fifth principle, that 
 •of Superstition; and though opposed to the last error yet 
 in Its own way preparing injury, from still another side,' to 
 tfie literary interests of our nation. It may seem to some 
 idle to talk of superstition as a peril of the nineteenth century 
 But an age that devours so eagerly the prodigies of Animal 
 Magnetism, is not quite entitled to talk superciliously of the 
 superstition of their forefathers in having been believers in 
 witchcraft. Much of the history of the human mind is but a 
 history of oscillations between opposite extremes of error. 
 There is naturally, in the soul of man, a recoil from the 
 narrowness of the mechanical and utilitarian spirit, as well 
 as from the lawlessness and the false liberalism of which we 
 have already spoken as evils of the times ; while the deifica- 
 tion of passion, another of those evils, makes welcome a 
 religion of absolutions and indulgences. And in this recoil, 
 that antiquity which these former influences would reject, 
 this new principle would not only retain but idolize. It is 
 difhcuit to cast off all regard for those who have preceded us. 
 It is not easy to persuade ourselves that we are men and 
 that our ancestors were but brutes. And there are, conse- 
 quently, several indications in the science, literature, and art 
 of the times, of a current setting steadily and rapidly towards 
 reverence for the past, a regard for the imaginative and the 
 venerable, in place of the cold idolatry of the useful; a drift- 
 ing back of the popular mind towards the times when the 
 Roman church was a dominant power in European civiliza- 
 tion. The Dark Ages once spoken of in our school-boy 
 days, are now more respectfully entitled the Middle Ages. 
 Iheir schoolmen, once derided, are now studied by some 
 scholars, and quoted by more. Cousin, the leading meta- 
 physician of France, has edited an unpublished work of Abe- 
 iara, as some of the Protestant theologians of England have 
 been republishing treatises of Aquinas. In church music the 
 ancient chant is revived. In church architecture, the Gothic, 
 
 5 
 
26 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 but a few years since thought uncouth and cumbrous, and 
 ahnost but another name for barbarous, the architecture of 
 the old time-worn cathedral, and the ruinous abbey, is now 
 regarded as the very perfection of beauty—" the frozen mu- 
 sic"^ of the art. In English poetry, the classical school of 
 Pope has given place to the romantic school of Scott and 
 Byron, in which the customs and the religious opinions of 
 the old ages of chivalry are more or less brought again to 
 recollection ; whilst most of the scholars of Britain seem in- 
 clined to transfer the honors of the Augustan age of their 
 literature from the reign of Queen Anne to the elder days 
 of Queen Elizabeth. A powerful party in its Established 
 Church are attempting to revive the doctrines of Laud, Han- 
 croft, and the school of the Nonjurors ; and to develop the 
 Catholic element in their church polity to an extent which 
 to others it would seem must render union with, and 
 subjection to Rome, the final and inevitable result of the 
 general ascendency of the party. Indeed the practical cha- 
 racter of the English mind, and their disposition to reduce 
 to action all opinions, would seem to forbid that the prose- 
 lytes of the new school should retain a foothold on the steep 
 declivity where their teachers contrive to stand, by the aid 
 of subtle distinctions. The nation once indoctrinated must 
 rush down to Rome. By a sort of moral gravitation inherent 
 in the Catholic system, the lesser must be attracted to the 
 larger body, and the more recent be absorbed in the more 
 ancient. All attempts to stay them, on such a system, would 
 be like arresting an avalanche, mid-way on its descent, and 
 securing it to the sides of the Alps by strips of court-plaster. 
 In the literature of France, the contest a few years since 
 so eagerly waged among that mercurial people between the 
 classical and the romantic schools, would seem now to have 
 been decided to the advantage of the latter, thus attaching 
 the European mind, as by a new bond, to the Mediajval 
 times. In some of the French historians, and the French 
 are now among the best of the modern writers of history, a 
 return has even been made to the picturesque style of the 
 old Mediaeval chroniclers. Much of this may be, and proba- 
 bly is, the fleeting fancy of the season. And all these things 
 may seem to some minds but fantasies of the day, and fash- 
 ions that are soon to pass ; but it should be remembered 
 
 6 Mad. de Stael. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 27 
 
 that such fantasies have in passing shaken thrones, and sub- 
 verted dynasties ; and that such fashions of feeling, if we 
 call them so, have maddened whole nations, and in the days 
 of the French Revolution armed France, almost as one man, 
 against the rest of Europe, as in the days of the Crusades 
 they had hurled Europe, in one embattled mass, upon Asia. 
 Favored by these, among other influences, the Church, 
 which is the great representative of superstition in Christen- 
 dom — it is the Romish church we mean — is rising rapidly to 
 some of her lost eminence and influence. She is multiplying 
 amongst us her colleges, many of them under the charge of 
 that order, the Jesuits, who were once the most renowned 
 instructors of Europe. Upon the field of Foreign Missions 
 she is jostling eagerly each successful Protestant Mission in 
 Asia, in Oceanica, or on our own continent. De Smet, a 
 Jesuit missionary, boasts of the hundreds of Indians bap- 
 tized near the mouth of the Columbia River, far beyond the 
 Rocky Mountains ; and rumors are already spread that the 
 Papal See is to be requested to constitute Oregon into a 
 Romish bishopric.'' But what is far more wondrous is the 
 rejuvenescence of this Church in the old strong-holds of 
 Protestantism in Europe. Germany, a few years since, saw 
 scholars like the Stolbergs and the Schlegels passing over 
 from Protestantism into the Papal communion. Scotland, 
 over whose grey mountains seems yet brooding the stern 
 and solemn earnestness of her old reformers — the land where 
 Knox destroyed the monasteries, "dinging down" the rook- 
 eries that the rooks might not return, has seen of late her 
 Romish chapels not only, but her Romish nunneries, erected, 
 and not left untenanted by votaries. Geneva, once the 
 Athens of the Reformation, is itself threatened with the ca- 
 lamity of becoming a Romish State.^ In England, the bul- 
 
 "> Since created. 
 
 8 Such is the testimony of a recent traveller, a clergyman of Scotland, the 
 Rev. Dr. Heugh, in his "Notices of the State of Religion in Geneva and Bd- 
 gium." Glasgow, 1844, pp. 205-210. "In the Genevese territory itself, the 
 progress of Popery is rapid beyond all precedent. For a long period subse- 
 quent to the Reformation, there could have been few, if any, resident Catho- 
 lics within the territory. A great and rapid change has recently taken place. 
 During the long occupation of Geneva by the French, that is from 1798 to 
 1814, both infidel and Popish influence made alarming progress. In the 
 latter year, a small additional territory was annexed, by treaty, to Geneva, 
 and being taken from Savoy, tiie population was entirely Catholic. It was 
 at this period that the Roman Catholic religion won the support of the State, 
 equally with the Protestant. From that time, the activity of the Popish 
 
28 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 wark of European Protestantism, the progress of the Romish 
 Church in numbers, wealth, boldness, and influence, within 
 the last few years, has been most rapid. And in some por- 
 tions of the earth, this artful and versatile power, rich in the 
 arts of centuries of diplomacy, and so long the ally of Des- 
 potism, and herself almost an incarnation of Oppression, 
 
 clergy and their party has been unremitting ; and by the formation of schools, 
 by domiciliary visitation, by public processions, by preaching, by the press, 
 they are straining every nerve to reduce long rebellious Geneva to her ab- 
 jured allegiance to the See of Rome. Far from attempting to conceal their 
 efforts, their object, and their confident expectations, they glory in avowing 
 them ; they already exult in their anticipated success ; and with too large a 
 proportion of such a population as they have to do with, confidence is re- 
 garded as the prestige of victory. It is not long since the Popish party 
 modestly requested that the chief church in Geneva, Calvin's church, the 
 cathedral itself, should be restored to them. Except when the eclat of a com- 
 munion attracts a throng of Unitarian formalists, the cathedral, we have 
 seen, is nearly empty at the usual worship of the Sabbath ; and the cold of 
 winter is such an overmatch for Unitarian ardor, that during that season 
 they surrender their cathedral, without a sigh, to the undisturbed possession 
 of the fogs and frosts, inviting the few worshippers who are not quite be- 
 numbed, to assemble m a small and more comfortable place adjoining. The 
 Roman Catholics sought the restoration of a place of worship for which the 
 Protestants appear to have so little need, accompanying the request with the 
 sarcastic Intimation, that they would keep the cathedral open ail the year 
 round, and that their numbers would keep it warm enough even during the 
 winter's cold. The clergy, it is said, avow their conviction, that the question 
 of occupancy is but a question of time; that there is no doubt that Geneva 
 will soon be their own again ; and remark with good humor, that the Prot- 
 estant motto will require no change, and will soon be fulfilled in another 
 sense than that in which its authors meant it — ' After darkness, light!'* Tiie 
 progress of the Popish population, completes the danger. By the annexation 
 of the new territory, and also by a perpetual immigration of poor Savoyards, 
 in quest of the comforts of Geneva (like Hibernian immigration into Britain), 
 the Roman Catholics have now upwards of 27,000 out of a population rather 
 under 60,000; and during the last five years, the Catholic population in- 
 creased by three thousand, while that of the Protestants diminished by 
 two hundred, the former by immigration into the territory, the latter by 
 emigration from it. That advancing minority will become, and probably 
 will soon become, an actual majority, and then, suffrage being universal, 
 Geneva may, by the vote of a majoiity of her citizens, lose her rank among 
 Protestant states, renounce by open profession the Protestantism which in 
 fact her ministers and her people have already betrayed, and reannex herself 
 to Rome. ********** 
 
 They have Unitarianism established already, and Catholicism virtually estab- 
 lished along with it, with the near prospect of its arriving at an ascendency, 
 possibly an exclusive ascendency." These are not the hasty and ill-advised 
 opinions of a foreign visitant, after the lapse of a few days of hurried observa- 
 tion. He quotes from a publication of the distinguished Merle D'Aubigne, 
 the author of the well-known History- of the Reformation. In a work of his, 
 "La Question cle I' Eglise" that eminent man, himself a resident of Geneva, 
 says : " The faith of our fathers made Rome tremble at the name of Geneva ; 
 now, alas ! Geneva trembles at the name of Rome. * * * Are we sure 
 
 * "Post tenebras, lux," the motto on the escutcheon and coin of Geneva. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 29 
 
 seems coquetting with Democracy, and courting the spirit 
 of Social Progress. It reminds one of the prediction of the 
 excellent Bengel, who, with all his errors in the interpreta- 
 tion of Scripture prophecy, was a scholar eminent for learn- 
 ing, acuteness and profound piety, that the last days would 
 witness a league of Socinianism and Romanism — the spirit 
 of tradition and the spirit of rationalism. ^ In fact this Apos- 
 tate Church, branded as the Babylon of New Testament 
 prophecy, seems disguising her wrinkles, and painting her 
 facef until it is rent*" again — rent, we mean, with some un- 
 seemly contradictions of her old principles. Like Jezebel, 
 in her gay old age, with tired head and lacquered eyes, she 
 is seen looking out from her palace windows, not like the 
 relict of Ahab, to upbraid, but to soothe and to allure the 
 Jehu of the age — the Spirit of Radicalism, and the party of 
 the movement, as with glowing axle, it drives the cliariot 
 wheels of innovation over every obstacle. And literature 
 must feel, and is already feeling, in various departments, the 
 weight of this new element, the element of superstition amid 
 the conflicting influences of our age. The contributions, for 
 instance, of Romish authors to English literature, have both 
 in amount and ability been trebled, probably, within the last 
 twenty years. As to the cramping and degrading power of 
 all superstition on the mind, the restraints it imposes on the 
 
 that Popery, triumphant, and perched upon our high towers, will not one 
 day, and quickly, mock with bitter derision the blindness of our citizens? 
 The air is heavy, the atmosphere is choking, the night, perhaps the tempest, 
 approaches. Let us enter then into our bosoms — let us reflect in that inner 
 temple, and raising our cry to heaven, let us say. O God, save the country, 
 for men come to destroy it. * * * * * Rome cannot change. All 
 around us she advances. She builds altar after altar upon the banks of 
 our lake. The progress is such amonest us, from the facility which stran- 
 gers have In acquiring the right of citizenship, that quickly (every one ac- 
 knowledges it) the Romish population will exceed the Protestant popidation 
 of Geneva. * * * * Let Rome triumph at Rome, it is natural. Let 
 Rome, as she assures herself, triumph at Oxford; the conquest will be great. 
 But let Rome triumph at Geneva, then she will raise a cry that will echo to 
 the extremity of the universe. Genevese! that cry will announce to the 
 world the death of your country." It is the quotation and translation of Dr. 
 Heugh that we here have used. 
 
 9 "Li the last times Popery and the Socinian heresy (a denial of the proper 
 deity of Christ) will run into one another." — Memoir of John Alb. Bengel by 
 John C. F. Biirk, translated from the German by Robert F. Walker, London, 
 1837, p. 301. 
 
 " But though Socinianism and Popery at present appear virtually alool, 
 they will in process of time form a mighty confluence, that will biu'st all 
 bounds and bring every thing to a crisis." — Ibid., p. 322. 
 
 10 Jerem. iv. 30. 
 
30 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 march of science, and its violence wrought against physical 
 as well as moral truth, let the story of Galileo tell, and let 
 the records of Spain and her Inquisition attest. 
 
 We would never forget, in speaking strongly of the errors 
 of the Romish Church, the piety and genius that have been 
 found in members of her communion. The memory of her 
 Kempis, her Fenelon, her Pascal, her Arnaulds, and her 
 Nicole, must ever remain dear to the Christian. But we 
 would remember that to some of the best of these her chil- 
 dren, she was but a harsh and persecuting step-mother,' and 
 that she cast out that most able and devout body of men, the 
 Jansenists of France, with ignominious cruelty — branding 
 their name, suppressing their books, and sparing not their 
 dead. Nor, while we cherish with the tenderest reverence 
 and affection, the names of some among her saints whose 
 shoe-latchets we are not worthy to unloose, can we forget 
 the wrongs she has inflicted upon humanity, and her blas- 
 phemies against God — can we blanch the long and dark 
 catalogue of her corruptions and errors, or dare to overlook 
 the sentence of prophecy, branding her with infamy, and 
 dooming her disastrous splendor to a fatal eclipse, and her 
 power to a final and utter overthrow. 
 
 Here then, if we have not deceived ourselves, are perils 
 besetting the future course of our literature, not only real 
 but formidable. Many of the details, that were unavoidable, 
 may have seemed to some of our hearers trivial, but in our 
 view they are trivial, only as are the weeds which float in ihe 
 edge of the Gulf-stream. Light and valueless in themselves, 
 they yet serve to remind the weary navigator what coast he 
 is nearing, and what the currents whose noiseless power is 
 drifting his bark away from her appointed course. Did any 
 one of these several causes operate separately, it would be 
 more easy to prognosticate from the signs of the times, re- 
 garding the destinies of American literature. The utilitarian 
 and mechanical spirit would threaten our literary glories with 
 the fate of Holland, whose early splendor of scholarship was 
 so fatally beclouded by her subsequent lust of gain. The 
 prevalence of passion would conform us to the imbecile, lux- 
 urious, trifling and vindictive character that mars so much 
 the glory of modern Italy. The reign of lawlessness would 
 revive in our history the later ages of Republican Greece, its 
 anarchy, violence and misery. The sway of a false lib- 
 eralism would renew on American shores the crimes and 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 31 
 
 sufferings of the reign of terror in France, when Anacharsis 
 Clootz led his motley representatives of the whole human 
 race to do homage to the French Republic, and the Arch- 
 bishop of Paris abjured Christianity ; as the victory of super- 
 stition would bring us into a resemblance with the former 
 condition of Spain, when rejoicing, as her king did, in the 
 title of the " Most Catholic" among the subject monarchs of 
 the Romish See, the country saw absolutism tilling the throne, 
 and the Inquisition filling every other place. Utilitarianism, 
 the iirst of these evil influences, would replace the Bible by 
 the ledger, the Price Current, and the bank note list. Pas- 
 sion, the second, would fill our hands with the viol, the song- 
 book, and the stiletto, or perchance the bowie-knife. The 
 third, or lawlessness, would compel every man to put on 
 sword and pouch, and turn robber and homicide in self-de- 
 fence, snatching what he could and standing sentry over his 
 spoils. The reign of a liberalism, such as we have seen in 
 Germany, would send us to the study of Polyglott grammars, 
 and furnish us for our religious reading with a manual of 
 Pantheistic Philosophy ; while the domination of the fifth 
 would give us the chaplet of beads, and the Index of pro- 
 hibited books to guide our prayers, and direct our studies ; 
 and meanwhile the Inquisition would take under its paternal 
 charge the erring and refractory press. But acting, as we 
 have said, not separately, but conjointly, it is more difficult 
 to predict the coming history of our literature. The several 
 causes we have indicated will, when acting as antagonist 
 forces, hardly neutralize, although they may often exaspe- 
 rate each other; and some of them are likely ultimately to 
 acquire the ascendency over and extinguish the others. 
 
 The influence of a demoralized and demoralizing literature 
 it is scarce possible to portray in too gloomy colors. There 
 were days in the history of revolutionary France when it 
 would have been difficult to say which had been the more 
 destructive engine, the press as worked by Marat, or the 
 guillotine as managed by Robespierre. If the one was reek- 
 ing continually with fresh blood, and heaped up its hecatombs 
 of the dead, the other ran with a more deadly venom, that 
 corroded the hearts of the living. Our cheap press, from its 
 powers of diffusive influence, would make a literature that 
 should be merely frivolous, and not flagrantly vicious, one 
 of no little harm to the mental soundness of the nation. A 
 race of heroes, such as Plutarch portrays, could never grow 
 
32 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 lip if fed only on the spoonmeats and syllabubs of an elegant 
 literature, and finding their entertainment in the lispings and 
 pulings of a feeble sentimentalism. If the press be more 
 than frivolous, if it have become licentious, its ravages on a 
 reading community, and in a free country — and such a com- 
 munity and country God has made ours — are incalculable. 
 For character and private peace, for honesty and morals, for 
 the domestic charities, and for life itself, there remains no 
 asylum on earth, when such a press is allowed to run a muck 
 against the victims that its caprice, its interest or its pique 
 may select. There have been newspapers circulating in 
 Christian America, that would have been hailed in the cities 
 of the plain, on the day ere the avenging fires fell from 
 Heaven, as the utterances of no uncongenial spirit, the work 
 of men morally acclimated to breathe that atmosphere of 
 putridity and death. There have been seen, as editors, men 
 whose hearts seem to have become first ossified, and then 
 carious, in the exercise of their vocation, alike hardened in 
 feeling and corrupted in principle, men who had no mercy, no 
 conscience and no shame. And such men have been not only 
 sufi'ered but applauded, courted and bribed, while "a reading 
 public," to use a phrase of the times, has been found to 
 gather eagerh' around the moral slaughter-houses, over which 
 such spirits presided ; and has delighted itself in snufling the 
 fumes of each fresh sacrifice, feeding on the garbage, and 
 drenching their souls in the puddles there supplied. The 
 extent of the moral taint already spread from such foul 
 sources of corruption, who can estimate ? Were such to 
 become the pervading and controlling spirit of our literature, 
 that literature, and the society which sustains it, must col- 
 lapse and perish, a loathsome mass of festering corruption. 
 
 For a profligate literature destroys itself and the commu- 
 nity who patronize it. Let literature be sold into bondage 
 to immorality, and its days are thenceforward numbered, as 
 well by the very nature of the human mind, as by the laws 
 of the divine government. Genius, when grinding, like a 
 blind Samson, in the prison-house of vice, ultimately per- 
 ishes in its task, and leaves no heir. It may not so seem at 
 first. A delirious frenzy may appear to call forth fresh elo- 
 quence and harmony, and every Muse, dissolute and shame- 
 less, may wave aloft the thyrsus of a mad Bacchante. Science 
 and art, and wit and eloquence, have thus aided in the erec- 
 tion of shrines to immorality ; but they have languished and 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 33 
 
 died amid their toils. A profligate people soon ceases to be 
 intelligent, and their literature loses all living power, all 
 ability to perpetuate itself. The literature of the dead past 
 is soon all that remains to a vicious community. And when 
 the proudest monument of unprincipled talent and perverted 
 genius has been completed, and stood perfect in beauty, its 
 last chapiter -carved and fixed, its topmost pinnacle glittering 
 on high, its last statue polished and fitted in its appointed 
 niche, the nation may have exulted in the splendor of their 
 immoral poetry, and eloquence and art. But that nation, 
 even in the hour of its triumph, stands before its trophies, 
 bereft of the talents that had aided in its work, desolate and 
 lone, like him who reared from its ruins the city of palm- 
 trees, the fated city over which hung the old but unslumber- 
 ing curse of Heaven. His children fell as the walls of his 
 new foundation rose ; and he stood at the last in the home 
 he had reared, a solitary man, with none to inherit his labors 
 — "For Hiel the Bethelite in those days built Jericho. He 
 laid the foundations thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and 
 set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub." Lite- 
 rature slays its children, when building under God's curse. 
 Talent prostituted in the cause of vice pines amid its suc- 
 cesses and dies ; and an imbruted communit}^, it is generally 
 seen, by a just retribution of Providence, soon buries in ob- 
 livion the literature that has corrupted and barbarized it. 
 
 Whether, then, we love the cause of letters or of religion, 
 whether our country or its honor, whether science or piety 
 be dear to us, we need to dread a depraved literature, and we 
 have cause with jealousy to watch every influence that may 
 threaten to work such corruption. We have seen that perils 
 of this kind are not wanting amongst us. 
 
 n. But where, it may be asked, is the remedy of the evils 
 that beset us, and against these perils is it in our power to 
 find and apply any preservative ? 
 
 Such defence, we reply then, against the possible corrup- 
 tion of our literature is not, amongst us at least, to be found 
 in legislation. We look with jealousy on every thing that 
 seems to abridge the freedom of the press. And, again, 
 legislation is with us but the emanation of the popular taste. 
 When that taste has itself become vitiated, it will of course 
 hardly seek to reform itself, or submit to the necessary re- 
 strictions. Nor is there a sufficient guard m education. Our 
 newspapers are in this land almost an integral part of our 
 
 6 
 
34 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 education, and no process that reached the schools only and 
 not the journals of the land would be sufficient. And our 
 scholastic education is itself but the utterance of the moral 
 taste and fashion of the times, and will therefore be very 
 slow to detect and check its own deficiencies. Nor is there 
 hope for us in philosophy. That never yet reached the masses, 
 and often in the classes it has reached, it has been lilie the 
 Epicurean philosophy in Roman society, a fermenting prin- 
 ciple that hastened the decay and dissolution of the common- 
 wealth. Not in general knowledge, for that may be the 
 knowledge of evil quite as much as of good, and the intelli- 
 gence that stores the head and neglects the heart, has cursed 
 many, but saved none. And if all these resources are insuf- 
 ficient, what have we left? 
 
 The remedy that shall guard and purge, and invigorate 
 and fructify our literature, must have power, and to possess 
 power it must come from without ; not from man, not from 
 society — but from something older, higher and mightier than 
 society or man. But to avail with us. it must not only have 
 power, but popular power. Our government is a govern- 
 ment of popular opinion, and no doctrine that confines itself 
 to the schools or to certain select classes in society, a sacer- 
 dotal or an aristocratic class, can suffice. It must also have 
 permanent power, and be beyond the reach of change from 
 the changing customs and fashions of the time. And where 
 shall such a remedy be found ; rebuking a cold utilitarianism, 
 curbing the fierceness of passion, awing the lawless, enlight- 
 ening and shaming the falsely liberal, and emancipating the 
 slave of superstition 1 Looking at the variety and complexity 
 of the evils to be overcome, where, it may be asked, shall we 
 seek it? Human authority is insufficient, and mortal wisdom 
 is dumb. Yet we believe that such a principle of recovery 
 and conservatism exists, and one that has in perfection all 
 the several elements needed to success. It has power ; for 
 it comes from God and stretches into eternity — popular 
 power; for it was made by the maker of man's heart, and 
 has in all ages of history and amid all varieties of culture 
 proved its power over the masses, and commended itself to 
 the hearts of the people — permanent power ; for it has lasted 
 while empires have fallen, and sects and schools of philoso- 
 phy have risen, vaunted, flourished, faded and been forgotten. 
 It claims all times, and its rewards and denunciations are 
 fetched from beyond the grave and lay hold upon another 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 35 
 
 world. Is it again asked : Where is this remedial agent— 
 this branch of healing for the bitter waters, the Marah foun- 
 tains of our literature ? 
 
 We answer : It is the cross of Christ. Let us not shrink 
 to say it. 
 
 The Cross of Christ is the only Conservative 
 Principle of our Literature. 
 
 Towards this point, as will be seen, all our earlier remarks 
 have tended; and it will furnish the theme of all that yet 
 remain to be made. Nothing else can save our literature. 
 This can— though alone, it is sufficient. The cross of Christ," 
 we say it again, is the only conservative principle of our lite- 
 rature. Nor let any be startled. Bacon spoke of Theology 
 as the haven of all science. It was said by a highly gifted 
 woman, Madame de Stael, who cannot be charged as a pro- 
 fessional or prejudiced witness in the matter, that the whole 
 history of the world resolved itself naturally into two great 
 eras, that before Christ's coming, and that which has followed 
 his advent. And we find John von Midler, a distinguished 
 scholar and historian of Germany, holding this language as 
 to his favorite science, in which he had made such eminent 
 proficiency. Animadverting on a defect of Herder in his 
 " Philosophy of History," " I find," said Miiller, " every 
 thing there but Christ, and what is the history of the world 
 without Christ?" '^ 
 
 And in fact the whole history of our world has looked 
 forward or backward to the fatal tree reared on grim Gol- 
 gotha. The oblation there made had the promise and immu- 
 table purpose of God with it to insure its efficacy over the 
 whole range of man's history antecedent and subsequent, 
 and along the whole course of the Mystery of Divine Prov- 
 idence, as seen in the government of the world. 
 
 Let us, we entreat you, be understood. By the Cross of 
 Christ we do not mean the imaged cross, as borne on the 
 banners of the Inquisition, with the emblems of Judgment 
 and Mercy floating over the scenes of the Auto da Fe, where 
 the judgment was without justice, and the mercy was a mere 
 lie. '2 JVor the Cross as borne on the shoulder of the cru- 
 
 '1 Tholuck in Princeton Bibl. Repertory, vol. iv., p. 229. 
 
 '2 A rugged and knotty cross, with the sword of Justice displayed on one 
 side and the olive branch of Mercy on the other, was the device borne on the 
 banner of the .Spanish Inquisition, and its motto was, "Arise, O Lord, and 
 plead thine own cause." Limborchi Histor. Inq. Ainstel., 1692, (p. 370.) 
 
36 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 sader, whilst, pleading the name of Christ, he moved through 
 scenes of rapine and massacre to lay his bloody hand on the 
 Holy Sepulchre. Nor do we mean the cross, as, carved and. 
 
 The inscription on that of the Inquisition at Goa was " Misericordia et Jus- 
 tiiia," and its emblem a figure of St. Dominic, with the right hand profTering 
 the olive branch and the left displaying the sword. (Ibidem.) 
 
 The remark in the text, on the utter falsehood of the claims made by the 
 Inquisition to mercy, refers mainly to its usual forms in passing judgment. 
 As the canonical law forbids ecclesiastics i'rom shedding blood, the clerical 
 judgts of that treniendous tribunal were accustomed in handing over the 
 heretic to the secular courts for execution, to annex the earnest recommen- 
 dation that he should be treated by these secular judges with mercy, and not 
 harmed in life or limb, whilst expecting and even requiring that these exe 
 cutioners of their will should destroy limbs and life in the fire. 
 
 Llorente, in his history of the Spanish Inquisition, animadverts severely 
 on this hollow and heartless mockery of Christian tenderness. It appears in 
 a very prominent manner on the singular records which Limborch, an earlier 
 and Protestant historian, published as an appendix to his History, containing 
 the sentences of the Inquisition established at Toulouse, in France, and 
 among whose victims were found many of the Albigenses and VValdenses. 
 The sentences are the identical records of the Sacred Office, at Toulouse, 
 from 1307 to 1323. "They deserved," is the remark of Gibbon (Decline and 
 Fall, chap, liv.), "a more learned and critical editor." The elaborate work 
 of Rev. S. R. Maitland, librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, upon the 
 VValdensian history, entitled, " Facts and Documents illustrative of the His- 
 tory, Doctrines, and Rites of the ancient Alb'igenses and VValdenses, Lon- 
 don, 1832," lays great stress, and justly, on this record, which it describes, 
 "as less known than it deserves to be." Speaking of other documents, 
 Maitland remarks — " In fact, I have brought forward the public documents 
 hitherto noticed very principally with a view to authenticate and illustrate 
 this one, which I consider to be the fullest, and the most decisive. Of its 
 genuineness, I believe there never has been, and never can be, any doubt." 
 (p. 213.)* 
 
 * Although we do not remember that Maitland alludes to the fact, the MS. of these 
 records of the Toulouse Inquisition seems to have passed into Ensland. In a work ed- 
 ited by T. Forstcr, London, 1830, and entitled, " Original LeIlPrs of Locke, Algernon 
 Sidney, and Anthony, Lord ShnftesJiurij," a manuscript (evidently that whicii Lim- 
 boicli u.sed), is descrilied as forming jiart of the large library of an EnsUsh merchant 
 settled at Rotterdam, hy tlie name of Benjamin Fiirly. In a catalogue of his library, as 
 sold by auction in 1714, the parchment volume is spoken of as being, '■•if all rarest 
 hooks'the 7nost rare, and beyond valuation,'^ (Pref. pp. cxviii, cxix.) Having been at 
 the sale bought in by the family, a son of Furly sold it ■' to Archhishop Seeker for the 
 British Museimi," p. cxix. Furly. its proprietor, was one of the early Quakers, a 
 learned man, aiidauthor, with George Fox and Stubhs. of that t^tiansc and erudite aittck 
 on the complimentary use of the ]iluial you. in addre.-sing a singU^ individual, entitled 
 " A Batlledorefor Teachers and Professors to team Sijigiitar and Plural ;" and was in 
 habits of intimacy with Locke, when in Holland, and with Le Clerc and Limborch. 
 To this remarkable Manuscript and its contents, Locke, in the correspondence pub- 
 lished in the above volume of Forster (a Catholic descendant of the Quaker Furly), 
 seems to allude, pp. 21, 26, 29, 30, an<l 32. On the publication of Limborch's volume, 
 Locke presented copies of it to his Eniilish friends (p. 54), and amongst others to Kid- 
 der, Bishop of Bath and Wells. If Seeker were the purchaser, it would seem that the 
 library of the Arclibishop of Canterbury, rather than that of the British Museum, would 
 be the place of deposit for this ancient Register. A Manuscript collection of similar 
 Inquisitorial Records is frequendy quoted by a living scholar of France, C. Schmiilt. 
 Theological Professor in the Protestant Seminary of Strasburgh. in his " Histoire des 
 Catharrs ou Albigeois,2 vols. Paris, 1849." It is the great Doat Collection, in several 
 folio volumes of manuscript, preserved in the " Bihliotheqiie Nationale," at Paris 
 (Schmidt, vol. I., pp. viii, and 382j, and being transcripts made in 1669 by Jean de 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 37 
 
 gilded, it is seen glittering on the spires of a cathedra], or 
 hung in jewels and gold around the maiden's neck, or eni- 
 
 Aniongst their victims was John Philibcrt, a priest of the Romish church, 
 vvho had, after having been sent to apprehend a fugitive VValdensian, become, 
 himself, a convert to the sect. The Church " having nothing more in htr 
 power to do against him adequate to his demerits" (cum eccksia ultra non 
 habeat quid faciat pro tuis demeritis contra te), pronounced sentence of degra- 
 dation from the priesthood ; and, upon his degradation, that he should be 
 abandoned to the judgment of the secular court, at the same time " affec- 
 tionately beseeching such secular court, as the requirements of the canon law 
 demand, to preserve to thee life and limbs unharmed" {eandem nj'ecluose ro- 
 ganles prout suadent canoniccB sandioncs ut tibi vitam et membra illibata ron- 
 serret.) Limborch, p. 255. Two other Waldensians are, with the s.ime gentle 
 phraseology and earnest entreaty, committed to the secular court. — (p.~2(io.) 
 In the recorded degradation of Philibert from his priestly olBce (p. 275), the 
 recommendation of mercy is repeated with new emphasis. The senesch'il 
 of Toulouse, the secular judge into whose hands he passes, is "earnestly 
 required and entreated to moderate his sentence regarding the heretic, so 
 that it extend not to peril of death or mutilation of limb." {Ij>sum.tameii 
 instanter requirimus et rogamus ut citra viortis periculuni et merribr'. mutila- 
 tionem suam circa te sententiam moderetur.) A husband and wife, Walden- 
 sians, are again committed to the mercies of the secular tribunal in the like 
 select and chary phrases (p. 291). A similar affectionate entreaty {afftctuose 
 rogantes) is used in delivering a female VValdensian to the chief judge of the 
 king, the lieutenant of the seneschal of Toulouse (p. 381), and two Beguins 
 to the same secular judge (p. 3S6), and yet two other Beguins, who are relin- 
 quished into the same hands (p. 393). 
 
 It was, then, part of the gracious etiquette of the Inquisitorial tribunal, like 
 Pilate, at the sentence of Christ, to wash her hands clean of the blood of 
 those she gave up. More eager than Pilate, she insisted on the penalty she 
 required others to inflict. But chary as she was of allowing the violent death 
 which followed to appear as her act, or to stain her records, the truth breaks 
 out in several places on the same records; as where one Petrus Lucensis, 
 who abjured his errors, speaks of some earlier victims of the Inquisition as 
 having been condemned by the inquisitors and prelates of the Roman church, 
 and " left to the secular arm and burnt" {condemnati per inquisitores et pre- 
 latos ecclesicB Romano:, et relicti seculari bracliio et combusti), p. 360. The 
 formula of abandonment to the secular arm was followed by the stake as its 
 invariable sequent — " condemnati et per secularem curiam combusti," pp. 310, 
 313, 319, 320, 323, &c. 
 
 And the inquisitors not only expected this sequent, but, as it appears from 
 Llorente's history of the kindred Inquisition in Spain, they required and 
 enforced it. It is from the second edition of his original work, as published 
 at Paris, in 1S18, in 4 vols. Svo., and not from the American re-print of his 
 abridged work, that we quote. The sentence of the Inquisition, he remarks, 
 closes with a prayer to the judges to treat the sufferer with humanity (I. 122) ; 
 but there were, he observes, several instances in which the secular magis- 
 trate, choosing to take the inquisitors at their word, and to suppose their 
 
 Doat, Conseiller du roi, from tlie registers of the Inquisition at Albv, Carcasoniie, 
 Toulouse, Narboniie, <fec., in tlieir proceedings against the Albieenses. Schmidt hoped 
 that the triumph of freedom in Italy would soon give access for similar researches into 
 the mediceval history of the Inquisition in that country. A re-issue of the Toulouse 
 MS. in England, with such annotations as Gibbon wished, and a free collation of the 
 Doat materials in France, were greatly to be desired. Schmidt, whose own work seems 
 the result of great research, seems disposed severely to criticise the cotemporary treatise 
 of the German scholar Hahn. on the kindred theme of the Heretics of the Middle Ag&s. 
 
38 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 broidered on tlie slipper of a pontiff/^ The cross, as we 
 understand it, has no sympathy with a religion of shows and 
 spectacles, of mummeries and pageants, of incense and music, 
 and long-drawn aisles, and painted windows, and gorgeous 
 pictures, and precious statuary. 
 
 language .sinceie, did not send the culprit to punishment, and the'judge was, 
 in consequence, arraigned himself, as one suspected of heresy (I. 125). " The 
 prayer, tlien," it is his language that we use, " was but a vain Ibrmality, dic- 
 tated by hypocrisy." {Ibid.) So again, in animadverting on the case of 
 Marine de Guevara (II. 253, 254), he exclaims, "Who would not be moved 
 with indignation to see this act of the tribunal closing with a recommenda- 
 tion, on the part of the inquisitors, to the royal judge in ordinary, that he 
 should use with the accused, gentleness and mercy, whilst they were not 
 ignorant as to what was to ensue? * * * jf' on the condemned being 
 placed in the hands of the corregidor, this officer should allow himself to 
 sentence the victim to perpetual imprisonment in some fortress, instead of 
 sentencing to capital punishment, they would have carried their complaints 
 to the king, and perhaps even have launched their censures against him, and 
 have brought him to judgment as one guilty of having opposed himself to 
 the measures of the holy office — of having violated his oath to lend to them 
 aid and assistance, and of being a favorer of heretics. What, then, means 
 this hypocritical affectation'? * * It is for their purposes to induce the belief 
 that they have no share in the death of the accused, who is their neighbor, 
 and that thus they have not incurred the penalties of ecclesiastical irregu- 
 larity, pronounced against those priests who have had a share in the death 
 of any person." Llorente, it will be remembered, was a Romanist; had, 
 himself, been for years an officer of the Inquisition ; and wrote with its re- 
 cords before him. 
 
 Of such infamous jugglery with truth and the forms of Christian kindness 
 it is not, then, harsh to say, that " Us mercy was a mere lie." 
 
 Several of the victims of the French Inquisition are charged, amongst 
 other offences, with confessing their sins to Waldensian or other pastors, 
 "who, as tkeij knew, were not priests ordained by any bishop of the Romish 
 church."— Limborch, pp. 264, 226, 230, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 
 290, &c. The tenet of apostolic succession, as coming through Rome, and 
 necessary to a valid ministry, was then one element in the storm of wrath 
 that burst upon these sufitjrers. One of them, Raymond Dominic, who 
 seems to have been arraigned in 1322, is charged, amongst other errors, with 
 holding that " the baptism of water, given by the Church to boys, was of no 
 worth, because the boys consented not, but rather wept." We give the mis- 
 spelt Latin of the Inquisitorial scribe: " Item quod baptismus aque /actus pel 
 ecctesiain pueris nicliil ralebat, quia pueri non consenciebant ymo Jlebant" — p. 
 348. He and his wife had been fugitives for eleven years. When asked 
 why, at his first citation, he had not appeared and confessed, but fled, he 
 replied, it was from pity for his seven children of either se.x, for whom he 
 
 '3 " The Pope is present. He is seated on a throne or chair of state; the 
 cardinals, in succession, approach and kiss his hand, retire one step, and 
 make three bows or nods : one to him in front, and one on the right hand, 
 and another on the left ; which, I am told, are intended for him (as the per- 
 sonification of the Father), and for the Son, and for the Holy Ghost, on 
 either side of him ; and all the cardinals having gone through these motions, 
 and the inferior priests having kissed his toe — that is, the cross embroidered 
 on his shoe — high mass begins." 
 
 Rome in the Nineteentli Century, 
 
 Harper's Eilition, vol. ii., pages 246, 247. 
 
IN OUR LITEUATURE. 39 
 
 But by this title, we mean the cross, naked, rugged, and 
 desolate, not pictured, save on the eye of faith, and upon 
 the pages of scripture — not graven but by the finger of the 
 Spirit on the regenerate heart ; the cross as Paul preached 
 
 feared that they would die of hunger if he and his wife had been then im- 
 prisoned, and that he proposed to come in and confess when his children 
 should have become able to help themselves. — p. 349. So also his wife, being 
 asked the reason of their flight, replied, it was chiefly from love and pity for 
 then- little boys — " prop/er amorein et compassionem puerorum suorum par- 
 vulorum" — who would perish of hunger. — p. 250. Such incidents reveal 
 some of the scenes of domestic anguish this ruthless tribunal created. 
 
 The same records of the Tribunal at Toulouse may throw some light on a 
 question lately agitated — whether the -oath of the Romish bishop, taken at 
 his consecration, is to be translated as requiring of him the persecution of 
 heretics. In the proceedings of the French Inquisition we find the Latin 
 word in question occurring in the oaths taken of the secular magistrates to 
 aid the Inquisition in the detection and suppression of heresy ; in the pen- 
 ances assigned those who recanted their heresy and were to prove their sin- 
 cerity by informing against and delivering up others; in the forms of abjura- 
 tion imposed upon penitents; and in the complaints of the suflerers against 
 the Romish church for its treatment of them ; and again in the statement by 
 her own officers, of that church's conduct towards errorists. On page 1, the 
 secular magistrates of Toulouse, under the French King, are sworn to defend 
 the faith of the holy Roman Church, and to "pursue (or persecute) and take, 
 and cause to be taken, accuse and denounce to the church and inquisitors, 
 heretics, their disciples, favorers, and harborers — " hereticos crcdentes, J'avlo- 
 res et receplalores eorumdem persequcmur," &c. This was sworn on the 
 Holy Gospels of God, and a similar oath was taken of the " consules" of Tou- 
 louse, p. 1. Similar oaths may be found imposed on the secular tribunals, 
 in pp. 292, 334, &c. So those admitted to penance, on recantation, are 
 charged, '^ Prmtei-ea persequamini hereticos quibuscunque nominibus cevsean- 
 tur et credentes et fautores et receptntores et defensores eoriivi," to persecute 
 heretics, by whatever names they be designated, and their disciples, favorers, 
 harborers and defenders, p. 341; and a similar penance, on p. 347, includes 
 also " fugitives for heresy." A William Garrick, Professor of Laws, admit- 
 ted to penance, but banished from the kingdom of France, in the year 1321, 
 "swears and promises to the best of his power, to persecute heretics of every 
 condemned sect, and those whom he knows or believes to be fugitives for 
 heresy, and to cause them, to the best of his power, to be apprehended and 
 delivered up to the inquisitors of heretical pravity." — p. 283. Certain offend- 
 ers, condemned to imprisonment, "abjure heresy and swear to keep, hold 
 and defend the orthodox faith — to persecute heretics and their favorers, and 
 to disclose and reveal them wherever known to be."— p. 202. A relapsed 
 Waldensian is charged with falsifying his oath, "parere mandatis ecclesice et 
 inquisitorum et pcrsequi Valdenses et alios hereticos," to obey the mandates 
 of the church and its inquisitors, and persecute Waldensians and other here- 
 tics, and is charged with thus returning, tanquam canis ad romitum. — p. 254. 
 So the church, describing her own conduct, uses the same word. Philibert, 
 already named, one of their own priests, whom the purer faith of the Wal- 
 densians had won over, is charged with holding these Waldensians to be 
 good men and a good sect, and of good faith in which men might be saved, 
 "cdlhough he knew that the Roman Church and the inquisitors of heretics per- 
 secuted and condemned them." — quamvis sciret quod ecclesia Romana et 
 
 INQUISITORES HERETICORUM PERSEQ.UERENTUH IPSOS ET CONDEMrNARENT. 
 
 Here is the church describing herself. — p. 254. John Brayssan, another of 
 
40 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 it, and the first Christians received it. This doctrine, we 
 suppose to have two aspects. The first, Christ crucified, as 
 becoming our free and i'ull jnstificalion by a blood that pur- 
 ges from all sin, and avails for the world. It was the reas- 
 
 these Waldensians, is charged with belonging to that sect of Waldensians, or 
 Poor Men of Lyons, " which the sacred Romish church, mother and mistress 
 of ail (churches), long since has condemned as heretical, and the same, as 
 being truly such, persecutes and condemns," quani sacrosancta Romano ecclesia 
 mater omnium et magistra dudiun tanquam hereticam condempnavit, et eam 
 
 TANQUAM VERB TALEM PERSEqUITUE ET CONDEMPNAT. — p. 207. So, tOO, tllC 
 
 complaints of the sufferers use the same word. The Waldensians are repre- 
 sented as asserting rashly (temerarie asserunt), '• that the sacred Roman 
 church sins and deals with them unlawfully and unjustly, because it perse- 
 cutes and condemns them" {quia ipsos persequitur et condempnat). — p. 207. 
 Another, .lohn Chauoat, of the same hapless sect, is charged, amongst his 
 other misdemeanors, with saying and asserting (dicis et asseris), " that those 
 who persecute these same [Waldensians), to wit, the prelates of the Roman 
 church and the inquisitors of heretical pravity, act unjustly, and in unright- 
 eously apprehending them and detaining them, and in giving up to the secu- 
 lar arm those who will not desert that sect." — p. 263. We have seen, and 
 the martyrs of the valleys felt, what the inquisitors call their "canonical 
 sanctions," which, amongst other things, required the use of a heartless form 
 of mercy, while giving up the victim to merciless tortures and death. We 
 need not be surprised to find, though the inquisitors seem to regard it as 
 unaccountable temerity, that these '^ canonicas sanci^nes," " the aforesaid sect, 
 wandering from the right path, neither receives nor regards as of any worth, 
 but spurns, rejects, and contemns" (sjiernit, rejicit et contempnit). — pp. 263 
 and 207. Familiar as were those blessed confessors with the Bible, they 
 probably recollected, in connexion with at least this portion of the venerable 
 " canonical sanctions," the language of the Psalmist, an earlier sufferer : "His 
 words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords." — (Ps. Iv. 21.) 
 
 If the Episcopal oath is, then, to be construed by the analogy of other 
 ancient usage of the word on the part of the same church, we can be at no 
 loss as to its signification. The word "persecution" is become, through the 
 growth of Protestant influence, an odious term. Many e.xcellent Catholics, 
 as individuals, repudiate the thing itself. But, as Bishop Hopkins, of Ver- 
 mont, has shown in his 9th lecture on the Reformation, the Roman church 
 has authoritatively established persecution as her duty. Individuals have no 
 right to create or decide the doctrine of the church. She claims infallibility 
 and immutability; and, although from the force of public opinion and the 
 stress of circumstances, she may allow certain doctrines and claims to re- 
 main in abeyance, they wait but the fitting season to revive and reclaim 
 their old influence. And what the supreme Pontiff; himself, judges of such 
 individual and modern modifications of the old doctrines we may augur from 
 that Encyclical letter issued by the reigning Pontiff' of our own times, Gre- 
 gory XVI., in the year 1832 [La Mennais ; Affaires de Rome. Bru.velles, 
 1837. pp. 352-395). Writing as under the patronage of the Virgin Mary, 
 whose aid he invokes to guide his mind {celesti afflatu suo) by her heavenly 
 inspiration, into salutary counsels (p. 356), he reminds the bishops and dig- 
 nitaries he addresses, in the languaa:e of his canonized predecessors in the 
 Pontificate, ^/io< every novelty whatsoever shakes the entire Church, and that 
 nothing once regularly established by the Church admits of being iii aught 
 diminished, in aught altered, in aught increased, but is to be presei-vcd unim- 
 paired in terms and in signification." — pp. 362-364. Rejecting, therefore, 
 indignantly, the proposed restoration and regeneration suggested by some, 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 41 
 
 sertion of this doctrine which wrought the glorious Rclbr- 
 mation. The second, Christ crucified, as the principle of 
 our sanctificaHon, under the influences of the renewiuff 
 Spirit^ that conforms the believer to his Lord, and crucifies 
 
 as necessary to the well-being of the chui^dTor^, he denounces^T^I^ 
 absurd and erroneous sentiment, or rather the rLingsofdeliHumfhe ZinZ 
 tiiat,for every one whatever, is to be claimed and defended, the ubektv op 
 C0NsciENCE."-p. 376 ; " to which most pestilent erro;- („e.J/c,T/l^,4o er/ „rn " 
 he goes on to remark, "the way has bee^ prepared hyhat £nTunlZlk 
 liberty of opinion which prevails widely, to the injury oflheZirTmrT. 
 commonwealth; some with extreme impudence vroLuiMiXt^f^tr ar o 
 Jow advantages to rehgion."~p. 376. Reading history b^ lights of his ovtn 
 he proceeds to declare that ' e.vperience has sholn.froL ile ^irUe^l Si^S 
 that States, the most eminent in wealth, power, and glory, have fallen bur his 
 ONE EVIL, the ungoverned freedom of 'opinion, license of discoursl and the 
 love qftnnovation.'-p 376. " To the same class," he proceeds, "is to be 
 referred that worst and never enough to be execrated, and detestable ideterrima 
 ac nunquam satis exsecranda et detestabilis,) liberty op the pbess " 
 {hbertas artis hbrariw).-p. 378. We must close our quotations, but such 
 anguage proves distinctly that the principles of toleration and freedom tE 
 n our country have made persecution for religion unpopular, are no yet 
 he pnncip es of the Romish See. Individuals may disavow and repudia e 
 the use of force t^ compel religious uniformity; but! with such decla ations 
 before us, from the head of the Romish Church, the very '-Seat of Ver°"v 
 and Unity,'' as the Romanists term it, it requires great heedlessness, or 
 singular credulity, to suppose that Rome has changed her principles hovv- 
 feie'andThJs'ce'rfe ^""'^ °' ™°'^''^ ^'' '^''''' '" '^' eiifergenLs'of the 
 That Rome has not repented of the blood she shed in former centuries for 
 he suppression of heresy the same document suiBcientlv attests, where in 
 the face of all history and in spite of admissions as to their moral excellence, 
 made by such high Catholic authority as Bossuet, the reio-nintr Pontiff eoes 
 on to speak of the " Waldensians, and other sons of Belial ofTlfe same claTs '' 
 {alwrumque hujusmodi flwrurn Belial), as being the ^' filth and shame of the 
 human race (qui humani generis sordes ac dedecora fuere), and " therefore 
 deservedly so often smitten by the anathema of the Seat of the Apostles. ~v 388 
 It IS not for any man to use such language of such confessors of Christ' 
 and especially for one holding the seat once stained by Alexander VI to talk 
 so unreservedly of "the filth of the human race" ••■, i" uuiv 
 
 He might well remember that the connexion of his own Pontifical line 
 with trie Borgias of the one sex, and the Marozias of the other, is a fact 
 much later and surer, as to the evidence establishing it, and the influence 
 emanatmg from it-both much nearer and much clearer than the Apocry- 
 phal claim that line has set up of apostolic descent and authority. To an 
 American Christian it afioids but little evidence of the possession of an 
 
 «„Tk . h '^I-' if'V"'"'^'''*''"''^"^^" apostolical spirit, to have launched 
 such butchery of old, and to scatter such Billingsgate now, upon 
 
 "O, Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains, cold ; 
 E en them who kept thy truth so pure of old. 
 
 * * * * 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 blain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled 
 Mother with infant down the rocks." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 7 Milion. 
 
43 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 his evil nature within him. Thus it was that Christ was not 
 only crucified himself, but required also every disciple to 
 come after him, taking up also his own cross, and Paul 
 speaks of himself as crucified unto the world. This last 
 aspect of the doctrine of the cross, we have thought, has 
 been rather overlooked by some of the Reformers, in their 
 zeal against self-righteousness, and against a false and asce- 
 tic piety. Such was Cecil's opinion,'^ whom none can sus- 
 pect of any want of reverent feeling for the Reformers. But 
 
 1^ " Man is a creature of extremes, * * * * Popish heresy of hu- 
 man merit in Justification, drove Luther on the other side into most unwar- 
 rantable and unscriptural statements of that doctrine."— Ceci/'s Works, 
 N. Y. 1825. Vol. iii., p. 419. 
 
 " The leading; defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional 
 HABIT. The Church of Rome made much of this habit. The contest 
 accompjmying and foJlowing the Reformation, with something of an indis- 
 criminate enmity against some of the good of that Church, as well as the 
 evil, combined to repress this spirit in the Protestant writings ; whereas the 
 mind of Christ seems, in fact, to be the grand end of Christianity in its 
 operation upon man." — Ibid., p. 308. 
 
 "A want of the spirit of the cross in its professors increases the offence of 
 the cross — that humility, patience and love to souls, which animated Christ 
 when he offered himself on the cross for the sins of the world." — Ibid., 
 p. 381. 
 
 The works of an Irish clergyman, the Rev. Henry Woodward, a writer of 
 genius and piety, an original thinker, and a determined Protestant, contain 
 some remarks to the same effect. As his writings are little known in the 
 American Churches, we shall append a lengthened extract. It is made 
 from his "Essays and Sermons. Fourth edition, London, 1844." (Vol. i., 
 pp. 5-14.) 
 
 "Justification by faith, or that free forgiveness which is offered, without 
 our own deservings, through the righteousness of Christ, has, we all know, 
 been styled by a great authority the 'articulus slantis vd cadentis ecclesicB.' 
 But, profoundly important and absolutely essential as this great doctrine is, 
 still it may be questioned whether its rank, comparatively^with other doc- 
 trines, is not higher in the scale of Protestantism than in that of the Scrip- 
 ture revelation generally ; whether in other words, it does not occupy a 
 more prominent part in the system of Christianity, as onposed to Popery, 
 than in the system of Christianity, considered in itself. On the denial, or at 
 least on the practical rejection of that vital doctrine, the fabric of Romanism 
 was built ; and, consequently, its vindication and re-establishment were felt 
 by the reformers as no less than 'life from the dead.' Like the man who 
 rejoices over his one lost sheep when found, more than over the ninety-and- 
 nine which went not astray, they naturally prized this article of the faith 
 once delivered to the saints, as if Christianity had centred in that alone. 
 But, assuredly, if the first Protestants had been called to fight their battles 
 with a church which oppugned, not only justification by faith, but the unity 
 of the Godhead— or the divinity of Christ — or the persoiiality and inspiration 
 of the Holy Spirit — or a future state of rewards and punishments — they 
 would not, in that case, have suffered their zeal to run so exclusively in the 
 channel of what is termed, emphatically, evangelical doctrine. 
 
 "However this may be, certain it is, that in the controversial attitude into 
 which the opposing force of Popery has thrown us, we take our stand, as 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 43 
 
 if we look to the New Testament, it is very evident that 
 both were blended in the doctrine as the early Christians 
 received it. The cross was not only their confidence, but 
 the model of their conformity. It is, we have supposed, a 
 defect here — a neglect of aiming at this high standard of 
 devotedness, on the part of many of us Protestants, that has 
 
 Protestants, in an especial manner, upon the Imprecrnable ground of justifi- 
 cation by faith alone. To maintain this position, we know that no weapon 
 can avail, but ' the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God ;' and, in 
 rightly dividing the word of truth, we direct against the advocates of human 
 intercessors and human merits that portion of the sacred canon which most 
 .clearly states the terms of our acceptance with God. Hence has resulted 
 the pre-eminence which many of our writers have given to the epistles, 
 above even the gospels themselves : a station which, I am convinced, they 
 could not have held, but for the relative position in which the Protestant 
 churches are placed. And hence, also, has resulted the comparative rank 
 with which not only the writings, but the character of St. Paul, have been 
 generally invested. Amongst mere human beings, I fully grant, that none 
 can, deservedly, be placed higher. But it may, perhaps, be questioned, 
 whether the example of this great apostle has not obtained an influence 
 which no mere man should exercise over a large proportion of the Protestant 
 mind. It is my firm conviction, that many of our religious professors shape 
 their habits of feeling and of living after the pattern, rather of St. Panl, than 
 of the blessed Jesus. 
 
 " I do not mean that this is done by any, consciously, and of set purpose : 
 nor do I charge the most restless spirit wliich stirs in the religious bustle of 
 the day, with a premeditated design to set the disciple above his Master, or 
 to honor the creature more than the Creator. But, that numbers form their 
 tastes, and take the standard of their duties, from the life of St. Paul, 
 rather than from the life of Christ, I judge, from effects and fruits, to be 
 accounted for on no other principle. The present state of the religious world 
 is, in t^ict, precisely what might be expected, if there were a general agree- 
 ment to erect the former, instead of the latter, into the grand exemplar. The 
 imitators of Christ, and the imitators of St. Paul, be it observed, must, in 
 one respect, bear a mutual resemblance; they must both fail in equalling the 
 model at which they aim. In the one instance, it would be blasphemy to 
 deny it. In the other, the event is no less certain ; because those that look 
 not unto Jesus must want the very principle which made the apostle of the 
 Gentiles what he was. We can, then, but compare failure with failure. 
 Nevertheless, I would put it to any candid and intelligent observer, whether 
 a large proportion of professors, at this moment, are not more like carica- 
 tures of St. Paul, than the faintest, or even the most distorted reflections of 
 the mind that was in Christ Jesus; whether the spirit that aniinates the 
 religious body does not resemble the ardor, the energy, and the impetuosity 
 of the one, rather than the calmness, the composure, and the serenity of the 
 other. 
 
 " God forbid that I should mean to throw disparagement upon the charac- 
 ter of the great apostle here alluded to. No human being, I believe, ever 
 trod more closely in the steps of his Divine Master. In personal holiness 
 he rose, perhaps, as high as is possible to man ; and in the wide extent of 
 the blessings which he diffused he has confessedly no rival. Still, St. Paul 
 was but a man — but one individual of the species. And as such, his charac- 
 ter, when held up for general imitation, cannot fail to lead his followers — 
 the far greater part at least — in a wrong direction. 
 
44 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 givea to the Oxford Tractarian movement, and to the present 
 efforts of Romanism, most of their hold upon the public 
 mind. Apparent estrangement from the world, and a self- 
 denial that rises superior to the ordinary idols of society, will 
 commend to the respect of mankind even much error in 
 those thus estranged and self-denying. It throws a glister- 
 
 " This must, infallibly, be the effect of every human model, if too closely 
 aimed at. In common life, we often see how awkwardly the most graceful 
 peculiarities of one man sit upon another; how that which appears amiable 
 and natural in the original, degenerates into mere affectation in the copy. 
 And so it is in the Church of Christ. Though all the members of one body, 
 'yet all have not the same office:' each has his peculiar temperament, his 
 distinctive character, his appropriate sphere. Some are called to lead, and 
 others to follow : some are fitted for privacy and retirement, others for public 
 life and active duty. In short, the shape and coloring of the Christian are 
 as endlessly diversified, as are the cast and mould of our natural features. 
 Hence it follows, that for all to imitate the same human pattern, is to run 
 counter to the course of Providence, and to resist the operations of that 
 Spirit who divideth to every man, severally, as he will. 
 
 "And thus it is, that if I am right in the conjecture which I have 
 hazarded, the reason is at once explained, why, in proportion to the quantum 
 of religious agency now at work, so little solid and genuine fruit appears. 
 The fault lies in this, that all are striving to do the same work; and thus, 
 instead of having an organized body, we have a multiplication of one mem- 
 ber. So that if St. Paul were to descend amongst us, and repeat his well- 
 known question, ' Are all apostles?' multitudes, if sincere, must rise up and 
 say, ' We are — we are, at least, endeavoring to become so.' Nay, are there 
 not some who might answer him in his own words, ' We suppose that we 
 are not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles 7' 
 
 "In spite of all our errors, there is, nevertheless, I trust in God, much of 
 the invaluable material of solid and practical religion in this country. And 
 if there be, partly, at least, from the cause assigned, an over-earnestness and 
 activity in our system, and if the streams that flow are disproportioned to 
 the fountain that should feed them, the remedy is near at hand. Let us 
 leave all human cisterns, and draw at once from the fulness of Christ. Let 
 us look unto Jesus, and set the Lord always before us. 
 
 " And here I would introduce an observation, in my mind, of no small 
 importance. There is, I conceive, an independent proof of our Saviour's 
 divine nature, to be derived from the universal applicability of his e.xample. 
 No olher pattern is suitable to all ; but his, like a master-key, fits every lock. 
 Human examples are only partial exhibitions of Divine grace. They are 
 moulded by their own peculiar circumstances, and fitted for the special de- 
 partment they have to fill. They are, in a word, like streams which take 
 their direction, and pursue their several windings, in a course tracked out for 
 them, and for them alone. And hence, it is impossible for one man impli- 
 citly to follow in the footsteps of another, without some unnecessary and 
 unnatural deviations from that line which the order of Providence has as- 
 signed him. But Christ is, as it were, an exhaustless fountain, not flowing 
 in one channel, but overflowing in all directions. He is not, if I may so 
 speak, an individual character : but all characters of excellence unite in him. 
 In imitating Christ, no man is led out of his natural sphere, or thrown into 
 a forced and affected altitude. Every movement after him is performed with 
 freedom, and his likeness sits easily and becomingly upon all that bear it. 
 The high and low — the rich and poor — the gifted and the ungifted — the con- 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 45 
 
 ing veil of sanctity even over the gross corruptions of Ro- 
 manism ; and her impostures and enormities are often over- 
 looked by those who see standing in her shrines her martyrs 
 of charity, her Vincent de Pauls, and her Francis Xaviers. 
 A pining recluse, scourging himself in sober sadness, as the 
 expression of his deep sense of sin, may be a pitiable spec- 
 tacle of delusion ; but he is not in the eyes of the world 
 generally, as odious a sight as that presented by a self-satis- 
 fied, self-indulgent professor of a purer creed," living in all 
 ease and pleasure, conformed to the world in all its follies, 
 
 templative and the active— all classes and all dispositions, find, in the exnni- 
 ple of Jesus, tiie teaching- whi(^h they want ; and all are led, by loolvlna unto 
 him, precisely in the path most suitable for them to walk in. We see at 
 once, in that comprehensive model, the bright contrast to whatever we 
 should shun, and ttie most attractive exhibition of all that we should aim at, 
 in our Christian course. Whatever our besetting sins may be. whether of 
 excess or of defect, they stand equally condemned by a comparison with 
 him. Thus, the restless and over-active spirit is calmed by the contempla- 
 tion of his nights of solitary prayer ; and the indolent are stimulated to exer- 
 tion by his ceaseless labors of love. The high and lofty are brought low, 
 when they behold their Lord and Master washing his disciples' feet ; and the 
 poor in this world's goods are taught contentment by him who ' had not 
 where to lay his head.' This subject could, indeed, be endlessly pursued. 
 Enough has, I trust, been said to prove the point assumed, namelv. that a 
 character which can thus adapt itself, in the way of example, to every pos- 
 sible variety of man; which can pour forth a healing virtue, equally applica- 
 ble to the most opposite extremes ; and which can thus spread its influence 
 over the wide extent of the whole human race ; that such a character cannot 
 be bounded within the narrow circle of our nature, but must partake of the 
 infinitude of God. 
 
 " Let us, then, I repeat it, prepare for the impending crisis in that spirit 
 which alone can enable us to meet it. Let us array ourselves in the whole 
 armor of God. Let us put on the Lord Jesus Christ. All weapons of our 
 own forging must fail. They have been long tried ; and they have been tried 
 in vain. If we go forth against our enemies, in dependence on an arm of 
 flesh, we miscalculate the force to which we are opposed. For in that case 
 human adversaries are but instruments : the real controversy is with God. 
 Not because he has a favor to our enemies, but because he has a favor unto 
 us, and because he is a jealous God towards those who professedly maintain 
 his cause. Persuaded I am, that until we throw ourselves unreservedly 
 upon him— till we fall back on God, and take up our position on the Rock 
 of ages, discomfiture and defeat will batfle and confound us in every cflbrt. 
 
 "But some may say, ' We grant these theories to be true, but what can 
 individuals do '? Where is the controlling and disposing mind, to combine 
 their movements and direct them to a common point?' To this, 1 answer, 
 that there is an all-disposing Mind on high. Let us, then, do our own part. 
 Let us arm ourselves with the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Let our light 
 shine forth in the triumphs of his patience, the splendor of his innocence, 
 and the victorious energy of his love. Let us stand thus equipped as Chris- 
 tian soldiers, and we shall not want a leader. God will teach oiir hands to 
 war, and our fingers to fiuht. Our cause will be the cause of Heaven ; and 
 we shall go forth conquering and to conquer." 
 
46 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 and vaunting^ of a doctrinal orthodoxy that produces no emi- 
 nence in holiness. Christians must live more upon the cross, 
 seeing in it not only the principle of their faith, but also the 
 pattern of their obedience — the cross not only as cancelling 
 their sin, but also as crucifying their lusts. Such is the two- 
 fold aspect of the great truth, the basis of all scriptural doc- 
 trine and practice, the centre of all its mysteries and all its 
 morality — the cross of Christ. 
 
 Let us now, for a moment, turn to the history of that 
 cross, m order that we may perceive more clearly its strange 
 elements of power. Place yourselves, then, in imagination, 
 amid the multitude, that, swayed by curiosity, or inflamed 
 by hate, are rushing from the hall of judgment, and sweeping 
 along their hurried and tumultuous way to the hill of cruci- 
 fixion. Reeling under insults, a meek sufferer, whose head 
 is bound with a crown of thorns, and his face swollen with 
 blows and wet with the spewings of the mob, is threading, 
 slowly and painfully, his way through that exasperated 
 crowd, who are all athirst and ravening for his blood. He 
 has reached the spot selected for his death. There he stands 
 faint, but mute and uncomplaining, whilst the cruel prepa- 
 rations are made that shall consummate the sacrifice. Amid 
 shouts, and taunts, and fiercest blasphemy, he is nailed and 
 lifted up. As the cross becomes erect, and he hangs at last 
 before that excited multitude, methinks I see exultation, like 
 a rising breeze, ruffle that sea of upturned faces. And there 
 he is raised on high, how utterly friendless and abject to the 
 eye of man ; for even the thieves upbraid him, that hang 
 and writhe beside him. 
 
 But were your eyes unsealed, as the prophet opened those 
 of his servant at Dothan, you would discern, beside and 
 above that howling rabble, a more august gathering. Le- 
 gions, whose feeblest warrior would have turned to paleness 
 the cheek of Ca;sar at the head of all his hosts, are gazing 
 there ; yet withheld by some dread sentence, they do not in- 
 terpose. Angels that excel in might and in glory, watch that 
 desolate sufierer with adoring interest. That much outraged 
 victim, seemingly rejected of man and abandoned of God, 
 is my Maker. In that lowly form is veiled the incarnate 
 Godliead. The angels that smote Sennacherib's host, and 
 slew the first-born of Egypt, dispeopling a camp and decima- 
 ting a nation in a night, have bowed often their heads to 
 this being, as their Lord and their Creator. Excited as are 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 47 
 
 his enemies, they could frame no consistent accusation against 
 him to justify their enmity. There, under reproach, anguish 
 and cursing, dies the only one of Adam's race that knew no 
 sin. For no guilt of his own is he suffering, but to cancel 
 that of his murderer, man. Thus viewed, what elements 
 of grandeur and tenderness, of the loftiest splendor and the 
 lowliest condescension, blend in that dread sacrifice ! Do 
 men look with interest on greatness in misery ! It is here : 
 the King of Glory dying as a malefactor. Are they touched 
 with sympathy for distress? How deep was the anguish 
 even of his patient spirit, when he cried out, invoking a 
 Father who had hidden his face ! Should wisdom attract, 
 here was the great Teacher whom all Jiidea had admired, 
 speaking as never man spake — the heavenly Teacher for 
 whom Socrates had taught himself and his scholars to hope. 
 He is here giving his lessons on the cross. The good man 
 dying ignominiously, of whom Plato had glimpses, is here, 
 the exemplar of perfect innocence, enduring the treatment 
 due to consummate wickedness. That sacrifice stirs all 
 worlds. Hell misses its expected prey, and the spell of de- 
 spair over the accursed earth is broken, while Heaven stoops 
 to behold its King incarnate and dying, that He may recon- 
 quer to his allegiance a revolted province of his empire; in 
 the same act indulging his mercy, and satisfying his justice, 
 whilst his expiring breath together magnifies his law and 
 enunciates his gospel. That sacrifice may well have power 
 with man, for it has power with God. To the human mind, 
 it presents in the closest union and in their highest energy, 
 all the elements of sympathy, awe and tenderness. It blends 
 a Divine majesty that might well overawe the haughtiest, 
 with a winning gentleness that would reassure the most 
 desponding. It may well be, at the same time, a theme for 
 the mind of an angel to study, without grasping all its vast- 
 ness ; and a motive for the mind of the Sabbath-school child 
 to feel, without being repelled by its loftiness. It has pow- 
 er, practical power — popular power — permanent power. It 
 is God's remedy for sin ; and with the accompanying influ- 
 ences of his Spirit, it can avail as the remedy for all forms 
 of man's sin, as that sin is infused into, and as it is found 
 envenoming either the literature of the world, or any other 
 product of the human mind. Let us but transcribe that 
 truth into the heart, and illustrate it in the life, or rather let 
 the renewing grace of God's Spirit so transfer it into the 
 
48 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 soul of man, let me be enabled to believe in this Divine Suf- 
 ferer, as my Saviour — to feel that with him I am dying to 
 the world, and that with him, too, I shall rise again from the 
 grave, see him on the judgment throne, and follow him into 
 the gates of Paradise ; and with these truths firmly grasped 
 by the mind, what has the world left wherewith to allure, 
 wherewith to appal me ? I have thrown myself loose from 
 the trammels of earth. Its cords have perished at the touch 
 of an ethereal fire. Disengaged from its entanglements, its 
 bonds sundered, and its snares parted, I soar aloft, to sit, in 
 the language of Paul, in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. I 
 rise yet higher, and in the awful language of Peter, I, the 
 heir of corruption, and once the bondsman of death, am 
 made "a partaker of the divine nature." Here is power.''' 
 
 Let that power of the cross but go forth in its appropriate 
 channels, in a holy, devoted ministry — in the more elevated 
 piety of the church, and in a Christian education of the 
 young given by the church, if the State may not give it : — 
 let that power, we say, but go forth in these channels, and 
 with God's l)lessing upon it, tijc world is saved. Carry that 
 truth into all the scenes of human activity, or suffering — into 
 the market-place, and the halls of legislation ; into the schools 
 of philosophy, and the student's cell, and the editor's desk, 
 the cabins of j)overty and the dungeons of crime ; let it fence 
 the cradle and watch the death-bed ; and it will be found 
 equal to every task, competent to every emergency, and 
 
 '' It has been promised at times that the removal from the Christian 
 system of its old, orthodox doctrines, as to the Atonement and Deity of our 
 Saviour, would, and it alone could, conciliate the favor of men of taste and 
 refinement. The language of Leasing, himsulf unhappily a sceptic, but a 
 critic of the highest name in German literature for taste and judgment, 
 would not sustain such promises. It has been quoted bv Pye Smith, in his 
 Scripture Testimony to the Messiah (2d ed. Lond. 1S29, vol. iii., p. 236), 
 " 1 agree with you, that our old religious system is false ; but I cannot say, 
 as you do, that it is a botch-work of haif-philoiophy and smatterings of 
 knowledge. I know nothing in the world ih it more drew out and exercised 
 a fine intellect. A botch-work of smatterings and half-p/dlosophij is that 
 system of religion uhich people now xpunt tv set up in'tlte place of the old 
 one; and u-itti far more invasion upon reason and philosophy/ than the old 
 one ever pretended to. If Christ is not the true God, the JMohamm ?dan 
 rtligion is indisputably f;ir better than the Christian, and Mohammed Himself 
 was incomparably a greiter and more honorable man than Jesus Christ; for 
 ha was more truih-telling, mf>ro circumspect in what he sa d, and more zeal- 
 ous for the honor of the one and only God, than Christ was, who, if he did 
 not e.vacily give himself out for God, 'yet at least said a hundred two-meaning 
 things to lead simple people to ihink so ; while Mohimmed could never be 
 charged with a single instance of double-dealing in this way." 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 49 
 
 mighty to exorcise every evil spirit. The earthly miracles 
 of our Lord were in some sense but anticipations and earnests 
 of the moral miracles which that doctrine of the cross has 
 wrought, is now working and will continue to work. Yet, 
 — yet, does this Saviour open the blinded eyes of passion, 
 and breathe strength wherewith to obey him into the palsied 
 will of the sinner. 
 
 ; 1. And first let us test the energy of the cross, in its ap- 
 plication to the mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the age. 
 ; It meets all the just wants of that spirit. Utilitarians demand 
 the practical, and this is a doctrine eminently practical. 
 Let us but observe this trait in Christ's own history. He 
 might have theorized brilliantly and perhaps safely to him- 
 self. He might have been the Plato or the Homer of his 
 age, a Plato far more profound, a Homer far more sublime 
 than tlie old Grecians. But he threw aside all such fame. 
 He furnished the substance and subject of tlie most glorious 
 literature the world has seen, but he left it for others to 
 write that literature. His business was doing good. He 
 was a practical teacher, and a practical philanthropist. And 
 as to the actual working, and the every-day results of the 
 doctrine since the Saviour's times, it is seen how Commerce 
 confesses that her way has been often prepared and protected 
 by the missionaries of this cross ; and how the statesman 
 bears witness that his government has owed the stability, 
 order and virtue of the community to the preaching of this 
 cross ; and how the scholar attests that science has flourished 
 best under the peaceful and sober influence of this religion 
 of the cross. The gospel is eminently practical, then, and 
 so far, it conciliates the spirit of utilitarianism. 
 
 But the doctrine of the cross is not sordid and selfish, and, 
 so far, it corrects the mechanical, utilitarian tendency of our 
 times. Against the lust of gain, it sets, in strong contrast, 
 the example of Christ's voluntary poverty, and in solemn 
 warning, the Saviour's declaration how hardly the rich man 
 enters the kingdom of heaven. Against the disposition 
 which would set material interests above all others, and teach 
 us to regard the tangible goods of earth as the only real or 
 the only valuable possessions, the gospel shows Christ set- 
 ting moral far above all material interests— and uttering the 
 brief and pithy question, before which avarice turns pale, and 
 ambition drops his unfinished task : " What shall it profit a 
 man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or 
 
50 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" If, as the 
 great English moralist said, that which exalts the future, 
 and disengages man's mind from being engrossed by the 
 present, serves to elevate man to the true dignity of his 
 nature ; how great the practical value of a faith, in whose 
 far-reaching visions, time dwindles into a speck, and eternity 
 becomes the paramount object of man's anxieties and hopes, 
 where Truth is made more valuable than all things, to be 
 bought at all risks, while Truth is not to be sold for the 
 world. — And the prevalent selfishness which lies at the basis 
 of that mechanical and utilitarian spirit of which we have 
 spoken, is sorely rebuked by the very thought of a Divine 
 Redeemer, who, moved by no selfish aims, but in disinterest- 
 ed kindness, compassionately visits, and by the sacrifice 
 of himself ransoms his envenomed foes ; and whose gospel 
 makes all mankind my brethren in a common sin, doom, 
 and ransom ; and bids me freely give to my fellow-man 
 what I have most freely received. 
 
 Imbue, then, your literature with that spirit, and men 
 learn that they are not mere calculating, money-getting 
 machines, that they have an immortal soul within them ; — 
 and that the earth which they till and parcel out, and conquer 
 and govern, is but the lodge of their few wayfaring years, 
 as they are journeying to their home in the far eternity. 
 Then the miser, as that world, revealed by the cross, heaves 
 into view, unclutches his gold. Then the manoeuvres and 
 tactics, the trickery and juggling of parties in the church 
 and the state, show in their native meanness, beside the 
 simple, sublime and unselfish scheme of the Redeemer. 
 The views of eternity, gained at the foot of that cross, open 
 a wider horizon to the noblest flights of science. The views 
 of duty there leai'ned, give a higher finish to all the details 
 of industry and art. Give literature thoroughly to feel and 
 diflfuse this doctrine of the cross, and while, on the one 
 hand, it is saved from fruitless speculations, and made em- 
 inently practical ; it is, on the other hand, effectually snatch- 
 ed from under the wheels of a "mechanical age, and saved 
 from being trodden into the mire beneath the hoofs of a sor- 
 did selfishness. Thus the human mind, in its pursuit of let- 
 ters, is made practical, but not mechanical ; and while taught 
 to aim at the widest usefulness, is raised above a grovelling 
 utilitarianism, that measures all good by selfish advantages, 
 and the standard of present expediency. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 
 
 51 
 
 j 2. Bring again this doctrine to the trial, in its power 
 'over passion. We have remarked its effects on the tyranny 
 of Maminon ; let us try its energies on the prowling spirit 
 of Belial. In the death of the Mediator and Propitiation, it 
 has provided for the free forgiveness of the most aggravated 
 sins. To those who have become the slaves of their un- 
 bridled passions, it holds out therefore the prospect of re- 
 covery, and the promise of a pardon, full and immediate. 
 It cheers those who had learned to despair of their own 
 moral renovation. It announces hope for the world's out- 
 casts. Those whom human society had shut out as irrecov- 
 erable, and as sunk below the notice and sympathy of their 
 fellows, it pursues and reclaims. In circumstances the most 
 discouraging, and characters the most hopeless, it delights to 
 work its miracles of mercy. It rears the flowers and fruits 
 of virtue on the scarce cooled crust of the flowing lava of 
 passion, that but lately had poured forth its devastating floods 
 over every green thing. But while thus welcoming the vilest, 
 it makes no peace with their evil passions. It exorcises 
 the fiercer, to foster the gentler of these impulses and atfec- 
 tions of man's heart. Of this religion, the Lamb and the 
 Dove are the chosen emblems ; meekness and kindness, the 
 instruments of its triumphs ; and its law the law of love. 
 
 Hence its signal power to humanize and civilize when 
 introduced into those portions of society where it had before 
 been unknown. See how it has tamed the rude, uplifted 
 the degraded, and cleansed the polluted, and righted the 
 oppressed in the islands and upon the continents to which 
 the missionary has carried it. It has, indeed, much yet to 
 accomplish even in the bounds of the Christian church. 
 Bring it to bear more fully upon the habits and feelings of 
 the church, and it will destroy there the supremacy of mere 
 emotion and excitement, operating as they sometimes do to 
 produce a false fire not from Heaven. It substitutes principle 
 as the guide of life, instead of that treacherous and change- 
 ful sympathy which is often made the rule of our way. It 
 summons the disciple to view his Master's journey, which 
 kept ever its unfaltering gaze on the cross as its end, and 
 looked steadily onward to the baptism of ignominy and 
 agony that was to crown the long conflict ; and it bids him 
 in emulation of his Master's example, to lead no random 
 life, the mere sport of caprice and impulse. It rebukes 
 those Christians who may be described as living by jerks, 
 
52 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 and whose fitful activity has all the contortions of the ad- 
 ventitious life of galvanism. When allowed its full scope 
 over the inner world of the heart, see its power to produce 
 high and symmetrical excellence in Leighton and Doddridge 
 and Baxter and Pearce, and, why should we hesitate to add, 
 in the heavenly-minded St, Cyran and Fenelon 1 See the 
 men whom it has thoroughly possessed, in whom it operated, 
 pervading all their passions, and making them to become 
 like Braiiierd or Martyn or Xavier, '■'■living burnt sacrifices'''' 
 on the altar of God, We see no lack of noble feelings and 
 high emotion there. It is no painted flame that shines there ; 
 much less are these the lurid fires of a malignant, persecu- 
 ting zeal. The victim is consumed in the flames of a heav^- 
 en-descended charity, a holocaust to God, while all around is 
 made radiant with the golden and lambent lustre of his love. 
 
 For the doctrine of the cross is far from extirpating pas- 
 sion. It but regulates it. No doctrine like it awakens and 
 sustains the holier passions. All is purified and subordinated 
 to the love of God, and man returns thus to the likeness of 
 his unfalJen self — to bear again some traces of his original 
 character ere sin had marred his nature, or sorrow darkened 
 his path ; and when all his powers and passions ministered to 
 virtue and contributed to his happiness. 
 
 Let literature then become but the handmaid of this doc- 
 trine of the cross, and it can no longer pander, as it has too 
 long done, to the fiercer or baser appetites of mankind. 
 How much has the cultivated talent of the race, in its va- 
 rious literary tasks, set itself to divide and destroy, to corrupt 
 and intoxicate mankind ! Genius has shouted to swell the 
 discord, and its cry has exasperated the strifes of the world, 
 instead of being their peace-maker. How often has the 
 scholar yoked himself to the brazen car of Moloch, or de- 
 meaned himself to heighten the idolatrous revel in the groves 
 of the wanton Ashtoreth ! How much of literary achieve- 
 ment has perished in consequence of the corruption that so 
 deeply engrained it,'« or has continued and lived only to 
 
 IS It is a remark of Sharon Turner, in his History of England during the 
 Middle Ages (vol. iv., p. 143, note), how much of the Greek classical poetry 
 was allowed to perish or destroyed by the Eastern Emperors, because of its 
 immorality. And some of the authors whose productions have thus disap- 
 peared, were, in the judgment of their countrymen and contemporaries, of 
 high genius. He names, among the writers whose remains thus perished 
 wholly or in great part, Menander, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philemon, Alexis, 
 Sappho, Grinna, Anacreon, Mimnermus, Bion, Alcman, and Alcaeus. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 53 
 
 spread around moral infection ! Looking back over the 
 history of our world, as preserved by those who knew not, 
 or obeyed not this gospel, it is a humiliating record. The 
 tumult and rage of passion seem endless. One wide and 
 restless sea overspreads the scene. But when the gospel 
 moves over this waste, dovelike in spirit, it comes like the 
 dove to the ark of our diluvian father, bearing the message of 
 peace and the omen of hope— the leaf that betokens the assuag- 
 ing of the waters, the cessation of the storm, and the re-appear- 
 ance of earth, from its long baptism of death, all radiant in 
 new-born verdure and beauty. 
 
 No skill in negotiation or prowess in war can avail like 
 this gospel to establish peace among the nations. No police, 
 however well-appointed and vigilant, has equal power to 
 give order and security to the nation or the city within itself. 
 No principle or art, no degree of refinement and no measure 
 of knowledge, can succeed like the religion of the cross in 
 givmg true peace to the household. To destroy, in all these 
 relations of society, the tyranny of the vindictive passions, 
 no power is like that of the gospel. Its efficacy to raise 
 and restore the slaves of the baser appetites of our nature, 
 we have already seen. A literature, then, controlled by 
 this gospel, will not be the literature of mere blind passion. 
 And no principle is so likely to eject from our literature this 
 unreasoning vehemence of passion, as the great truth of Christ 
 crucified, iterated and reiterated in the ears of our people. 
 
 3. Apply it again, as a conservative principle, to counter- 
 act the lawlessness of our times. If ever it appeared as if 
 there might be a just revolt against the will of Providence, 
 it seemed to be at the time when the meek Saviour, inno- 
 cent, lowly and loving, was sold by the traitor, deserted of 
 his disciples, assailed by the false accuser, and condemned by 
 the unjust judge, whilst a race of malefactors and ingrates 
 crowded around their Deliverer, howling for his blood, the 
 blood of the Holy One. But though the cup was bitter, it was 
 meekly drunk, for it had been the Father's will to mingle it, 
 and his was the hand that held to the lips of the Son the 
 deadly draught. Lawlessnesss is hushed at the sight of 
 Gethsemane. In the garden and at the cross you see illus- 
 trated the sanctity of law as it appears nowhere else. It 
 was Mercy indeed that was forcing her way to the sinner; 
 but as she went, she was seen doing homage to Justice, and 
 paying the debt, ere she freed the captive. That dread 
 
54 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 transaction proclaimed the truth that transgression could 
 never in God's universe occur with impunity ; and that if one 
 did not suffer, another must. Tenderness was there lavish- 
 ed, such as the heart of man never conceived in its hour 
 of most rmpassioned and concentrated affection. Yet that 
 tenderness leaned on the sternest principle. The Father 
 loved the Son thus sacrificed as his well-beloved one ; yet it 
 " pleased the Father to bruise Him." Surely here is found 
 no precedent for the lawless tenderness that exonerates the 
 criminal and blames the law. It is not at the cross of Christ 
 that ministry has learned its lessons, which employs itself 
 in weaving silken scabbards, in the vain hope to sheathe the 
 lightnings of God's law ; or which is full of dainty contri- 
 vances to muffle "the live, leaping thunders" of Sinai, and 
 make them no longer a terror to the evil-doer. In the last 
 scenes of the Saviour's life that law was not contemned, 
 but " magnified and made honorable." So Christ would 
 have it be ; and a true church of Christ would say : So 
 let it be. What submission is here taught us to the ap- 
 pointments of God — even though he slay us ! Where can 
 self-denial, that rare and splendid grace of the Chris- 
 tian, be so effectually acquired, as in watching the scene of 
 his Master's passion, presented beneath the olives of Geth- 
 semane, while the sod beneath is wet with great drops of 
 bloody sweat, and the leaves above are stirred with the sobs 
 of that ascending prayer, " not my will, Father, but thine 
 be done." Subjection to the law of God is one of the best 
 preparatives for submission to all the just laws of human 
 society. " Paralytic laws," as Bentham expressively called 
 those statutes of the Old World, which, from the expensive- 
 ness of the courts and forms of justice, are inaccessible to 
 the poor, are indeed a sore evil. But it may well be ques- 
 tioned whether they are much worse than epileptic laws, as 
 we may style those convulsive and spasmodic efforts at jus- 
 tice, that are not unknown in the New World ; that sum- 
 mary resolution of the legislative, the judiciary and the execu- 
 tive branches of government into the sovereign will of the 
 multitude ; the legislation which a mob in its hot haste 
 enacts and executes in the same breath, compressing into 
 one single act, all the various and dilatory tasks of the law- 
 maker, advocate, judge, jury, jailor, and hangman. Send 
 the spirit of Christ's cross through a land, and what a law- 
 biding community would it become. The sanctity of law 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 55 
 
 and right would then hedge around the property, character 
 and interests of each member of society. It would make a 
 latch sufficient protection for the vaults of a bank. Men's 
 word would be their bond. Our schools and colleges would 
 then be filled with youth, docile and modest, who would 
 not begin their studies by undertaking to teach their instruc- 
 tors, nor consider it their earliest duty to exercise a pater- 
 nal authority and supervision over the Faculty of the In- 
 stitution, whose instructors they deign to patronize bybeino- 
 there matriculated. Our sanctuaries would present the 
 spectacle of Christians united in affection, bearing one an- 
 other's burdens and so fulfilling the law of love. Far as 
 the spirit of the gospel has already influenced literature, it 
 has been made a literature friendly to public order, and the 
 ally of law, thinning where our popular literature too often 
 serves but to multiply the tenants of our jails ; and teaching 
 the disciples of the Crucified to render honor unto whom 
 honor is due, and fear to whom fear. 
 
 4. Look, next, at its power to check the false liberalism 
 of the limes, in its wretched effects on the moral integrity 
 and purity of our literature. This form of evil has many 
 shapes. All we cannot discuss. We would but enumerate 
 its strange speculations as to Scripture ; its false liberality 
 as to religious faith ; its false toleration in morals ; and lastly, 
 its demon pride setting itself up to supersede Jehovah. All 
 these how sternly does the cross of Christ rebuke and re- 
 pudiate. 
 
 Trust some of these liberal teachers, and all the old truths 
 of Scripture vanish. Instead of its solid grounds of history, 
 its significant prophecy, and all its varied, unerring inspira- 
 tion ; they would usher us into a mere cloud-land of shifting 
 speculations, unsubstantial and formless and evanescent. 
 They would disembowel the Bible of its facts, and leave be- 
 hind a i'ew cold truths of Natural Religion, most awkwardly 
 told, the fragments of a myth about the development of 
 Human Nature. But take their theory to the cross. Look 
 up at that sufferer. Read his discourses ; follow his miracles ; 
 and believe, if you can, that this is not a history of facts. 
 The confession of the infidel Rousseau bursts to your lips : 
 "If this be a fiction, the inventor is yet more wondrous 
 even than the hero of the narrative." You have the fullest 
 circumstantial details of Christ's life, the country and age 
 in which he lived, the cities he visited and the persons he 
 
56 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 met. The Sermon on the Mount is a fact, if you throw- 
 aside all the history in which it is found imbedded. Its ex- 
 istence and its excellence are facts inexplicable rationally on 
 any other theory than that of the truth and virtue and in- 
 spiration of the Author. Pilate and Herod were facts. Je- 
 rusalem was a fact. Gethsemane was a fact. Calvary was 
 a fact. And he who hung there, on the fatal tree of anguish 
 and shame, asserted not myths, but facts — wrought not 
 myths, but facts — loved not in myth, but in fact ; and the 
 salvation he has oflered, the Heaven Avhich he has opened, 
 and the Hell from which he has warned us — all — all are 
 facts. Wo to those who treat all as myths, until, not mythi- 
 cally but really, they for ever forfeit the one, and plunge 
 irrevocably into the other. To study the narrative of the 
 gospels, apart from the prejudices of a preconceived system, 
 and believe it a fiction, is impossible. Then were all history 
 a fable. 
 
 Try by the same test the spirit to wliich we refer, in its 
 false liberality as to religious faith — its chameleon character, 
 finding true piety in all creeds and worships, and identifying, 
 as being but one God, Jehovah the God of the Scriptures 
 with the Baal and Moloch whom he cursed, with Juggernaut, 
 whose worshippers are crushed beneath chariot-wheels, and 
 with Kalee even, when wearing her necklace of human 
 skulls, and when invoked by the Thug, ere he strangles his 
 victim. No, the Bible knows no such toleration and liberal- 
 ity as this. It exclaims, "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, 
 and buildeth temples.'"^ A man may be, as a liberalist 
 would term him, religious, and rear costly shrines from his 
 devotional feeling, and yet God say of him that he had forgot- 
 ten his Maker, and his religion was therefore valueless. 
 The exclusive character of Truth, disdaining all compromise, 
 was apparent in all Christ's course. He did not blend Sad- 
 duceanism, Pharisaism, and Herodianism, and Heathenism, 
 into one religion, a mere compost of creedless, Pantheistic 
 piety ; and sanction all as meaning the same thing. On the 
 contrary, he denounced all, provoked all, was assailed by all, 
 and at last is seen dying by the confederated malice and hate 
 of all. Truth was not, on his lips, a motley compound of all 
 human opinions, an eclecticism from all varieties of human 
 
 , ■ '" Hosea viii. 14. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE, 57 
 
 error, but, like its Divine Author, immutable and one, sanc- 
 tioning no compromise and allowing no rival; 
 
 Try these falsely liberal views, as to the toleration to be 
 shown in questions of morals. Literature in our day pro- 
 fesses to cultivate a sympathy for all classes, even for those 
 who trade in vice, and eat the bread of wickedness. It has 
 discovered that highwaymen, prostitutes and pickpockets 
 have their literary rights, and should be fully represented in 
 their own fashion in the great commonwealtli of letters. A 
 literature of felons is accordingly written, and alas, it is also 
 read, corrupting our language with the slang of cut-throats, 
 and our youth with their contagious immorality. Was this, 
 now, the spirit of our crucified Lord ? He was indeed the 
 friend of sinners. He sate in the publican's house as a 
 guest ; he frowned not from his feet the weeping penitent, 
 whose very presence seemed to others to shed contamination 
 around her. But although thus forgiving to the sinner when 
 contrite, he never dallied with sin itself. Paul seems to 
 have found converts to the cross in the household of the 
 atrocious Nero; but he never improves the advantages thus 
 afforded him, to draw revolting pictures of the excesses of 
 Nero's drunken hours ; nor has he recorded what to our 
 modern novelists would have been invaluable, the confessions 
 he might have heard from the criminals who Avere wafted 
 with him over the Mediterranean, in the prison ship that 
 bore him to Rome. There were things of which Paul says 
 he thought it a shame even to speak. Well had it been for 
 the purity of our literature and the innocence of our youth, 
 had the writers of our age condescended to learn wisdom at 
 the feet of Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. Peter, another 
 of the first preachers of the cross, speaks of sinners who 
 had, " like the dog, turned to their own vomit again, and like 
 the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.'' 
 But the apostle of the circumcision never stooped to picture 
 the loathsome detail, and thus in effect to partake the ban- 
 quet of the one, and share the bath of the other. Modern 
 literature, aye, elegant literature, amid all the vaunted refine- 
 ment of the nineteenth century, has done both, in order to 
 enlarge our knowledge of nature and life, and to teach us 
 superiority to the exclusiveness of vulgar prejudices. With 
 such forms of liberalism the cross and its preachers have no 
 sympathy. 
 
 The cross repudiates the demon pride of this false liber- 
 9 
 
58 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 alism. In Eden, Satan but ventured to promise " Ye shall be 
 as Gods," hinting a distant likeness to God as the reward of 
 sin. Modern Pantheism has renounced the qualifying terms, 
 laid aside all hesitation, and converting the promise of future 
 good into an assertion of present privilege, it exclaims au- 
 daciously, " Ye are God." Hence, at the funeral, a few 
 years since, of a great metaphysician of Germany,'^ one of 
 the leaders of this philosophy, it is said that some of his 
 admirers spoke of him reverently as a singular incarnation 
 of God. But bring such dreams of pride to the atoning 
 cross. He who hung there tasted death for every man. 
 And Avhy? We had all sinned : he died the just for the 
 unjust ; and without the shedding of blood there is no re- 
 mission. And there I learn my desert. In the fate of the 
 second Adam I read the character of the first Adam, whose 
 place he took, and whose doom he averted, I am a doomed 
 sinner, by nature a child of wrath. The taint of an endless 
 curse is on my soul. The blood of a divine atonement was 
 necessary to purge me from fatal blots. Do they tell me of 
 the innate innocence of man's nature ? I point them to 
 virtue, perfect, peerless and divine, as it was incarnate in 
 Christ Jesus. But that excellence was not welcomed in the 
 world it came to redeem ; but on the contrary, it seemed to 
 be the more fiercely hated, the more brightly it shone ; and 
 it was revealed before the eyes of the race only to be ma- 
 ligned, persecuted and slaughtered. At the cross of Christ 
 I learn, then, that I must come down into the dust of lowly 
 penitence, or I perish. His kingdom is for the poor in 
 spirit ; and his most diligent followers are to confess them- 
 selves but unprofitable servants. Is it in such scenes, and 
 under the eyes of such a teacher, I am to claim equality and 
 oneness with God ? No ! such thoughts, every where ab- 
 surdly impious, are there most oflensively absurd and most 
 unpardonably impious. And, as with a battle-axe, does the 
 cross of Christ cleave and annihilate these arrogant fictions 
 of that liberalism cherished by some who yet call themselves 
 Christians. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, the gospel meets all those just 
 claims of the soul, to which this liberalism has addressed its 
 flatteries. The doctrine of the cross, with a true liberality, 
 allows all national peculiarities not in themselves sinful. It 
 
 18 Hegel. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 59 
 
 welcomes the savage and the slave into the brotherhood of 
 the race, and is prepared in the most degraded and forlorn 
 of all the tribes of the earth, to eject the brute, acknowledge 
 the man, and develope the saint. It lays the basis of a true, 
 universal. Catholic church ; — not the local, arrogant and 
 usurping church of Rome, which, to make plausible its poor 
 claim to universality, must anathematize the myriads of the 
 Greek and Syrian churches, and all Protestant Christendom ; 
 but that one church, real though invisible, which comprises 
 the multitudes no man can number, and no man can name ; 
 the Christians of every land, age and sect, that hold the 
 Head, and love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.^* The 
 idea of unity, so dear to the liberalist, the cross alone truly 
 reveals. It shows a unity of Providence in the whole history 
 
 '9 It was one of the grave offences in the excellent commentary of that 
 devout Jansenist, Father Q,uesnel, on the New Testament, which brought 
 down upon him and his work ihe fulminations of the Vatican in the lanious 
 Bull Unigenitus, that he had wrongly defined the Catholicity of the Church. 
 Two of the one hundred and one heretical propositions selected from his Ex- 
 position, the 72d and 76th, are these : " It is a mark of the Christian Church 
 that it is Catholic, embracing both all the angels of heaven, and all the elect 
 and righteous of the earth, and these of all times." And again, " Nothing is 
 more expansive than the Church of God, for all the elect and all the righteous 
 of all times make it up." — {Magn. Bultariuni Rom., Luxemb., 1727, torn. 
 viii.) It can, we think, be shown that this true invisible Church, com- 
 prising the truly righteous, the elect of all times, lands, and kindreds, is the 
 only Catholic Church known to the Scriptures; the only Catholic Church 
 of which Christ will acknowledge the Headship ; or membership in which 
 ensures salvation. Romanism could not, however, hold her power if such a 
 theory of Catholicism were to prevail. The 72d Prop, is taken, apparently, 
 from Ciuesnel's remarks upon Heb. xii. 24 : as is the 76th from his Commen- 
 tary at the 20-22d v. of Ephes. ii. His observations on the latter passage, by 
 their beauty, tempt us to a longer quotation. " ' And are built upon the found- 
 ation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief 
 corner-stone; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto 
 an holy temple in the Lord : in whom ye also ar^ builded together lor an 
 habitation of God through the Spirit.' How majestic and how admirable, 
 my God, is thy Church ! How worthy the work of its builder ! Nothing 
 can be so august, for it is thy palace. Nothing so holy, for it is thy temple. 
 Nothing inspire such reverence, for it is thine abode. Nothing is so ancient, 
 for patriarchs and prophets have labored upon it. Nothing is so immovable, 
 for Christ is its foundation. Nothing is more compact and indivisible, for 
 He is its corner-stone. Nothing more lofty, for it lifts itself to the skies, and 
 even into the very bosom of God. Nothing is better in its proportions, or better 
 in arrangement, for the Holy Spirit is the architect here. Nothing is more 
 beauteous or more variegated, for precious stones of all kinds are built into 
 it, the Jew and the Gentile, those of all ages and countries, of either sex and 
 of all conditions. Nothing is so expa naive, for all the elect and all the right- 
 eous of all ages vxake it up. Nothing is more inviolable, since it is a sanctu- 
 ary consecrated to the Lord. Nothing is so divine, since it is a living struc- 
 ture, in which the Holy Ghost has his dwelling, which He vivifies — which 
 He sanctifies. There is but one God, one Christ, one Church. None is to 
 
60 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 of the world — a unity of piety in all dispensations from those 
 days ere yet the ark was launched, to those of a new heaven 
 and a new earth, when there shall be no more sea — a unity 
 of origin, in the common descent of our race — a unity of 
 transgression in our common sin — a unity of account in 
 our gathering before Christ's bar, and a unity of brother- 
 hood in our one ransom paid at Christ's cross. 
 
 Let but our literature be saturated with this doctrine of 
 the cross, and it will conquer all miscalled liberalism by 
 showing the source of its errors and meeting its just claims. 
 It will set up the truth, and require the renunciation of every 
 error. But it will set up the truth in love ; and there will 
 be ultimately one Lord, and his name One ; and He will 
 not be the material and sinful God of Pantheism, but the 
 Everlasting One, uncreated, impassible, spiritual, sinless and 
 supreme, distinct from the universe he made and governs — 
 the Creator, and not the creature. 
 
 5, And lastly, would we say, the cross thus mighty to 
 demolish liberalism, has also equal energy as the antagonist 
 of superstition, which was spoken of as the last of the evil 
 influences besetting our youthful literature. 
 
 Instead of forms and rites, the great resource of supersti- 
 tion, the gospel of the cross requires a spiritual worship, and 
 an inward conversion. It has no regard for mere penances 
 and austerities as practised for their own sake, or from a 
 belief in their intrinsic merit. The doctrine of self-torture, 
 so dear to the saints of Romish legends, is unknown to the 
 gospel. Christ did not hew his own cross, nor was he his 
 own scourger, as have been many saints that shine in the 
 papal calendar. Instead of that antiquity of ten or twelve 
 or fifteen centuries, of which Antichrist vaunts so much, 
 the cross reveals a more ancient antiquity of eighteen cen- 
 turies. Instead of its hazy and dubious traditions, scripture 
 verily ; and instead of its councils and fathers, and a long 
 succession of sinners wearing tiaras, and claiming names of 
 blasphemy — a primitive Apostolic church, and Christ " for 
 
 be adored besides the God whom we adore in three Persons. None wor- 
 ships Him but as he loves Him, and none worships and loves Him as he 
 should, but by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and but in his body, which is the 
 Church." Such views of Caiholicism might well, for their spirituality, their 
 wisdom, and their truth, be allowed to supplant and expel the arrogant and 
 carnal dreams of a visible Catholic Church, that have been too prevalent 
 even beyond the precincts of Rome. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 61 
 
 the chief Apostle and Bishop of our profession," whose 
 priesthood is the unchangeable priesthood of Melchisedec, 
 and whose dominion is an everlasting dominion. It acknow- 
 ledges no religion that is merely a religion of the senses or 
 the imagination. The feelings that stirred Paul at Athens, 
 as he stood amid its altars and gazed on lines of images 
 crowding its every street, would have sprung up as naturally 
 within him, had he stood beneath the vaults of many a cathe- 
 dral, with its " dim religious light," and rich with the trophies 
 of the pencil and the chisel. Against the idolatry of the 
 material image of the cross and its sculptured burden, as 
 seen in the Romish reverence of the crucifix — against the 
 idolatry of the material emblems of bread and wine in the 
 sacrament, as they are deified in the Romish doctrine of 
 Transubstantiation — against the popular idol of all Romish 
 countries, the earthly parent of our Saviour, the human and 
 sinful mother, to whom they have transferred the media- 
 torial office of her divine and sinless Son — against all these 
 aspects of the worship of the creature, there is no better 
 remedy than the faithful and full presentation of the true 
 doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, the world's Creator, 
 Redeemer and Lord, As Christ gave it, and as Paul dis- 
 pensed it, the gospel of the cross is the grand Iconoclast 
 principle of the age. And as of old it routed the gods from 
 the summit of shadowy Olympus, and in later days drove 
 into darkness all the deities of the Valhalla; so will it ul- 
 timately abolish all the idols out of the earth. And not 
 the graven image only of wood and of stone, but the idols 
 also of which Bacon has spoken, the idols of the forum 
 and the cavern, the prejudices of the busy, and the errors of 
 the studious.^" 
 
 20 The writer has long believed, and elsewhere remarked years since, that 
 in the inevitable conflict of the truth with Romanism in our days, we need 
 to allow and to emulate more than some Protestants seem disposed to do, 
 the excellences of individuals and of individual practices in that anti-Chris- 
 tian communion : and that, especially in the field of missions we may learn 
 from her history much to inspirit, and somewhat to instruct us. Since the 
 deiivery of this address he has met with the following observations from p. 
 writer on missions, whose work is probably in the hands of but few Ameri- 
 can Christians. Though containing incidental e.xpressions the present 
 writer might not have preferred to employ himself, they seem so admirable 
 on the whole, in sentiment, temper and style, that he could not deny himself 
 the gratification of copying them. They are from the French of M. Bost. 
 He is known to English Christians as the author of a history of Moravian- 
 ism, published by the London Religious Tract Society, and of a lite and 
 collection of the letters of Feli.x Neffj whose intimate friendship he enjoyed. 
 
62 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 To bring out the great truth to the cross, in one of its 
 two-lbld aspects, as the principle of sanctilication no less 
 than of juslilication, Protestantism may learn some not use- 
 less lessons even from the Romish church. That abnega- 
 tion of self, that deadness to the world, and those heroic 
 
 and whose opposition to Romanism, we need not say he shares. He is an 
 active and efficient laborer in the revival of evangelical truth in the churches 
 of Switzerland. Ho published, in four volumes, a French version of the 
 History of Christian Missions, written by the excellent Bluirihardt, formerly 
 head of the Mission School at Oasle, which has sent so many laborers into 
 most quarters of the earth. Bhimhardt's death left the work incomplete. In 
 his own original preface to his French translation from the German, M. 
 Bost has these observations on the justice to be rendered the Romish 
 Church. We present them in a free and hasty version from his French 
 oriuinal. 
 
 " But here I reach a point yet more important than any that has preceded 
 it. It is one upon which I am happy to tind my sentiments in unison with 
 those of my author:* as they will also prove to be, I think, with those of 
 every man who has studied history in a spirit of impartiality. I refer to the 
 two-fold judgment to which the facts of tiistory conduct us, as to the good 
 and the evil, the two sides that are found in the Romish Church, whether re- 
 garded at any given moment in her existence, or at different eras in her 
 career. I shall dwell, at some length, on this grave topic. 
 
 "If all that were required, were but to discuss this subject in generalities 
 and as an abstract question, the aflair would be one of the utmost facility. 
 History presents us in this Church, on the one hand, objects so grand and 
 lovely, and on the other, those so atrocious, that it becomes impossible to 
 persist, as regards this community, in that narrow judgment which sees in her 
 only every thing divine, or only every thing devilish. On the contrary we 
 find there to a demonstration a decided intermixture of God's work and of the 
 work of Satan ; just as one may see a few paces from the spot where I am writ- 
 ing, two streams that flow the one beside the other, in the same channel, the 
 one all turbid and discolored — the other blue as the skies. t A little farther on 
 they intermingle, but even yet they remain distinct- the good does not 
 destroy the evil — the evil does not destroy the good. It would then be a 
 nuitter of no difficulty to decide this question in the peaceful study, and amid 
 the silence of our retirement. There it is perfectly simple, and admits of no 
 dispute. The Romish church has exhibited in all ages, just as she con- 
 tinues in our own times to exhibit, a decided alliance of evil and good : and 
 of these, each perhaps is carried to a degree in which it surpasses what is to 
 be found any where else. 
 
 "But if we utter this judgment before the public, immediately passions 
 are inflamed, interests are wounded, and we touch, so to speak, the raw 
 flesh. In fact, the papacy, like a snake bruised beneath the wheels of a 
 passing chariot, but that is not killed, is so far from dead, as to be rising 
 again, and beginning anew to hiss and bare its fangs. Powerless as it will 
 be before God, whenever God shall see fit to command it again into the pit, 
 it is as yet more powerful than man, and seems, under more than one aspect, 
 to resemble the strong man armed who is named in the Gospel. She is all 
 the stronger and better armed, from the fact that to all the weapons of brute 
 force, she knows how to unite those of artifice and restless intrigue, and even 
 to associate with these, in many cases, the influence of profound piety. By 
 
 * M Blnmhardt. 
 
 t The allusion is probably to llie conHuence of the Rhone and the Arve near Geneva. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 63 
 
 sacrifices, in which some of her confessors have excelled, 
 have served to the staunchest Protestants as the incentives 
 of a holy emulation. Leighton in one age, and Zinzendorf 
 in another, were supposed to have enkindled their piety, 
 
 turns, with clasped hands, with eyes raised to heaven, and clad in sackcloth, 
 she is the ardent and high-minded missionary ; and next she is the courtier, 
 climbing, flattering, and domineering ; attacking, by the arts of policy, no 
 less than by the aids of religion, bearing down the devout by appeals to his 
 conscience, and holding out lures to the ambition of the diplomaiist ; caress- 
 ing now the anarchist, and now tiie despot ; the foe of republics, and yet the 
 assassin of kings ; changing her hues like the chameleon, as you observe 
 her at Dublin, at London, at Madrid, or at Paris ; winning over the sterner 
 spirits by her Trappists, and the libertines by her Madonnas ; drawing you 
 heavenward by her incense, her concerts and her sacred processions , and 
 allowing you to slide into hell by her cheapened absolutions, and by pen- 
 ances, that exempt you fi'om the repentance of the heart ; founding schools 
 in Italy, and overturning them in France; by turns, O'Connell, La Mennais, 
 Xavier, Vincent de Paul, Ravaillac and Fenelon ; it is tlie SLime church 
 who, in the middle ages, copied for us th3 sacred scriptures, and who, in our 
 times, is burning them. At the present time, the blows which are aimed at 
 her have been called forth, it must be allowed, rather by scepticism than by 
 zeal fcr God. And although we may know what will be her last end, yet we 
 know not its exact moment; and above all, we know not how much ^-he 
 may yet grasp, before she sinks. She is threatening England. She is 
 infiltrating herself into all parts of the United States. She is rising anew in 
 France 5 and there she is nu t (and this is the observation we have been 
 desirous thus to introduce), by a spirit of partizanship on the side of her 
 adversaries, which, inclining them to treat her as enemies are usually treated, 
 with blows, blows continually, and nothing but blows, does not stop to ask, 
 if even she liave not, in some points, claims upon our justice. 
 
 " And yet, it is to Protestants that we speak, if we believe that on our side 
 is found the truth, let us walk in the truth, as did the Master whom we claim 
 to follow. Let us, in consequence, be just even towards the most unjust. 
 Let us learn to guard ourselves against that absurd and heedless vanity 
 which sees in its own ranks but splendid virtues, and in the opponents but 
 faults and wrongs. Let us recollect that injustice never yet was able to 
 found an enduring structure; — that the disciple of Jesus is teachable towards 
 all, ever ready to learn, prompt in humbling himself, eager to find good 
 wherever it is to be met, readily and with joy acknowledging it, and above 
 all, having sufiBcient confidence in the sacred cause of Christ's Gospel, never 
 to fear bemg generous to any party, be it what it may. Many see danger in 
 the concessions that might possibly be made. But in what concessions? 
 In those which should be unjust'! We ought never to make any such; not 
 because they would be concessions, but because they would be errors. In 
 those which should be just ! We ought to make all such, and to make them 
 without fear. Without fear, did I say '? — We ought to tremble lest we 
 should leave a single one unmade — to tremble, lest we leave to our enemy a 
 single point in which he would have the advantage over us; a single virtue 
 in which he surpassed us. In truth, the kingdom of God is a combat of 
 holiness against sin, much more than it is a confiict of opinions, of dogmas, 
 or of hierarchies. Let this rule, then, without ceasing, be heard resounding 
 over our heads : 'Z?y their fruits shall ye know them.'' And let us not say, or 
 rather let us cease saying, as it often has been done, that this rule is a vague 
 one ; for on whom does our censure in such case fall 7 And who is He that 
 gave us it, but the Only Wise, the friend of the lowly and simple in heart, who 
 brings down questions the most profound and the most abstract, to princi- 
 
64 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 and formed in part their religious character, amid the Jan- 
 senist Catholics of France, with whom each had mingled. 
 Wesley, in his admiration of the character and graces of 
 some of that communion, and in his endeavors to bring 
 
 pies the most popular and practical, reducing them to questions of obedi- 
 ence, of love, and of lowliness? 
 
 "Protestants then let us continue to be ; but let us be humble. Protest- 
 ants let us be ; but let us not proceed, from an apprehension of wronging the 
 doctrine of divine grace, to fall into a dread of good works, or perhaps to 
 regard as good works, and works quite sufficient, the style of doing good, 
 as by turning a crank, adopted in certain societies, in which one does good 
 with his neighbor's money, and in his ambition to convert the world, forgets 
 too often his own proper and personal sanctification. Protestants let us be ; 
 but let us know how to pardon others besides St. Paul, if they mortify their 
 body, and keep it in subjection, through fear lest having preached to others, 
 they become themselves castaways. Let us relinquish those vague and con- 
 temptuous declamations against superstition, which better become the 
 enemies of the gospel than disciples of the Saviour. And let us remember, 
 that if it be wrong to build on a good foundation 'hay, wood and stubble,' 
 we must yet, at the same time, know how to respect that laborer who, be- 
 sides these worthless materials, brings gold and precious stones, and this, 
 perhaps, in greater abundance than ourselves. Let us not fear to make the 
 declaration. From that moment in which the Protestant Church shall have 
 imitated, embraced and reverenced all that there is of excellence and super- 
 iority in the Ronjish communion, from that moment the Romish com- 
 munion must fall, and will in fact fall, because of the crying abuses con- 
 tained witbin her; but not one instant sooner. And until that time, she 
 will, on the contrary, continue to exist, for the purpose of humbling us, for 
 the purpose of holding us in check, for the purpose of counterpoising us in 
 those points in which we refuse to obey, and for the purpose of accomplish- 
 ing a sort of good which we have not learned to do. God compensates for 
 one extreme by allowing another ; and it is not until the day when our prin- 
 ciples shall no longer present any void and any vacant spot, that we can claim 
 to look for the fall of a system which will then oppose to us nought but in- 
 feriorities. Then the two communions, like two dark clouds, surcharged 
 with opposite electricity, will approach each other to intermingle and become 
 one : a spark from the higher regions will produce a sudden fusion, and a 
 shower of grace pouring itself upon the earth, there will then start up in 
 abundance new harvests, on the one side and on the other. 
 
 "But it is not the mere exactitude of doctrinal orthodoxy, that will be 
 honored to bring about this wondrous result. It will be rather the sacred 
 uni(m formed between Truth and Holiness; and our God will then be glo- 
 rified, not amid some of his people only, but in all his saints. 
 
 " Such are the declarations that I have believed myself bound to make in 
 the outset, when publishing this work : there are, I believe, some readers 
 that will need them. We shall, along our way, and this long before the six- 
 teenth century, find many ProtestanTs, it is true : but yet we shall see, too, 
 that God glorified himself also in men who were imbued with many preju- 
 dices; and the reader must have little Christian feeling, who is not touched 
 with admiration, and softened into tenderness, at the sight of a multitude of 
 things that present themselves to our view, even in those ages when super- 
 stition had already invaded the church. 
 
 " Finally, when all this shall have been said and admitted, it is yet most 
 true, and history proves it to demonstration, that in proportion as Rome 
 more and more intermingled herself in the government of the church, in 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 65 
 
 the light of their example before his own societies, by his 
 publication of the lives of Xavier, De Renti, and Gregory 
 Lopez, incurred from some heedless Protestants of his age, 
 the imputation of covert Romanism. He complains thai 
 he had thus been represented by one of our own Sten- 
 netts, as but a disguised Papist. David Brainerd, too, in 
 the earlier years of his heroic mission, found himself fol- 
 lowed by a like rumor, that he was but a concealed Roman- 
 ist. We do well to remember in our conflict with error, 
 that a prevalent worldliness is, in God's eyes, as great a 
 practical heresy as is the tenet of justification by works. 
 And a worldly orthodoxy in Protestantism will never avail 
 to subdue a devout superstition in Romanism, because it is 
 not in the nature of Beelzebub to cast out Beelzebub, as our 
 Saviour has told us. 
 
 In the collision, not only impending but already begun, at 
 so many points of the foreign missionary field, between the 
 Church of Rome and the Churches of a purer faith, God is 
 making a merciful provision to strip the Churches of the 
 Reformation of their remaining worldliness and errors, to 
 crush in them all self-dei)endence and all vain-glorying, and, 
 shutting them up to a simpler faith and a more heroic ardor, 
 to nail them more closely, as by a blessed necessity, to his 
 own cross as their one refuge and exemplar. Rome may, 
 from the very amount of superstition she brings with her, 
 find her missionary labors in the lands of Pagan superstition 
 more rapidly crowned with success, than those of her rivals, 
 in the adhesion of nominal proselytes to her standard. But 
 her victories will be less solid and enduring than the slower 
 conquests of Protestantism. Where resorting, as she has 
 so often done, to worldly intrigue, and calling to her aid 
 the arm of the secular power, she will often find her advan- 
 tages but short-lived, from the original sin that gave their 
 first seeming prosperity. The Sandwich Islander, for in- 
 
 that same proportion also did the Spirit of God withdraw from it. The 
 safetv and the life of every church whatsoever are found in obedience to the 
 laws of Christ. 
 
 " I would no further anticipate the details contained in the body of this 
 work ; but I found myself compelled to defend, as in advance, those views, 
 and as I may emphatically call it that comprehensiveness of principle, which 
 it has seemed to me are demanded alike by Christian truth, by Christian 
 wisdom, and by Christian humility." — A. Bost. 
 
 Histoire de retahlissement du Christianisme, 
 
 Geueva. 1838. t. I. Preface du Traducteur, pp. viii— xiii 
 
 10 
 
66 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 Stance, is not likely soon to forget that the missionary of the 
 chair of St. Peter came to his islands with the cannon of 
 Catholic France forming the van-guard, whilst the crucifix 
 and the brandy-flask filled, as it were, the two hands of the 
 intrusive missionary church. 
 
 As to the ultimate influence this ambitious and versatile 
 church is to win on our own shores, the statesman may well 
 have his doubts. Never let Protestantism, even in resisting 
 Rome, be driven to adopt measures of proscription and 
 persecution. If for the time, here and in other lands, Rome 
 may attempt a union with the free tendencies of the age, 
 and seek to identify herself with the cause of Social Pro- 
 gress, it yet seems but little likely that she will be able to 
 maintain a very firm and lasting alliance with our " fierce 
 democracy." That democracy is bent upon change and 
 impatient of control, whilst this church proclaims change in- 
 compatible with truth, and demands control as necessary to 
 unity, M. de Tocqueville has supposed that the love of our 
 people for unity will naturally, and most powerfully, com- 
 mend to them the church holding out so wide-spread and 
 magnificent an exhibition of it. But, on the other hand, 
 there is, as yet, rife amongst us a passion for independence, 
 and our institutions generally foster a free and early de- 
 velopment of individual character, which will work in a con- 
 trary direction. And Rome, again, whatever she may claim 
 to be abroad, is essentially a secular power at her own 
 proper home. By her own hearth she is an autocrat, the 
 most absolute. In her forms of government there, in her 
 European alliances, and in well nigh all the recollections of 
 her history, she is essentially a petrifaction of despotism. 
 It will, therefore, be diflicult, even for her ingenuity, to weld 
 together the old tyrannies of the East and the new liberties 
 of the West. Still, it is not in such considerations that we 
 trust. 
 
 The Christian, looking higher than the mere statesman, 
 relies for his country's freedom, as well as for the purity 
 of his country's faith, on the cross of Christ. The provi- 
 dence of God has abolished here all religious establishments, 
 and proclaimed unlimited toleration. Puritanism fled hither 
 for a refuge. The hierarchies of the old world would gladly 
 find here a new and rich domain. God has thus, apparently, 
 intended to make our land an arena for the unfettered con- 
 flict of the crucifix and the cross — an open field for the con- 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 67 
 
 test between the idolatrous materialism and the divine spiri- 
 tualism of the doctrine of Christ crucified. If the American 
 Churches are but true to the gospel, they need not fear. If 
 they are not true to it, God will find another people who 
 will be. Its ultimate and universal triumphs are sure as the 
 flight of time. We read in the unerring volume of scripture, 
 not the history of the past alone, but that of the future as 
 well. Prophecy had uttered, and sealed up to the times of 
 the end, the doom of Romanism, centuries before our birth, 
 even when it was yet but as a hidden leaven, working, in 
 concealment and darkness, its stealthy way to the hearts of 
 the nations. And while the sceptre of the universe shall 
 continue, as continue it will, to lie in the hand that was 
 pierced for us and nailed to the tree of Golgotha — while 
 Christ reigns, Antichrist cannot. Here are our auguries for 
 our country, our age, and our race. 
 
 Bring up all forms of error, and we say, however numer- 
 ous and however venomous the viperous brood, the heads 
 of all are yet to be crushed against the cross of Calvary. 
 Produce all the spiritual diseases, aggravated, various and 
 loathsome, that have made earth one huge lazar-honse, and 
 we lay our hand upon the cross and say, here is the catholi- 
 con, the sure and suflicient remedy for all the countless 
 maladies of the soul. Receive, love, difluse and exemplify 
 that doctrine ; and every error is subverted, and every truth 
 is ultimately established. 
 
 " Ye are the salt of the earth," said the founder of Chris- 
 tianity to his disciples. They were the conservators of the 
 world's knowledge, virtue, freedom and peace. In the 
 Church was to be found the quickening and recuperative 
 energy, that was to stay each moral plague of society, and 
 preserve its masses from a universal corruption, which 
 would else allow them to settle down into an utter and 
 putrid deliquescence of the social elements. The followers 
 of Christ were thus conservative, not from their talents but 
 from their principles, not by their personal endowments or 
 worldly rank, so much as by their relations to the gospel 
 and God, sending up their intercessions to Heaven, and 
 holding up the light of their example and their testimony 
 before man, advocates with one world and patterns to an- 
 otlier. Their faith was then the principle of their spiritual 
 vitality, and that faith centered in the atoning and availing 
 sacrifice of the cross, as its sole trust and its highest model. 
 
68 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 In our examination, therefore, of literature and its depen- 
 dence upon the cross, we have been but appropriating to a 
 narrower field, what our Saviour said of the wide circuit of 
 the world. We say of its literature what He said in the 
 broadest sense of all its interests. And if any should deem 
 our claims of the literary power of the gospel unwarrant- 
 ed or exaggerated, their accusation, it will be seen, rebounds 
 from us as a reproach on the wisdom of Him who " spake 
 as never man spake." 
 
 We might glance at the effects upon the interests of 
 literature, of the resurrection of the true doctrine of the 
 cross at the era of the Reformation. We might look to the 
 splendid and varied literary results of the revival of this doc- 
 trine among the Jansenists of France, when the literature 
 of the nation, in logic and in style, in sobriety and manly 
 vigor of thought, as well as in purity of moral and religious 
 character, was so rapidly advanced by the devout Port Roy- 
 alists*' — when Tillemont produced the erudite, candid and 
 accurate history that received the praises of Gibbon, when 
 Nicole wrote so beautifully on Christian morals, Le Maistre 
 stood at the head of the French bar, De Saci furnished to the 
 nation what remains yet their best version of the Bible,** 
 
 21 " It would not be too much to assert, that this mass of men of high 
 intellect, and filled with noble objects, who, in their mutual intercourse, and 
 by their original and unassisted efforts, gave rise to a new tone of expression 
 and a new method of communicating ideas, had a most remarkable influ- 
 ence on the whole form and character of the literature of France, and hence 
 of Europe; and that the literary splendor of the age of Louis XIV. may be 
 in part ascribed to the society of Port Royal." 
 
 Raotce's History of the Popes. Philaii. 1841. Vol. ii, p. 203. 
 
 22 An English scholar, James Stephen, Esq., the nephew, we believe, of 
 VVilberforce, in a brilliant article upon the Port Royalists, contributed to the 
 Edinburgh Review in the year 1841, has pronounced this glowing eulogy on 
 the version of De Saci. " In those hours De Saci e.xecuFed, and his fliend 
 transcribed, that translation of the Holy Scriptures, which to this moment 
 is regarded in France as the most perfect version in their own or in any 
 other modern tongue. While yet under the charge of St. Cyran, the studv 
 of the divine oracles was the ceaseless task of De Saci. In mature life, i't 
 had been his continual delight ; in the absence of every other solace, it pos- 
 sessed his mind with all the energy of a master passion. Of the ten thou- 
 sand chords which there blend together in harmony, there was not one 
 which did not awaken a responsive "note in the heart of the aged prisoner. 
 In a critical knowledge of the sacred te.\f, he may have had many superiors, 
 but not in that exquisite sensibility to the grandeur, the pnthos, the super- 
 human wisdom, and the awful purity of the divine original, without which 
 none can truly apprehend, of accurately render into another idiom, the sense 
 of the inspired writers. * * * Protestants may with justice except to many 
 a passage of De Saci's translation ; but they will, we fear, search their own 
 libraries in vain for any, where the author's unhesitating assurance of the 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 69 
 
 Lancelot aided by his grammars the progress of classical 
 science, Pascal in so many walks displayed such rare and 
 varied excellence, while Arnauld thundered as the doughtiest 
 theologian of the schools — when Racine, the pupil of the 
 community, became the most finished of French poets, 
 Boileau, their friend, the most perfect and most pure of 
 French satirists, and Madame de Sevigne, their admirer, the 
 most graceful and simple of French letter-writers. 
 
 The cross of Christ thoroughly appreciated and ardently 
 loved is an adequate remedy for all the evils of the world, 
 and necessarily, therefore, for all the evils of the world's 
 literature. It contains the only elements which can coun- 
 teract all the perils we have described, satisfy the demands 
 of the human heart, and correct the wanderings of the hu- 
 man reason, and thus remedy the evils, be they literary or 
 political, of society, by supplying those wants of our nature 
 out of which these evils have sprung, and by restraining the 
 excesses to which these wants lead. As to the casuistry 
 and superstition, the fanaticism and persecution, that have 
 sometimes abused the name of the cross for their shelter, we 
 can only say that the doctrine is no more chargeable with 
 these its perversions, than is the dread Name of God re- 
 sponsible for all the fearful profanation made of it, when it is 
 used as an oath to give sting to a jest, or to add venom to a 
 curse. 
 
 But some feel, and others have intimated that the cross of 
 
 real sense of controverted words permits his style to flow with a similar 
 absence of constraint, and an equal warmth and glow of diction." A calmer 
 critic, and one more versed in the text and versions of the scriptures. Dr. J. 
 Pye Smith, unites in awarding eminent merit to the translation of De Saci. 
 In his Four Discourses on the Sacrifice and Priesthood of Christ, (Lond. 
 1828,) he remarks upon the advantage of studying a difBcult passage with 
 the consultation of various translators. " Even translations which may, as 
 a whole, be inferior, will often exhibit instances of successful expression, in 
 single words and clauses, most remarkably bringing out the beauty and 
 genuine force of the original. Among the modern versions I beg leave to 
 point out the extraordinary excellence, particularly in the New Testament, 
 both as to fidelity of sentiment, and felicity of expression, which distinguishes 
 the French translation of Isaac le Maistre de Sacy, one of the illustrious 
 society of Port Royal, and a noble sufferer for truth and conscience." (pp. 
 273, 274.) The chief defects of the work grew out of its being founded on 
 the Vulgate, and its being frequently ra-ther a beautiful paraphrase, than a 
 literal version. It is, like the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, the Letters of 
 the Marian Martyrs in England, the letters of the e.xcellent Samuel Ruther- 
 ford of Scotland, the Latin Psalms of Buchanan, and some of the religious 
 works of Grotius, a part of the prison literature of the church, having em- 
 ployed its venerable author during his incarceration, as a confessor tor the 
 truth, under the dominant influence of Jesuitism at the French court. 
 
70 CONSERVATIVE l'RINCIPi,i: 
 
 Christ has been tried, and has failed. The church has tried 
 substitutes for it indeed, and these have ever failed. But 
 the cross itself has not yet been tried by the church contin- 
 uously and fully. Protestantism even has talked too much 
 of it as justifying the sinner, but shrunk from it as sancti- 
 fying him. As to its failures, when really tried, they have 
 never been more than apparent. In the hurry and cry of 
 the conflict, the voice of evil is louder than that of good. 
 When most seeming to fail, the cross is but like its Founder, 
 when amid the growing darkness of his last agony, the 
 Dragon seemed writhed around him, and the fatal sting of 
 death was transfixing him. For a time the race of mankind 
 might seem to have lost their Redeemer, and the gates of 
 Hope, as they swung slowly back, appeared about to close 
 for ever upon a sinking world. But when that darkness 
 was past, and the field of battle was again seen, it was the 
 Dragon that lay outstretched and stiffened, with bruised 
 head— all feeble and still, in the shadow of that silent cross ; 
 while radiant in the distance were the open portals of 
 heaven, and earth lay bathed in the lustrous dawn of a new 
 Hope. 
 
 " For the gates of Paradise 
 Open stand on Calvary."* 
 
 And when some forty days have passed, there is seen in 
 the glittering air over the summit of Olivet, the form of the 
 unharmed and ascending Redeemer. As victor over death 
 and hell, he is leading captivity captive, returning to his 
 proper and native glory, and going before to prepare a royal 
 mansion and a crown of righteousness for all his cross-bear- 
 ing followers. Thus was seeming failure the secret and the 
 forerunner of real victory. So has it since been. The days 
 of the French revolution, when infidelity was ready to tri- 
 umph, ushered in the era of foreign missions, when Satan's 
 oldest seats underwent a new invasion. So will it continue 
 to be. Every conflict, sore and long though it may be, will 
 but add to the trophies of the Redeemer's cross, till around 
 it cluster, as votive oflerings, the wreaths of every science 
 and the palms of every art — and that instrument of shame 
 and anguish be hailed as the hinge of the world's history 
 and destiny, the theme of all our study, and the central sun 
 of all our hopes, the sanction to the universe of all God's 
 
 * Montgomery. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 71 
 
 laws, and the seal to all the elect of our race of an endless 
 redemption from the belief, power, and practice of all evil. 
 In the coming years of the world's history, the presaging eye 
 may look forward to the fierce clash of opinions, the tumult 
 of parties, and the collision of empires. But when the 
 waters are out, and one barrier after another is overwhelmed, 
 and one sea-mark topples and disappears after another 
 beneath the engulfing flood, God is but overturning what man 
 has built. The foundation of his own hand will remain un- 
 shaken. The floods of the people cannot submerge it; the 
 gates of hell cannot prevail against its quiet might. 
 
 We feel that we need your forgiveness for the length to 
 which we have pursued this topic. But the subject, in its 
 earlier portion at least, was a complex one ; on the latter 
 portion of it, if any where, the Christian loves to linger ; and 
 dwelling as we had been compelled to do on the gloomier 
 side of the picture, we may now be pardoned, if the eye 
 loves to rest on that light from heaven, and those radiant and 
 celestial omens, that descend upon this darkness from the 
 cross of our Lord. 
 
 And now, in conclusion, will you allow, gentlemen, the 
 stranger, as he is to most of you, who addresses you, to ap- 
 peal to you as students? Your studies have taught you 
 how the best interests of the nation are bound up with those 
 of learning; and we have endeavored at this time to revive 
 a lesson your respected and beloved instructors have often 
 enforced, that the interests of learning are bound up with 
 those of the gospel, and that there only is found a knowledge 
 which to have learned, will form the best preparation for 
 rightly improving all other knowledge ; — which not to have 
 learned, will render all other learning finally nugatory to its 
 possessor. 
 
 Amid the various and multiform evils that threaten our 
 literature, the cross of Christ is the one conservative prin- 
 ciple, and it needs but to be fully presented, to prove ever 
 the sufficient remedy. We entreat you then, for yourselves, 
 to view habitually this cross in either of its aspects, as re- 
 vealing the way of the sinner's justification, and as showing 
 the process of the believer's sanctification. 
 
 Look to it as your salvation. You need to be transformed 
 by its holy influences. There learn the love of God as 
 poetry cannot paint it — the wisdom of God as philosophy 
 in her boldest flights never surmised it — the holiness of God, 
 
72 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 as not even Sinai proclaimed it. Receive this crucified 
 Christ as your Saviour, Say, as you raise your eyes to this 
 throne of suffering mercy, in the language of that old 
 monkish verse from the Dies Irae, which Johnson, stern as 
 was his rugged nature, could never repeat without bursting 
 into a flood of tears — 
 
 " diiaerens me sedisti lassus, 
 Redemisti cruceni pussus ; 
 Tantiis labor non sit cassus ! 2S 
 
 Again, many or most of you look to be preachers of this 
 gospel. Be the cross your theme. Christ, as there lifted 
 up, will draw all men unto him. Do not yield blindly to 
 the rage for novelty. There are those who cannot be satis- 
 tied with any thing as old as the gospel, and as unchange- 
 able as Christ. Like the Israelites, they loathe even manna, 
 when made their daily bread. Remember, this appetite 
 for change is not to be cured by indulging it, and is itself a 
 symptom of moral disease. With all skill used in varying 
 the mode of its presentation, still let your theme be one ; 
 and shrink not from the censures of those who demand some- 
 thing newer than the truth, and better than Jesus Christ, 
 " the same yesterday, to-day and forever." And the more 
 the school or the press may eject this doctrine, but the more 
 let the pulpit insist upon, reiterate, and thunder it forth, in 
 all the tongues of the earth. For it is to you a surer pledge 
 of success than that imaged cross which Constantine put 
 into the labarum of the empire, was of victory to the im- 
 perial hosts whom it so often guided to conquest. Do not 
 crucify that Lord " afresh" by your sins. Nor trust to your 
 ofiice and work as preserving you from these. See in Paul, 
 the distress an apostle felt, lest having preached to others 
 he himself should prove a cast-away. The anxieties of 
 such a hero and martyr, lest he should turn and perish, may 
 well arouse you to a salutary self-distrust. The pulsations 
 
 23 "VVearily for me thou soughtest, 
 
 On the cross my soul thou boughtest, 
 Lose not all for which thou wroughtest." 
 It is to Mrs. Piozzi that we owe this anecdote of Johnson. " When he 
 would try to repeat the celebrated Prosa Ecclesiastica pro Mortuis, as it is 
 called, beginning Dies Irw, dies ilia, he could never pass the stanza ending 
 thus, Ta7\tus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of tears ; 
 which sensibility I used to quote against him when he would inveigh 
 against devotional poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and 
 feeble, and unworthy the subject.'' — Crokcr's Boswell, London, 1839, vol. 
 ix. p. 73. — {Set Appendix, Dies Irce.) 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 73 
 
 of that mighty heart, in its strong apprehensions, are even 
 now to be felt, as after the lapse of centuries, it seems yet 
 to throb and heave under the pages of the epistles. Value 
 not any professional learning apart from an experimental 
 knowledge of the cross of Christ. Remember that the man 
 mighty in prayer, and full of the Holy Ghost, and who knows, 
 as a preacher, but the scriptures in his own vernacular 
 tongue, may take his place, as a theologian-^ and a pastor, 
 
 2i We may well ponder the language upon this subject of a scholar who 
 is not liable to the imputation of enthusiasm, ignorance, or partiality. 
 Speaking of theBereans who searched the Scriptures, Bishop Horsley, in his 
 Nine Sermons on the Resurrection,. <f*c. (New York, 1816, pp. 165, 166), takes 
 occasion to remark upon the knowledge that may be gained from the mere 
 English version, by a collation, diligent and prayerful, of its parallel passages. 
 " It is incredible to any one who has not in some degree made the experi- 
 ment, what a proficiency may be made in that knowledge, which maketh 
 wise unto salvation, by studying the Scriptures in this manner, without any 
 other commentary or exposition than what the different parts of the sacred 
 volume mutually furnish for each other. I will not scruple to assert that 
 the most illiterate Christian, if he can but read his English Bible, and will 
 take the pains to read it in this manner, will not only attain all that practi- 
 cal knowledge which is necessary to his salvation, but by God's blessing, he 
 will become learned in every thing relating to his religion in such degree, 
 that he will not be liable to be misled, either by the refined arguments, or 
 the false assertions of those who endeavor to ingraft their own opinion upon 
 the oracles of God. He may safely be ignorant of all philosophy except what 
 is to be learned from the sacred books ; which indeed contain the highest 
 philosophy adapted to the lowest apprehensions. He may safely remain ig- 
 norant of all history, except so much of the history of the first ages of the 
 Jewish and of the Christian church, as is to be gathered from the canonical 
 books of the Old and New Testament. Let him study these in the manner 
 I recommend, and let him never cease to pray for the illumination of that 
 Spirit by which these books were dictated, and the whole compass of ab- 
 struse philosophy and recondite history shall furnish no argument with 
 which the perverse will of man shall be able to shake this learned Christian's 
 faith." 
 
 The testimony as to the amount of theologicial science to be attained from 
 the study of the English version, has the more force, coming as it does from 
 a controversialist of the highest rank, a scholar of great robustness of intel- 
 lect, and eminent for his attainments not only in biblical criticism, but also 
 in physical science ; and who was known, withal, to have few sympathies 
 with the Methodists and the Dissenters of England, and their pious but 
 often uneducated ministry. The editor of the works of Sir Isaac Newton, 
 the chaplain of Bishop Lowth, and the antagonist of Priestly, was no vulgar 
 scholar. Ortne has said of him, that he " never wrote what did not deserve 
 to be read," and characterizes him as "stern, bold, clear, and brilliant, often 
 elegant, sometimes argumentative, and always original, and as a critic, 
 learned but dogmatic." (Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 249.) Such a man was 
 little likely to indulge in language of undue disparagement as to those literary 
 advantages in which he himself so abounded. We allude here to his testi- 
 mony, only for the sake of enforcing a protest we would, here and elsewhere, 
 now and at all times, make against the language of depreciation, sometimes 
 incautiously used, regarding the competency as theologians of some of our 
 ministers who have missed the advantages of a classical education ; but who 
 
 11 
 
74 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 far above you with all your knowledge of criticism and lan- 
 guages, if you rely on that learning and neglect to cultivate 
 piety. The true exegesis of the Scriptures is, after all, that 
 put upon them by the Holy Spirit who first indited them, as He 
 unfolds them to the prayerful student, and he who puts him- 
 self, with few earthly helps, under that teaching, will profit 
 more than the man who with all earthly helps neglects that 
 teaching. Steep then all your attainments in prayer. And 
 never so far forget your obligations to true learning, and 
 your vows to Christ, as to speak or think lightly of the de- 
 vout, though less learned student of the Scriptures, who 
 bears meekly, and commends earnestly that cross it is your 
 business and his, in common, to exemplify and extol in the 
 eyes of the world. 
 
 Lastly, let that cross be your pattern. Let Christ and 
 him crucified, be not a mere phrase or profession, but a 
 living reality. That sacrifice on the cross was the embodi- 
 ment of all true glory, and the concentration of all moral 
 excellence. Be prepared to sufter in the school of Christ. 
 "If we sufl^er, we shall also reign with him." Such is the 
 law of success in the world of mind and of eternity. Learn 
 the mute energy of meekness daring to sufier, persisting to 
 love, and scorning to complain, as illustrated in Christ dy- 
 ing for his murderers, and proffering to the world a recon- 
 ciliation bought by his own blood for those who had shed 
 that blood ; and extending to his embittered foes pardon 
 which their sins alone had made necessary, and which his 
 unparalleled compassion alone made possible. Remember 
 that your rest, and your reward and your record, are not 
 here, as His were not here. It was not that you might 
 seek a snug parish and a fat salary, that the Master en- 
 listed you — not that you might gather round you the flat- 
 teries, and become the idol of an. attached church and an 
 admiring congregation. You were bought by the agonies 
 and shame of Calvary for a sterner task. You are not 
 carpet-knights, come out to shiver a lance in sport ; the 
 actors in some gay tournament, where " ladies' eyes rain 
 influence." Your work is a sad reality in a world of sin 
 
 are yet vigorous thinkers, and praj'crful and most diligent students of the 
 English version. We must record our humble dissent from such sweeping 
 censure and depreciation, and while the name and memory of Andrew Fuller 
 remain, we scarce need to quote even the authority of Horsley in our favor, 
 who with all his stores of learning and his vigorous genius, was certainly 
 not a sounder or abler theologian than the Kettering pastor. 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE, 75 
 
 and wo, where you are called to a continuous and perilous 
 onset, fighting against principalities and powers, and spirit- 
 ual wickedness in high places; and the field around you 
 is strewn with many a memorial of defeated hope, of suc- 
 cessful temptation, and exulting wickedness. You will not 
 then content yourself with a mere decorous, dozing and 
 perfunctory discharge of your weekly task-work in the pul- 
 pit. You are a man of the cross — it will be your aim to 
 train up the churches to the same standard and in the same 
 spirit. They will learn that the charity of the cross is one 
 seeking rather to enrich others, than to hoard for itself. 
 When the churches are more thoroughly pervaded by this 
 spirit, there Avill be no longer a lack of funds or of labors 
 for our foreign missions ; nor will the nations rush by myri- 
 ads into hell, whilst the church is grudgingly telling out 
 her few dollars for the work of evangelization, and calcu- 
 lating how much money may be saved from the expense of 
 the world's salvation, not economizing for the cross, so 
 much as economizing /ro?« its demands.^^ You will remind 
 
 23 The resources of the later Christian Church for the general diffusion of 
 their faith may possibly resemble, in character, those of the earlier church. 
 In a work, from the preface of which we have already quoted in a former 
 note, the History of Missions by Blumhardt in its French version by M. 
 Bost, we find M. Blumhardt makin!? these observations on the missionary 
 character and success of the early Christians. He is reviewing, at the close 
 of the fourth century, the fall of Heathenism and the triumph oi" Christianity 
 in the Roman empire, and the influences that produced these results. (Livre 
 II. C. V. Vol. i., pp. 203-215). Having observed (p. 205), " that the Church 
 is in Its very nature an institution designed to form men into Christians, and 
 not merely to gather together those who have already become such," and 
 having remarked upon the various powers that aided, modified, and cor- 
 rupted the Christian Church in its action on Roman Paganism, he holds 
 this language as to the arms that the primitive Christians employed in the 
 victories they won (p. 209). "We may perceive, amid this train of events, 
 the law of perpetuation which was pursued by the messengers of salva- 
 tion. All their preaching they grouped around the one figure of Christ as 
 the Sovereign, Saviour and Judge of the human race, and this doctrine, 
 again, they evermore based upon the Scriptures, to which they continually 
 referred, not as to a human system, to which other systems might in turn 
 he opposed, but as to a direct revelation from God. This course supplied to 
 the Church, at once, the basis, the standard, and the unity tliat it needed, 
 and also, at the same time, what was its most powerful means of conversion 
 and of diffusion. The great cause of the success of the s-ospel was to be 
 found in Its very nature. A faith, that taught men their reconciliation with 
 God, brought into the world a principle of life, which nothino- else could 
 rival, and lor which nought else could compensate. This it is^which gave 
 to the Christians, at the very outset, the courage, and we may well call it, 
 the audacity, with which they always faced their adversaries. One might 
 tremble for a Tertullian, had we not known the strength on which he 
 leaned. * * The Christians had on their side an irresistible might, not in 
 
76 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE 
 
 the churches that they were enlisted beneath the gory cross, 
 the badge of the Master's anguish and shame, that, as far 
 as man is concerned, they might rather give than receive ; — 
 that no vulgar pangs bought their peace ; and it was no 
 easy task for their Lord to purchase for them their hope 
 of Heaven. If impelled and permitted yourselves to go 
 forth to the heathen, you will look to Golgotha, and find 
 there motives whose impulsive power is never spent, and an 
 example, whose self-sacrificing benevolence can never be 
 rivalled. It is one of the traditions of the age of chivalry, 
 that a Scottish king, when dying, bequeathed his heart to 
 the most trusted and beloved of his nobles to be carried to 
 Palestine. Enclosing the precious deposit in a golden case, 
 and suspending it from his neck, the knight went out with 
 his companions. He found himself, when on his way to 
 Syria, hard pressed in battle by the Moors of Spain. To 
 
 the form of reasonings so much as of facts. ' That which we have seen and 
 heard, and our hands have handled, of the word of life, declare we unto you.' 
 And as these sacred truths from the beginning had been preserved in au- 
 thentic writings, the Christians devoted themselves to the dissemination of 
 these their sacred books, and to the translation of these books into various 
 languages, with a zeal that had no parallel : and this form of proselytisni was 
 to be found nowhere else than in Christianity." * * * * Having ad- 
 verted to the secondary causes, as found in the existing condition of society, 
 that favored the spread of the gospel, he proceeds (p. 211) to the remark. 
 " But it was above all the love that was diffused among the believers, that 
 must strike and win the hearts of the pagans, in this era of selfishness and 
 of cruelty. In this respect, the Church presented a spectacle such as 
 Paganism had never beheld; and on this topic, indeed, nothing stronger 
 could be said, than was afterwards said by Julian himself, as in one of his 
 edicts he addressed his Pagan subjects : ' Is there not reason for us to be 
 ashamed as we look upon others 7 The Jews allow not one of their number 
 to sink into beggary ; and the accursed Galileans support not only their own 
 adherents, but even those of our party also ? We alone are unable to point 
 to any institution of a kind resembling theirs.' 
 
 " Such, then, were the powerful arms of which the faith availed itself in 
 this memorable epoch in its history. There existed no missionary societies 
 properly so called ; it was the entire Church of Christ Jesus that took upon 
 itself the task of proclaiming the gospel. Nor did there e.xist missionary 
 treasuries, or any. provision of that kind, whether it were that missionaries 
 then had little or no use for money, or whether it were that each member of 
 the church, rich or poor, finding his own happiness in the aid he lent to 
 this work, found also with ease the requisite means. All the institutions of 
 this kind that have been seen growing up in our times, as the fruits of a 
 growing zeal, have their place only as the day has not yet come, when each 
 member of the Church shall have again become for himself a zealous servant 
 of the Saviour." We append to these remarks of Blumhardt the note 
 annexed to the concluding sentences above quoted, by M. Bost. " It is 
 worthy of remark, that all this was written by the presiding officer of one 
 of our best missionary institutions, for the entire paragraph has been trans- 
 lated with almost literal exactness." 
 
IN OUR LITERATURE. 77 
 
 animate himself to supernatural efforts as it were, that he 
 might break through his thronging foes, he snatched the 
 charge entrusted to him from his neck, and flinging it into 
 the midst of his enemies, exclaimed, " Forth, heart of Bruce, 
 as thou wast wont, and Douglas will follow thee or die :" 
 and so he perished in the endeavor to reclaim it from the 
 trampling feet of the infidels, and force his own way out. 
 Even such will you feel your own position to be when en- 
 countering the hosts of heathenism. Your Master's heart 
 has flung itself in advance of your steps. In the rushing 
 crowds that withstand you, there is not one whom that hearl 
 has not cared for and pitied, however hostile and debased, 
 unlovely and vile. It is your business to follow the leadings 
 of His heart, to pluck it, as it were, from beneath the feet 
 of those who, in ignorance and enmity, would tread it into 
 the dust. From the cross, as from a lofty eminence, it has 
 cast itself abroad among these " armies of the aliens." And 
 not like Douglas, is it yours to follow it and die ; you fol- 
 low it and live. You follow it, and the heathen live. And 
 whether your post be at home or abroad, among the des- 
 titution of the West, or that of the ancient East, whenever 
 glory, ease or wealth may seek to lure you aside from your 
 work, look to that cross, and remember him who hung there 
 in agony for your sins. Let the look which broke Peter's 
 heart check your first infirmity of purpose, recall each wan- 
 dering thought and rally anew all the powers of your faint- 
 ing spirit. Be Paul's determination yours. " God forbid 
 that i should glory save in the cross of our lord 
 Jesus Christ, by which ^^ the world is crucified 
 unto me, and i unto the world." 
 
 May we all believe in, and bear that cross here, that it 
 may bear us up in the day of the world's doom ! 
 
 2S " U^ereby." Versions of Tyndale, Cranmer, and Geneva : and not 
 ' by whom," as the Rhemish and the English Received Version. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 THE "DIES IRJE." 
 
 {See page 72.) 
 
 A SMALL volume, not without interest, might be compiled from the literary 
 history of the Dies Irae, and the versions it has received into various Euro- 
 pean languages, and from examples of the powerful influence it has exercised 
 upon the feelings and course of individuals. It can scarce be regarded as a 
 waste of time to observe and analyze the power this hymn, from the awful- 
 ness of its theme, and its own quaint, antique, and massive grandeur of 
 structure, has acquired over the hearts of men. Unlike the Stabat Mater, 
 another hymn of the Romish service, with which by mere critics it is ordi- 
 narily classed, it is free from idolatry. A devout Protestant cannot unite in 
 the Stabat Mater. It degrades the Redeemer by idolizing his earthly pa- 
 rent. But in the Dies Irse, salvation is represented as being of Christ alone, 
 and as being of mere grace : " Clui sahandos salvas gratis." Combining 
 somewhat of the rhythm of classical Latin, with the rhymes of the Mediaeval 
 Latin, treating of a theme full of awful sublimity, and grouping together the 
 most startling imagery of scripture, as to the last judgment, and throwing 
 this into yet stronger relief by the barbaric simplicity of the style in which it 
 is set, and adding to all these its full and trumpet-like cadences, and uniting 
 with tlie impassioned feelings of the South whence it emanated, the gravity 
 of th ' Nortli whose severer style it adopted, it is well fitted to arouse the 
 heart r. It forms a part of the Romish service for the dead. Albert Knapp. 
 one of the living sacred poets of Protestant Germany, and the compiler of a 
 large body of hymns, the Liedeischatz, has inserted a German version of it 
 in his voluminous collection. (Evang. Liederschatz. Stuttgart, 1837. Vol. 
 ii. p. 786, Hymn 3475.) He compares the original to a blast fiom the trump 
 of the resurrection, and while himself attempting a version of it, declares its 
 origai d power mimitable in any translation. (Ibid. p. 870.) This is the 
 Jiidunient of a man not to be contemned as a critic or a translator, for 
 Knjpp himself is called by a recent German critic, who seems far removed 
 fioin any sympathy with the religious school to which Knapp belongs,-" un- 
 questionably the most distinguished religious poet of the day." (T/iimm's 
 Literature of Germany, Lond. 1844 ; p. 260.) Knapp refers to other versions of 
 it uKide by the distinguished scholar, Aug. Wm. Schlegel, by Claus Harms, 
 one of the most eminent of the living evangelical preachers of Germany, as 
 well as by J. G. Fichte, by A. L. Follen, J. G. Von Meyer, and the Cheva- 
 lier Bunsen, the friend of Niebuhr and of the late Dr. Arnold, and now the 
 Ambassador of Prussia at the Court of St. James. The translation of 
 Bunsen, with some slight variations, is appended by Tholuck to his sermon 
 on the Feast day of the Dead. {Tholuck, Predigten. Hamburg, 1838, vol. I. 
 pp. 28, 149.) Professors Edwards and Park, in their Selections from German 
 Literature (Andovcr, 1839), quote the remark of Tholuck, as to the deep sen- 
 sation produced by the singing of this hymn in the University church at 
 Halle ; " The impression, especially that which was made by the last words, 
 
APPENDIX. 79 
 
 as sung by the University choir alone, will be forgotten by no one." They 
 introduce also the words of an American clergyman, present on the occa- 
 sion, who says, "It was impossible to refrain from tears, when at the seventh 
 stanza, all the trumpets ceased, and the choir, accompanied by a softened 
 tone of the organ, sung those touching lines, " Quid sum miser tunc dictu- 
 rus," &c. Like Knapp, they unite in the judgment, that no translation has 
 equalled, or can equal the original Latin. (Gennon SelecUms, p. 1S5.) Dr. H. 
 A. Daniel, another German scholar, in his Bliithenslrauss alt-latein, Kir- 
 chenpocsie, Halle, 1S40, has inserted, besides the original Latin, and the Ger- 
 man version of Bunsen (pp.78 and 116), another version of his own (p. 110). 
 Goethe has introduced snatches of the original Latin into the first part of his 
 Faust. 
 
 The larger work of Daniel on the Mediaeval Hymns, his " Thesaurus Hym- 
 nologicus," has not come into our hands. Dr. G. A. Kiinigsfeld, in his Lutei- 
 ni-sclie Hymiien und Gescinge aus dem Miltelaller, Bonn, 1S47," has given (pp. 
 1.55 and 264) his German imitation of this hymn, with some interesting notes 
 upon its variations and history. Together with Lisco, hereafter named, he 
 refers to an earlier Essay by G. C. F. Mohnike, in his Kirchen. u. lit. hist. 
 Studien, Ir Band, Is Heft, Sti-alsund, 1814, as having very thoroughly dis- 
 cussed the origin and literary fortunes of this remarkable composition. This 
 Essay we have failed to find. 
 
 With the thoroughness that distinguishes the scholars of his nation, a liv- 
 ing Protestant theologian, Dr. Frederick G. Lisco, preacher at the church 
 of St. Gertrude, in Berlin, already advantageously known to British and 
 American Christians, from his work on the Parables of our Lord, transited 
 and issued in the Edinburgh Biblical Cabinet, and author of a popular com- 
 mentary on the New Testament, has prepared and issued an edition of the 
 Dies Irse {Berlin, 1840), containing seventy translations, fragmentary or com- 
 plete, of this magnificent hymn, mostly into German, with notes of much 
 interest and research. To a similar work on the Stabat Mater {Berlin, 1843), 
 Lisco subjoined seventeen additional versions of the Judgment Hyrnn. One 
 of these is a translation of it into modern Greek, by the Rev. Mr. Hildner, 
 a Missionary of the (English) Church Missionary Society at Syra, and was 
 sent by its author to the Litt. Anzeiger of the distinguished Prof. Tholuck. 
 As double rhymes in Greek may be a curiosity to some readers, we subjoin 
 the verse already quoted, in the modern Greek garb given it by Mr. Hildner. 
 
 H.o'otji' {J]i) KeKOTTiaajitvoi 
 At Cjis, K is'OLvpwjiivoi. 
 KoTToj ^i] naTato)fjL£i/oi ! 
 
 Hildner's remark is that, dear as the Hymn had always been to him, it had 
 ever borne a higher place in his regard after having heard it sung in the cele- 
 brated Si.xtine Chapel at Rome. Lisco's Stabat Muter did not reach the 
 hands of the present writer until after the first edition of this address, nor did 
 he succeed in procuring the sight of his Dies Irce until after the second edi- 
 tion had been issued. 
 
 Though some have claimed the honor of the authorship for the eminent 
 Bernard, and others given to it an earlier and pontifical parentage in assign- 
 ing it to Gregory the Great, Lisco and Mohnike and Gieseler refer it to Thomas 
 de Celano. Lisco's main reliance in this seems, that it is e.xplicitly and with- 
 out hesitation ascribed to him by Wadding, in his two works on the His- 
 tory and the Writers of the Minorite Order, {Annates Minorum, Lugd.. 1625, 
 and Scriptores Ord. Minorum, Romcc, 1650.) These German scholars seem 
 fond of remarking that although Celano was of Italian birth, his native place 
 being the town of that name in the Neapolitan territory, some of his life was 
 spent in the service of his order, on the banks of their own Rhine, at Co- 
 logne, and elsewhere. 
 
 Lisco refers to one German, Lecke, who wrote and published twelve sev- 
 eral versions of the Dies Irae. 
 
80 APPENDIX. 
 
 The authorship of the hymn is generally ascribed to one of the Franciscan 
 order, or the Minorites as they are also called. Thomas de Celano, the friend 
 and biographer of Francis of Assisi, the founder of this order, and who lived 
 in the thirteenth century, is generally supposed to have written it about the 
 year 1250. {Gieseler's Ch. Hist. 1st Am. Ed. II. 2S8. Knanp, Liederschatz II. 
 870. Tholuck and Daniel ut supra.) Celano, it may be observed by the way, 
 is one of those on whoso authority is made to rest the legend that Francis 
 received the stigmata or miraculous impressions of Christ's wounds. {Alban 
 Butler, Live.^ of Saints.) It has also been attributed to others of the same 
 order, as to Matthew of Aquasparta, a general of the Minorites, who died with 
 the rank of Cardinal, in 1302, or to Frangipani, the Dominican, who died in 
 1294. {Knapp, Lisco, id supra.) Churton, the author of the ^' Early English 
 Church," would give it, however, a much earlier origin, or he has fallen into 
 a gross anachronism ; for he places it in the lips of the dying Thurstan, the 
 Archbishop of York, who ended his course in the year 1140, a full century 
 before the time generally fixed for its composition by T. de Celano. (Chur- 
 ton, Am. Ed. p. 272.) 
 
 Issuing, as it certainly did, from an age of great superstition and corrup- 
 tion, it is remarkable that it should be so httle incrusted with the prevalent 
 errors of the time. The lines " Quern patronum rogaturus Cum vi.c Justus 
 sit securus?" seem almost a renunciation of the Romish doctrine of the ad- 
 vocacy of saints. Like the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, it 
 remains as a monument of the truth, that in ages of general declension, God 
 had his own hidden ones, and that beneath the drifting and accunudating 
 mass of heresies and human inventions and traditions, there was an under- 
 current of simple faith in Christ, that kept alive and verdant some less 
 noticed portions of the blighted vineyard of the church. If really the work 
 of the historian of the stigmata of the fanatical Francis of Assisi, it affords 
 another of the many e.xamples that show how much excellence and how 
 much error may exist together. 
 
 The Franciscan order, in its earlier history, would seem to have cultivated 
 sacred poetry. Francis, its founder, was the writer of some Italian verses, 
 "two in the earliest poetical flights in the language," (Eustace. Classical 
 Tour, II. 148) ; to Thomas de Celano, the authorship of the Dies Irae is 
 generally attributed ; and to another Franciscan, Jacopone, is ascribed by 
 the chief authorities the composition of the Stabat Mater. 
 
 The received Text of the Judgment Hymn, as incorporated into the Church 
 Service in the Romish Missal, is not supposed to be by any means its origi- 
 nal shape. The revisions of devotional poetry, which have in our own times 
 awakened loud complaint, as if they were modern and audacious examples 
 of a temerity unknown to our fathers, were practised in earlier times; and, 
 in some cases, retrenchment was improvement. The earliest forms of the 
 Dies IriE are thought to be that in which it is found inscribed upon a mar- 
 ble slab in the Church of St. Francis, at Mantua, and that in which it is 
 given by Eeli.v Malleolus (Hammerlein). In the Mantuan text, it has the 
 aspect, by its introduction, of a devotional and solitary meditation, rather 
 than of an anthem for the use of an assembly ; beginning with the following 
 verses, the entire excision of which, by the Romish Missal, leaves in the fifth 
 verse (thus made the first) an opening peal of startling majesty. 
 
 1. Cogita, anima fidelis, 
 Ad quid respondere veils 
 Christo venturo de coelis. 
 
 2. Cum deposcet rationem, 
 Ob boni oniissionem, 
 Ob mali commissionem. 
 
 3. Dies ilia, dies irae, 
 
 Quam coneniur prsevenire, 
 Obviamque dec irae. 
 
APPENDIX. 81 
 
 4. Seria contritione, 
 Gratiae apprehensione, 
 Vitae emendatione. 
 
 Then follow the first sixteen verses of the present received Text ; but, in- 
 stead of the 17th of this, " Oro suj^plex," &c., comes as the conclusion of the 
 Mantuan text, being, (with the four introductory verses above given,) the 
 21st verse, 
 
 Consors ut beatitatis 
 
 Vivam cum justificatis, 
 
 In jEvum aeternitatis. Amen. 
 
 The text of Hammerlein has the first sixteen verses as we find them in the 
 Breviary, with some verbal variations ; and then follow eight verses, more reg- 
 ular in structure than the close as found in the Received Text, and contain- 
 ing (which the latter docs not) an idolatrous reference to the Virgin Mary, 
 as herself, instead of her Son, being the Root and Offspring of David. The 
 close, as found in the popular and ecclesiastical shape of the Hymn, seems 
 an irregular and fragmentary condensation of these verses — the more forcible 
 from its greater brevity, and, to a Protestant, welcome by its unaccountable 
 omission of the Mariolatry. 
 
 17. Oro supplex a ruinis 
 
 Cor contritum quasi cinis; ' 
 
 Gere curam mei finis. 
 
 18. Lacrymosa die ilia. 
 Cum resurget ex favilla 
 Tanquam ignis ex scintilla, 
 
 19. Judicandus homo reus, — 
 Huic ergo parce Deus, 
 
 Esto semper {tunc ?) adjutor mens. 
 
 20. Q,uando coeli sunt movendi, 
 Dies adsunt tunc tremendi, 
 Nullum tempus pcenitendi. 
 
 21. Sed salvatis loeta dies ; 
 Et damnatis nulla quies, 
 Sed daemonum effigies. 
 
 22. O tu Deus majestatis, 
 Alme candor Trinitatis, 
 Nunc conjunge cum beatis. 
 
 23. Vitam meam fac felicem, 
 Propter tuam genetricem, 
 Jesse florem et radicem. 
 
 24. Prssta nobis tunc levamen, 
 Dulce nostrum fac certamen, 
 Ut clamemus omnes. Amen. 
 
 Although the exact relation of these texts to each other is a matter of 
 doubt, it seems the more probable that the Received Text is the truncated 
 remnant, left after a double revision ; the first excision having removed the 
 introductory stanzas, as found on the marble in the church of St. Francis, 
 and, when this retrenched text was elongated by additional verses at the 
 close, as in the text of Hammerlein, a second revision greatly condensed 
 these; and each excision benefited the Hymn. 
 
 A French scholar, in an article contributed to the Revue des deux Mondes, 
 
 12 
 
82 APPENDIX. 
 
 Paris, since the appearance of Lisco's work, but in which we do not re- 
 member any reference to the work of the German scholar, has traced what 
 he supposes intimations and germs of the Dies Irae, both as to its phrase- 
 ology and its metre, in the Latin hymns of the Romish church, in the cen- 
 turies preceding its composition. He has also entered at much length, and 
 it would seem with much delicacy and justness of criticism, into the char- 
 acter of the music that some of the most distinguished composers of Italy 
 and Germany have prepared for the Dies Irae. 
 
 Upon the Dies JrcB, Mozart has founded his celebrated Requiem, the latest 
 and not the least celebrated of his works. The excitement of his feelings 
 whilst employed on this musical composition, is supposed to have hastened 
 his end, which occurred, indeed, before he could fully complete the task. 
 Among the great names who have sought to marry its poetry to immortal 
 melody, may be enumerated Cherubini, Haydn, Jomelli, Palastrina, and 
 Pergolesi. 
 
 Of the various versions the Hymn has received into the French language, 
 we are unable to speak. Lisco {D. I. 146) alludes to one by Gonon, a Cel- 
 estine monk, in the beginning of the 17ih century, and (in his App. to the 
 St. M. 48) gives another of the date of 1702, apparently from a Catholic 
 prayer book. A Jesuit of France, whose work we have seen, issued, some- 
 where about the time of the first great Revolution of that country, in a vol- 
 ume of Latin poetry, an expansion of the Judgment Hymn, in other metre, 
 and in Latin of more classical style, in each change betraying, it would 
 seem to us, a want of discrimination and taste. 
 
 Among the poets of England the Dies IriE has found hosts of admirers, 
 and many translators. The admiration which Sir Walter Scott felt for it is 
 well known. He has introduced an English version of a few of its opening 
 stanzas into the Lay of the Last Minstrel, whence Bishop Heber adopted 
 it into his Hymns for the Church Service. They are too few to give any 
 just idea of the original, and the measure of the old Hymn is not as well re- 
 tained as in the best German versions. Knapp, Daniel and Bunsen all pre- 
 serve the double rhymes of the Latin original ; Scott and the earlier Eng- 
 lish translators have given but a single rhymed ending to their verses. In 
 this respect the English version of the London Christian Observer ( Vol. 
 xxvi. p. 26), copied by Edwards and Park {German Selections, p. 15), also 
 comes short of its model, as does that of the Rev. Isaac Williams, one of 
 the writers of the Oxford Tracts, and who contested unsuccessfully with 
 the Rev. Mr. Garbett, the election to the Professorship of Poetry in Oxford, 
 on the retirement of Keble. Williams' version may be found in his Thoughls 
 in Past Years (Am. ed., p. 308). The school of Oxford Tractarian Theology, 
 to which this writer belonged, seem to have been, from their admiration of 
 the Mediaeval Church, as well as from its own intrinsic merits, strongly at- 
 tracted to the Judgment Hymn. One of their number, Rev. E. Caswall, who 
 has gone over to Rome, has in his Lyra Catholica {London, 1849), a version 
 of the Hymns of the Breviary, given an English rendering (p. 241), that may 
 vie, for closeness and felicity, with that of Trench, named hereafter. Another 
 writer, of the same type in doctrine with the Oxford Tractarian, the Rev. 
 W. J. Irons, has published {Dies Irce, by VV. J. Irons, London, S. Masters, 
 1849) a version, with music, described as retaining the metre and double 
 rhyme of the original. This last work we have failed to meet. 
 
 A writer in the New- York Evangelist {October, 1841), has judiciously re- 
 tained the double rhyme, but the reader misses the antique simplicity and 
 rugged strength of the original. Sir Walter Scott in his letter to a brother 
 poet, Crabbe, remarks : "To my Gothic ear, the Stabat Mater, the Dies Iree, 
 and some of the other hymns of the Catholic church, are more solemn and 
 afil'cting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan ; the one has the gloomy 
 dignity of a Gothic church, and reminds us constantly of the worship to 
 which it is dedicated; the other is more like a pagan temple recalling to our 
 memory the class.ical and fabulous deities." {LockharV s Life of Scott, Phil- 
 
APPENDIX. 83 
 
 adclphia, 1S3S. vol. i., p 430.) In his last days of life and reason, he was 
 overheard quoting it with fragments of the Bible, and the old Scotch Psalms. 
 " We very often,' says his icinsman and his biographer, " heard distinctly the 
 cadence of the Dies Irce." {Ibid., vol. ii., p. 734.) Its lines haunted in like 
 manner the dying hours of an earlier and inferior poet, the Earl of Roscom- 
 mon. He was the author of an English version of the hymn, and, as we 
 learn from Johnson's Lives of the Poets, he uttered, in the moment when 
 he expired, with great energy and devotion, two lines of his own translation 
 of the Dies Irae : 
 
 "My God, my Father and my Friend, 
 Do not forsake me in my end." 
 
 Another nobleman, on the Continent, Count von Bernstoff^ a native of 
 Denmark; who died in Berlin, in the year 1835, is mentioned by Lisco (D. I., 
 p. 139), as having prod\iced his German rendering of the .Tudgmeiit Hymn, 
 upon his death bed. Milman, another distinguished name in English po- 
 etry, has, in his History of Christianity, rated this hymn as superior to any 
 of the poetry of the Christian church in the early ages. " As to the hymns 
 (setting aside the Te Deum), paradoxical as it may sound, I cannot but think 
 the latter and more barbarous the best. There is nothing, in my judgment, 
 to be compared with the monkish " Dies Irce, dies ilia" or even the Stabat 
 Male?-. (Milman, GalignanVs Ed. II., p. 336, note). Roscommon's trans- 
 lation, already the subject of reference, is said by VVarton to be largely in- 
 debted to the earlier version of Crashaw, a sacred poet of true genius, whose 
 rendering of the Dies Irce was, in the judgment of Pope, the best of liis com- 
 positions. {Willmott's Lives of Sacred Poets, Lond. 1839, vol. i., p. 317.) This 
 work of Crashaw may be found in Anderson's British Poets (vol. iv., p. 745). 
 Crashaw was one of the clergymen of the English church, who during, or soon 
 after the days of Laud, and probably from the influence of that school whose 
 leader and martyr Laud was, went over, as by a natural progression, into 
 the Romish communion. Drummond of Hawthornden has also imitated 
 the Dies Irm. (Anderson, iv. 682.) Evelyn, the author of the Sylva, and 
 the friend of Jeremy Taylor, seems also to have tested his strength upon the 
 same task. In their correspondence, Taylor asks a copy of his friend's ver- 
 sion. (Memoirs of Evelyn, Vol. IV. p. 26.) 
 
 An English version of the Hymn has been given, amongst our own schol- 
 ars, by the Rev. J. Newton Brown (Baptist Memorial, New York, October, 
 1848), now one of the Secretaries of the Baptist Publication Society in Phil- 
 adelphia ; and another rendering of the Hymn, the most successful of the 
 English versions in double rhyme, appeared in the Nevyark Daily Adverti- 
 ser of March 17, 1847. In that Journal, as in the New York Observer, it 
 was awarded generous and jiist commendation, as is understood, by a distin- 
 guished pastor and professor, whose praise is true honor. Although appearing 
 anonymously, the version in the Newark Daily Advertiser was by Abraham 
 Coles, M.D., of Newark, N. J., whose friends may well congratulate him on 
 having achieved so successfully a difficult task, in which so many, and of 
 eminent name, have been his competitors. 
 
 That accomplished Christian nobleman. Lord Lyndsay, in his Work on 
 Christian Art (Lond., 1847, vol. I., pp. ccvii., ccviii.), has contributed another 
 to the long ;ist of attempts to transfer this Hymn into our own tongue. His 
 version has but the single rhyme. He remarks, upon the tone of its piety, 
 " as expressive of the feelings of dread, and almost despair, with which the 
 Christians of the middle ages — taught to look on Christ as Jehovah, rather 
 than the merciful Mediator, through whose atoning blood and all-sufficient 
 merits the sinner is reconciled to his Maker — looked forward to the awful 
 consummation of all things." We cannot but dissent, in some measure, 
 from this judgment. Our Lord's own picture of the judgment, in the Gos- 
 pel of Matthew, is equally stern and terrific ; and the Hymn does not, as 
 
84 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 much as most offices of the Romish Church, overlook the grace of Christ 
 as the sinner's only plea. 
 
 In allusion probably to its antique tnassiveness and majesty, Lisco quotes 
 the title given by some to the Dies Irae, "a Hymn of Giants," (p. 87.) 
 Considering the character, however, which the Anakim of Holy Writ, and 
 the Titans of classic mythology, have borne for piety, the appellation seems 
 intelicitously chosen. That name might, it appears to us, be more fitly 
 given to the parodies of this great hymn, in which sacred themes, and the 
 celestial imagery of Revelation, have been plundered by human passion, for 
 the purposes of passing controversy and political satire. To parodies, in 
 his own tongue, of this class, by Ed. Duller, J. H. Voss, and E. Ortlepp, 
 Lisco refers, {D. /., p. 139 ; St. M., p. 55.) Prom his work it appears, 
 also, that the example of putting to such baser uses holy things had been 
 long before set by the clergy of the Roman Church. He quotes {D. I., pp. 
 110, &c.) from the German writings of Leibnitz, a Latin parody given by 
 that great scholar, as the work of some Catholic priest about the year 1700. 
 This zealous parodist, from the union of the French and Spanish crowns in 
 the Bourbon f^iimily, hoped for the downfall of the Protestant Holland, the 
 conversion of England, and, in consequence, the subversion of Lutheranism 
 and Calvinism throughout Europe. 
 
 Of Spain's future victories in the fens of the Netherlands, he sings : 
 
 Q,uantus tremor est futurus, 
 Dum PhilippiLs est venturus, 
 Has paludes aggressurus ! 
 ***** 
 Hie Re.\ ergo cum sedebit, 
 Verajides refulgebit. 
 Nil Calvino remanehU. 
 
 Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, 
 Q,uem Patronum rogaturus, 
 Cuin nee Anglus sit securus ? 
 
 The great monarch of France he thus apostrophizes, in allusion to the 
 lilies on his armorial shield. 
 
 Magne Rector liliorum, 
 Amor, timor populorum, 
 Parce terris Batavorum. 
 
 To the anticipated defeat of the "bald-headed" William of Orange, the 
 political hope of the Protestant interest in Europe, and to the restoration of 
 James H., the abdicated king, and of his son the Pretender, that, in their 
 recovered British dominions, they might plant a triumphant Romanism, he 
 thus dedicates his two closing stanzas. 
 
 Confutatis Caloi brutis. 
 Patre, nato, restitutis, 
 Redde mihi spem salutis ! 
 
 Oro supplex et acclinis 
 Calvinismusjiat cinis, 
 Lacrymarum ut sit finis ! 
 
 The attempt thus to hurl the thunderbolts of Providence, and to predict 
 the glories in reserve for the Catholic Church, proved a wretched failure. 
 Never in the century since, has the cause of Rome been, in contrast with 
 that of the Reformation, possessed of as much even of comparative strength, 
 as when the parodist prophesied : far less has she increased in resources and 
 influence to the extent his auguries promised ; and the Stuart dynasty, in- 
 stead of the promised restoranon, has met its extinction. 
 
APPENDIX. 85 
 
 The want of any devout feeling that pervades this parody, whose author 
 certainly wanted not either talent or ingenuity, in singing the future tri- 
 umphs of his church, is most painfully apparent, in his profane distortion of 
 the 14th stanza, to the adulation of Louis XIV. 
 
 Preces meae non sunt dignje, 
 Sed, Rex /nagne, fac benigne, 
 Ne bomborum cremer igne. 
 
 Little did the " Grande Monarque," or his flatterers suspect, that his own 
 victories and glories, and those of his family after him, were sowing for their 
 country, and for Europe, the seeds of that stormy retribution, the great French 
 Revolution, in which neither Catholic France, nor Catholic Spain, nor Cath- 
 olic Italy escaped so well as did the Holland and England whose degrada- 
 tion and ruin they had plotted and promised. 
 
 But to return from these reckless perversions, a Hymn, such as the Dies Irae, 
 which has wrought so strongly on the graver temperament of the North, 
 was not, although Gothic in its structure, hkely to remain without any effect 
 on the quicker feelings of the South. Ancina, at that time a professor of 
 medicine in the University of Turin, was one day hearing mass, when the 
 Dies Irae, as chanted in the service for the dead, so strongly affected him, that 
 he determined to abandon the world. He afterwards became Bishop of 
 Saluzzo ; (Biogr. Did. of Soc. Dif. Use/. Knoid., '^Ancina;") and in that 
 episcopal charge, St. Francis de Sales declared of him, that he had never 
 known one of more apostolic character. {Lives of the Companions of St. 
 Philip Neri, London, 1849, p. 8.) 
 
 A composition that has, with no effort at elaboration or poetic art, so long 
 attracted the admiration of poets like Goethe and Scott, distinguished for 
 their skill in the mere art ; and yet met also the wants and won the sympa- 
 thies of men, who, disregarding poetry, looked mainly to piety of sentiment — 
 a poem that has thus united the suffrages of religion and taste, deserves 
 some study, as a model, in that walk of such difficulty and dignity, the walk 
 of sacred poetry. 
 
 The Latin original though made accessible to American readers in Ed- 
 wards and Park's German selections, p. 185; in the Encyclopajdia Amer- 
 icana, (art. Dies Irae) ; and in Isaac Williams' Thoughts in Past Years, (Am. 
 Ed. p. 309,) may be here given, for the benefit of some who may not have at 
 hand either of those works. 
 
 Dies irae ! dies ilia ! 
 Solvet saeclum in favilla ; 
 Teste David cum Sibylla. 
 
 II. 
 
 Quantus tremor est futurus, 
 Quando Judex est venturus, 
 Cuncta stricte discussurus 
 
 Tuba mirum spargens sonum, 
 Per sepulchra regionum, 
 Coget omnes ante thronum. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Mors stupebit et Natura, 
 Cum resurget creatura, 
 Judicanti responsura. 
 
86 APPENDIX. 
 
 Liber scriptus proferetur, 
 In quo totum continetur, 
 Unde mundus judicetur. 
 
 Judex ergo cum sedebit, 
 Quidquid latet apparebit, 
 INil inultum remanebit. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? 
 Gtuem patron um rogaturus, 
 Cum vix Justus sit securus'] 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Rex tremendae majestatis ! 
 
 Q,ui salvandos salvas gratis, 
 Salva me, fons pietatis. 
 
 Recordare, Jesu pie, 
 Quod sum causa tuae viae : 
 Ne me perdas ilia die. 
 
 Quserens me sedisti lassus ; 
 Redemisti crucem passus ; 
 Tantus labor non sit cassus. 
 
 XI. 
 
 Juste Judex ultionis, 
 Donum t'ac remissionis 
 Ante diem rationis. 
 
 Ingeniisco tanquam reus; 
 Culpa rubet vultus meus ; 
 Supplicanti parce, Deus. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Qui Mariam absolvisti, 
 Et latronem exaudisti, 
 Mihi quoque spem dedisti. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Preces meae non sunt dignae 
 Sed tu bonus fac benigne, 
 Ne perenni cremer igne. 
 
 Inter oves locum proesta, 
 Et ab haedis me sequestra, 
 Statuens in parte dextra. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Confutiitis maledictis, 
 Flanunis acribus addictis 
 Voca me cum benedictis. 
 
APPENDIX. 87 
 
 Oro supplex et acclinis, 
 Cor contritum quasi cinis, 
 Gere curam mei finis. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Lachrymosa dies ilia, ' ' 
 
 Q,ua resurgct ex favilla, 
 Judicandus homo reus : 
 Huic ergo parce, Deus ! 
 
 The readings of the first stanza at Rome and Paris differ. The former has 
 as the second line, " Crucis expandens vexilla" in allusion to the old Romish 
 tradition that the " Sign of the Son of Man," to be seen in the heavens on 
 his coming to judgment, is the cross. The latter, omitting this line, has 
 for its third line, " Teste David cum Sib'jlla," a reference to the Sibylline or- 
 acles, whose genuineness as Christian prophecies seems never in tiie Me- 
 diaeval times to have been questioned, and whose authority Bishop Horsley 
 has sought to revive. {Joiu-nee du Chretien, Paris, 1810, pp. 82, 84.) This 
 seems the more ancient, and, to Protestants, is perhaps the less objection- 
 able reading. The closing sentence, " Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem, 
 Amen," is a prayer for the dead ; but not having the rhymes of the rest, we 
 sh(juld suppose the words rather a part of the burial service into which the 
 hymn is inlaid, than a portion originally of the hymn itself. 
 
 The closest of the English versions of the Dies Irse, that has fallen under 
 the eye of the present writer, is that of the Rev. Richard C. Trench, a cler- 
 gyman of the FJstablished Church in England, author of two admirable 
 volumes, the one on the Miracles and the other on the Parables of our Lord, 
 and editor of " Sacred Latin Poetry," which latter work the present writer 
 has failed to see. His rendering does not reach, however, the flowing free- 
 dom or full cadences of the original. It is subjoined. 
 
 DIES IRJE. 
 
 O that day, that day of ire. 
 Told of Prophet, when in fire, 
 Shall a world dissolved expire .' 
 
 O what terror shall be then, 
 When the Judge shall come again, 
 Strictly searching deeds of men : 
 
 When a trump of awful tone. 
 Thro' the caves sepulchral blown, 
 Summons all before the throne. 
 
 What amazement shall o'ertake 
 Nature, when the dead shall wake, 
 Answer to the Judge to make. 
 
 Open then the book shall lie, 
 All o'erwrit for every eye, 
 With a world's iniquity. 
 
 When the Judge his place has ta'en. 
 All things hid shall be made plain. 
 Nothing unavenged remain. 
 
 What then, wretched ! shall I speak, 
 
 Or what intercession seek. 
 
 When the just man's cause is weak 1 
 
88 APPENDIX. 
 
 Jesus, Lord, remember, pray, 
 I the cause was of thy way ; 
 Do not lose me on that day. 
 
 King of awful majesty. 
 
 Who the saved dost freely free ; 
 
 Fount of mercy, pity me ! 
 
 Tired thou satest, seeking me — 
 Crucified, to set me free ; 
 Let such pain not fruitless be. 
 
 Terrible Avenger, make 
 
 Of thy mercy me partake. 
 
 E'er that day of vengeance wake. 
 
 As a criminal I groan, 
 Blushing deep my faults 1 own ; 
 Grace be to a suppliant shown. 
 
 Thou who Mary didst forgive. 
 And who bad'st the robber live, 
 Hope to me dost also give. 
 
 Though my prayer unworthy be. 
 Yet, O set me graciously 
 From the fire eternal free. 
 
 Mid thy sheep my place command, 
 From the goats far off to stand ; 
 Set me, Lord, at thy right hand ; 
 
 And when them who scorned thee here 
 Thou hast judged to doom severe, 
 Bid me with thy saved draw near. 
 
 Lying low before thy throne, 
 Crushed my heart in dust, I groan ; 
 Grace be to a suppliant shown. 
 
 Another version, earlier than that of Dr. Coles, which has been the subject 
 of a reference above, is here for the first time published, as adding another 
 to the attempts, in English comparatively few, to preserve the double 
 rhymes of the original. 
 
 DIES IRffi. 
 
 I. 
 
 Day of wrath ! that day dismaymg ; — 
 As the seers of old are saying, 
 All the world in ashes laying. 
 
 II. 
 
 What the fear ! and what the quaking ! 
 When the Judge his way is taking. 
 Strictest search in all things making. 
 
 When the trump, with blast astounding, 
 Through the tombs of earth resounding, 
 Bids all stand, the throne surrounding. 
 
APPENDIX. 89 
 
 Death and Nature all aghast are, — 
 While the dead rise fast and faster, 
 Answering to their Judge and Master. 
 
 V. 
 
 Forth is brought the record solemn ; 
 
 See, o'erwrit in each dread column, 
 
 With men's deeds, the Doomsday volume. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Now the Sovran Judge is seated : 
 All, long hid, is loud repeated ; 
 Nought escapes the judgment meted. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Ah ! what plea shall I be pleading '? 
 
 Who for me be interceding. 
 
 When the just man help is needing! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Oh, thou King of awful splendor. 
 Of salvation free the Sender, 
 Grace to me, all gracious, render ! 
 
 Jesus, Lord, my plea let this be. 
 
 Mine the wo that brought from bliss Thee; 
 
 On that day. Lord, wilt Thou miss me? 
 
 Wearily for me thou soughtest ; 
 
 On the cross my soul thou boughtest ; 
 
 Lose not all for which thou wroughtest ! 
 
 XI. 
 
 Vengeance, Lord, then be thy mission : 
 Now, of sin grant free remission, 
 Ere that day of inquisition. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Low in shame before Thee groaning ; 
 Blushes deep my sin are owning : 
 Hear, O Lord, my suppliant moaning ! 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Her of old that sinned forgiving. 
 And the dying thief receiving, 
 Thou, to me too, hope art giving. 
 
 In my prayer though sin discerning, 
 Yet, good Loj-d, in goodness turjiinc 
 Save me from the endless burning ! 
 
 'Mid thy sheep be my place given ; 
 Far the goats from me be driven ; 
 At thy right hand fi.xed in heaven. 
 
 13 
 
90 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 When the cursed are confounded, 
 With devourinor flame surrounded ; 
 With the blest be my name sounded. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Bowed and prostrate hear me crying ; 
 Heart in dust before thee lying :" 
 Lord, my end, O be thou liigh in I 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Ah that day ! that day of weeping ' 
 When, in dust no longer sleeping^ 
 Man to God, in guilt is going :— 
 Lord, be, then, thy mercy showing ! 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 (Delivered before the Hudson River Baptist Association, June 16, 1835.) 
 " I AM PURE FROM THE BLOOD OF ALL MEN." — ActS XX. 26. 
 
 No writer of the Bible has insisted more earnestly than 
 did Paul on the great fact of the Divine sovereignty. He 
 saw the plan of Infinite wisdom perfect in all its parts, and 
 immutable in all its results, stretching away over the whole 
 field of his labors ; reaching over every country, and ex- 
 tending through all ages, the unchanged and unchangeable 
 counsel of God. He rejoiced in it. He rested upon it. 
 Yet it did not at all lower his views of human duty, nor 
 with him did the Divine agency supersede the workings of 
 an inferior and mortal instrumentality. He knew that, with 
 all his counsel, nothing could be but as God ordered it ; and 
 with all his labor, nothing could prosper but as God wrought 
 it. And yet, on the other hand, he saw that the command- 
 ments of God to man were part of his counsels for man, 
 and that one of the modes in which the Most High would 
 work was his sending man to work. While looking at the 
 cause of his Master on the one side, he was therefore seen 
 soaring away, as on the pinions of serapliim, into the regions 
 of fathomless wisdom, and his theme was the election of 
 God, sure and indefeasible. Looking at that same cause 
 under an opposite aspect, he saw the law of God and the 
 duty of man, rising up to cast their shadow as over the 
 whole breadth of the earth. He then felt himself a debtor 
 to all, and intense was his anxiety lest his skirts should bear 
 the blood of any. 
 
 Fathers and brethren, permit one who feels deeply, that 
 in holiness and usefulness, as in the number of years and 
 the weight of experience, he is far surpassed by those whom 
 he addresses — permit him yet, to lead you to the same point 
 of view at which the great Apostle of the Gentiles was often 
 
92 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 found. Like him, let us look abroad upon the field of duty 
 as in the light of eternity. If the superiors of the speaker, 
 you are the inferiors of that Saviour to whose feet he would 
 summon, and in whose name, as brethren, he warns, or as 
 fathers, he entreats you. Forgetting therefore, for the time, 
 our relative position, as the younger and the older ministers 
 of the New Testament, let us gather in one indiscriminate 
 throng around the seat of our common Lord, and hear what 
 He hath said to us by the mouth of his holy apostle. And 
 give to me your prayers that the Spirit of God may so 
 replenish and aid him who speaks, that he may be saved 
 from bearing the blood of the souls that now surround 
 him. 
 
 Paul appealed to the Ephesian pastors, as his witnesses, 
 that, in diligence and devotedness, he had escaped the stain 
 of blood-guiltiness. Such stain was possible, or else it was 
 idle to rejoice before God in having avoided a danger that 
 never existed. His words imply that Christian pastors may 
 be guilty of the blood of the souls that perish as under the 
 shadow of their sanctuaries. Now they cannot be guilty 
 where they have not first been responsible. Let us, then, 
 inquire what the Scriptures have said indicating such respon- 
 sibility. And if the fact of ministerial accountability for 
 the souls of their hearers be found written, broatlly and 
 vividly, upon the pages of this volume, does it not behoove 
 us, then, to inquire the modes, in which, as pastors and 
 evangelists, we may incur this trevieiidous curse, the blood 
 of our people ? And since, in addressing the impenitent, we 
 are wont to imitate Paul, and derive from themes of the 
 most awful character our appeals to the human heart, and 
 " knowing the terrors of the Lord" so to " persuade men," 
 let us in the same spirit school ourselves ; and allow a fel- 
 low-laborer to bring before you, pastors of the fold of Christ, 
 the fearfulness of the guilt thus incurred — the overwhelm- 
 ing horrors of standing at the foot of the throne, with the 
 blood of souls on the hand and on the head, perjured stew- 
 ards, sentinels false to our trust, and pastors who have 
 destroyed the flock of our charge. 
 
 I. To understand the phrase employed by the apostle, 
 here in his intercourse with the Christian pastors of Ephe- 
 sus, and at an earlier period in his reply to the Jewish blas- 
 phemers of Corinth, it is necessary to refer to the Hebrew 
 Scriptures, from which this form of expression was borrowed. 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 93 
 
 By the laws of Moses, the Israelite who reared not a battle- 
 ment upon the roof of his house, brought upon himself the 
 blood of the incautious stranger, who fell and perished in 
 consequence of his neglect. He had not indeed lifted the 
 murderous weapon ; he had not lain in ambush, or drugged 
 the cup of his guest with poison ; nor had he even cherished 
 a revengeful feeling or thought of anger. Besides all this, 
 the stranger himself must have been careless, thus to perish. 
 Yet the absence of any overt act, and even of any thought 
 of crime on the part of the host, and the want of due cau- 
 tion on the part of his guest, did not relieve the former from 
 blood-guiltiness, where he had neglected an enjoined duty. 
 So when the murdered traveller was found on the way-side, 
 felled by an unknown hand, the elders of the nearest city 
 Avere not exonerated from guilt, and the innocent blood 
 would be laid to the charge of the land, unless, washing 
 their hands over a slaughtered victim, they would pray to 
 God, and solemnly declare that their hands had not shed 
 the blood of the hapless stranger, nor had their eyes seen his 
 fall. Now here was crime which not only was not com- 
 mitted by them, but the commission of which they perhaps 
 could not have prevented by any precaution : yet was the 
 blood upon them unless they thus protested against the 
 deed. It was not then only an overt act of murder which 
 condemned them, but the omission of due care, in providing 
 that it should not occur, or in denouncing it when it had 
 occurred, would also make them chargeable with guilt in 
 tlie eyes of God. The same principle, and with the same 
 phraseology to convey it, was carried out into the teachings 
 of the prophets. Ezekiel was made a watchman. He was 
 to see the coming vengeance, and lift aloud the note of 
 warning. If he did it not, the man or the people who 
 ollended, perished indeed in their iniquity, and wrought out 
 their own ruin ; but the minister of God found upon his 
 head also the blood of the evil-doer thus cut off in his trans- 
 gressions. 
 
 The apostle takes up this language and these principles, 
 as being fully applicable to the new dispensation under 
 which he labored. He spoke as a man to whom had been 
 transferred the charge received by the prophet, who of old 
 had seen the visions of God by the river Chebar. It was 
 not the Jews only he had warned, for the Ephesian Church 
 contained the Gentile as well, and from the blood of all 
 
94 MINISTERIAL RESPO N SIBII IT V 
 
 men was he free, and every man had he warned, " testify- 
 ing," as he asserts, " both to Jews and to Greel^s." It was 
 not of civil war, of the ruin of Jerusalem, or of temporal 
 death that he warned them ; but as he earnestly appeals to 
 them, " repentance and faith" — repentance and faith — had 
 been the topics of his warning ; among them he had gone 
 " preaching the kingdom of God," and the ministry which 
 he had received, and would discharge to others as he had 
 done it to them, was "to testify of the Gospel of the Grace 
 of Gody Grace and the Gospel, then, were not, in his 
 view, inconsistent with this appalling responsibility. If he 
 had unfaithfully executed his apostolical charge, wo was 
 unto him, not only from the tortures of an accusing con- 
 science, but from the added curses of a world betrayed and 
 ruined by his neglect. But when his work had been fear- 
 lessly and fully done, he could turn, as he did to those of 
 his own nation at Corinth, and warn them that their blood 
 was on their own head ; while, shaking his raiment, he de- 
 clared of himself that he was " clear" from the clinging 
 curse of their destruction. 
 
 Now it is not merely the number of passages containing 
 any doctrine, that decides its certainty ; for a single asser- 
 tion of the Holy Ghost is as true, as if it were thrice repeat- 
 ed. Had, therefore, the Bible contained nothing further of 
 explicit testimony to this effect, it seems as if in the instances 
 already quoted, we shall find the responsibility of the Chris- 
 tian ministry for the souls of their hearers placed beyond 
 question. But there is other evidence, in the teachings of 
 human reason, as to the extent of our influence over each 
 other, in the language of the Bible with regard to such influ- 
 ence, in the descriptions employed to represent the charac- 
 ter and ofljce of the Christian minister, and in the express 
 testimony of the apostolical epistles, that the pastor owes to 
 God an account of the flock, which he was appointed to fold 
 and to tend. 
 
 The Bible, in the words already cited, only recognizes a 
 great truth, of which even unaided reason gives us testimony 
 in part, we mean, the influence of man over man, and his 
 evident accountability for the character of the influence that 
 he is thus shedding over all around him. The world is 
 filled with the countless and interlacing filaments of influ- 
 ence, that spread from each individual over the whole face 
 and frame-work of society. The infant that lies wailing 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 95 
 
 and helpless in the arms of his mother, is already wielding 
 an influence felt through the whole household, by his fret- 
 fulness disturbing, or by his serene smiles gladdening that 
 entire home. And as, with added years, his faculties are 
 expanded, and the sphere of his activity widens itself, his 
 influence increases. And every man whom he meets, much 
 more whom he moulds and governs, becomes the more hap- 
 py or the more wretched, the better or the worse, according 
 to the character of his spirit and example. Nor can he strip 
 from himself this influence. If he flee away from the soci- 
 ety of his fellows to dwell alone in the wilderness, he leaves 
 behind him the example of neglected duty, and the memory 
 of disregarded love, to curse the family he has abandoned. 
 Even in the pathless desert he finds his own feet caught in 
 the torn and entangled web of influence, that bound him to 
 society ; and its cords remain wherever he was once known, 
 sending home to the hearts that twined around him, sorrow 
 and pain. Nor can the possessor of it expect it to go down 
 into the grave with him. The sepulchre may have closed 
 in silence over him, and his name may have perished from 
 among men, yet his influence, nameless as it is, and untrace- 
 able by human eye, is floating over the face of society. As 
 in the external and visible world, the fall of a pebble agitates, 
 not perceptibly indeed, yet really, the whole mass of the 
 earth, thus in the world of morals, every act of every spirit 
 is telling upon the whole system of moral beings to which 
 God has bound him. No man leaves the world, in all things, 
 such as he found it. The habits which he was instrumental 
 in forming, may go on from century to century, an heir-loom 
 for good or for evil, doing their work of misery or of happi- 
 ness, blasting or blessing the country that has now lost all 
 record of his memory. In the case of some, this influence 
 is most sensible. Every age beholds and owns their power. 
 Such men have lived. And thus it is, that, although centu- 
 ries have rolled their intervening tide between the age of 
 their birth and our own, and the empires under which they 
 flourished have long since mouldered away from the soil 
 whence they sprung, and the material frame of the author 
 himself has been trampled down into the undistinguished 
 dust, the writers of classical antiquity are yet living and 
 laboring in our midst. The glorious dreams of Plato are 
 yet floating before the eye of the metaphysician, and the 
 genius of Homer has tinged with its own light the whole 
 
96 
 
 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 firmament of modern invention. Nor, unhappily, is this all. 
 Corruption is yet oozing out, in lessons of profligacy and 
 of atheism, from the pages of an Ovid and a Lucretius, and 
 as from their graves streams forth the undecaying rankness 
 of vice and of falsehood, though the dominion of the world 
 has long since passed from the halls of their Cassars, and 
 the very language they employed has died away from the 
 lips of the nation. The Church yet feels, throughout all 
 lands, the influence of the thoughts that passed, perhaps in 
 the solitude of midnight, through the bosom of Paul, as he 
 sat in the shadows of his prison, an old and unbefriended 
 man — thoughts which, lifting his manacled hand, he spread 
 in his epistles before the eyes of men, there to remain for 
 ever. They feel yet the effect of the pious meditations of 
 David, when roaming on the hill-side, a humble shepherd 
 lad, of the family piety of Abraham, and of the religious 
 nurture that trained up the infancy of Moses. Every nation 
 is affected at this moment by the moral power that emanated 
 from the despised Noah, as that preacher of righteousness 
 sat among his family, perhaps dejected and faint with un- 
 successful toil, teaching them to call upon God, when all 
 the families of the earth beside had forgotten him. And if 
 the mind, taking its flight from the narrow precinct of these 
 walls, were to wander abroad along the peopled highways, 
 and to the farthest hamlets of our own land, and, passing the 
 seas, to traverse distant realms and barbarous coasts, every 
 man whom its travels met — nay, every being of human 
 mould that has ever trodden this earth in earlier ages, or 
 that is now to be found among its moving myriads, has felt, 
 or is feeling, the influence of the thoughts of a solitary wo- 
 man, who, centuries since, stood debating the claims of con- 
 science and of sin, amid the verdant glories of the yet unfor- 
 feited Paradise. Nor does this influence end with time. 
 The shock of the archangel's trump will not break the line 
 of its power, nor the gulf of eternity swallow up its steady 
 stream. It travels on into the world of spirits. And the 
 influence of the pious or the wicked parent, of the faithful or 
 unfaithful pastor, will be felt through all the bowers of hea- 
 ven, and course its way into all the caverns of hell. The 
 benighted pagan, who has, within the last hour, shuddered 
 on awaking in eternity to the full view of his doings and 
 destiny, will, through the ceaseless lapse of that eternity, 
 curse the moral power of the ancestors, through whose 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 97 
 
 neglect of Divine Revelation, he himself was born amid the 
 starless gloom of heathenism. 
 
 Influence is, then, mighty and enduring. Now, if, as all 
 will allow who believe in human accountability, man be 
 accountable for his acts, and accountable for his feelings, 
 then'is he responsible for his influence ; for his acts and 
 his feelings are the elements which go to make up that influ- 
 ence. And, in proportion to his station and his opportuni- 
 ties, his influence growing, there grows with it a correspond- 
 ing responsibility. And if the ministry occupy an eminent 
 po^st, and cast abroad a wide influence, as its enemies and 
 its friends alike allege, then the man who fills it stands 
 answerable to his God and his race, as one bound by high 
 and fearful obligations, the cords of which he cannot sever, 
 and the burden of which he may not hope to transfer. 
 
 And are not these views taken up and set in a more full 
 and appalling light in the Book of Scripture ? See in what 
 terms it denounces the guilt of exercising an unholy influ- 
 ence. How has the name of Jeroboam been branded with 
 reprobation by that fearful repetition — "he made Israel to 
 sin." He made Israel to sin, not by the application of brute 
 force, not that they ceased to be voluntary agents, (for every 
 one of them continued accountable for his individual share 
 in the national sin,) but by the moral power of his example 
 and authority. It had been the aggravation of their guilt in 
 the degenerate sons of Eli, that through their misconduct, 
 shedding around a disastrous influence, •' men abhorred the 
 ofi'ering°of the Lord," and therefore was their "sin very 
 great."" And the charge, which in a far distant day Malachi 
 brought against the corrupted and corrupting priesthood of 
 his own age, was that, whilst their fathers had by a holier 
 influence " turned many to righteousness," they themselves 
 had by their hypocrisy and scandals " caused many to stum- 
 ble at the law." When our Saviour, with an unfaltering 
 hand, tore the mask from the Pharisees, he described them 
 as blind leaders of the Wind. Others fell by their arts, or 
 their negligence ; and they drew in the sweeping train of 
 their influence multitudes into ruin, as the dragon of the 
 Apocalyptic vision dragged down in his fall to the earth a 
 third part of the stars of heaven. Of the proselyte whom 
 they made with such zeal, and at such cost of effort, our 
 Lord declared, that they made him twofold more the child 
 of hell than themselves. Not that he was a passive mass of 
 
 14 
 
98 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 matter to their plastic touch. But the strong hand of their 
 moral influence left upon him the imprint of a hopeless 
 hypocrisy. He bore about him a conscience which they had 
 aided in searing as with a hot iron, and an understanding 
 which they had garrisoned with pride, and walled about with 
 prejudices, to guard it from the very access of truth. It is 
 of the vast range and power of man's moral influence that 
 Christ spoke, when he uttered the ominous words, " Wo 
 
 UNTO THE WORLD BECAUSE OF OFFENCES." It is of OUr 
 
 rigid accounting to our God for the effects of that influence 
 that he teslifles, when declaring, " But wo unto that 
 
 MAN BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH." 
 
 But in addition to this general doctrine of influence, the 
 Bible uses, in nearly all of its appellations for the office of 
 the Christian ministry, terms which imply personal respon- 
 sibility for the individuals intrusted to, or operated upon, by 
 the Christian teacher. The shepherd answerable for his 
 flock, the steward accountable for his lord's goods, the hus- 
 bandman laboring and receiving wages or blame according 
 to the character of his tillage, the leader by his steps guid- 
 ing the steps of others, the overseer exercising a deputed 
 authority of which he must return an account to his em- 
 ployer, and the ruler controlling others, and responsible for 
 the conduct which such control has produced, are favorite 
 titles with the inspired writers for the Christian pastor and 
 evangelist. Now, do not nearly all of these imply account- 
 ability of a very high order as to the souls of men ? Would 
 the shepherd be allowed to cast all the blame of his deso- 
 lated fold upon the ravening wolf, or the silly sheep ; or 
 would the steward be permitted to refer all his losses to the 
 dishonesty of thieves or the wastefulness of servants, if he 
 himself had not been careful ? 
 
 As if to end all doubt, we find the apostolic epistles ex- 
 plicit in their testimony upon this subject. It is said of 
 ministers by Paul in his letter to the Hebrew believers, that 
 they watch for souls as those that must give account. 
 They hold a fearful stewardship, and it is required m stew- 
 ards that a man he found faithful. As to the extent of 
 moral influence, he himself speaks of it as operating upon 
 all whom the Christian minister met. If not for their salva- 
 tion, then was it for iheir ruin — a savor of death unto death ; 
 where it healed not, it hardened, and where it could not 
 melt, there it cauterized. And the principle in its broadest 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 99 
 
 ground he has adopted m an alhision to ministerial duty, 
 where he hids his beloved associate not to become " par- 
 taker of other men's sins." There is then a sense in which 
 we may share the sins of others. And so, the death eternal 
 which these sins produce, may be in some sense chargeable 
 to us. As the vigilant pastor saves himself and those that 
 hear him, even thus does the negligent minister destroy not 
 only his own soul, but the souls intrusted to his faithless 
 hands. 
 
 Do not the Scriptures, then, brethren, fully publish the 
 fact of ministerial accountability for the souls of their hear- 
 ers 1 The Christian teacher stands not alone, and alofie he 
 cannot fall. His every act, his internal and hidden spirit, 
 are telling day by day on three worlds. Heaven has sent 
 forth from its expanded gates angels to minister to his on- 
 ward career, or they have returned thither to rejoice over 
 the sinners converted by his instrumentality. Hell is pour- 
 ing out her hordes to thwart and to seduce, to allure and to 
 alarm. And this earth, the great scene of interest, and the 
 field of conflict for the two worlds of Hght and of darkness, 
 is benefited or harmed by every step that he takes, as with 
 the censer of intercession in his hands, he rushes forth be- 
 tween the living and the dead : to stay the desolating pesti- 
 lence if he wave that censer aright, looking upward ; and 
 if he loiter and neglect it, then standing but to spread the 
 contagion he was sent to rebuke. Prayer withheld, or 
 prayer offered — labor performed, or labor neglected — faith 
 in vigorous exercise, or faith imprisoned in unrighteousness 
 — a heart glowing with love to Christ, or a heart chilled 
 with worldliness — the Spirit of God grieved, or the Spirit 
 of God obeyed — these make up the history of every wakeful 
 hour in that man's life. And who shall say, that such a 
 man, standing in a relation so close and so momentous to 
 this and other worlds, is not responsible for the character of 
 each hour, and for the workings of that hour upon the eter- 
 nal interests of all that surround him 2 
 
 But where, then, are the limits of this influence ? Is the 
 sinner responsible for nothing? Is the guilt of his impeni- 
 tence and ruin solely his pastor's? — Not so. There is a 
 sense in which each of us lives for himself, dies for himself, 
 for himself sins, or for himself believes. There is another 
 sense, in which none of us lives for himself, dies for him- 
 self, for himself alone sins, or believes only for himself. 
 
100 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 According to the first of these, the sinner is chargeable with 
 his own ruin, nor shall our unfaithful ministration be any 
 plea at the bar of God, my unconverted hearers, for your 
 oft'ences. God gave to you personally a conscience and 
 reason, warnings and invitations. You perish in your own 
 iniquity. But, according to the latter sense, if you have 
 been left unwarned by friend or teacher, the guilt of that 
 iniquity and of your consequent ruin is in part shared by the 
 Christian teacher who warned you not. His share in the 
 sin and the punishment makes not your portion of both the 
 less or the lighter, as the union of many accomplices in a 
 deed of blood lessens not their individual criminality, but 
 often aggravates it. But it may still be asked, if sinners 
 perish at all, is it not always through unfaithfulness on the 
 part of the Church ? — We believe not. Christ's own preach- 
 ing, faithful, sincere and full as it was, did not save Jerusa- 
 lem. The sinner may be warned with perfect fidelity, and 
 the Christian's responsibility be fully satisfied, and yet the 
 sinner perish. If he perish warned of his sin, his blood is 
 on his own head. But if the ministry have not been faithful 
 to declare to him the whole counsel of God, and that in the 
 right spirit, it is evident that the Christian teacher in some 
 sense partakes the sins, and may share the doom of him 
 whom he thus neglects or perverts. 
 
 Nor let it ever be supposed, that, by thus stating the re- 
 sponsibilities and the influence of man, we forget or dispute 
 the great doctrine of the Divine power in regeneration, and 
 the great doctrine of the Divine sovereignty in the putting 
 forth of that power. It is of the grace of God that any are 
 saved, and the instrumentality and influence of man, apart 
 from that grace, are in themselves idle as the voice of music 
 to the storms. It is for God to regenerate the man. But 
 it is the pleasure of God to use in his kingdom human instru- 
 mentality, and human influence. It is the duty of man to 
 put them forth. It is of the grace of God to bless them 
 when put forth. It is of one only of these truths that we 
 are now called to treat, that of human duty, and its connec- 
 tion in the order of the Divine purposes with the salvation 
 of mankind. As the human eye cannot at once behold the 
 two opposite sides of the object it confronts, thus is it difli- 
 cult for the mind to bring into one view the two opposite 
 aspects that belong to every great doctrine of the Bible. 
 The other great truths to which we have alluded stand up 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 101 
 
 in the volume of God in impregnable strength. Fully re- 
 ceiving them, it is sufficient now to remark, brethren, as we 
 pass, that human agency cannot trench upon them, or pros- 
 per without them. 
 
 n. If such be the far-spreading power and the manifold 
 and fearful responsibilities of our office, fathers and breth- 
 ren, well might the man, who uttered the words before us, 
 years after admonish the Colossian pastor Archippus, that 
 he should take heed to the ministry which he had received 
 of the Lord, that he fulfil it ; and well might he bind upon 
 the conscience of his beloved disciple and coadjutor the in- 
 junction, that he should make full proof of his ministry. 
 And a fitting termination was it to the announcement of 
 such a truth, that he should proceed, as he did, to admonish 
 the Ephesian pastors that they take heed therefore to them- 
 selves, no less than to all the flock. Wherein have we 
 failed to make this fulfilment and full proof of our ministry ? 
 For it is not the interests of others alone that are concerned : 
 let us look to ourselves, for the responsibilities of our office 
 are entwined with our own well-being for time, and through 
 eternity. We pass, therefore, to inquire the methods, in 
 which we may by remissness have drawn upon our heads 
 the blood of the sinners we may have failed to warn. 
 
 Were we to imagine a herald sent forth to the peopled 
 villages of a revolted province with the proclamation of his 
 prince, charged to promise a free pardon to all who might 
 submit, and return to their allegiance, commissioned to de- 
 nounce a sure and overwhelming vengeance against all per- 
 severing in their mad rebellion, and instructed withal to 
 spread far and wide the royal edict, and to distribute it to 
 every group of villagers he should meet by the way-side, 
 and to every traveller who shared his journeyiiigs, we can 
 readily see in what mode his duties must be disch:irged, or 
 he remain guilty, to his prince of unfaithfulness, and to the 
 revolter of a murderous treachery. He might suppress the 
 document, and substitute a forgery of his own imagination ; 
 or while disclosing it in part, he might interpolate and 
 abridge, erase, and amend, suppressing one fact and distort- 
 ing another, until the proclamation, as read to the crowds 
 who gathered at his feet, might to their ears bring a mean- 
 ing utterly alien to that which had stirred the heart of the 
 king from whom it emanated. Or, passing to another hamlet, 
 he might there, without marring a syllable of the document, 
 
102 MINISTEniAL RESPONSIBILITY, 
 
 SO dispose of it that few would meet it. Wholly over- 
 looking the general dispersion of it through the liomes of 
 the district, he might content himself with affixing the edict 
 on high amid other and ordinary notices, to meet perhaps 
 the gaze of a diligent inquirer, but scarce perceptible to the 
 casual observer ; and go his way, without further effort to 
 bring home to the individuals whom he met their danger 
 and their duty, or inquiring, as he passed, who had read and 
 who had heeded the momentous instrument. And when 
 coming to yet another neighborhood, planted in the bosom 
 of some quiet valley, we might see him, not without assidu- 
 ity, gathering together from its shades and from the hills 
 which environed it, the population of the scattered cottages, 
 and delivering to the tumultuotis crowd the mandate, alike 
 unmutilated and incorruj)! ; but yet his whole statement 
 might be marked with such listlessness, or such levity, and 
 be uttered so heartlessly, or so scornfully, that the con 
 temptuous group around him might at once adjudge him in 
 sincere, and declare the proclamation he bore a forgery of 
 no value. And it would be evident that, in all or in either 
 of these ways, the very intent of the embassy would have 
 been frustrated, and a wrong would have been done to the 
 prince thus unfaithfully served, and to the people thus un- 
 faithfully warned. And in every battle-field which should 
 afterwards be strewed with the slain of the unsuccessful ic- 
 volters, and on every scaffold on which others of them 
 should expiate their treason with their blood, he would be 
 to some extent, implicated ; and the blood of the deluded 
 villagers would, alike by their kindred and their ruler, be 
 asked at his hands. 
 
 Now the gospel ministry is such a proclamation. The 
 preacher derives his name from the office of the herald, thus 
 publishing to a mingled and busy population the laws or the 
 news of the day. And, in any one of the modes thus indi- 
 cated, the Christian minister may sin, and bring down upon 
 his head the curse of those who have perished through his 
 imbecile and faithless demeanor. In the substance of our 
 message, in the scene and manner of its delivery, and above 
 all, in the spirit that marks its announcement, we may be 
 misleading and hardening the souls we were sent forth to 
 invite again to their God and ours. And such a three-fold 
 fulfilment, as requisite to the Christian ministry, seems inti- 
 mated in Paul's description of his own course : " By 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 103 
 
 manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every 
 man's conscience as in the sight of God." The manifested 
 truth described the substance of his ministry ; its commenda- 
 tion to every man — the manner of his labor, and his appeal 
 to the conscience of the hearer, and his constant sense in 
 his own conscience that God was observing him, indicated 
 the spirit of his ministry. 
 
 1. In the substa7ice of our ministrations, we may contract 
 the guilt of blood by delivering error in the stead of truth, 
 and substituting the traditions of men for the testimonies 
 and law of God. Or giving one portion of the truth, we 
 may make it a virtual falsehood, by withholding the truth 
 which in Scripture accompanies and guards it. We may 
 preach human dependence to the subversion of the great 
 truth of human obligation, or we may so insist on human 
 duty and ability, as to mar the glorious trutli of the necessity 
 of the Divine influences. We may preach a gospel that 
 crucifies and tramples upon the law, the eternal and immu- 
 table law, that Christ came expressly to magnify : or we 
 may hold up the law till it hides that gospel of which it is 
 but the precursor and the inferior. And even when we 
 bring to the people of our charge the truth symmetrically, 
 and in its fair proportions, we may fail to bring the well- 
 timed truth adapted to the snares, the duties, and the trials 
 of the passing day. We may be combating heresies they 
 never knew, and indoctrinating a church who are already 
 but too proud of their orthodoxy, and too neglectful of their 
 morals ; or we may be preaching practically to those who 
 are yet ignorant of the first motives, the seminal principles 
 of the Divine life — principles which the doctrines of the 
 Bible, and those doctrines only, can minister. And we may 
 utter truths not entirely unseasonable, yet comparatively of 
 less moment, whilst from the sides of our desk, from our 
 pews and our hearths, one and another is sliding into eter- 
 nity, untaught in the great lessons of repentance and faith. 
 We may give an undue and disproportionate attention to 
 the necessary, but the minor truths of the Bible, more anxious 
 to make men partisans than Christians ; whilst " the weight- 
 ier mattei's" of its testimony are scarce ever felt by our peo- 
 ple, pealing over their heads, as with a voice of mighty 
 thunderings, the shortness of life, the nearness of judgment, 
 the worth of the soul, the value of the atonement, the need 
 of regeneration, and the promises of the wonder-working 
 
104 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 Spirit. And what will be the testimony borne against us by 
 them, as they awake in the light of eternity to a vivid know- 
 ledge of the wliole gospel ? Is there not, herein, guilt upon 
 us, my brethren 1 
 
 2. We may attract the displeasure of our God in our pas- 
 toral character, by overlooking the extent and the minute- 
 ness of the duties owed to the church in the personal deliv- 
 ery and enforcement of truth, or in the scene and mode of 
 our labors. We may dispense the gospel too much in the 
 generalizations of the pulpit, and too little in the special 
 applications of private intercourse. When the apostle 
 vouched his own exemption from the curse of blood, he 
 declared that he had not ceased day and night to warn eve- 
 ry man, and with many tears, and from house to house. 
 Although we would not give to these words the rigid inter- 
 pretation employed by some, yet is it not but too probable, 
 brethren, that we are all deficient in the faithful and earnest 
 visitation of the flock, and that the truth is too little urged 
 home within the bounds of the family ? And is not much 
 of the remissness and worldliness of Christians owing to 
 the want of a more thorough endeavor, to follow home the 
 impressions of the Sabbath by the less formal and more 
 familiar and searching intercourse of the week ? In the 
 world, is not our ministry defective, by resembling too 
 faintly that of the primitive church, in its aggressive char- 
 acter, against the mass of impenitent and unsanctified mind, 
 that never enters our sanctuaries, and which must be sought 
 out and assailed in its own lurking-places ? And if not able 
 ourselves to accomplish the work, need we not in our 
 churches to sustain a distinct class of men who shall thus 
 go forth upon the world, and leave no home, where man is 
 wretched and man is sinful, unvisited by that gospel, which 
 reveals the only remedy of his wretchedness, and the only 
 hope for his guiltiness ? Should not the wonderful success 
 which crowned the faithfulness, in this work, of Baxter at 
 Kidderminster, be resounding in the ears of us all, until we 
 had attempted a similar onset upon the hearths of our own 
 neighborhoods ? And is there not in our churches the guilt 
 of blood, in our failing to maintain the high and severe 
 standard of primitive discipline, delivering the gospel to 
 the world anew in the holy lives of its professed disciples ? 
 Shall not the blood of the covetous, and formal, and sensual, 
 the drunkards, extortioners, and revilers, that lurk in the 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 105 
 
 church, suspected or well known, but not warned or cen- 
 sured, cry out against us ? Hardened, as they are, by im- 
 punity, shall not that impunity be loudly pleading against 
 us in the great day of retribution ? We preach the truth ; 
 is it enforced, and doled out anew upon the world, in the 
 discipline of our churches? Yet again, would not Paul 
 have been guilty, had he, in teaching the Ephesians, forgot- 
 ten the more destitute of other lands ; or had he neglected 
 to inculcate upon the converts at Ephesus their duty in 
 sending the gospel to the lands that were yet unevangelized? 
 Paul and the Christians whom he now addressed, would not 
 have been clear of the blood of the heathen, had they for- 
 gotten them in their prayers, and confined their labors ex- 
 clusively to the narrow province of their own home. Illyr- 
 icum, and Spain, and Britain, were probably in the heart 
 of the apostle, while his hands were ministering to his own 
 wants at Ephesus. The gospel he preached was for the 
 world ; and he preached it in blood-guiltiness, if he did not 
 regard and teach others to regard it, as going out over the 
 length and breadth of the earth. And although God has 
 blessed the Church and the pastors of the present age, with 
 the spirit of missionary enterprise, is there not yet a defi- 
 ciency ? Are not the garments of the church and her pas- 
 torship yet dripping with the blood of pagan nations, acces- 
 sible but not approached by the word of God ? And here 
 again, is there not guilt, the guilt of blood upon us, my 
 brethren ? 
 
 3. But the greatest of the dangers, as we believe, to which 
 those now present are exposed, regards the spirit in which 
 we utter our message. We may deliver the true proclama- 
 tion in hypocrisy, and an angered God withhold from our 
 labors all blessing. Or, by formality and listlessness, we 
 may contrive to throw an aspect of tameness over the most 
 momentous and thrilling of all topics, and the vast realities 
 of eternity may dwindle under our hands into a thrice-told 
 and vapid " old wives' fable." In selfish avarice and ambi- 
 tion, we may be coveting with an evil covetousness to set 
 our house on high, and build up our personal and social 
 interests on the base of God's own church. There may be 
 bitter envying and strife amid the common members of one 
 mystical body, and the fellow-combatants in one strenuous 
 and hard-fought warfare. We may grieve in secret at the 
 fulness of the net which our own hands cast not abroad 
 
 15 
 
106 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 upon the face of the waters, or drew not to the shore. We 
 may enact again the contest rebuked by Christ, and wliisper 
 to ourselves, " Who is the greatest T^ when in lowliness 
 each should esteem others better than himself. Vain-glory 
 and ostentation may be our companions in the study, and 
 mount with us into the sacred desk ; and while the famished 
 church is weeping, and fiends exult over the world rushing 
 into ruin at our feet, we may be busily employed in endea- 
 voring to carve our paltry names upon the rugged front of 
 Christ's own cross. We may preach ourselves, and not the 
 Master. While bound to seek out acceptable words, we 
 may proceed too far, and harm the sword of the Spirit by 
 gilding and blunting its edge. Self-reliance and self-seek- 
 ing may palsy our spiritual strength ; and we may but beat 
 the air, and labor in vain. While men admire, God may be 
 writing upon us his fearful curse as pronounced by his 
 servant Zechariah : " Wo to the idol shepherd — the sword 
 shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye: his arm 
 shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall he utterly 
 darkened.'''' Spiritual vigor and spiritual discernment may 
 depart from us, while bowing in secret at the shrine of van- 
 ity. Or carelessness, and frivolity, and worldliness, may 
 eat out the heart of our strength, and we may lie along in 
 the church, the prostrate and rotting cumberers of the field 
 we should have shaded with our foliage, and gladdened 
 with our fruit. How diflicult is it, brethren, to guard well 
 our own hearts — to act ever as in the love of Christ — and 
 to preach in sight of the bar of judgment. And even where 
 we may be preserved watching and praying against the 
 evils already indicated, how far may our piety be beneath 
 the high standard commanded by our God, and attainable 
 to us. How little, brethren, is our profiting, compared 
 with that which it might be, did we, like the bride of the 
 Apocalypse, stand before the churches " clothed with the 
 sun" — were there seen upon our example, our prayers, and 
 our preaching, the lustre of a dazzling holiness, derived 
 from intimate communion with God, and sending even into 
 the eyes of the scofter its vivid and blinding brightness. 
 And shall we not be judged by the possible and attainable 
 standard which was before us I Look to the wide and deep 
 influence which has been gained by some devoted men in 
 all ages, who, though often of inferior talents, were men 
 mighty in prayer, in faith, and in the Holy Ghost. See 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 107 
 
 how the hearts of the world and the church melted at the 
 opening of their lips — how the Spirit of Glory and of God 
 tracked all their steps ; and, turning from the sight, let us 
 ask : — Why are we not all such ? We need a deeper piety, 
 and the guilt of blood is upon us — is it not, brethren ? — be- 
 cause we are not men of deeper piety, men baptized with 
 the Holy Ghost, and testifying to the churches what our 
 own eyes have seen, and our own hands have handled of the 
 word of life. 
 
 Are we accused of disparaging our vocation? Our reply 
 may be in the quaint, but expressive language of Baxter : 
 " Had our sins been only in Latin, in Latin they mio-ht 
 have been rebuked ; but if our transgressions have been 
 wrought before the people, in the tongue, and before the 
 eyes of the people must they be assailed and confessed." 
 We are crying out against the dangers of the church from 
 the rampant infidelity of the age. But, alas, it is not the 
 feathered and barbed shaft of Voltaire, the refined scepti- 
 cism of Hume and Gibbon, or the coarser blasphemies of a 
 Paine, a Taylor, or a Carlisle, that most endanger us. Ra- 
 ther need we fear and deprecate the infidelity of the church, 
 the practical scepticism of the lukewarm pastor, the efi'ect- 
 ive atheism of a worldly, and a time-serving, a vain-glorious, 
 and a selfish ministry. It is not the most specious or the 
 most active of the speculative heresies of the day, that we 
 have cause, brethren, so much to dread, as the heresy of 
 heart found in Christ's own church — the want of a purer 
 love, and a simpler faith, and a more vigorous hope. We 
 cannot afford the time requisite to decide the nicer contro- 
 versies of the day among true brethren, while this, the great 
 controversy of the church with her God, remains undecided. 
 Our sin against the commandment that bids us love our God 
 is as fearful a heresy as any in the list invented and propa- 
 gated by human perverseness. No, brethren, it is not a 
 fitting season for the church to be compounding unguents 
 for the freckled skin of a fancied, or at most, a frivolous 
 heresy ; while the plague of lukewarmness is sweeping her 
 streets, and the bier of spiritual death is passing on its way 
 from door to door of her habitations. We have another 
 and a sterner quarrel to settle. The stain of blood — of the 
 blood of souls, is on the floor of our deserted and untrodden 
 closets — upon our pulpits — upon our communion tables. 
 It IS, as the prophet of old witnessed, " not found by secret 
 
10^5 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 search, but openly, and upon all these." And yet we feel 
 it not, or ticknowledging it, we do not aright apprehend and 
 repent of the evil of our ways. 
 
 III. Lastly, then, let us, brethren, endeavor to fasten upon 
 our sluo-oish hearts the sense of the fearful character of the 
 guilt thus incurred. "We may learn it by looking to the 
 worth of the soul. Is the life of the body, though so soon 
 to terminate, guarded by all the terrors of earthly law — is 
 the murderer so sternly hunted, and so sorely punished ; 
 and is there no guilt in flinging away, or in aiding others to 
 cast away the life of the soul, its happiness and well-being, 
 not for threescore years only, but for ages multiplied upon 
 ages, and yet making no unit in the fearful sum of its eter- 
 nity ? Is the hand of the lapidary cautious when touching 
 the gem whose very dust is precious ? Is the touch of the 
 surgeon most delicate, but most firm, when probing or sev- 
 ering the organs of our bodily frame : and what shall not 
 be our care who have to do with the soul of man, so deli- 
 cately framed, so easily and irremediably injured — that soul 
 which is to sparkle as a gem on the Mediator's brow through 
 all ages, or to suffer under the venom of unhealed sin in the 
 ever-growing pangs of the second death ? The worth of 
 the gospel, neutralized by unfaithfulness in the ministry, 
 that gospel which angels announced with songs of gratula- 
 tion — which was sealed with the blood of a dying God — 
 and whicli bears the only hope of life for the world, affords 
 another standard by which to test the character of our guilt, 
 if we Alii to declare it in its whole counsel. The high 
 chums of the church, narrowed and famished, and degraded 
 by pastoral infidelity, bid us to awake ; for if any man defile 
 the temple of God, him shall God destroy. The fearful 
 dish(m()r brought upon the name of that God, who will be 
 sanctified in all them that come nigh him, may well fill us 
 with dread. And the thought of the wide-spread influence 
 we are to exercise through all time and through eternity, 
 may well cause the stoutest heart to quail. Another argu- 
 ment might be derived from the brevity of the life we waste, 
 and from its singleness. We have but one life— it is soon 
 spent, and suddenly as well as speedily may it be ended. 
 1 he dying are around us. They fill the seats of our sanc- 
 tuaries. They are at our boards, by the way they meet, 
 and in the house they surround us. Riches, and fame, 
 earthly lore, and earthly p„wer— what are they to the dying 
 
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 109 
 
 man ? How soon will all earthly distinctions fade away 
 from before the eye, as it glazes and settles in the last strug- 
 gle — and mock the grasp of dying agony. We are from 
 eternity. For it we live. Of it we testify. To it we pass. 
 Into that world of waking reality this life of dreams and 
 shadows is fast bearing us. Our kindred are there. The 
 former occupants of our pews are there. Ears that once 
 listened to the voice of our teachings are now filled with 
 the songs of the seraphim, or tingle with the cry of the de- 
 spairing and the lost. Eyes that have gazed into ours, as 
 we have looked down from the pulpit, have already seen 
 the Judge of all the earth. 
 
 What yet remains for them, and for us ? — Men of God, I 
 cite you to his bar. Yet a little while, and we stand before 
 the great white throne. The judgment is set. The books 
 are opened. Heaven and earth have passed away before 
 the glance that is transfixing our hearts. The history of 
 every day, the motives of every sermon, the morbid anato- 
 my of the soul, are bared to an assembled universe ; and 
 we with all the dead, stand up to give an account of the 
 deeds done in the body. Who would then take the fearful 
 tiara of the papacy, lined with the curses of its deluded mil- 
 lions 1 Who would then wear the earthly honors of the 
 fliithless pastor ? " And who shall live when God doeth 
 this ?" exclaimed an able but false-hearted prophet of former 
 times. Who of us shall live when God doeth this, may we, 
 taking up his lament, and prolonging it, say, for who may 
 abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he 
 appeareth ? Blessed be his name, the sentence is not yet 
 pronounced. The books are not yet written out. On the 
 leaf yet uninscribed, and perhaps the last, let us write our 
 weeping penitence. For yet is there hope in Israel con- 
 cerning tins thing. 
 
 Oh, is it not from such scenes that we turn with deepest 
 sensibility to the Cross of Christ ? Were it not for the 
 fountain opened in the house of David, were we not, breth- 
 ren of the ministry, of all men most miserable ? From his 
 multiplied snares, from his burdensome sins, how delightful 
 for the Christian pastor is it thither to flee, and to plunge 
 in its cleansing and quickening streams. How vivid, when 
 viewed after such contemplations, how vivid in beauty, and 
 how vast the wealth of the promises which assure us the 
 aid of the Spirit, an<] the workings of that Power by which 
 
110 MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 the weak are made strong, and the foolish wise. Upon our 
 Master we will cast ourselves. Often have we provoked 
 him, but never has he spurned us. For the sake of his 
 goodness, and his free and repeated forgiveness of our con- 
 stant transgressions, will we endeavor to preserve our gar- 
 ments henceforth unspotted. Shall we loiter, or trifle, or 
 engage in petty bickerings, or turn aside at the beck of 
 sense or of pleasure ? God helping us, brethren, we will 
 not ; for behind us are heard the steps of the avenger of 
 blood, before us gleam the crown of righteousness and the 
 palm of victory, and the pealing anthems of the blessed are 
 heard in the distance. No, we will quit the plain of worldly 
 strife, of sensual and secular pursuits, and climb the rugged 
 mount of communion and transfiguration. We will relax 
 our grasp of the polluting and perplexing vanities of this 
 life, that we may set our affection on things above, where 
 Christ sitleth at the right hand of God. We will move 
 onward through the j)eople of our charge, as those who shall 
 lead or follow them to the grave, and meet them again in 
 the judgment. We will pass along, intent on this one 
 thing, the glory of God in the salvation of souls. We will 
 be the men of one book, aiming to throw over the literature 
 and the arts of life, over the scenes of business and retire- 
 ment, over man in all stations and under every aspect, its 
 hallowed light. Our eyes have seen there the descending 
 glories of an opened heaven. We have looked downward 
 upon a world sinking into the flaming abyss of hell. We 
 liave heard the commandment that we pluck men out of the 
 licry torrent. Where is our strength ? Conscious of our 
 utlt r weakness, we will fling ourselves back on Him who 
 Wiis our own deliverer— we will ask the Spirit of God in 
 the name of Christ, and girt in his strength, we will labor, 
 praying to make it, with holy Paul, our dying declaration : 
 1 have fought a good fight ; I have finished my course ; 
 1 have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me 
 a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous 
 Judge, shall give me in that day, when the pure in heart 
 and the clean of hands shall see God. 
 
THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH NEEDED FOR 
 HER RISING MINISTRY. 
 
 (Delivered before the N. Y. Baptist Education Society, August 18, 1835.) 
 
 "Making mention of you in my prayers ; that the God of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the 
 
 SPIRIT OF WISDOM AND REVELATION IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIM : THE EYES 
 OF YOUR UNDERSTANDING BEING ENLIGHTENED." — EpheslailS i. 16, 17, 18. 
 
 Prayer for the descent of the Spirit upon the Church 
 hud been among the last employments of Paul's Lord and 
 Master, as He was girding hhiiself for the scenes of Geth- 
 scmane and Calvary. Even when the Holy Ghost had come 
 in answer to the requests of our Great Advocate, the inter- 
 cessions of the saints for each other were yet needed to pro- 
 long and to deepen the influences of the Heavenly Visitant. 
 To gain these intercessory supplications of the church be- 
 came then an object of high moment. How earnestly Paul 
 besought for himself, that his disciples and fellow-confessors 
 should remember him in their approaches to the mercy-seat, 
 is apparent on the most cursory reading of his epistles. In 
 the present letter to the Ephesian saints, in each of those 
 which he addressed to the Thessalonian church, in the sec- 
 ond of his epistles to the Corinthians, in those to the churches 
 at Colosse and Philippi, in his private letter to Philemon, 
 and his general one to the Hebrew believers, the same re- 
 quest for their prayers is urged upon various grounds, but 
 in all these eight epistles with marked, and, at times, impor- 
 tunate earnestness. 
 
 What he asked of his brethren for himself he was ready 
 in turn to impart for their benefit. He loved prayei-, and 
 practised it himself, as he enjoined it upon others, " without 
 ceasing," To the ministry of the word and to prayer he 
 had, like the apostles who were in Christ before hini, given 
 himself, as to the one proper employment of his office, and 
 the future business of his life. The evidence of his conver- 
 sion, by which our Lord reassured the suspicious Ananias, 
 
112 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 was, "Behold he prayeth." When with Silas he occupied 
 the duno-eons of Philippi, he broke the silence of midnight 
 with the voice of prayer: when parting on a former occa- 
 sion from the elders of this same Ephesiau church, and when 
 biddiiio- fareweil to the disciples at Tyre, prayer lightened 
 their mutual regrets, and gave voice to their mutual affec- 
 tion. When himself receiving in the temple at Jerusalem 
 the vision of his Lord that sent him to the far Gentiles, and 
 when healing the father of Publius at Malta, his previous 
 preparation had been found in prayer. And to the last days 
 of his life he remained in this exercise, true to the church 
 and to her great Head, even as he was seen entering the 
 skirts of that dark storm, which seized him and bore him 
 upward to his heavenly rest. Amid sorrow and loneliness 
 he breathes neither dejection nor misanthropy ; but we find 
 him assuring his beloved scholar, that without ceasing he 
 had remembrance of him in his prayers night and day. A 
 like touching ])ledge of Christian affection he had already 
 given to his friend Philemon, to the Ephesian and the Co- 
 lossian churches, as well as to those at Philippi, Thessalo- 
 nica, and Rome, to all of whom he avers a similar mindful- 
 ness of them in his private supplications. Thus it was, that 
 even from the chariot of bloody triumph, which wafted him 
 to his Father's house, there was seen falling the mantle of 
 his example and his prayers, to bless that militant church, in 
 whose sorrows and warfare he might no longer share. 
 
 And upon whom did the great apostle of the uncircum- 
 cision here invoke the descent of the Holy Ghost, as a spirit 
 of wisdom and revelation? Not upon those who knew not 
 God, and whose eyes had not yet been opened to discern 
 the glories of the Saviour ; but upon men whom he con- 
 gratulated as " the faithful in Christ Jesus " and " the saints 
 which were at Ephesus." Nor by his prayer for the en- 
 lightening of their understandings did he impeach their 
 society of any peculiar imbecility or ignorance. In their 
 libraries had been found volumes of unhallowed and magical 
 lore, amounting in value to fifty thousand pieces of silver. 
 Then- ability to study these implied some general knowledge, 
 and a taste for such researches required some measure of 
 native talent and sagacity ; and it rendered probable also 
 the possession and the mastery of at least some volumes of 
 a sounder literature. Nor was it for a crowd of rude and 
 untaught converts, the ill-fed tlock of some incompetent 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 113 
 
 shepherd, that he supplicated the heavenly gift ; but for a 
 favored church who had long profited by the ministrations 
 of an apostle, and whom he himself had for the space of 
 three years ceased not to warn night and day with tears^ 
 to whom he had given alike private admonition and more 
 public instructions, and who in addition to his personal 
 addresses were now receiving his written counsels. But 
 though thus bred in heathen scholarship, and taught by an 
 apostolical pastorship, and although thus anxiously and 
 fondly cared for by these the " labors more abundant " of 
 an inspired teacher, they needed still the aids of the Holy 
 Ghost to open the eyes of their understanding. It had not 
 yet become a needless petition to be oficred for them, that 
 they might receive the spirit of wisdom; nor was it an un- 
 timely request on their behalf, that to them might be more 
 laro-ely given the spirit of revelation in the knowledge of 
 Christ. If ever there were a splendid exemplification of 
 the fact that the doctrine of the Divine Influences does not 
 foster indolence, and that, again, human industry does not 
 supersede the necessity of the Spirit's aids and agency, it 
 was here, in a church so ably and so assiduously taught, yet 
 the objects of such impassioned prayer — for whom Paul 
 labor(3d as if he were the only keeper of their souls, and for 
 whom he prayed as if Providence had placed the charge of 
 their souls entirely beyond the reach of his personal effcirts. 
 You are convened, fathers and brethren, as the friends of 
 ministerial education. It were needless to labor in proving 
 its necessity to men who have already decided the question 
 in their own minds, and whose presence in these scenes may 
 well be regarded as sufficient warrant for supposing them 
 convinced of its importance. But is it unseasonable to re- 
 mind you, brethren, that more than human agency is needed 
 in the education of the ministry — that the great work of 
 training up the Christian and the Christian pastor is not 
 confided to your faltering hands alone — but that the instruc- 
 tion of the church and of the teachers of the church is to be 
 commenced and consummated by the Holy Ghost, as a 
 superior agency enveloping and making effective your infe- 
 rior instrumentality ? With all your wise provision for dis- 
 ciplining your younger brethren, ere they go forth I)carmg 
 the banner of Christ, the trumpet and the sword of the gos- 
 pel, into the field of battle, you will not forget that your 
 interest with the Great Captain of the Lord's Host is yet 
 
 16 
 
114 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 more needed to be exerted in their behalf. For him who 
 speaks, then — for your own churches — for the whole family 
 of our Lord upon earth — and, especially, at the present time, 
 for this school of the prophets, let me beseech you, like the 
 apostle before us, to implore the gifts of the Holy Ghost. 
 Ask the counsellincrs of Divine Wisdom, and the illumina- 
 tions of the Uncreated Light. And to this end bear with 
 me, in reminding you of the need which the theological 
 student has for your prayers, first, from his present snares, 
 and next, from his future influence, and lastly, in urging 
 upon you your consequent duty to continue instant in your 
 supplications for him. 
 
 I. While exposed, in common with yourselves, to all the 
 iOther temptations that belong to the depravity of his own 
 heart, the character of the evil world around him, and of the 
 Evil One that rules it, and subjected in addition to the pecu 
 liar besetments of his youthful age, let it not be forgotten, 
 that in his very studies, necessary as they may be, there are 
 found perils of formidable character. Many of these will at 
 once suggest themselves. He is in danger of converting the 
 season of leisure and the scenes of retirement here allowed 
 him into the refuge of indolence. Or, if studious and suc- 
 cessful, he may be infected with the pride of learning, and 
 lose the docility of Christ's disciple. Or, forgetting the dis- 
 tinction between knowledge and wisdom, he may crowd the 
 chambers of the soul with the furniture of a useless or frivo- 
 lous learning, until the miud is converted into a magnificent 
 luniber-roon), where the great truths of Christian faith and 
 duty have little space left them to live and to work. By 
 unskilfulness in the discipline of the mind, he may walk 
 forth into the scene of strife with this world and its vanities, 
 armed without, but enfeebled within — burdened and crippled 
 by the ill- chosen armor in which he has been pleased to 
 incase himself, and felled to the earth, at the first onset, by 
 the weight of his own ill-managed lore. Or in studies well- 
 selected and vigorously pursued, he may exert himself to 
 purpose ; but it may be, that all is done from an unholy 
 rivalry, or with regard to earthly lucre or earthly honor. 
 And he may thus go forth into the world, crowned with the 
 chaplet of academic distinction, while from every leaf of that 
 chaplet the mildew of God's curse, breathed over his selfish- 
 ness and earthliness, is falling, and blasting the labors of his 
 hands wherever it falls. AH the peculiar snares of the 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 115 
 
 student's life it were impossible now to discuss : let us but 
 advert to some of the more common, though often unsus- 
 pected, evils that beset him, 
 
 1. The first of these to which we would now allude, as 
 one against which he needs to be guarded by your prayers, 
 is that of losing his sympathy with ordinary and uneducated 
 mind. As his own intellect acquires vigor and expansion, 
 be may learn to pass rapidly, and with ease, through trains 
 of reasoning, which are without interest, or which may even 
 be unintelligible, to others who have not been conducted 
 through the same routine of preparation. And forgetting 
 this fact, while pursuing a track of research, which to his 
 own mind teems at every step with objects of interest, and 
 where on every hand breaks out some new and deligluful 
 vision, he may be traversing scenes into which no common 
 auditory can follow him, and whilst he hurries on, delighted 
 himself, and confident of delighting others, his hearers may 
 be toiling in perplexity far behind him, wondering at the 
 speed of his course, and bewildered as to the object and 
 end of his journeyings. The art of simplifying his know- 
 ledge needs perpetual study. As in his subjects of thought, 
 so in the language with which he learns to invest his favorite 
 themes, he may unintentionally and insensibly lose sight of 
 the people, and, forgetting their simpler idioms, find his 
 thoughts naturally fall into terms metaphysical and abstract, 
 with which men in general are little familiar, and towards 
 which they may be disposed to show little patience. The 
 same estrangement from the common mind may be gradually 
 imbibed from the spirit of much of the literature with which 
 he becomes conversant. Much of Greek, and nearly all of 
 Roman letters, breathes a proud oblivion or contempt of the 
 commonalty. The scornful sentiment of one of the most 
 celebrated of Latin poets, "hate for the profime rabble," is 
 but too faithfully reflected from the pages of ancient schol- 
 arship. Through a large portion of the literature even of 
 Christian lands, the same feeling, not avowed indeed, yet 
 bui too evident, lives and breathes. And by a gradual as- 
 similation to the models of classic beauty, a student may find 
 the spirit of alienation from the popular intellect diffusing 
 itself over his mind and labors, even while preparing to pub- 
 lish abroad that gospel, of which it was once the high boast 
 and the heavenly seal — that it was preached to the poor. 
 Visiting the lowly and the ignorant, it told them in the 
 
JJg THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 simplest words, and by the aid of the most familiar imagery, 
 of irlorics celestial and divine, before which the proudest 
 splendors of pagan morality and the most gorgeous visions of 
 heathen poetry waned and grew pale. Against this tendency 
 to lose his hold upon the common mass of an audience, it is 
 no small part of a wise education to guard. Yet, on the 
 other liand, let it not be forgotten, that no man can long 
 profit or guide the minds of a people, who is not himself in 
 mental power or furniture raised above them. 
 
 2. Another of the evil influences which often engross the 
 mind of the scholar devoted to prolonged and solitary study, 
 is the love of fame. Harshly as the accusation may fall on 
 the ears of some, it is but too certain that the mass of litera- 
 ture, even in the lands now most thoroughly evangelized, is 
 idolatrous in its spirit and tendencies. More covert indeed, 
 but not less impious, than the paganism which defiles the 
 monuments of Greek and Roman genius, it is yet but idol- 
 atry, a decent and baptized idolatry. It teaches the student 
 principles of action and a strain of feeling essentially hea- 
 thenish. The love of fame for its own sake is boastfully 
 avowed as the scholar's great incentive : to live in the mem- 
 ories and upon the tongues of other ages, is the guerdon of 
 his toils and sacrifices. As the great motive for action, this 
 is a principle as sternly rebuked in the New Testament, as 
 is that covetousness which bars against its votary the gates 
 of heaven. It is a principle of which our Saviour explicitly 
 testified, in the case of the Pharisees, that because they 
 were guided by it, seeking honor one of another, they could 
 not believe, and therefore could not be saved. 
 
 3. Another evil of that literature with which the theologi- 
 cal student must in his studies become more or less intimate, 
 is the blind worship of genius, as an object of admiration 
 for its own sake, and apart from the moral uses to which it 
 is devoted. This is a leprosy that has scarred the whole 
 literature of the present age. Mental power, though em- 
 ployed oidy to corrupt, to mislead, or to oppress, is deified, 
 with as much reason as men might ascribe divine honors to 
 the whirlwind fi)r its might, or to the volcano for its powers 
 of wide-s])read desolation. The resplendent skin and shin- 
 ing crest of the serpt at win for him a place in the bosom, 
 though a serpent still ; and the polish and symmetry of the 
 arrow give it value in our eyes, though its point is known 
 to be tipped with deadly venom, and its barbs are yet red 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 117 
 
 with the blood of former victims. This should not be so. 
 To him that seeks the welfare of his country, and knows 
 how much her social well-being depends upon the purpose 
 and purity of her popular literature, it is indeed matter of 
 sorrow and of alarm that any moral obliquity and the gross- 
 est and most hideous depravity ir.ay win patient and admir- 
 ing listeners, if it only come playing the pander, with the 
 voice of melody, and the garb and air of refinement. This 
 insane idolatry of genius may gradually discolor even the 
 views of the youth who has dedicated himself to minister at 
 the altar of God ; and he who should become the Aaron of 
 the camp may be its Achan. The Babylonish garment and 
 the golden wedge may be secretly pilfered from the spoils 
 devoted by God's just wrath to utter destruction and obliv- 
 ion ; and he who should have shown himself the intercessor 
 and guardian of the church, may prove, like Diotrephes or 
 Ahab, the troubler of Israel. Before the tribunal which 
 awaits us, it is not power, but the rightful use of power ; it 
 is not wealth, but the proper employment of our pittance or 
 our opulence ; it is not talent, but the motives with which 
 and the modes in which talent exerted itself, that shall bring 
 honor to the possessor. Yet a little while, and we are there. 
 But meanwhile, how many myriads may be lost for ever by 
 that irrational admiration of irreligious genius, and that 
 blind love of human applause, which are as the plague-spots 
 of our popular literature. 
 
 4. Oppositions of science falsely so called became, even 
 under the eyes of an apostle, an occasion to many of erring 
 from the faith. Akin to the worship of great names in lite- 
 rature, and often found resulting from it, is that presumptu- 
 ous and unprofitable speculation which has at times invaded 
 the schools of the church. Dogmatizing where the Scrip- 
 ture was silent, or running into perplexed refinements where 
 the Scripture held its usual tone of plain and practical good 
 sense, men have introduced error upon error into the church 
 of former ages, and our own may not hope for exemption. 
 They who have arisen to combat the new delusion have 
 ofteu, with the natural infirmity of the human mind, done so 
 by evoking and patronizing some opposite error — the an- 
 tagonist indeed of the first, but equally fatal with it to the 
 true interests of religion. And learning- and talent have 
 clustered and glowed around the contending theories, until 
 the whole heavens were illumined bv the lustre of two 
 
21y -IHK PRAYKKS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 contending systems, adverse and opposite in all else, save in 
 this:— that both were alike lawless and eccentric meteors, 
 splendid as thev were baleful, gazed upon with adtniration 
 by the upturned eyes of wondering multitudes, yet proving 
 themselves at last but magniticent heresies and wandering 
 stars to which was reserved the blackness of darkness for- 
 ever. Into the shades of academic retirement such errors 
 may yet find their way. And in the endowments furnished 
 by the piety and liberality of one age, the next may see in- 
 stalled lieresies which the original founders of the institution 
 would have indignantly denounced as the foulest blasphe- 
 mies. To preserve alike individuals and institutions from 
 this eating canker of unsound doctrine, creeds will not 
 fidly avail, nor any barrier of human invention. Anxious 
 denunciation will not avert or remedy the evil, but only the 
 Spirit of God, sought and won by fervent prayer. Nor can 
 any precautions merely human check the growth of these 
 evils. They are not the proper fruit of Theological Semi- 
 naries, although those schools may at times afTord a favora- 
 ble scene for their development. The abolition of every 
 Theological Seminary in the land would not effect the ex- 
 tinction of errors. They would still spring up as the native 
 growth of the unsanctified heart, starting in irrepressible 
 freshness from a root which human skill cannot reach, and 
 which no power merely of earth has ever succeeded in ex- 
 tirj)ating. 
 
 5. lint perhaps the chief danger of the youthful student is 
 to be feared, not so much in the infusion of positive error 
 into his doctrinal system, as in his studying the truth merely 
 as an exercise of the understanding, without securing its due 
 influence on the heart. It is possible for us to investigate 
 the gospel — the true and life-giving gospel — merely as a 
 science, and to delude ourselves, and to curse the church 
 with that heartless form of sound knowledge which may be 
 called the Religion of the Intellect. By this we here in- 
 tend, not merely a false system, wrought out by the self- 
 confidence of an unsanctified intellect, neglecting and amend- 
 ing the Scriptures, a class of errors which the term might 
 well include ; but we intend, at present, by it to describe 
 only that reception of r/u- t ruth itself \v\\\c\\ gives it no lodg- 
 ment in the atiections, and allows it no control over the life ; 
 which examines the Scrijjtures but as furnishing a system to 
 be learned and defended, and comes not to them as to oracles 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 
 
 119 
 
 claiming our obedience — as to promises upholding, and 
 precepts guiding, and penalties guarding the spiritual life 
 of the inquirer himself. Now it is possible for a student to 
 attain in this mode a full and correct knowledge of the great 
 outlines of Christian faith ; while the spirit of the gospel is 
 an utter stranger to his bosom, and of its great mysteries he 
 has no practical experience, and with its informing life he 
 has no communion or sympathy. The distinction which 
 may thus exist between a familiarity with the external forms 
 of any science and its actual mastery, may be illustrated by 
 a reference to the scenes of worldly activity. A man may 
 discern and relish, in a writing which he peruses, the strength 
 of its logic and the ornaments of its rhetoric, and yet all this 
 delight might consist in his mind with an utter indifference, 
 or a hearty distaste, to the object and purport of the writing. 
 His scholarship might give him an intelligent admiration of 
 the vehicle into which the thought had been cast, while his 
 prejndices, or his habits, or his interest, might lead him to 
 look upon the cause which it advocated with an uncom- 
 promising hostility. Thus, to illustrate our meaning, might 
 we imagine the instrument that severed our people from 
 their dependence upon the mother-country, and asserted our 
 claims to a separate station and an equal rank among the 
 nations of the earth, finding its way on its first promulgation, 
 over mountain and forest, until it lighted down upon some 
 remote hamlet, where it was seized and scanned with an 
 eager curiosity. And among the group, who were gathered 
 to listen to that portentous instrument, might be found the 
 teacher of the neighboring peasantry ; and into his hands, 
 with one consent, that Declaration might be put, that he 
 should read it to the anxious crowd pressing around him. 
 And in scholarship he might be the only one of the number 
 qualified to appreciate the literary merit of that great instru- 
 ment, or the moral daring of the attitude in which it placed 
 our country. And the beauty of its style and the force of 
 its sentiments might extort the man's reluctant applause, 
 and his heart might yield a passing homage to the bold mag- 
 nanimity of the statesmen who had planned and published 
 it ; whilst the whole current of his feelings and wishes placed 
 him in determined and deadly opposition to the cause it 
 represented. And at the side of this man so competent to 
 estimate the document, but withal so set in heart against it, 
 might stand some illiterate ploughman, himself unable to 
 
120 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 read tlie instrument to which he had listened with a breath- 
 less interest, and still less qualified to descry any literary 
 beauty it might possess. And yet the man's whole soul 
 might be seen kindling with sympathy for its spirit — in his 
 bosom alone it might have met with congenial elements : 
 and while others are staying to praise its sentiments, or to 
 admire its phrases, his patriotism might have borne him 
 homeward, to bid a hurried farewell to the inmates of his 
 home ; and the morrow, while it found his neighbors still 
 busy in pondering the literature of the act, might have 
 dawned upon that unlettered patriot upholding the act itself 
 in the tented field, and prepared to pour out his blood in 
 enforcement of a document, whosf words he could not have 
 spelled out to the children he had forsaken. And even such 
 may be the diflerence between an intimate acquaintance with 
 the literature of the Bible, and an honest, but withal, an un- 
 lettered submission to the Bible as the charter of our own 
 personal hope. 
 
 Yet such is the infatuation of mankind on the subject of 
 religion, that a heartless but intelligent admiration of the 
 Scriptui-e literature is often supposed by its possessor to be 
 proof of his advancement in true religion. And the scholar, 
 blinded by vain-glory, may go on flattering himself and 
 astounding his age, with the mass and splendor of his criti- 
 cal acquisitions in illustration of the Scriptures, while he is 
 farther from any real knowledge of its contents than the 
 ignorant slave, whose range of knowledge never extended 
 to the reading of one word in the pages of that volume, but 
 who throws himself back on his couch, cheered in his dying 
 hour, penetrated to the heart, and sanctified, and saved, by 
 the truths of that Bible which was known to him only from 
 the lij)s of others. 
 
 Before overvaluing, as we are too prone to do, the results 
 of biblical criticism, let us remember that a tliorough ac- 
 quaintance with the original dialect of an evangelist, and a 
 perfect and most ajjplauded familiarity with the customs of 
 the age and its phrases, and with the scenery and costume 
 of tlie biblical narrative, if we may so speak, can after all do 
 nothing more, than bring up the possessor of it to a level, 
 in point of intellige.ice and endowments, as a skilful inter- 
 preter, with the bigoted Pharisee, who had often heard our 
 Saviour himself sj)eak : yet that man, learned as he might 
 be in his own national Scriptures, and with all his perfect 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY, 121 
 
 and prompt apprehension as to our Lord's meaning, seeing 
 as he did the Saviour's ideas at once, and without the aid 
 of glossary or grammar, beheved not — heard not aright, and 
 in truth knew not the gospel, because of the state of his 
 heart, which made him, having eyes, to see not, and, having 
 ears, to hear not. And even thus, the man who in our own 
 times should pride himself on advantages confessed to be 
 inferior to those of the Hebrew doctor, and who, neglectful 
 of the state of his heart, would forsooth impose upon all oth- 
 ers the interpretation given by his own transcendent schol- 
 arship, may well be reminded, that, with all his science and 
 with all his talent, he may be as ignorant of the principles 
 of Christ's gospel, as was that contented and ignorant Phar- 
 isee ; and before allowing him to take, in grave dignity, his 
 seat as an ermined and stalled doctor in our schools, we call 
 on him to show that he has reached even the attainments of 
 those, whom Paul styled " babes in Christ." Let it not 
 be supposed that we would decry learning, or underrate its 
 value in the study of the Scriptures. We seek now but to 
 bring forward the cautionary truth, that the teachings of the 
 Spirit are yet more necessary — that they are indispensable. 
 Another and varied form in which the same pitiable delu- 
 sion, the mere religion of the intellect, displays itself, is in 
 the pride of orthodoxy. A man may have succeeded in de- 
 vising a correct system of theology, guarded by apposite 
 texts, and fenced around with the authority of great names ; 
 and may deem the post which he now holds to be the very 
 citadel and heart of religious truth : and yet of true piety 
 the man may be utterly destitute. The delusion is found 
 as well in the hearers as in the teachers of the church ; and 
 niany, there is cause to fear, content themselves thus with 
 the truth dissevered from the love and the life of the truth. 
 They hold the verity of the Scripture indeed, but it is not 
 the living, and acting, and controlling truth — the laborious, 
 self-denying, and heavenly-minded truth, as it is in Jesus, 
 received by the installation of Christ himself in the heart, as 
 inmate and master of it, and as ruler over the conduct. It 
 is the truth preserved as by Egyptian art, heartless and dis- 
 embowelled — a varnished and painted mummy, where are 
 the lineaments and the hues of life ; but the warmth, the 
 energy, the soul, are fled ; and the true votary of Christ 
 finds there no fellow-feeling, and to the out-gushings of his 
 sanctified affection " there is no voice, nor any that answer," 
 
 17 
 
122 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 and he goes his way saddened from the voiceless and life- 
 less imao-e of his Master. With such mistaken apprehen- 
 sions of religion, it is possible for us to constitute ourselves 
 the very sentinels of orthodoxy, descrying and denouncing 
 the first stirrings of heresy, as it peeps and mutters from 
 the earth ; while the heart is unhumbled and carnal, our 
 devotion is but a burdensome form, and the Avorld reigns 
 supreme in our affections. And thus may we, proudly 
 standing before the churches, like the scholastic doctors of 
 the dark ages, rejoice in the title of the Mallets of Heresy ; 
 whilst before God we stand ourselves impeached of hetero- 
 doxy as to the first and greatest of the commandments — 
 practical errorists as to the first principles of the Divine Life, 
 
 Into this false form of religion it is but too easy for the 
 heedless student to descend ; if he do not, according to the 
 injunction of Jude, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep him- 
 self in the love of God. 
 
 Yet let it not be suggested that studies so rife with dan- 
 ger might wisely be omitted. It were easy to show that 
 these evils are the growth of a heart which in any situation 
 will find the occasions of stumbling, and minister to itself 
 sources of temptation in every scene. We might show the 
 evils which beset the duty of pastoral visitation, and how 
 prone the ambassador of Heaven may there be to sink into 
 a mere caterer of frivolous gossip and petty scandal ; — we 
 might show the perils of ministerial activity in behalf of the 
 benevolent enterprises of the day, and how easily the zeal 
 of the pastor thus engaged may sink into a calculating and 
 heartless bustle ; — we might discover danger even in the 
 course of the pastor, who rejoices in the many conversions 
 that attend his ministry, and how the affection of his people 
 may become to him the incitement of vanity, and in them 
 an idolatrous forgetfulness of the God who prepared the in- 
 strument, and gave its whole success — until it would be seen, 
 that every work of good, and even the elevations of heart 
 found in the closet while communing with God, ministered 
 tcniplation ; and that the man who had been caught up to 
 the third heaven, and seen the visions of God, needed the 
 buflctings of a thorn in the flesh, lest the visions should un- 
 duly exalt him. Yet the peril accompanying those visions 
 did not destroy their value. No, knowledge is to be sought, 
 although it has its snares ; and religion is to be studied, 
 although the student needs to be watchful over his own 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 123 
 
 spirit. And how, by the grace of God, scholarship may be 
 combined with piety, has been sufficiently shown in the 
 former ages of the church. In Owen might be seen an in- 
 stance of varied and profound attainments united with the 
 most thorough study of his own heart ; and the man who 
 moved into the field of polemic theology among the most 
 formidable of combatants, with the dust of many libraries 
 upon him, is yet found holding communion in his practical 
 writings with the heart of the unlettered Christian ; and the 
 delighted reader wonders at the vivid and accurate portrait- 
 ure of his own feelings, drawn by one whose literary pur- 
 suits and whose political activity did not trench on his habits 
 of private devotion, or prevent his prayerful examination of 
 his own heart and way. In Baxter we see how familiarity 
 with the most abstruse researches of metaphysical specula- 
 tion may yet consist with eminent devotedness as a pastor 
 and surpassing usefulness — and a style which in his practical 
 writings speaks to the heart of all classes, as with a burning 
 vehemence. Edwards might be quoted as a model of patient 
 and profound investigation — the mighty taskings of a mighty 
 intellect, united with childlike humility, great holiness, and 
 the widest and most enduring usefulness. Of Leighton we 
 might speak as exhibiting the union of classical refinement 
 and a style of admirable clearness and simplicity with an an- 
 gelic elevation and sweetness of sentiment, that seem to throw 
 over his pages the very spirit of the Scriptures. And to Pas- 
 cal we might refer as a sufficient proof, did he stand alone (and, 
 thanks be to God, alone he does not stand), how science, 
 and genius, and literature, may become the meek handmaids 
 of religion; and how an intellect of the very highest order, 
 and philosophical attainments which, for his age, and under 
 the circumstances of their acquirement, lifted him above most 
 of our race, may be united to a childlike docility and humility, 
 and an earnest and spiritual piety, such as have not often 
 blessed the world apart and disconnected, and which combin- 
 ed, as they were in him, proved that God did indeed make 
 man but a little lower than the angels. And the time would 
 fail to tell the lights of our own era — of Henry Martyn, of 
 our own Carey, and Hall, and Ryland, and Fuller, and of 
 the long and resplendent line of witnesses, whose history 
 shows how mind may be tasked and stored, while it is sanc- 
 tified ; and how the culture of the heart may keep equal 
 pace with that of the intellect. 
 
124 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 No — these examples and a vast cloud of like witnesses 
 admonish us, that the evils already alluded to are not the 
 necessary or inseparable results of knowledge, and that the 
 church needs, and may profit by, the culture of the mind in 
 her pastors, great as may be the dangers attending that cul- 
 ture. 
 
 II. From the future influence, it was said, as well as from 
 the present employments of the rising ministry, we might 
 infer the need of prayer in their behalf for the outpourings 
 of the Spirit. How large an amount of moral power is to 
 emanate from the inmates of these walls, eternity alone can 
 make manifest. But much has already been done by this 
 and similar institutions. And as we see the giant strides 
 of our nation in power, and arts, and wealth, and how fast 
 her moral needs are outstripping the preparations for her 
 moral culture, and how rapidly her villages and settlements 
 are outgrowing the largest efforts of the church in their be- 
 half, we have reason to pray that the resources of that 
 church may be increased. We have cause to pray for the 
 men who shall arise to mould and guide the coming age, 
 that they may be of high spiritual endowments, and trained 
 by habits of devotedness and energy for the great and difli- 
 cult work before them. The young men here taught will 
 bear no limited sway among the pastors of the next genera- 
 tion. If you would have them men like Samuel Pearce, 
 whose holy love shall burn in their memory upon the 
 hearts of the churches, you must have them men who, like 
 Pearce, shall even in the Theological Seminary be marked 
 by eminent prayerfulness. Upon them in part will it de- 
 pend, under God, whether the glorious revivals which have 
 distinguished this favored nation shall go on, until they have 
 overspread and sanctified the land. Upon them, in their 
 station, will be suspended the religious welfare, and neces- 
 sardy therefore the political well-being, in no small degree, 
 of your chddrcn— the race that are rising to occupy your 
 homes and your sanctuaries. It will be for them to aid in 
 determinmg the question, of such fearful importance and 
 now in the course of solution, whether this nation, trained 
 tor self-government by moral and religious culture, shall 
 retam unnnpaired the liberty it has inherited ; or, whether 
 It shall plunge itself into the most cruel of all slavery, under 
 the deal and bloody despotism of the mob. Their faithful- 
 ness will uphold and extend, or their treachery embarrass 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 
 
 125 
 
 and break up, the great instrumentalities, the moral ma- 
 chinery, now at work in this nation for the conversion of 
 the world. And while busied in thus caring for distant 
 nations, it will be for them to see to it, that our American 
 Israel, in going forth against the more remote enemies of 
 the Cross, see not, like the men of Ai, as she turns back to 
 her own homes, the flames arising from the face of her own 
 land, overspread and consuming by the fires of superstition 
 or atheism. From within these walls are to go forth a por- 
 tion of the needed missionaries to heathen lands, and of the 
 translators who shall give to the pagan in his own tongue 
 the Book of God, To some of them, as they go forth pub- 
 lishing to all the Bible given for all, to the world the Savi- 
 our who died for the world, and to all flesh the Spirit that 
 is yet to be poured out upon all flesh, it may be reserved to 
 win in the perilous onset the honors of an early grave, and 
 perhaps of a cruel martyrdom. As in the Pentecostal 
 church were seen gathered the representatives of many and 
 distant lands, even thus may soon be assembled within these 
 walls the representatives, by anticipation, of many a heathen 
 ti-ibe — the heralds who shall go forth to regions widely re- 
 mote, casting over the broad earth the one band of the gos- 
 pel, and knitting around all its tribes the ties of a common 
 brotherhood. Certain it is, that the doings and spirit of 
 each one here will have an influence for good or for evil on 
 myriads through eternity. May God by his Spirit forbid, 
 that the influence thus exerted by any one of us should be 
 that of the insincere or the loitering ! 
 
 III. Lastly, let us for a moment turn your thoughts to the 
 consequent duty of being found earnest in prayer for the 
 rising pastors and evangelists of your churches. To qualify 
 for duties so vast, and to guard against dangers so many and 
 great, what shall avail but the Spirit in its sevenfold energies ? 
 And if prayer may win the descent of that Spirit, how evi- 
 dently is it the duty of all to be found ofl'ering it! Of the 
 unconverted here shall we ask it. Their cry, alas, is going 
 up with fearful accord and constancy, that God and his Spirit 
 should depart from us; for they desire not the knowledge of 
 his ways. And your prayer may be heard to your own 
 undoing. Neither for ourselves nor for you let it prevail; 
 and would that it were no longer offered. But of those here 
 who have hope in Christ, are we not entitled to expect that 
 they will not be found wanting? 
 
126 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 For the sake of the church, then, we beseech not of min- 
 isters alone but of all Christians, their prayers. How great 
 is the power upon her happiness, and honor, and increase, 
 of an enlightened- and spiritual ministry. Alas, what pastor 
 shall become such, or continue such, if his brethren sustain 
 not his feeble arms by their own hands outstretched heaven- 
 wards? The charge of barrenness is by the Christians of 
 our own age made to bear too exclusively upon the ministry. 
 Know ye not, brethren, that palsied limbs will send back 
 chilled and sluggish blood to the heart? You would have 
 an efficient ministry — become a praying people. And as 
 you value your own growth in grace, and your own instruc- 
 tion and comfort ; as you desire the conversion of your chil- 
 dren and friends ; as you prize the union, and stability, and 
 prosperity, of your churches, be more fiiithful in the secret 
 and devout remembrance of your rising pastors and evange- 
 lists. And how lovely and how excellent is a devoted and 
 holy church ! Thin its members as you may — take from it 
 worldly influence, and wealth, and talent — but leave it bright 
 in the lustre of eminent holiness ; and does it not become a 
 home to which the heart of the Christian turns with instinc- 
 tive and growing affection ? How solemn the rites— how full 
 of (juiet, unpretending power, the example of such a commu- 
 nity — how close the union, and how celestial the peace of 
 believers thus distinguished ! And who that has seen such 
 a flock "through quiet valleys led," in which the pastor 
 moved as a father or brother m the midst of the united family, 
 and there was the oneness of interest, the ready and guile- 
 less confidence, of some rural homestead, inhabited by a 
 numerous and afTectionate household, but has felt that he has 
 seen the miage and the earnest of heaven ? Would, brethren, 
 that every church represented in this assembly might become 
 such, liut a few indolent wishes, a few fervent prayers, a 
 ew passionate vows, wdl not effect it. Self-denial, faith, 
 love to Christ, forbearance, mutual and persevering prayer 
 call, with the blessing of God, effect it. All these are the 
 iruils of the Spirit, and for that Spirit as descending on the 
 churches of our kind, and on their ministry, and on their 
 sclmols of theology, let us pray diligently and habitually. 
 
 \ et another reason for entreating the prayers of the church 
 in l)e half of her pastors and guides, is that the honor of 
 Uirist IS involved 111 their character. Paul, in alluding to 
 the messengers of the churches, has without hesitation termed 
 
NEEDED FOR HER RISING MINISTRY. 127 
 
 them " the glory of Christ.''^ The ministers of the gospel, 
 trained or training, are the ambassadors of our Saviour. It 
 is for the honor of the King and his whole kingdom that 
 they be men of Christian skill and integrity — that their 
 embassy be successful, and their persons inviolate of the 
 enemy. They bear the name, they represent the person, 
 and plead the cause of our common Redeemer. For his 
 sake, then, and the love of Christ constraining you, pray 
 for them. The petition ofl'ered in secret may sustain the 
 Christian faithfulness, that the tiattery presented to your 
 pastor or brother would only wound: the infirmity which 
 your censures have assailed in vain, may be healed by your 
 secret intercessions. And the gain is Christ's. " Inasmuch 
 as ye have done it unto one of the least of these," he will 
 say, "ye have done it unto me." How deUghtful would it 
 be to discover, in the great day of revelation and retribution, 
 that your prayers, unknown of men, but marked by your 
 Father who seeth in secret, had given new strength to the 
 servants of the cross, nerved their drooping courage, broken 
 the edge of difficulty, bedimmed the glare of temptation, 
 calmed a throbbing heart, and restored serenity to a troubled 
 bosom. Delightful indeed will it be to find, that in your 
 closet the impulse had been given which sent new force and 
 life into the heart of vour pastorship. But far more delight- 
 ful will it be, to learn that Christ had thus been honored— 
 that through this means new glories had been gathered around 
 the brow that is yet to wear the many crowns of earth ; and 
 that, instead of wounding your Master in the house of his 
 friends, you had been honored to crown him in the persons 
 of his ministers. 
 
 And how vast the range of blessing your prayers may take ! 
 Who can tell the history or trace the wanderings of yon 
 cloud that sails in light and glory across the sky, or indicate 
 from what source its bosom was filled with the vapors it is 
 yet to shed back upon the earth? Perhaps, though now 
 wandering over the tilled field and the peopled village, its 
 stores were drawn from some shaded fountain in the deep 
 forest, where the eye of man has scarce ever penetrated. 
 In silent obscurity that fountain yielded its pittance, and did 
 its work of preparing to bless the far-ofi" lands that shall yet 
 be glad for it. And even thus it is with the descending 
 Spirit. Little do we know often of the secret origin ot the 
 dews of blessing that descend on the churches of God. in 
 
128 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH NEEDED, ETC. 
 
 the recesses of some lowly cottage, in the depths of some 
 humble heart, may be going on the work of pious interces- 
 sion, in answer to which the grace of Heaven descends on 
 us and on our children, on the labors of the wondering and 
 joyful pastor, and on the hearts of the far heathen, until the 
 wilderness and the solitary place are glad for them. The 
 time is to come when from every home, brethren, such prayer 
 shall arise. Let us sustain and swell, in our day, the as- 
 cending volume of supplication that is yet to roll around the 
 globe, and never to fail, until over a world regenerated and 
 purified the morning stars shall again shout for joy, and the 
 earth, emerging from her long and disastrous eclipse of sin 
 and wrath, shall yet again walk the heavens in her unsullied 
 brightness — a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dweUeth 
 righteousness. Till then we have no reason, no right, to 
 intermit our supplications ; and it is only when, in the final 
 accomplishment of David's prayer, his greater Son shall have 
 come to reign king over all lands, and to have dominion from 
 sea to sea — it is not until that prayer shall have been made 
 for him continually, and he shall daily have been praised, that 
 the believer remaining on earth will be warranted to adopt 
 to his own lips the touching and triumphant close appended 
 to the supplications of the crowned Singer of Israel : " The 
 
 PRAYERS OF DaVID THE SON OF Jesse ARE ENDED." 
 
THE CHURCH OF CHRIST THE HOME AND 
 HOPE OF THE FREE. 
 
 (A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the South Bap. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., 
 July 13, 1845.) 
 
 " STAND FAST, THEREFcftlE, IN THE LIBERTY WHEREWITH CHRIST HATH 
 MADE US FREE, AND BE NOT ENTANGLED AGAIN WITH THE YOKE OF BOND- 
 AGE."— Gal. V. i. 
 
 The Jewish church had been a state of preparation for 
 higher privileges and larger illumination, that were, as yet, 
 beyond them. Paul elsewhere, therefore, speaks of that dis- 
 pensation as being a condition of pupilage, such as the heir 
 undergoes during the season of minority, when, though the 
 heir, he was treated but as a servant, and was kept in sub- 
 jection. The new dispensation ended this, and the burdens 
 and bonds of the old ceremonies were then abrogated, and 
 the people of God were welcomed into the rights and free- 
 dom of adult heirship. But Judaizing teachers wished to 
 undo all this, Paul resented it, and protested against it. 
 He charged the disciples in the Galatian church, to guard 
 with all tenacity, firmness and jealousy, this glorious free- 
 dom which Christ had won for them, and conferred upon 
 them. It was a gift steeped in the atoning blood of their 
 Divine Liberator, a conquest won for them upon the high 
 places of the field in Gethsemane and Golgotha. They 
 were to be meek indeed ; but their meekness was not to 
 show itself in putting their necks passively under a burden, 
 which, as Peter himself, the great apostle of the circumcision, 
 had said, " Neither our fathers nor we were able to bear."* 
 Nor should they, in deference to any teachers, or precedents, 
 or traditions, allow themselves to " be entangled again with 
 the yoke of bondage." The Church of Christ had, by her 
 Sovereign and her Saviour, been made free, and it was but 
 
130 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 a proof of due fidelity to her Head, and of due gratitude to 
 her DeHverer, that she should remain free. Calvary had 
 bought them, not only exemption from the curse of the law, 
 as a means of justification, but deliverance from the entire 
 ritual of Judaism. We come not, my brethren, into the 
 church of the redeemed, as some Jewish Christians in the 
 first century contended, as proselytes to the Jew, but as dis- 
 ciples to the Nazarene. Our ministers are not the heirs of 
 Aaron, nor our ordinances the mere offshoots of Jewish cere- 
 monies. The Saviour had, indeed, been the trunk and the 
 root of David, in all, even the earliest ages, and in the Pa- 
 triarchal as in the Levitical, and in the Levitical as in the 
 Christian dispensation ; and when the local, national, and 
 transient church of Judaism broke itsen off from that stem, 
 like a branch broken off from its parent trunk — we of the 
 new, the Gentile church, were grafted into its place ; but we 
 came to possess privileges it never knew, and to inherit and 
 grasp promises which it had only beheld at a vast distance. 
 The Jewish church had been grafted into Christ, under the 
 restrictions of an infant heirship ; the Christian church are 
 grafted into the same Christ, with the liberties of an adult 
 heirship. Thus the graft was made a new branch, with new 
 twigs shooting from it, and other foliage and other fruit 
 than those that had clothed the broken and fallen branch of 
 the Jewish church. 
 
 In a land blest, as is ours, with a freedom of which we 
 are, perhaps, at times unwisely boastful — having seen, but 
 little more than a week since, the anniversary of our nation- 
 al independence celebrated through our broad land by one 
 storm of joy, and living as we do in an age of democratic 
 tendencies, when the rising surges of popular power are swel- 
 ling and dashing around the base of the oldest thrones of the 
 old world ; it seems not unsuitable or unseasonable to think 
 and speak together of Christian liberty, and to remember, 
 amid the tumults, and plans, and fears of our times, how 
 much the Church of Christ has to do in realizing, diffusing 
 and establishing true Freedom. Let us remind others, and 
 recall to our own recollection, how little that much used and 
 much abused, that idolized and blasphemed name. Liberty, 
 is really understood or enjoyed out of the pale of the Church 
 of the Living God. 
 
 Let us now consider 
 
 L The nature of true Freedom. 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 
 
 131 
 
 II. The Church of Christ as the Home of the Free, where 
 alone, Liberty in its highest sense is to be enjoyed. 
 
 III. The Church of Christ as the Hope of the Free, whence 
 alone, the ultimate and universal emancipation of the race is 
 to proceed. 
 
 When our Saviour spoke of this matter to the Jews, they 
 resented it, and replied with more zeal than truth, that they 
 had never been in bondage to any man.* It was scarce fit- 
 tin o- language for the men whose national history began with 
 the long and hard servitude to Egypt ; whose fathers had 
 hung their harps on the willows of Babylon during a tedious 
 captivity of seventy years ; who had been peeled and scatter- 
 ed by the tyranny of the princes of the royal family of An- 
 tiochus ; and who were, at the very hour of uttering the boast, 
 licking the dust beneath the kingly feet of Herod, the Idu- 
 mean, and fretting and biting, like prisoned wolves, at the 
 chain of the Roman, unable to break, and yet most loth to 
 bear it. And it is so in our day : men may talk much of 
 freedom that are as yet destitute of its best privileges, and 
 ignorant of its first principles. What, then, is true free- 
 do tn ? 
 
 I. Freedom is the absence of all restraint. A mere created 
 and dependent being cannot enjoy absolute and unqualified 
 freedom, because his finite and dependent nature necessarily 
 imposes certain restraints which he cannot surmount or 
 escape. Surrounded, again, as we are, by others (our fellow- 
 creatures), who all have their rights and wishes as well as 
 ourselves, our just freedom consists in the absence of all 
 such restraints as are not necessary to prevent our doing 
 wrono- to the happiness and rights of others of our fellow- 
 men." The owner of one of these houses is free to make 
 what use he will of his own habitation, that does not render 
 it a nuisance and injury to his neighbors. But because he 
 is free to use his own property at will, he is not free to set 
 it on fire, and thus involve an entire street in the conflagra- 
 tion. The passenger in one of the ships lying at our wharves, 
 is free to occupy his cabin, and, for the time, it is his castle ; 
 but he is not free to scuttle it, and sink his fellow-voyagers 
 along with himself. 
 
 Again, we are beings constituted with reason and con- 
 science, and our freedom cannot be called rational freedom, 
 
 * John viii. 33. 
 
132 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 if employed in contravention of the dictates of right reason, 
 or in Ivnovvn disregard of truth, which is to be the standard 
 by which reason acts, or in opposition to the warnings of 
 conscience, the monitor within us. We are not as much free 
 to follow error as to follow truth. We are not free to de- 
 fend wrong as well as right. It is putting a violence on our- 
 selves, on the nature within us, to make this perverse use of 
 our freedom. It is rather the ruin of liberty. It is virtually 
 enslaving the soul, to put a force upon right reason and an 
 enlightened conscience, by resisting their dictates. 
 
 Nor is ours a desirable freedom, unless when used to ad- 
 vance the happiness both of ourselves and our neighbors. 
 The madman left to hack away his limbs, or to destroy his 
 own life by plunging from a precipice, or to scatter fire- 
 brands, arrows and death upon others, and say, " Am I not 
 in sport?"* — and the child, left in uncurbed freedom to its 
 own ignorance and waywardness, to glean in our streets and 
 lanes a precocious wickedness — neither of them enjoys a lib- 
 erty that is desirable, because in both cases the freedom is 
 used to ultimate misery instead of happiness. Of a just, ra- 
 tional, and desirable freedom, these are then the limits. To 
 be truly a good, freedom must be guided by truth as its 
 standard, and aim at real happiness as its end. We are not, 
 of right, free either to follow falsehood or to speak it. We 
 are not truly free to work out our own or another's misery 
 and ruin. 
 
 Liberty, it appears then, is really a relative thing. It must 
 conform to truth and justice as its rule, and conduce to hap- 
 piness as its end. Where is the standard of the truth that 
 must guide it, and where the source and measure of the hap- 
 piness at which it must aim ? We answer, both are found in 
 God. His will, as that will is intimated in creation around 
 us, as it is developed in the conscience within us, and as it is 
 fully disclosed in the book of revelation before us — this, the 
 law and purpose of our Maker, is the one perfect standard of 
 truth, and therefore the limit of freedom. His favor is the 
 only happiness any of his creatures can know. To seek, to 
 learn, to serve, to see, and to adore Him, is the bliss toward 
 which all nature struggles as its end, the source of its true 
 and abiding felicity. And nought, therefore, is true freedom, 
 
 * Prov. xxvi. 18, 19. 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 133 
 
 that does not tend thitherward, because no other freedom con- 
 duces to true happiijess. 
 
 One who had never known the sorrows of vassalage and 
 captivity — in youth free as a shepherd lad, and in age enjoy- 
 ing the independence of an absolute prince, yet made the lib- 
 erty in which he rejoiced, to consist in subjection to God. 
 " And I will walk at liberty," said David ; " for I seek thy 
 precepts."* Instead of fettering him, the laws of Jehovah 
 constituted the freedom of his soul. Elsewhere, therefore, 
 he said, "When thou shalt enlarge my heart, I will run the 
 way of thy commandments."! The emancipation of the soul 
 is shown by its making haste in the path of pious obedience. 
 
 Wishing to be more than dependent and finite creatures, 
 and aspiring to be as God, our race lost freedom, when they 
 lost also truth and bliss in the fall of Eden. We wished to 
 be free from the Creator, dependence on whom was needful 
 to our existence and enjoyment, just as if a man should wish 
 to make himself free from and independent of his limbs, by 
 amputating them, and were to proclaim his independence of 
 his eyes by plucking them from their sockets. Creation 
 made man dependent on his limbs and eyes, and still more 
 did it make man necessarily, inevitably and eternally depen- 
 dent on his Creator. Aiming at more than he could of right 
 claim, or could by any possibility attain, man lost what he 
 already had. His conscience darkened, his passions inflam- 
 ed, his reason weakened ; he who had scorned to be the child 
 and servant of God became the bondsman of sin and death, 
 the child of wrath, the prey of Satan, and the heir of Hell. 
 Well is it for mankind that their powers do not equal their as- 
 pirations, and that their freedom of action is restrained. Sin 
 has, indeed, made this a bad and sorrowful world. But how 
 much worse, even than it is, had it been, were it not for God's 
 restraints upon our race. The book of history, the record 
 of man's acts, is a dark volume. But the book of man's pur- 
 poses, of his " imaginations, only evil, and that continually" 
 — the pages that will be opened in the day of judgment, the 
 dread volume of conscience, and of the hidden workings of 
 the heart, is a far darker one. Had no God checked and 
 curbed the race, the world would have been made a mere 
 hell, and human kind would have been long since demonized. 
 Those unhappy sufferers, plagued and possessed by devils in 
 
 * Ps. cxix. 45. t Ps. cxix. 32. 
 
J34 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 the times of our Saviour, would have been, not as now, ex- 
 ceptions to, but examples of the general rule, as to the char- 
 acter and condition, the tempers and the prospects of our 
 race. Even as it is, the Destroyer and the Father of lies ex- 
 ercises a fearful influence over us. The Scripture represents 
 us as his besotted dupes, led captive of him at his will, danc- 
 inc to the music of our chains, and in maniacal delusion, 
 working out merrily, and with a strong hand and a cheerful 
 heart, our own eternal damnation. Such is human freedom, 
 as the fall left it. 
 
 But what Eden lost, Calvary recovered. When the strong 
 man, armed, kept his goods in peace, blessed be the grace 
 and mercy of our God, a stronger than he, the Lord from 
 Heaven, came to disabuse us and to dispossess him ; and to 
 make us free from the tyranny of that fearful trinity, self, 
 earth, and Satan. To know Christ, is to be restored to true 
 liberty and happiness, and hence he said, " The truth shall 
 make you free." He compared his own work of human 
 liberation to the emancipation of a slave by the son and heir. 
 " If the son," he said, " make you free, then are ye free in- 
 deed." The son and not the steward has the right and the 
 power thus to rescue and set at liberty. It was as if he had 
 said to the Jews : Moses, in whom ye trust, was but as a 
 servant in God's house, and could not emancipate from the 
 law ; but I rule that house as son, heir and master. 
 
 2. The worldling' is not free. Can he, we appeal to your 
 own hearts, in the courts and presence of the heart-searching 
 God — can he, who is tossed to and fro by vain fears, an;i 
 hopes as vain, the sport of passions he can neither tame nor 
 satisfy — whose conscience is burdened with sin, whose recol- 
 lections are haunted by busy remorse — who sees the vanity 
 of the world at times, and yet knows nothing better to grat- 
 ify the cravings of his heart as it yearns for happiness — who 
 dreads death, and yet knows it to be inevitable— who looks 
 to the judgment, and feels himself unprepared ; can such a 
 man be called free ? No blood of atonement sprinkled over 
 his aching conscience— no smile of fatherly favor from the 
 throne, breaking through the gloom of affliction, and beam- 
 mg over Ins beclouded and uncertain path— does not all Na- 
 ture and all Providence cry out to him, as of old the aveno-er 
 to the crmimal : '^ What hast thou to do with peace ?" Look 
 at the vauntmg infidel, that boasts of having trampled under 
 his leet the vain terrors of revelation and eternity, and who 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 135 
 
 arrogates to himself the lofty title of the free thinker — the 
 man whose thoughts soar to a more than vulgar freedom, and 
 rove with unfettered wing — is he really the freeman he 
 claims to be ? Can he always quench conscience and stifle 
 fear ? Do his blasphemies annul the law, or annihilate the 
 lawgiver and the judge 1 Can his delusions fill up the fiery 
 pit, or cause the Heaven he derides and neglects to vanish, 
 as the baseless fabric of a vision ? No ; he prides himself in 
 a freedom he has not achieved — he has broken, he thinks, 
 the thrall and servitude of conscience and Christ, and an 
 eternal judgment. But it is all the delusion of a drunken in- 
 fatuation — the dream of a sleeping captive, who takes strong 
 drink when ready to perish, and in the visions of the night, 
 his prison, fetters, and guards are gone ; and he wakes, and 
 behold they are all here again. A fiery gulf envelopes and 
 awakes the sleeper, and ends the dream for ever. 
 
 Look at the free-liver, the gay sensualist, the pert trifler, 
 the wretched and misnamed daughter of pleasure: surely 
 these are free ? Not so. They forget God, but it is only 
 for a time, and their misery and their ruin is, that God will 
 not, cannot forget them. Wafted amid all their frivolities 
 continually onward toward a world of retribution, unable to 
 stifle all reflection, and to call up a good hope, they laugh, 
 they shout, they scheme, they build, they plant, and God is 
 not in all their thoughts : but His eye observes them. His 
 hand envelopes their most prolonged and reckless wanderings, 
 and His bar gathers them, compels their submission, and 
 issues their irrevocable and inevitable sentence. 
 
 3. Yet man is so constituted that freedom he must desire. 
 Look at the blind quest and gropings of our race after free- 
 dom — liberty or political deliverance for the state, and liberty 
 for the soul or mental emancipation. Political and mental 
 liberation have been the subject of the most earnest aspira- 
 tions, of fierce strugglings, and bloody sacrifices. As be- 
 tween man and man, much may have been gained. Far be 
 it from us to forget or dispute these temporal blessings, in 
 the train of social and spiritual emancipation. But if between 
 man and his God, there are instituted no better and ha])pier 
 relations, what is the ultimate gain to those who must soon 
 quit the world and its governments and schools, to enter 
 another and eternal state, where these governments and 
 schools are not to be transferred ? If, amid our political 
 schemings or our social reforms, we seek not and gain not 
 
136 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free, of W'hat avail are 
 the brief goods of earth, when we miss the enduring bliss 
 of eternity? The science of our times is, indeed, in the 
 hands of some of its cultivators, aiming to go further. It 
 would emancipate us of our fears and responsibilities. It 
 would screw God into the laws of his own material universe, 
 shut him up into a sort of blind and dumb, physical, unaltei*- 
 able Fate, and make all events and beings but the blind de- 
 velopment of physical, unconscious, unconscientious and irre- 
 sponsible laws of being. Pinioned, thus, as in a vice, God has, 
 on this theory, no freedom to act, apart from these old mate- 
 rial laws. He grows like a tree, and man and history arc his 
 bark and leaves. Man has thus no individual futurity, and 
 no accountability to trouble him. But meanwhile, in strip- 
 ping us of our fears, these philosophical emancipators have 
 torn from us our hopes. They have made the grave darker 
 than it was before their philosophy began its teachings, and 
 by annihilating the immortality of the soul, and abolishing 
 Providence, they have given us up to the hard servitude of 
 appetite, license, mortality and despair. Little is there de- 
 sirable in such a freedom as this, that thrusts the race out 
 of the immediate and paternal keeping of God, robs them 
 of a heaven, and assures them only of a quiet and sleepless 
 grave. It is like talking of the blessed freedom of an un- 
 fledged, unfeathered nestling, free to be hurled from the pa- 
 rent nest, free to flutter and fall to the earth — and unable as 
 it is to feed, guide, and defend itself, free there to lie and rot 
 into the undistinguished dust. Give us rather the freedom 
 of the sheltering home where God cherishes us, the free 
 guidance of the outstretched and parental wings flutterino- 
 over us, and directing our upward way. Give us back from 
 the yawning abysses of your vain philosophy, our old con- 
 solations, 
 
 * * * Our home, 
 Our God, our Heaven, our all. 
 
 Your nominal freedom from Providence is but an insult to 
 the intellect and an outrage on the heart. 
 
 II. The Church of Christ is the Home of the Free. 
 Here is found the freedom sin has forfeited, and after which 
 governinents and schools, revolutions and philosophies, have 
 groped in vain. 
 
 Now the Christian Church has been, by many, reo-arded as 
 
 L. 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 137 
 
 the very den of spiritual tyranny. But as we have already 
 and early seen, all desirable freedom resolves itself into that 
 which has truth for its standard and happiness for its results. 
 Now that gospel, of which the church is the embodiment, and 
 the guardian, and the channel, is the great truth requisite to 
 meet the wants, solve the doubts, and heal the maladies of 
 our nature. It is this gospel that secures our happiness amid 
 the trials of time, in the terrors of death, and through the 
 long cycles of eternity. But it may be asked, does it not im- 
 pose hard, unnatural restraints ? It gives rather new impul- 
 ses and aspirations, that fight with the corrupt and degradino- 
 tendencies of our old and fallen nature. Its restraints are 
 the emancipating struggles of a successful rebellion against 
 old tyranny, the sacrifices of a glorious war of liberation and 
 revolution. 
 
 1. The Church of the Redeemer is, be it remembered, of 
 right free, for it is a voluntary association. Christ establish- 
 ed it. He enlists as its members " a people made willino- in 
 the day of His power." Men are not born into it by birth in 
 a Christian nation — they are not forced into it by pains and 
 penalties, by the fires of the Auto da Fe, and the rack and 
 dungeon of the Inquisition. They are not born into it by de- 
 scent from a Christian parent, and lineage from a pious 
 household. To them that believe on His name He gives 
 power to become the sons of God. Belief is an untransfera- 
 ble, personal, voluntary act. It is the result of a spiritual 
 change, that turns them from the idols of the world, liberates 
 them from their old fears and tyranny, and makes them grate- 
 ful subjects of their Liberator and Redeemei-. To perfect 
 this glorious recovery, they put themselves under His care 
 and guidance as their Ruler. His presence in the Church, 
 and the perpetual influences of the omnipresent and omnipo- 
 tent Spirit, which He promised, as the Comforter and Teach- 
 er of His Church, make up the very life of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 Much has been said of a visible Church on earth, contain- 
 ing the Christians of a nation — or all nations. But in Scrip- 
 ture we find but two uses for the word Church. The one de- 
 scribes the great Invisible Church, comprising all the saints 
 of all dispensations before and since the incarnation, and em- 
 braces the whole sacramental host of God's elect on either 
 side the stream of death — the dead, the living, and those yet 
 unborn. The other, a Visible Church, is described in the 
 
 19 
 
138 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 New Testament as a collection of individual disciples, who 
 come together in one place for the word and ordinances of 
 Christ. Hence the Scriptures do not speak of a national 
 Christian Church of Judea, or of Asia Minor, but of the 
 Churches of Judea, and the seven Churches of Asia. This 
 new and unauthorized notion of a collective visible Church, 
 made up of the several congregations of a land or nation, is 
 the basis on which rests the assumption of the Roman Cath- 
 olic Church. The visible Church of Scripture, and of the 
 earliest fathers, is an independent and single congregation of 
 disciples. 
 
 As a voluntary association, some may think that the 
 Church has power to make its own laws, and may be desert- 
 ed at will. But this is not so. He who enters it cheerfully 
 does homage to Christ, as the lawgiver of his Church, who 
 has completed and closed the statute-book of the body he has 
 founded. In professing himself a Christian, he has made a 
 contract to which there are three parties — the Church, him- 
 self, and the Saviour, as head of the Church. As to his 
 power of quitting it, it follows, then, that the congregation he 
 joins cannot at will relinquish him ; for if they could release 
 their own rights over him, they are not entitled to release 
 Christ's rights over his professed and pledged followers. 
 Hence it will be seen, tliat they err who think that they have 
 a right at any moment to desert the Church — and that the 
 Church ought to permit them to withdraw their names from 
 the Church roll, and sink into the world unquestioned and 
 unrebuked. It is for Christ to release you. Should he, or 
 will he do it ? 
 
 2. Let us look again at the adaptation of the Church to 
 promote human happiness. It is a divine invention for tlie 
 diffusion of truth, the culture of piety, and the increase of the 
 order and enjoyment of the saints. It is not a nation, but 
 something yet more extensive, for it may include the deni- 
 zens of every clime ; and yet far more select, for it takes 
 none by mere national right ; it is not a family, but some- 
 thing more expansive, yet equally tender in its bonds of 
 union. It is not a caste, for it despises none, and rejects 
 none, yet like the caste it preserves amid human mortality, 
 and change, and revolution, a sacred order, not of ministers 
 but of samts, all kings and all priests unto God ; it is not a 
 secret society, for it makes no reserve of its doctrines or 
 practices from the world, yet in secret each of its true 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 139 
 
 members finds in the communings of his soul with God, the 
 sources of a secret and hidden hfe from heaven. " Your life 
 is hidden with Christ in God." Incurring none, then, of the 
 drawbacks and defects of the nation, the family, the caste, or 
 the secret society — it unites the advantages of them all. 
 
 Those who are spiritually its members by union with Christ 
 and the Holy Ghost, are, indeed, freemen ; they are free from 
 the dominion of sin, free from the curse of the law, free from 
 the bondage of ancient ritual and modern tradition, free from 
 the world, and free from Satan. This liberty is not license, for it 
 is the just, the rational, the durable freedom that, as we have 
 already endeavored to show, is the only one adapted to our na- 
 ture and wants. They are not free from Scripture— the Spirit 
 living in them does not contradict or neutrahze his own ear- 
 lier oracles in the written page, because He cannot contradict 
 Himself. They are not free from conscience ; it witnesses 
 for God, but not as of old and in their unregenerate state, to 
 condemn them. Sprinkled now with the appeasing blood of 
 the Mercy-seat, it has peace, and preaches grateful honiage, 
 humility, earnest and constant service to the Divine bringer 
 of that peace. They are not free from Christ. They would 
 not wish it more than the patriot would wish to be free from 
 the bonds of the country he loves, as he loves his own life- 
 more than the mother would yearn to be free from the chil- 
 dren whom she cherishes as her own soul. They are not 
 free from the love of the brethren, nor do they desire it ; this 
 brotherly union and alliance is not a restraint or an incum- 
 brance, but like wings to the bird,* instead of burdening, it is 
 an aid to soar, and a help in their heavenward way. 
 
 3. It is a state of preparation and training for higher 
 scenes. They are fitting to become at last members of the 
 family of heaven. The employments and services of the 
 earthly church are maturing and meetening them for the in- 
 heritance of the saints in light. The Sabbath, as it comes, 
 bringing its repose from toil, and its respite from eating 
 cares, hushing the din, and stopping the noisy wheels of bu- 
 siness, reminds them of an endless and unbroken Sabbath 
 above. They bring their sorrows to the sanctuary, and to 
 their brethren, and to their Elder Brother, and are consoled. 
 The snare of the tempter is broken. Age is Ughtened amid 
 its clouds of infirmity, and youth is guided along its steep 
 
 * Bernard. 
 
140 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 and slippery way, full of temptations. They look to the 
 time of final emancipation, to be free from the flesh, and from 
 sin and the tempter. In prayer and the word, and the break- 
 ino- of bread, and in their alms and efforts, they commune 
 with the saints of all classes and cUmes, with the churches of 
 other lands. And the brotherhood of the race, and their 
 heirship with angels, come into view as nowhere else, to the 
 saints of God, on God's day, and in God's house, 
 
 4. Yet see their freedom, in the relation of these several 
 bands of disciples to their own members, to one another, and 
 to the governments and states of the world. In themselves 
 the several members are all united to the same Christ, and 
 although there are different offices and diversities of gifts and 
 graces, authority is not tyranny, and subjection is not servi- 
 tude. The Church is not a mere nest of anarchy, nor yet is 
 it a scene of spiritual despotism, where a Diotrephes rules in 
 the pastorate, or an oligarchy in the deaconship crushes 
 pastor and people beneath its iron rod. Amongst their sister 
 churches they are related by sympathies and kind offices, but 
 own no subjection, and acknowledge no dependence, either 
 on cotemporary churches of their own country, or upon the 
 churches of other lands or other times, except as those 
 churches have held the same truth, cling to the same Head, 
 and have imbibed the same spii'it, The churches of the con- 
 gregational system acknowledge no ecclesiastical power in 
 synods, associations, councils, prelates or pontiffs. 
 
 They claim to hold directly of the ever-living. Almighty, 
 and omnipresent Spirit, and to lean, without the interposition 
 of ciiains of succession and lines of spiritual lineage, immedi- 
 ately and for themselves, on the bosom and the heart of the 
 Saviour, who pledged his presence to the end of the world, 
 where two or three are gathered m his name. To all pedi- 
 grees of a spiritual and priestly class claimed by some Chris- 
 tians, therefore, we oppose the permanent presence and in- 
 defeasible priesthood of the great Melchisedec of our profes- 
 sion, without beginning of days or end of years ; and we 
 claim to " come up out of the wilderness" stayed directly on 
 Christ, and " leaning on our beloved." We touch, so to 
 speak, his bare arm as our stay, without the intervention of 
 the enveloj)es of any favored order, or virtue running through 
 a chain of spiritual conductors. Our graces are not trans- 
 mitted, but taken direct from the Redeemer's own hand. 
 Nothing short of a personal application to Christ, we suppose, 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE, 141 
 
 will avail us in conversion ; and nothing short of the personal 
 presence of Christ will sustain us in the dying hour : and, as 
 churches, we judge nothing short of the personal presence of 
 the Lord can give energy to our preaching, validity to our 
 ordinances, or life to our worship. If we have this, let others 
 find, if they can, something better, holier, older, newer, and 
 vaster. We know it not, and seek it not. " Where the Spirit 
 of the Lord is there is liberty." Each visible church or sin- 
 gle congregation is a visible section of the great invisible and 
 Catholic church of all ages. 
 
 As to our relations to the state, we suppose that a church 
 established by law cannot, in the best sense of the word, be 
 free. Whether it be a republic or monarchy, we suppose the 
 state to have no prerogatives over the church of the redeem- 
 ed. CcEsar and Christ have different spheres. Christ paid 
 the tribute-money, during his incarnation, as a citizen of the 
 Roman state, and a subject of Ceesar. But it was not for 
 Cffisar to come into the church as a patron or a prince. He 
 could not dictate the Sermon on the Mount. It was not for 
 Pilate to prompt the parables, or for Herod to originate and 
 regulate the miracles of our Saviour, arrange his resurrec- 
 tion, or fix the gifts and time, and scene of the Pentecost 
 and its effusions of the Holy Ghost. And if the worldly 
 ruler could not do these, he has no right as a legislator in the 
 Christian church. The only competent legislator for that 
 church is the potentate so endowed. Hence, while as citi- 
 zens of the state we give, and gladly give tribute to whom 
 tribute is due, and fear to whom fear, and honor to whom 
 honor, when these limits are past we know no man after the 
 flesh. In our own country and denomination, and with our 
 social institutions, the intrusions and usurpations of the world 
 upon the church are most likely to come in the form of vol- 
 untary societies, attempting to control and use the churches 
 for their own purposes, and to break them down, and their 
 ministers also, when they prove refractory under such at- 
 tempted intervention. It is the duty, and the interest of the 
 church so invaded, to stand fast, unmoved by the shock of 
 the onset, unterrified by denunciations, and unbribed by pop- 
 ular interest and favor. Is the voluntary society of man's 
 organization, entitled to prescribe to the voluntary society of 
 Christ's organization ? We question it. To us it seems but 
 the old parable of Jotham revived— the thistle, thorny and 
 low, undertaking to rule by fire the cedar in Lebanon. Let 
 
142 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 US as churches root ourselves in the reserved rights of Christ 
 Jesus, and repel all other legislation. 
 
 III. Our last division is the province of the church, in 
 diffusing the true freedom of the race. Tke church of the 
 living God is the Hope of the Free. The true lover of lib- 
 erty wishes it extended to all. The Head of the church has 
 assured to him, from the Father, universal dominion. Far, 
 then, as the sun travels over our earth, we expect one day to 
 see the Sun of Righteousness ditfusing his beams and swath- 
 ing the globe with the brightness of his light as with a gar- 
 ment of glory. Wherever the rain falls or the dew gathers, 
 we look one day to behold the early and the latter rain of 
 the Holy Ghost difl'using its showers, and converting the 
 arid wilderness into the garden of the Lord. 
 
 1. We look, then, in estimating the future emancipatory 
 influence of the church, to what it has done. Receiving a 
 free gospel, and having been commanded what it had freely 
 received freely to give, it has preached to the poor, the ne- 
 glected, and the destitute. In our times it is preached by the 
 new engine of the press. The Word of God which, as the 
 incarcerated apostle rejoiced in his times to say, "is not 
 bound," has by the press, as the missionary has employed it, 
 been unbound and set loose in strange dialects, till the lan- 
 guages most generally spoken by our race have now all the 
 Bible in versions of their own. And Christians have largely 
 scattered them. From the gospel, as preached by some of 
 its most consistent adherents, has sprung the chief -political 
 freedom of our times. Even Hume saw in the Puritans, 
 whose religious and political principles he alike hated, the 
 conservators of English freedom. And American freedom is, 
 in a great measure, the harvest, sprung from seed sown by 
 the Puritan and Pilgrim Fathers of New England. As to 
 intellectual emancipation in the form of education, the best 
 common school systems of the old and new world have been 
 formed and matured by the Protestantism of the several 
 countries, where such schools are found. Most of our col- 
 leges are traceable to the Church of Christ. The American 
 Revolution triumphed, because a pure religious faith had 
 prej)arcd the way, by training a people disposed and capaci- 
 tated for freedom. The tirst French Revolution failed, be- 
 cause it had no such basis to rest upon ; and the second 
 French Revolution, that of our own times, failing to find 
 permanency on an inlidel basis, is seeking a religious support, 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 143 
 
 by reviving and patronizing the once decaying Romanism of 
 France. 
 
 Such are the forms of freedom, the freedom of literature, 
 government, and education, man most desires and exults in ; 
 and for all how much has the church done. But there is a 
 higher style of emancipation. The souls freed and saved, 
 and ushered into heaven — these more glorious trophies of 
 the gospel — who can calculate or follow, as, free from the 
 chains of sin and Satan, and from the low dungeons of earth, 
 the Liberator and Redeemer has led them in, to the rest, the 
 triumphs, the harpings, and the endless freedom of the heav- 
 enly woi'ld ? 
 
 2. But from what the church has done, let us look, in 
 estimating its prospective power, to what it would do. It 
 seeks the universal illumination, and emancipation, and evan- 
 gelization of the race. Its prayer is. Thy kingdom come ; 
 and the Messiah's kingdom is but another name for the lib- 
 erty wherewith Christ maketh free. It would banish war 
 and bondage, and intemperance, and ignorance, and oppres- 
 sion — all that can degrade, all that can exasperate, divide, or 
 brutify the race. The truth it would universally difluse ; 
 and freedom, as we have seen, leans on truth. Happiness it 
 does not believe in as being rightfully a matter of monopoly. 
 " Freely ye have received, freely give," is the motto of all 
 its spiritual enjoyments. Grace is their name, as coming 
 from Divine benignity — Grace, as commiserating all human 
 misery. Its blessedness is enhanced by being diffused. Each 
 new heir of heavenly joy fills the courts of the upper world 
 with new melody, and awakens a new anthem from the 
 seraphim and cherubim that circle the throne of light. A 
 religion thus vast and expansive in its hopes, and plans, and 
 prayers, is the religion likely to attempt what the race needs. 
 3. But does it accomplish what it attempts ? This brings 
 us to our last remark. We have seen what the church has 
 done, and what she woxild fain do. Let us now inquire, in 
 conclusion, what she can do ? She can do what nothing else 
 can. 
 
 (L) The freedom of the gospel, we observe, in the first 
 place is necessary ; for it alone has the power to make other 
 and inferior forms of freedom possible. When the Church ol 
 Christ would go forth to evangelize the savage in the last cen- 
 tury, philosophy stepped between the relief and the wretch- 
 edness, parting the barbarian and his benefactor, to tell the 
 
144 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 Missionary that he coukl not evangelize until the savage had 
 been first civilized ; and that civilization must always precede 
 the gospel. The Missionary thus rebuked, was not repelled. 
 He went on. The result has shown the folly of this inter- 
 meddling and braggart philosophy. Instead of the gospel re- 
 quiring civilization as a pioneer, it was civilization that could 
 not go on till the gospel had prepared its way. It was the 
 gospel that had made civilization possible. By awakening a 
 soul within him, and revealing a heaven and hell before him, 
 the savage was aroused to discern other and inferior wants, 
 and civil culture travelled in the train of Christian truth — 
 and where the Bible, and the Missionary, and the Sunday 
 School, had gone, the common school, constitutional law, art 
 and domestic comfort travelled after. But a similar feeling, 
 unhappily, prevails as to other social ameliorations. It is 
 said to the gospel and the church, " Stand back until educa- 
 tion, until a better system of relief for the poor, enfranchise- 
 ment for the slave, and democratic insurrections, prepare 
 your way." Our reply is, " Let the world stand back for the 
 church, and the church stand fast in the vanguard, where it 
 has a right to be." It is the Bible and the church, and the 
 Spirit of (tod, that must make most of these social ameliora- 
 tions possible. Here, as elsewhere, the policy of the nation, 
 as Christ has made it the policy of the individual, is to seek 
 first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these 
 things shall be added. Get a man or a nation converted, and 
 all else needful will come in its time. But an irreligious and 
 godless nation cannot be permanently free, cultivated, order- 
 ly,^ or happy. 
 
 There are blessings of the highest worth, which religion 
 can give to the world as no other influence can give them : 
 and yet the Church of Christ cannot bestow them directly 
 without swerving from her appointed course, and endanger- 
 ing her own purity. She blesses the world with national 
 wealth and household comfort, but it is indirectly by the in- 
 dustry and thrift she teaches. If she sought to accumulate 
 wealth, in her corporate character, or made riches a term of 
 her membership, she would become the slave of Mammon, 
 and laying up her treasures on earth, be, on the instant, dis- 
 owned of Christ. She gives the world political emancipa- 
 tion ; but it is indirectly, for if she directly mingled herself 
 up with the work of organizing one form of government, 
 and subverting another, she would be false to her supreme 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE. 145 
 
 allegiance to Christ, by making his kingdom tributary to the 
 republics and potentates of this world. She is to advance in 
 the world the cause of illumination and universal education. 
 But this, too, is done indirectly. If she did it directly, and 
 converted her pulpit into a mere desk of philosophy, and 
 made admission into her membership and ministry dependent 
 upon a certain amount of literary culture, she would not only 
 wrong the Holy Ghost, but retard ultimately, and in the most 
 important quarters, the very work of spiritual enfranchise- 
 ment for the race, that she would be scheming to aid. It is 
 the genius of her system, the law of her organization, to push 
 God's claims first, and let man's rights follow ; to aim at 
 heaven, and bless earth by the way ; to fasten one hand on 
 those skies where her King is throned, and her own crown is 
 reserved, whilst from the other she flings around as inferior 
 gifts, the earthly and indirect benefits of her influence, just 
 as a king, on the day of his coronation, scatters among the 
 crowd on his way gifts of price, but his own eye is on the 
 diadem and the throne. 
 
 (2.) The Church of God is needed again, for it alone can 
 make other freedom valuable. Leave the heart under the 
 bondage of selfishness and depravity, and the science and the 
 freedom of earth cannot wash the Ethiop white, or make any 
 change of circumstances heal the private and social miseries 
 of the times. There may be political freedom, and art, and 
 knowledge, where there is no piety found, but amid them 
 all, man will groan, like Solomon, exclaiming, amid his 
 wealth, while his heart ached under the royal purple, and his 
 head throbbed under the kingly diadem : " Vanity of vanities 
 and vexation of spirit." With a conscience that cannot be 
 calmed, and passions that cannot be subdued — with the foot 
 in the grave, and the hand stretching forth into an unknown 
 eternity, and groping in uncertainty to find some clue to 
 life and hope beyond the tomb — can man be blest until the 
 church of the living God has reached, disenthralled, enlight- 
 ened, and gladdened him ? What is political equality to a 
 dying sinner, and what your own Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence to a soul, that, burdened with its sins, and ignorant of 
 the Cross of Christ, asks in dismay, " How can man be just 
 with God?" "Ifamandie shall he live again?" No; the 
 church must make all other artd earthly blessings worth hav- 
 ing. The blood of Calvary must drop into the cup of worldly 
 freedom, or that freedom even is a bitter draught. 
 
 20 
 
146 THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 (3.) Lastly, we say, the Bible and the Church, and the 
 Spirit of God only, can give enduring freedom. Intelligent 
 and observing statesmen have begun to see that bad men 
 may rebel, but cannot be free. There are certain blessings, 
 that, if given, cannot be kept, unless there be a certain state 
 of preparation for them, a good soil in which they may be 
 planted. Solomon's vines, the fruit whereof was to bring a 
 thousand pieces of silver, would not thrive if planted on the 
 sea-shore, and flooded by the salt tide. So freedom, to 
 endure, must have its substratum of moral culture to sustain 
 it, and its showers of Divine grace to develop it, or else 
 it takes no permanent root, and brings forth no perfect fruit. 
 Establish to-day universal equality and universal suffrage, an 
 agrarian division of property, and universal education ; and 
 men's weakness, their difference of years, inequality of 
 strength, and talents, and influence, would re-establish dis- 
 cord and inequality to-morrow. Self-government is the basis 
 of all abiding liberal governments, and who, but the Chris- 
 tian, has learned to govern himself in truth ? Brotherly love 
 is the only intelligible and practical form of social equality ; 
 and a pure Christianity has the secret of this. Christianity 
 is the true citizenship of the world ; and universal peace, and 
 the free exchange by all lands and tribes of their several pe- 
 culiar goods and gifts, are possible only as all are grouped 
 around, and united by the Cross of a common Redeemer, 
 and the hope of a common heaven. 
 
 1. We live, my brethren, in eventful times. If ever the 
 cry needed to go forth, distinctly and repeatedly, over all the 
 battalions of the sacramental host, "Stand fast in your lib- 
 erty as Christ gave it," it is in our times. There are theo- 
 ries many of social change, and nostrums many of social 
 relief, that undervalue the church, decry the ministry, and 
 slight the paramount claims of the Bible. But regeneration 
 and personal conversion are the only remedy for man's great 
 misery. The chnrch is God's organization, for the true dis- 
 enthralinent of the world. Betray it not, improve it not, by 
 the admixture of human arts and inventions. Surrender it 
 not to the philosopher ; nor let the statesman subsidize it. If, 
 as sonie think, the death-grapple of truth and error is not far 
 off; it is the church, simple, spiritual, and divine, the body of 
 Christ, the tcm})le of the Holy Ghost, that is to be the invinci- 
 ble and infrangible battalion, the Innnorial Legion, in the im- 
 pending conflict. Out of it, we see her coming, "Fair as the 
 
THE HOME AND HOPE OF THE FREE, 
 
 147 
 
 sun, clear as the moon, and terrible as an army with ban- 
 ners." In the strifes and storms of the times the ship of the 
 state may labor and break. Unduly lengthened, some fear, 
 that the Union may part amidships. But the ship of the 
 church cannot founder. Her Lord, the Almighty One, is 
 embarked in her. 
 
 2. The grand, the vital question of all remains. Am / 
 free 1 It is not whether I be a professor of religion. But 
 have I felt the power of the gospel to subdue sin, cancel 
 guilt, and breathe peace ? Does it give me filial freedom be- 
 fore God, and fraternal freedom before man? 
 
 " He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free, 
 And all are slaves beside." 
 
 If the slave of Satan, how little can I, the prayerless and 
 the God-hating, and the God-forsaken, be an available bar- 
 rier to my country against the tide of evil influences that 
 would flood her. I need God's freedom to give and sustain 
 efiectually the human and social liberty I prize. 
 
 Am I freed by the grace of Christ Jesus, then am I free 
 to pray — to enter with holy boldness and a filial frankness 
 into the most holy place. The Bible charges the wicked 
 with enlarging their desires as hell. Surely, it is the strength 
 and honor of the Christian to enlarge his desires as heaven — 
 to ask according to the breadth of the promises, and the 
 greatness of the great King, at whose feet he is a petitioner. 
 " He that spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us 
 all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things ?" 
 Thus encouraged, seek blessings for the race, for your coun- 
 try, your city and yourself, in God's order ; salvation the 
 greatest first, and all else the lesser benefits in its train. 
 " Seek first the kingdom of God," and then expect that, ul- 
 timately, under its emancipating, enlightening, and peaceful 
 influences, the earth will become the suburbs of heaven. 
 The knowledge and freedom of the upper world will drop 
 down upon this lower world ; and man Avill breathe even in 
 time the spirit of the freedom of eternity, and anticipate the 
 joys of that city, described by the same apostle in this same 
 epistle, as the Jerusalem which is from above, which is free, 
 "which is the mother of us all."* 
 
 * Gal. iv. 26. 
 
THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 
 
 (A Discourse preached in the Amitj' St. Bap. Church, April 12, 1840, on occasion of the death of 
 TIMOTHY R. GREEN, ESQ.) 
 
 " How IS THE STRONG STAFF BROKEN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD !" 
 
 Jer. xlviii. 17. 
 
 These words were first spoken of Moab, But the imagery 
 they contain is used in Scripture to describe the benefactors 
 as well as the oppressors of mankind. The staff is the em- 
 blem of power, whether employed in kindness or in tyranny, 
 to support or to crush. The rod, shooting out of the earth 
 with its buds clustering thickly upon it, seems the image that 
 nature would instinctively select as the fitting emblem of 
 promise and hope. The surrounding nations, in the fall of 
 Moab, saw with astonishment that sceptre of power on 
 which they had long looked with awe, shattered, and the rod 
 of beauty cut down. And still, in his Providence, God 
 calls us to look with mournful surprise upon those on whom 
 many leaned, and from whom much was hoped — the young, 
 the beloved, and the useful, laid low in the dust. We had 
 counted upon their long life, we had deemed them too much 
 needed to the best interests of the world and the church, to 
 be early removed — we had expected their influence to ex- 
 tend and strengthen itself with the slow lapse of time, and 
 when we allowed ourselves to think of their death, we put 
 far ofl'the evil day, and thought of them only as going down 
 to the grave in a good old age, laden with blessings and full 
 of honors and usefulness. But, ere we are aware, their 
 course is ended, in the full flush of their strength and of our 
 own hopes. Their sun goes down while it is yet noon. 
 
 The dispensation to which our remarks at this time will 
 have reference, seems a mysterious one. We mourn, but 
 it is in submission. We are not forbidden to weep, for 
 Christ himself wept at the grave of his friend. But we are 
 forbidden to sorrow as those who are without hope, and our 
 
THE STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD, 149 
 
 mourning must be without murmuring. The event is one 
 tliat has saddened many hearts, and blighted the richest 
 promises of general usefulness to society, and the fairest 
 prospects of domestic happiness. We see a Christian widely 
 known, and as generally beloved, crowned with blossoming 
 hopes and clustering fruits, struck down into the dust, in the 
 strength of his years. We see, on the other hand, thousands 
 spared to old age, who seem to flom-ish in flaunting, peren- 
 nial barrenness, from whom society receives no good, and 
 who are the mere cumberers of the earth. Such scenes are 
 strange, yet they are not new. They were seen by the 
 prophets in their times, they drew tears from the eyes of de- 
 vout men in the days of the apostles. The Church of Christ 
 in the earliest ages must have wondered to see James, one 
 of the brothers whom Christ had hailed as the Sons of Thun- 
 der, falling in the very commencement of his career, while 
 they beheld Simon the Sorcerer remaining to be the curse 
 and snare of thousands. The devout men who carried Ste- 
 phen to his burial and made great lamentation over him, 
 must have had their sorrow mixed with no little perplexity, 
 when they looked at the bruised corpse of the zealous and 
 youthful evangelist, and, thinking of his untimely fate, turned 
 to Annas, the high-priest. They must have found their 
 faith tried as they asked, why the youthful preacher fell and 
 the hoary -headed persecutor was allowed to survive ? Yet 
 God did it. He ruled then and He rules now. This was 
 their consolation, and it must be ours. We would remem- 
 ber this, and be comforted. And may the God of all wis- 
 dom and of all consolation touch the lips of the speaker and 
 the heart of each hearer, as, standing beside this open grave, 
 we ask in reverence — 
 
 I . The purposes of our Heavenly Father in such bereave- 
 ments. 
 
 II. The duties to which we are at such seasons called. 
 
 I. There is much that we know not now, and that can 
 never be known in this world ; but this we know assuredly, 
 that God does not willingly grieve or afflict us. Reluc- 
 tantly does he wound us, and only because it is indispensable 
 to our sanctiiication, and our sanctification is indispensable 
 to our happiness. 
 
 1. And one great and known purpose of our Heavenly 
 Father in such overwhelming bereavements is, to teach us 
 that we should not misplace our trust. Man from his 
 
150 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 weakness must necessarily have, without and beyond himself, 
 objects on which to rely and confide. But it is his misery 
 and his sin, that he forgets the true object of trust, and leans 
 for support on helpers that must fail him in the hour of trial. 
 Men confiding in their fellow-mortals, are but like vines, 
 entwined around each other, and which thence lie rotting on 
 the earth, when they should rather with their tendrils climb 
 the sides of the Rock of Ages. We expect, all of us, from 
 earth what earth cannot give. We lean on the reed — it is 
 shattered in our grasp and pierces the hand that clasped it. 
 The disappointments and perplexities of earth are embittered 
 by our expecting constancy and permanent aid and lasting 
 sympathy from man — from man, the mortal, the being of 
 yesterday, whom to-morrow hides in the tomb — from man, 
 the fickle, whose purposes change, often and greatly, even 
 in the course of his brief life — from man, the feeble, whose 
 power is limited even where his kindness may continue un- 
 abated. This dislocation of our faith, this misplaced trust, 
 is the mystery of the world's ruin. What but this misplaced 
 reliance is it that makes up the false religions of the world ? 
 One idolizes his own reason, and therefore pours contempt 
 on the Creative intellect, because it rises to a height which 
 his tiny glasses cannot bring within their sweep, or sinks 
 into depths which his scanty lines and plummets cannot 
 fathom. Another trusts in tradition because he dares not 
 trust in the unguarded Scripture. Antichrist himself builds 
 his fearful system on this simple basis — a transfer of confi- 
 dence from Christ to the Church — from the Redeemer to the 
 redeemed — from the Sinless to the sinful — from the Infalli- 
 ble to the fiillible — from God to man. Instead of finding the 
 One only Saviour, men are taught to go in quest of the one 
 only Church. The Church rather than the Christ, is to 
 ensure their salvation, and protect them from all possibility 
 of error. The superstitious and the sceptical, the idolater 
 and the Atheist all agree, widely as their paths may after- 
 wards diverge, in leaving the way of Truth at this one point 
 — they trust in " the creature more than in the Creator." 
 And doing this, they inherit the curse of the God they for- 
 sake ; for "cursed is the man that trusteth in man and 
 maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the 
 Lord.*" And what is the process of the sinner's conversion 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD, 151 
 
 but the retracing of his course back to this fatal step, and 
 returning at this point to the way of truth, and making the 
 transfer of his confidence back again from self and earth to 
 one Saviour and God ? The turning point of our eternal 
 destiny is found in the object on which we rely. Faith and 
 unbelief are the poles on which the eternal world revolves. 
 Yet, even when God has brought us to renounce all earthly 
 confidences, and to make Him, the High God, our Refuo-e 
 and our Portion, the heart is continually prone to relaps°e. 
 The Church of God is but too ready to prize undidy the 
 helpers of her faith whom God has raised up ; and to guard 
 us from the consequences of an error so fatal, the Holy One 
 of Israel breaks the rods in whose beauty we delighted, and 
 causes the props on which we have leaned to crumble be- 
 neath us. And this misplaced confidence in earthly friends 
 is found but too compatible with a neglect rightly to employ 
 the blessings we so value. The king of Israel could neglect 
 that prophet in his life-time, over whose death-bed he cried 
 in passionate despair, " My father, my father, the chariot 
 of Israel and the horsemen thereof." He could weep over 
 the expiring prophet, as if in his death the God of Israel had 
 perished, and the fall of that one man had thrown to the 
 earth all the bulwarks of the land ; and yet he had disre- 
 garded that holy seer of the Lord in the days of his health 
 and strength, and given little heed to his instructions. Thus 
 it is, that we contrive at once to undervalue the blessing, as 
 to any actual use made of it ; and to overvalue it, in our 
 expectations of the advantages it is to ensure us. 
 
 2, Another great and avowed design of our Heavenly 
 Father in such dispensations, is, to convince us of our sins, 
 and sever us from them. The misplaced confidence already 
 shown to be so habitually our feeling, is itself a sin ; but it 
 is not the only sin thus visited. All transgression requires 
 some mark of the displeasure of the God against whose law 
 it offends, and the beauty, harmony and happiness of whose 
 universe it mars. Sin, the act of man and his invention, has 
 caused all the misery that darkens our world. The hand 
 that plucked from the tree in Eden the forbidden fruit, aided, 
 by that act, in tearing up every goodly plant of hope and 
 every scion of promise and enjoyment, over whose fall man- 
 kind have since wept. Each bereavement that makes our 
 homes desolate and puts out the light of our tabernacles, and 
 that clothes our sanctuaries with mournincr — each funeral 
 
152 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 threading its slow way through our busy streets, and each 
 sandy ridge in our crowded church-yards, eloquently reminds 
 us of sin. It was through that gate of sin, which man's own 
 rash hand forced open, that the Avenger Death entered the 
 world, and Eden became a place of graves, and the Paradise 
 of God, once redolent with undying beauty and glittering in 
 perennial life, became what the sin of Israel in the wilder- 
 ness made the scene of their enjoyments to them, a Kibroth 
 Hattaavah. It is thus that God checks not only our per- 
 sonal but our social transgressions. Paul declares that many 
 amongst the Corinthian believers slept the sleep of death, 
 because of the sins that infested that branch of the Christian 
 Church. And we, my dear friends, as a Church, have 
 doubtless deserved at God's hands this sore and bitter be- 
 reavement. Let us feel it, and ask wherefore God has so 
 heavily afflicted us? Let us "be zealous and repent." 
 With a holy indignation let us examine ourselves for the 
 traitor sins that have provoked this chastisement, and, if 
 God's purpose be answered in thus divorcing us from our 
 idols, even this calamity shall work for our good. 
 
 3. A further end that the Providence of God seems to 
 pursue in such visitations, is the teaching us His own inde- 
 pendence of the instruments He employs. It seems to us 
 unaccountable, that after having endowed with every gift 
 and grace those whom He has raised up to be the benefactors 
 of their age, He should scatter and dissipate His own gifts 
 and hide the treasures He has thus accumulated, as a dark 
 and unused hoard, in the grave. After having chosen his 
 servants, conducted the process of their education, and quali- 
 fied them by trials and lessons and privileges for the work in 
 which death surprised them. He interrupts them often at the 
 very season when they seem most useful, and when their 
 continuance has appeared indispensable to the interests of 
 the family gathered around them, or the churches with whom 
 they walked. We wonder that a Martyn, a Summerfield 
 and a Pearce are but shown to the churches, and then with- 
 drawn. Now, if we do not so far sin, as to put our trust in 
 these our friends, but our confidence is really in God alone, 
 we may yet limit too much the Holy One of Israel. We 
 may suppose that He is able to bless us only through certain 
 favorite channels. To show his own independence, and 
 that " He will send by whom He will send," God may sum- 
 mon hence his most useful servants by what seems an 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 153 
 
 untimely call, that, in the language of Paul, " the excellency 
 of the power might be seen to be of God, and not of men." 
 The Sovereign of the Universe must not appear even to re- 
 semble those earthly monarchs whose aggrandizement is 
 owing more to the skill of their statesmen and the conduct 
 of their generals, than to their own policy or prowess. It 
 was in part, perhaps, for such reasons, that, in bringing the 
 chosen tribes to the Land of Promise, God determined to 
 bury their leaders in the way. Had these entered Canaan 
 at the head of the tribes, Israel might have thought that their 
 God could bless them only through the instrumentality of 
 Moses, Aaron, and Miriam ; nor had they then asked or 
 received their Joshuas and their Deborahs, the Samuel and 
 the David that adorned their later annals. And how skill- 
 fully does God contrive to show his independence of all his 
 instruments. He withdraws, one by one, each individual 
 thread in the warp and in the woof of human society. It is 
 removed, and its place supplied by another, and yet the 
 whole web remains unbroken. Amid perpetual change, the 
 scheme of human society and the plan of the Divine govern- 
 ment moves on in unbroken continuity. 
 
 4. And even were we able to trace to no other purpose the 
 origin of the affliction that has bowed us in the dust, we know 
 that there is one errand it was undoubtedly intended to accom- 
 plish. It came to remind us of the Sovereignty of God. 
 This is a truth which even the most pious are apt to forget. 
 We fail to remember that God is the Great Proprietor of the 
 Universe, and that we ourselves, and our friends, our health 
 and life, and all that we have, and all that we are, belong to 
 Him, as the possessions which He may arrange and remove 
 at his pleasure. We do not wish to be called to account by 
 a stranger for the use of what is our own, and we can ex- 
 claim at such intermeddling, " Is it not mine own ? Is thine 
 eye evil because I am good?" And should not God be allowed 
 the same right? And there are dispensations of Providence, 
 the great errand of which seems to be, to leave on our hearts 
 the impression, " God giveth no account of any of his mat- 
 ters."* We wonder and we suffer ; but we feel, that 
 although " clouds and darkness are round about Him, yet 
 righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne."! 
 "His path is in the great waters,"! ^"<^^ ^^^ cannot trace it. 
 
 * Job xxxiii. 13. + Psalm xcvii. 2. ; Psalm Lxxvii. 19. 
 
 •21 
 
154 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 But thouo-h in those waters our earthly hopes be wrecked — 
 though the son, the brother and the friend may be buried in 
 their abysses — though " deep calleth unto deep," and all 
 " his waves and his billows go over us," we know assuredly, 
 that He who moves amid that storm is Just, and the foot- 
 steps which we cannot follow are those of a Father, moving 
 in a right way towards his own glorious purpose. And this 
 lesson itself, were it the only one, is worth all it costs. To 
 know that God rules, that He is supreme, is, to every mind 
 which feels aright, consolation under any trial, and a reply 
 to all murmurings. Each bereavement is but the act of One 
 who gave all that we now lose, and who is but resuming his 
 own boon. If He try our faith as he did that of Abraham, 
 by asking our Isaacs, let us remember that He takes but to 
 restore — that the "brother" whom we lose "shall rise 
 again at the resurrection in the last day " — and above all, 
 let us reflect, that the God who asks such sacrifices from us, 
 has made a greater sacrifice for us, when He gave his own 
 Son, a sacrifice for a world of sinners. When the Isaac of 
 the Heavenly Father was bound, there was no angel crying 
 from heaven to avert the descending knife, no ram caught in 
 the thickets became a substitute for that costly victim. And 
 having so loved us as to give His own Son to become the 
 propitiation for our sins, may we not freely surrender to his 
 disposal each lesser good? 
 
 5. But it is not His mere power that He would have us 
 remen)ber. We may discern traces in such dispensations 
 also of His wise and watchful benevolence. There are per- 
 haps designs of the richest mercy to the surviving Israel of 
 God, in making, at times, the removal of a Christian from 
 earth most unexpected ; — sudden as may be the shock thus 
 produced, and wide as may be the chasm created by the be- 
 reavement. It is adding to the happiness of Heaven, which 
 has long comprised the larger portion of the Church Univer- 
 sal, and it is, by adding to the attractions of that, " the Gen- 
 eral Assembly and Church of the first-born " above, exciting 
 the upward aspirations, lessening the temptations, and loos- 
 ening the bonds of the Church yet militant upon earth. 
 " I go," said the tiaviour, when about to quit the earth — 
 " I go to prepare a place for you." His creative word could 
 have framed in the highest heavens all that was needed, 
 whilst He himself should have remained still on the earth. 
 Scenes of surpassing magnificence and beauty would have 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 155 
 
 started into existence at his bare command ; nor was His 
 personal return to heaven needed, to lay the foundations of 
 the New Jerusalem, and to set up its gates of pearl. But 
 the Church of Christ was at death to pass within the vail 
 into an untried state, and its very obscurity clothed it with 
 an awful and repulsive aspect. The assurance that a Friend 
 of infinite tenderness and equal power, ever living and ever 
 faithful, was already there, would disperse much of this 
 dread. And amid all their uncertainty as to the scenes and 
 employments of the heavenly world, they thus knew some- 
 thing of its society. The fact that Chr'st was there was 
 enough to make it a better land, inviting to the heart, meet- 
 ing their largest hopes, and quelling all their fears. But He 
 has yet other modes of rendering Heaven less an object of 
 apprehension and more one of desire. Each one of those 
 known to us whom He has removed thither becomes a new 
 incentive to seek that blessed city, and a new evidence of 
 its spiritual opulence. When we have known a departed 
 Christian merely from his biography, or by his written labors, 
 he becomes often so endeared to us, and we so interested in 
 his character, that the thought of meeting him and pursuing 
 the acquaintance thus formed with him adds new lustre to 
 our conception of the heavenly state. We close the memoirs 
 of a Halyburton, a Martyn, or a Payson, or the burning pages 
 of a Baxter or a Leighton, and feel as if we had lost a per- 
 sonal friend, when the grave closes upon their earthly ca- 
 reer, and we long to see their history resumed, and to behold 
 their character yet more fully and beauteously developed in 
 the state beyond the grave. But if converse with a man's 
 works and memoirs makes him thus ours, and we wish to 
 trace and regain our lost friend in his removal to other 
 spheres of existence, much more must we feel this for the 
 brother with whom we have taken sweet counsel, and with 
 whom we have gone up to the house of God in company, 
 whose voice has led in our devotions, who has aided us by 
 advice and kindness, and made our hearts glad by the ten- 
 derness and sympathy of friendship. The loss of such a 
 Christian friend and kinsman is a wise provision of the Elder 
 Brother to prepare the heavenly home for the travellers that 
 yet linger on their way through the wilderness. It makes 
 heaven more attractive and more familiar, and every such 
 death is adding to the spiritual furniture of the Father's 
 house of many mansions, enriching it with inmates whose 
 
150 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 fellowship we would fain regain, and whose example comes 
 to us recommended by affection and hallowed by death. 
 And may we not say without irreverence, that each one 
 thus departing uses to us the language of his dying Redeem- 
 er ; "I go to prepare a place for you?" The tendencies of 
 earth and sense are most strong to make the visible and the 
 invisible world too distant from each other, cutting off all 
 sympathy by the impassable barriers of the tomb. But by 
 such removals God makes our affections bridge the chasm, 
 and fling to the earth all intervening barriers. Our bonds of 
 attachment and confidence grow over the yawning gulf, and 
 shoot onward into the unseen and eternal world. We feel that, 
 divided as we may be, the church is yet one; and that the 
 stream of death destroys not the unity of the Israel of God. 
 The bands that are yet occupying the nearer shores, and the 
 larger and happier host that liave passed over the swellings 
 of Jordan and are now set down in the city of endless rest, 
 are really one. 0«e banner — one Captain — one inheritance 
 prove their indivisibility. And every friend who has reached 
 the farther shore becomes a helper of our faith, not only in 
 the example left behind by his earthly career, but also in the 
 incentive supplied by that higher and more lasting career of 
 existence on which he has now entered, and in which he is 
 looking for us to share. 
 
 And the more sudden the removal, the less that the be- 
 reavement has been expected, the more closely does God 
 seem to bring into visible union the two divisions of His 
 sacramental host. When the Christian dies after a lingering 
 illness that had long been regarded as fatal, or sinks slowly 
 into the grave beneath the burden of old age, we feel as if 
 th(! space between the state of the righteous in this world 
 and that of their disembodied brethren were more like a vast 
 and immeasural)le interval. It seems as if the long period 
 of their sickness and declining age was needed to carry them 
 over the wide chasm intervening between the world of active 
 life here on earth, and the world of rest there. But when 
 death snatches them from our sides with the heat of the 
 day yet moistening their brows, and the burden of the day 
 yet bowing their siioulders, and they are hurried at once 
 into that world of repose, the separation between the world 
 of the senses and the world of spirits seems, as it actually is, 
 most slight. We feel that our daily steps take hold upon eter- 
 nity, and that the earthly church should at every moment be 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 157 
 
 ready to migrate to the fellowship of the church above. 
 Viewed under its ordinary aspects, the waters of death to- 
 wards which our feet are tending seem a dark ocean, stretching 
 away into the shoreless distance. But the loss of the young 
 and vigorous, smitten down at our sides in the midst of their 
 tasks, narrows the stream. The eye glances across to the 
 farther shores, and we seem to catch glimpses of the unut- 
 terable glories, and to hear the harpings of the innumerable 
 company of harpers before the throne. We know that he 
 who has disappeared from our view has made his entrance 
 into that assembly, and our thoughts are carried, in his rapid 
 transit, with unwonted ease to the new scenes he inhabits ; 
 and the heart of the survivor almost forgets to bleed, when 
 thus wafted suddenly into, that land where the hand of an 
 Almighty Father staunches not only the wounds but even 
 the tears of his suffering people. Were every death linger- 
 ing and long expected, the heavenly world would seem more 
 distant than it actually is. But the sudden translation of 
 the believer makes us feel its nearness. We think no more 
 of the change as the voyage of many weary days ; but feel 
 how easily the Redeemer may accomplish the promise to 
 bring the soul this day to be with him in Paradise. 
 
 II. Such are some of the lessons that the God of Provi- 
 dence would have us learn ; let us remember also the duties 
 to which we are, amid such scenes, specially called. These 
 are submission, improvement and confidence in God. 
 
 1. In the light cast by the word of God upon these His 
 dispensations, we are to exercise submission. He does not 
 call us to apathy. He expressly warns us against despising 
 the chastening of the Lord, and to display a frigid insensi- 
 bility were to despise and to defy His chastenings. But yet 
 we are not to faint when rebuked of Him. We are, in our 
 weeping, assured that Christ himself can sympathize, and 
 that the Ruler of the universe has not forgotten that He was 
 once the Man of Sorrows. But we may not in selfish grief 
 refuse to be comforted. Remembering our many mercies, 
 blessing God that what we have lost was so rich a blessing, 
 and was so long continued to us, counting up our transgres- 
 sions, and feeling how little proportion the severest chas- 
 tisement has yet borne to our unworthiness, we shall see 
 that submission is our evident duty. But while the intellect 
 and the conscience may yield their prompt acquiescence to 
 the dealings of our God, the aft'ections may again and again 
 
158 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 renew the contest. It \v;is thus with Job. When the trials 
 that were appointed him came fast and heavily, he at first 
 charged not God foolishly, accepted the chastisement, and 
 justitied the chastiser, and both in his language and his 
 conduct under the first onset of his calamities " he sinned 
 not.'' But although his judgment was thus convinced, his 
 feelings soon rebelled. He rashly challenged God to ap- 
 pear in controversy with him and justify His severe dispen- 
 sations. Yet at last, through the influences of the Spirit, the 
 inwrmurer was silenced and the mourner comforted ; and 
 the apostle, when alluding to that remarkable history, be- 
 seeches us to remember " the end of the Lord," and that He 
 was proved by the issue even of those severe and multiplied 
 afflictions, "very pitiful and of tender mercy." 
 
 2. Another duty which God demands from all who share 
 in scenes of mourning like the present, is our personal im- 
 provement, and that we profit by the example of those who 
 have " died in the Lord." The testimony given by our 
 friend was the eloquent testimony of a life of Christian con- 
 sistency. I feel that, in attempting to sketch the character 
 of a beloved friend, I may be suspected of overcharging the 
 picture. But I would remember that the place I here occupy 
 is that of the minister of Christ's gospel, and that not the 
 partial eulogy of man, but the truth in its severe simplicity 
 is all that is permitted by the Master to whom I stand or fall. 
 We know, too, that our departed brother would have rejected 
 ail praise that placed him before others in any other light 
 than that in which he had long rejoiced to stand before God, 
 as a penitent sinner saved by grace. But that grace was in 
 him so winningly manifested — there was in him so much to 
 love, and so much to admire, that it seems due to the glory 
 of the grace of God which made him what he was, that he be 
 not left to sink unnoticed into the grave. The unexpected 
 removal of his father, who embarked from a southern port 
 in a vessel from which no tidings were ever received, left 
 him, as the eldest son of his widowed mother, to be from an 
 early age the hope of the family. He was often told by his 
 surviving parent, at this early age, how much depended on 
 his bearing and conduct. We have more than once heard 
 him alluding to this, and describing the strong influence it 
 had exercised on his feelings and character. He felt that 
 there were required of him forethought and considerateness 
 more than are generally found at his years. The natural 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 159 
 
 sobriety of his toniperament, and his innate dignity of de- 
 meanor, became in consequence more strongly developed, 
 perhaps, than they would otherwise have been. His classi- 
 cal studies were pursued under the direction of Daniel H. 
 Barnes, that must enthusiastic and successful teacher, whose 
 respect and esteem he secured in a remarkable degree, and 
 of whose delicate kindness he always preserved a grateful 
 remembrance. His collegiate course he completed with 
 honor in Columbia College. On leaving it he selected for 
 his profession that which had been also the employment of 
 his father, the law. He had been but little more than a year 
 engaged in its study when his attention was drawn to the 
 subject of religion. He had thought of the gospel as some- 
 thing which behttcd rather the other sex, but which would 
 be inimical to that manliness of character which from an 
 early period it had been his ambition to cultivate. The 
 work of that most patient and profound reasoner, Butler, on 
 the Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion, taught him 
 that in neglecting (Christianity, he had been contemning what 
 he had not understood. In the study of the scriptures, and 
 in earnest and secret prayer, he was brought, as he trusted, 
 out of the darkness of nature into the glorious light of the 
 gospel, and was made to rejoice in the hope of the children 
 of God. Some difficulty made in the Baptist Church to 
 which he first oilered himself for membership, because of the 
 sentiments which he held as to the atonement of Christ being 
 made for the whole world, prevented his union there. His 
 views of religious truth were those generally called Calvin- 
 istic, although he did not, with many who would claim ex- 
 clusively that designation, regard the sacrifice of Christ as 
 being in its original provision made only for those who are 
 finally saved by its eliects. A delay of some months, if not 
 years intervened, during which he studied the Scriptures, 
 and the views of several evangelical denominations. 
 
 Shortly before or after the completion of his legal studies, 
 in the years of opening manhood, he made a public profes- 
 sion of religion in connexion with the Oliver Street Baptist 
 Church in this city. In the formation of the Amity Street 
 Church, an ofl'set from that, he took an early and active 
 part. How great his usefulness to us as a people, the value 
 of his counsels, influence, and example, and of his ])ersonal 
 labors in the Sabbath School, of which from its establishment 
 he was the beloved and indefatigable Superintendent, I need 
 
160 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 not say to those who already know it so well, and feel so 
 deeply the loss we have endured by his removal. 
 
 In his professional career and in his influence on society 
 he seemed marked for distinction and great usefulness. 
 Averse from principle and the habitual dignity of his charac- 
 ter to all that chicanery which has more generally than justly 
 been ascribed to the members of the bar, he won universal 
 respect and confidence. Well read in his profession, known 
 to a very extended circle of acquaintances, and universally 
 esteemed, the blended dignity and courtesy of his manners, 
 his assiduous devotion to business, and his strong, sound 
 intellect, seemed to promise him the honors and emoluments 
 of his profession in liberal measure. His attention to his 
 Ictral studies did not cramp his mind, or lead him to shun all 
 other reading. With great refinement of taste and delicacy 
 of feeling, and a judgment of remarkable maturity and ripe- 
 ness, there was an unvarying propriety that ran through his 
 actions. The same traits made him an adviser of great value. 
 Imagination, though richly stored with classic and beautiful 
 imagery, was not with him an active faculty. His judgment 
 had too overbearing a preponderance to allow to the fancy 
 its full scope. Hence, though he could clothe any sentiment 
 with appropriate and graceful illustrations, they were rather 
 the acquisitions won by reading than the play of his own 
 imagination. His intellect was eminently a practical one, 
 and he showed great skill in seizing on two or three of the 
 strong points of any question, and placing these in a clear 
 light, he left the lesser details comparatively to care for them- 
 selves. Yet, though practical, his mind was not like that 
 of many practical men, narrowed and distorted by looking 
 merely at a few obvious and common facts entirely apart 
 from their principles, thus neglecting those general truths 
 which must ultimately sway the course of every mind pos- 
 sessed of any power. He rose invariably and of choice to 
 the contemplation of principles, but in the application of 
 them he allowed quite as invariably for the actual state of 
 things in the world around him. In temper he displayed the 
 greatest calmness and sweetness, and united happily great 
 frankness of bearing with much caution. The reserve some- 
 times imputed to his manners was rather the result of his 
 signal prudence, and of a refined taste that shrunk alike from 
 display on his own part and coarseness on the part of others, 
 than of any coldness of feeling. For in the free intercourse 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 161 
 
 of friendship none ever bore a warmer, kinder heart. In 
 the retirement of home, how considerate, how amiable, how 
 estimable and exemplary he was, they only can tell aright, 
 who feel that in the brother, the son and the husband, they 
 have been bereaved of one whose loss can never be replaced. 
 A more devoted son no widowed mother ever leaned upon 
 in the hour of trial, and the testimony of all who have ob- 
 served him nearly, and most the testimony of those " the 
 light of whose tabernacle" God "has put out" in this be- 
 reavement, would prove how few have ever been so richly 
 endowed with those qualities that shed around the little 
 world of home the serene, unbroken sunshine of cheerfulness 
 and afiection. 
 
 But it is chiefly with his religious character that we havt 
 here to do. And religion in him was a principle so con- 
 stantly influencing his course, suffused over his whole cha- 
 racter, no where gathered in unseemly blotches, but shedding 
 every where the hues and bloom of spiritual life, that it must 
 have attracted the notice of all who have known him. No 
 man dreaded or disliked more all appearance of ostentation, 
 or the least semblance of cant. His was a practical religion, 
 uniform, steady and noiseless as the light of day. His busi- 
 ness habits, and the peculiar ripeness of judgment already 
 mentioned, made him in the boards of the Amer. Bible Soci- 
 ety, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday 
 School Union, an adviser greatly valued and relied upon. 
 Of the Young Men's Bible Society of this city he had been 
 an efficient member for nearly the whole period of his Chris- 
 tian profession, and he was at the time of his death its Presi- 
 dent. When leading in the prayers of the conference room, 
 there was a devout and subdued earnestness that gave to his 
 prayers a peculiar character, and compelled all to feel when 
 he conducted their supplications, that he was entering into 
 the presence of a God Avhom he adored whilst he loved. 
 Reverence and humility seemed breathing in the tones of 
 his voice, while his language was tinged with that rich, an- 
 tique simplicity of which our English Bible is so beautiful a 
 specimen. Alas, that we shall hear that voice no more ! In 
 the concerns of this church how discriminating a mind he 
 ever showed, and with how steady a hand he held the balance 
 in which he weighed and conciliated opposing opinions, many 
 here have remarked with admiration, and they will long 
 remember with deep regret the irretrievable loss we have 
 
 22 
 
JgO THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 endured in his departure. Though from conviction and 
 studv he preferred the denomination to which he belonged, 
 his feelings were eminently catholic. He showed it in all 
 his intercourse with Christians known by other names. It 
 was manifest in his reading. He could relish true piety, 
 whether found in its seraphic fire in the Lectures of Leigh- 
 ton, or in the prayers, tinged with superstition as they are, 
 of Bishop Andrews, in the memoirs of Halyburton, a book 
 which he prized highly for its close anatomy of the heart, in 
 the history of that most devout and able body of men, the 
 Port Royalists, or in the story of the missionary toils of some 
 of the earlier and purer Jesuits. The refinement and polish 
 of his manners, his intelligence and cheerfulness, won him 
 the respect even of the worldly, without betraying him into 
 any sacrifice of principle, or unworthy concealment of his 
 Christian character. 
 
 Such he was ; and we had hoped for many years to have 
 rejoiced in his light and been strengthened by his counsel. 
 But God saw fit to order otherwise. A derangement of the 
 digestive system, under which he had long labored, became 
 more severe in the autumn of last year. His whole consti- 
 tution seemed greatly enfeebled. But neither his friends 
 nor himself apprehended danger. At the commencement 
 of the present year he suddenly determined on a voyage to 
 the South, hoping for benefit chiefly from the voyage, and 
 most confidently expecting to return to his professional en- 
 gagements and to his friends here after the lapse of some four 
 weeks. The voyage instead of alleviating seemed to exas- 
 perate his disorder, and left him among his friends at the 
 South so greatly exhausted that he was compelled to aban- 
 don all thoughts of an immediate return. The friends to 
 whose home he was most kindly and tenderly welcomed, 
 fi'ared far more as to the issue of his disorder than he him- 
 self had yet learned to do. Anticipations of possible danger 
 did probably pass across his mind, but these seem to have 
 been brief and at long intervals. Yet many circumstances 
 combine to show that the retirement of the sick-room was 
 employed in the review of his life and the close scrutiny of 
 his heart. Members of his family from New York, alarmed 
 and distressed at the unexpected tidings of his growing 
 weakness, set out to join him at the South. She" who is 
 now his afllicted widow, and his sister, were permitted to 
 reach him a week or more before his death. Two other 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 163 
 
 members of the family arrived but four days before the clos- 
 ing scene. Yet to the last they and he could not but cling 
 to the hope of recovery, persuaded as were his physicians 
 that there was no disorder other than a derangement of the 
 digestive system, and that the chief danger was from the ex- 
 treme feebleness produced by his inability to receive nourish- 
 ment. To Mrs. Green, before she was willing to admit those 
 anticipations of his probable departure to which he some- 
 times adverted, he remarked that he had been looking at the 
 character of God, and it appeared awfully pure and holy, 
 " and thatioas right ;'''' he looked then at himself, and he was 
 unholy, and the contrast distressed him. Though his course 
 had been in the eyes of his friends one of singular consis- 
 tency, and his character as a disciple of Christ had been pre- 
 served in the eyes of the world unblemished, he yet said in 
 the course of another conversation, " that the world had 
 doubtless seen much in him to disapprove, but they had not 
 seen his deep and secret repentings." Language of this 
 kind from one whose course had been marked by such beau- 
 tiful moral symmetry, showed how deep and spiritual were 
 his views of religion. And although from an anxiety to 
 avoid distressing his friends, and the expectation he himself 
 habitually cherished of being permitted at least to return to 
 his home in this city, he did not constantly speak of death 
 as being near, there were yet times when his language showed 
 that he was looking forward to it as an event that was not 
 improbable, and that might not be very remote. Rut still, 
 with all this, the last summons came suddenly. Being 
 asked on the last day of his life, when scarce able to speak, 
 if he found the Saviour near, and if he could in his strength 
 enter eternity, he replied with a voice so low as to be well 
 nigh inaudible, "He is here." The expression still more 
 faintly uttered some little time after, '■'■ I am dying,'''' was the 
 last intelligible language that was gathered from his lips. 
 But when he had lost the power of speech, he was still sen- 
 sible, and as the promises of Scripture were recited in his 
 hearing, and he was asked if he found his mind peaceful and 
 calm in the prospect of the change before him, to signify it 
 by closing and then opening his eyes, he was seen, as they 
 who stood by the death-bed were watching him with intent 
 anxiety, to close and open them, and then closing them a 
 second time to open them again, while he fixed on his wufe 
 a look of unspeakable benignity. His lips were seen moving 
 
J(34 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 as if in prayer, and his eyes were cast heavenward. Life 
 went out gradually, and it was difficult to fix the time of his 
 dismission. His death-bed was peace. There were no rap- 
 tures. The state of his body, attenuated as it was and en- 
 feebled to the utmost, exercised its usual influence on his 
 mind. But there was, amid all, peace. He had said, ten days 
 before, to Mrs. Green at a time when she was unprepared 
 to believe his danger so imminent, and when he himself at 
 times cherished strong hopes of recovery, that the 16th of 
 March was his birth-day, and it might prove the day of his 
 death. And such it was — the day of his emancipation from 
 earth, and his birth-day, we humbly trust, into the glory and 
 bliss of the heavenly world. 
 
 He received from the unwearied kindness of the relatives 
 at whose residence he expired, most assiduous and devoted 
 attentions. He enjoyed the visits and conversations of pious 
 friends from the vicinity, and amongst others of the Rev. 
 Mr. McGill, a Presbyterian clergyman, who also officiated 
 at his funeral services. Several of his family were permitted 
 to reach his dying couch. Yet with all these alleviations, 
 and they were many and merciful, it seemed a melancholy 
 comment on the uncertainty of all human calculations, that 
 he who went to pay the visit of a fortnight, remained to die, 
 away from home, and far from some of his nearest kindred. 
 It seemed mysterious that one so beloved and so useful, so 
 needful to the general interests of religion amongst us, and 
 so indispensable to the family who leaned on him in confiding 
 affection, should be removed so unexpectedly. Yet we know 
 that it was ordered by Infinite kindness and unerring wis- 
 dom. We trust that our departed brother knew this, and 
 that he found the sentiment which he quoted to a pious vis- 
 itor in the last days of his life, the habitual language of his 
 heart : " I will remember the years of the right hand of the 
 Most High." 
 
 We think of what he was, and we think of what he prom- 
 ised yet to become ; and it seems difficult to acquiesce in the 
 dispensation. Yet He who has done it, loved him more truly 
 and tenderly than we could ever do. He made him wdiathe 
 was upon earth, and has now, we doubt not, made him a far 
 happier and holier being in the world of light than he was or 
 could ever become upon our dark earth. Let us not then 
 mourn him selfishly in wishing that our gain might be se- 
 cured by his loss — restoring him to earth by deprivino- him 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD, 165 
 
 of heaven ; — let us not mourn him sullenly, in chiding with 
 the Father who gave and who has taken him; but let us 
 mourn him meekly and wisely, by treading in his steps, and 
 following him even as he followed Christ, and thus hastening 
 forward to the reunions of Heaven by a growing meetness 
 for its employments. Were he here again he would see 
 much doubtless to be amended in his own course — he would 
 perhaps discern, high and consistent as was his career, how 
 worldly ambition had yet dimmed at times the clear vision 
 of his faith ; and the interests of time usurped more than 
 their share of thought and labor, in comparison with the in- 
 terests of eternity. Let us mourn him, by living not only as 
 he lived, but as he would live were his career to be again 
 commenced. 
 
 Especially is the example of such a man valuable in this 
 day of contest and agitation. Calm and reflecting, with a 
 coolness of judgment that ever guided the movements of a 
 warm heart, he was not to be swept away at the mercy of 
 every current. His actions, the result of principle, rather 
 than of blind impulse, had a serene steadiness. You knew 
 where to find him. He had not to wait until he could com- 
 pile his creed from the huzzas of the multitude. In the calm 
 light of conscience and truth he studied his duty, and in tlie 
 broad day-light he did it. 
 
 3. It is the voice of each bereavement like the present that 
 we cease from man and put our trust in the Lord Jehovah, 
 in whom is everlasting strength. 
 
 The young men here present see in the character of our 
 departed brother the eflfects of such a faith. They are taught 
 by a noble example how much a young man may accomplish, 
 how strong the confidence and how profound the respect that 
 may be won even for that age which is generally looked 
 upon rather for exertion than counsel, for glowing impulses, 
 tlian for the lights of wisdom and meditation. And how 
 rich is the legacy bequeathed by such a Christian to his 
 fatherless child and his mourning relatives, compared with 
 the legacy many a young man leaves, of a tarnished name 
 and wasted powers and a lost life. His was not a lost life. 
 Many of his plans were left incomplete, and his plough was 
 checked by death, and stood still in the middle of the furrow, 
 but it was rightly aimed, and well had it been driven, and he 
 looked not back. 
 
 This bereaved Church are called to confide in God. Our 
 
166 THE STRONG STAFF 
 
 lamented brother was one of the colony originally constitui- 
 ino- this Church ; and in all the counsels, labors and sacri- 
 fices necessary to its establishment, he has borne an active 
 part. He was greatly and deservedly beloved. In the 
 Sabbath School he united, in a singular degree, the power 
 of securing the respect, with that of conciliating the affections 
 of the children. He was absent from us. We hoped for 
 his return. We hear of his death. Others of our number 
 have been cut down in the promise and strength of opening 
 manhood. Let us as a people turn to Him that has smitten 
 us, and by the united and augmented efforts of many aim to 
 supply the loss of one — but that one so variously endowed 
 and so greatly useful. And although we may scarce in the 
 usual course of God's providence expect to see again his 
 like, for it is not the ordinary dealing of God to bestow two 
 such men upon a church in one generation, yet trusting Him 
 and serving Him, He will not fail us. Let us emulate his 
 piety, not intermittent and occasional flashes, but a broad, 
 serene and steady light. And if his loss but bring nearer to 
 us the eternity he has entered, and the Saviour and the 
 Spirit, to whose influences he owed all, even this bereave- 
 ment shall be for our good. 
 
 To the bereaved family where should I find language to 
 address myself or arguments for consolation, could I not bid 
 them also trust in God? How wide a chasm has one death 
 occasioned, from the mother who has seen the son that was 
 for years her stay, suddenly removed, to the child yet un- 
 conscious of the vast loss he has endured, and the widow 
 whose brimming cup of happiness God has dashed to the 
 earth. If I sought to point you to earthly topics of consola- 
 tion, how mean and petty would these worldly consolations 
 seem. But in the remembrance that he whom you have lost 
 is now, we have good and joyful hope, with God— in the 
 hope given to so many of you, that you are journeying to 
 the same city of habitation, and that death is "the gate of a 
 blissful and endless reunion to those who " die in the Lord" 
 —there are thoughts that may brighten even such a scene. 
 When a pious visitor asked our dying friend for what he 
 should pray, his ansvvfr was, " Sanctification." And if this 
 be your prayer for yourselves, and for those who as yet 
 know not the God of your friend and brother— if we all that 
 loved and himent him could but be persuaded to bury in his 
 grave all worldliness and indiflerencc, how glorious and 
 
AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 167 
 
 salutary the fruits tliat would spring even from this bitter be- 
 reavjpment. And although Nature will, even in the heirs of 
 promise, murmur at a trial like the present, yet, the anchor 
 of the promise, my beloved friends, has not torn itself loose 
 even amid this storm ; and this, even this calamity shall work 
 together for good to them that love God and that trust Ilim. 
 The ark may be tossed, but through all the wild and sicken- 
 ing commotion it shall swing, heavily indeed, but safely, its 
 vi^ay towards the haven of rest. We see, in every death, 
 God's truth as executing his threats pronounced in Eden. 
 Let the fulfillment of the curse teach us that the same truth 
 is pledged to the accomplishment of the promise. 
 
 To the Sabbath school teacher I would say. Trust more 
 entirely in God. Remember how sudden may be your 
 transfer from the class and the teachers' meeting to the pre- 
 sence of the Judge and the scenes of your rest. You leave 
 the school-room, perhaps, as it was left by your beloved 
 superintendent, all unconscious that your eye is casting its 
 last glance on the walls, and your feet crossing the threshold 
 never to return. Oh, the light that such events let in uj)on 
 old and familiar truths ! How, by the grave of one thus 
 smitten down in the strength of manhood, do we see the true 
 purpose of life, the worth of the soul, the majesty of the 
 gospel, the glories of a Saviour, and the tremendous import 
 of that word — Eternity. 
 
 To us all it remains, as the one duty, the first and the last 
 of each of our fallen race, to renounce our trust in the crea- 
 ture for a simple and grateful trust in the Creator. It is 
 affecting to observe how they who have tried Him most 
 closely have attested his unshaken stability. David and 
 Moses, both men of large experience in the most active and 
 diversified scenes of life, are found in their last hours extol- 
 ling God under this one aspect — the Rock. They had found 
 man as treacherous as he is feeble, and earth full of change, 
 and uncertainty, and instability. The one had heard his 
 own followers speak of stoning him at Ziklag ; and the other 
 had caught the shoutings of idolatry from the tribes, chosen, 
 and led, and fed by miracles, at the foot of the burning Si- 
 nai ; and even his meekness had given way on hearing the 
 contentions of the people at Meribah. The one had felt 
 the murmurings of Miriam, and borne the envy of Korah. 
 The other had encountered the enmity of Saul, the malice 
 of Doeg, the craft of Ahithophel, the treachery of Absalom, 
 
168 THK STRONG STAFF AND THE BEAUTIFUL ROD. 
 
 and the cursings of Shimei. Pleasure, and wealth, and 
 honor had offered their aid to ensure happiness, and to estab- 
 lish security : but from them all these men returned, declar- 
 ing that God is the Rock. Prove Him, then, ye sinners. 
 For He stands, amid all the changes of the world, the Endless 
 and the Immutable One. The strong sceptre which His hand 
 grasps is not shattered, and the Rod of the Stem of Jesse is 
 yet to rule all nations, and to fill the world with its fruit. There 
 was an hour when it was grasped and splintered in the fierce 
 onset of hell. That was the hour and power of darkness. 
 But, buried in the earth, that Rod blossomed from the dust, 
 and sprung up, a Shoot of Hope for all the earth — the Plant 
 of Renown and of Life to all the nations. Believe in Him, 
 and your reliance shall never fail. Neglect Him, and not 
 all the prosperity He may permit, or that earth can bestow, 
 will be to you other than a bruised reed. The time is com- 
 ing when it shall fail you — when even pious friends, and 
 godly parents, and Bibles, and sanctuaries shall not save you. 
 How wretched, then, will be your lot compared with that of 
 the man, who, looking round on the dark valley, can also 
 look upward and say, " I will fear no evil. Thy rod and Thy 
 staff they shall comfort me." Grasping that staff, the parting 
 spirit can say to an avenging law, an opening grave and a 
 flaming hell, " He is here" — He, the Propitiation, the 
 Redeemer and the Resurrection. And if enabled to say this 
 truly of ourselves, we have the pledge of Christ's presence 
 wherever we wander. If called to take the wings of the 
 morning, and to travel to the furthest shores of the universe ; 
 if, tempting an untried way, we pass through scenes the most 
 perilous, this shall remove all loneliness and ensure all hap- 
 piness, that everywhere the sinless spirit can say still, " He 
 is here,'' reposing securely in His Omnipresence, and resting 
 content in His All-sufficiency. 
 
THE JESUITS, AS A MISSIONARY ORDER.* 
 
 The missionary spirit contributed to the discovery of our 
 continent. " The man who gave to Castile and Leon a New 
 World," was full of high religious aspirations. With much 
 of the superstition, Columbus had more than the piety of his 
 age. He regarded himself as commissioned by a higher 
 than any earthly court, in the great enterprise which he pur- 
 sued with such calm constancy. On reaching the shores he 
 had long sought, his first act was to kneel in devout thanks- 
 giving. If his chroniclers have truly reported his prayer, 
 he blessed the God who had deigned to use his humble ser- 
 vice in preparing the way that his own sacred name might 
 be preached in this new portion of his universe. And in his 
 last will, he charges it upon his son to maintain divines who 
 should be employed in striving to make Christians of the 
 natives, declaring this a work in which " no expense should 
 be thought too great.'' ^ 
 
 Little knew Columbus of the trains of religious influence 
 that came in the wake of his great discovery. In those weary 
 days and nights of anxiety and watchfulness, when his soli- 
 tary courage buffeted, single-handed, the mutinous remon- 
 strances of his companions — when, with such difficulty, he 
 kept the prow of his vessel turned still toward the West — if 
 he understood little the peculiar aspect of the shores he was 
 fast nearing, he knew quite as little of the mysterious instru- 
 mentality, already provided in the Old World, to grasp and 
 shape the New Continent as it emerged from its concealment 
 of affes in the recesses of ocean. Had he been asked, on 
 
 * This article was originally prepared as an address before the Society of 
 Missionary Inquiry in Brown University, before whom it was delivered at 
 their anniversary on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1839. A separate pub- 
 lication was intended, in pursuance of the request of the Society. Various 
 causes have prevented its receiving the additions and changes it was once 
 the writer's wish to have made, and have delayed its appearance to the 
 present time. — Note in Christian Review, Boston, 184 1, p. 165. 
 
 23 
 
170 THE JESUITS, 
 
 that morning of triumph when his eyes first beheld, green, 
 brio-ht and fragrant, the shores of the new-found world, who 
 would be the instruments of its conversion to the true God, 
 how blindly would he have answered ! For its religious in- 
 structors, he would have looked to the universities of the 
 Spain that had patronized him, or of the England or the 
 France that had neglected him ; or he would have tui'ned his 
 eyes to his own native Italy. But we, to whose gaze have 
 been revealed those leaves in the volume of Providence that 
 no mortal eye had then read, have learned to look elsewhere 
 for the religious guides already training for the new-found 
 hemisphere. Standing in fancy by the side of the great 
 Genoese navigator, we look back over the intervening waste 
 of waters to the Old World. But our eyes turn not to the 
 points that attract liis gaze. Ours wander in quest of Eise- 
 nach, a petty town in Western Germany. In the band of 
 school-boys that go from door to door through its streets, 
 singing their hymns, and looking for their dole of daily bread, 
 we catch sight of the full, ruddy face of a lad now some nine 
 years old. Those cheerful features bear the mingling im- 
 press of bi'oad humor, vigorous sense, good-nature the most 
 genial, and a will somewhat of the sternest. The youth is 
 the son of an humble miner. His father has sent him hither, 
 some three years ago, that the boy may be taught Latin, and 
 receive such help as poor scholars in Germany thought it no 
 shame to ask. That lad is Martin Luther ; a name soon to 
 ring through either hemisphere, the antagonist of the papacy, 
 the translator of the Scriptures, and the instrument of a 
 spiritual revolution, that is to impress its own character, not 
 on Northern Europe only, but also on the larger half of that 
 continent, of whose discovery that school-boy will soon be 
 told, as he bends over his grammar or bounds through the 
 play-ground. And here have we found one of the master- 
 spirits, that is to fix the religious destiny of the New World. 
 We look yet again for the rival mind, tliat is to contest 
 with Luther's the honor of fashioning American character 
 and history. Our next glance is at Spain, that country from 
 whose ports had been fitted out the little armament that is 
 riding on the sea before us. But it is not to its brilliant 
 court, or to its universities, then famous throughout Europe, 
 that we look for this other mind, that is to aid in casting the 
 spiritual horoscope of our continent. On the northern shores 
 of the country, in the province of Biscay, and under the 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 171 
 
 shadow of the Pyrenees, stands an old baronial castle, ten- 
 anted by a Spanish gentleman of ancient and noble lineage. 
 In the family of eleven children that gladdens his hearth, 
 the youngest born, the Benjamin of the household, is now a 
 child of some two years old. That tottering infant, as he 
 grows up to manhood, will at first mistake his destiny. 
 Smitten with the chivalrous spirit, that hangs as an atmos- 
 phere of romance over the Spain of that age, he will become 
 a courtly knight, delighting in feats of arms, and not free 
 from the soldier's vices. But his ultimate history will be of 
 far different cast. Wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, his 
 shattered limb will confine him to a couch, where his waking 
 hours will be spent in reading the legends of saints, and from 
 that couch of pain he will rise an altered man. For this 
 prattling child is Ignatius Loyola, This baby hand is yet 
 to pen the " Spiritual Exercises," that far-famed volume, 
 which still remains the manual of the Jesuit order, the book 
 that has swayed so many a strong intellect for this life and 
 the next, and shaken some minds even to insanity. He is 
 to become the founder of a religious fraternity, who shall be 
 the Janizaries of the Romish church, its stoutest champions 
 against the Reformation, and its most daring emissaries 
 around the globe. Neither Luther nor Loyola ever visited 
 our shores, yet no two of the contemporary minds of Eu- 
 rope so signally controlled the religious history of this con- 
 tinent ; and both were in their boyhood, the one at a Ger- 
 man grammar-school, the other romping in the nursery of 
 an old Spanish castle, when Columbus planted his foot on 
 the shores of St. Salvador. 
 
 The institution, which Loyola created, early wrapped 
 itself about the history of our country ; fathers of the Jesuit 
 order having, both in the northern and southern portions of 
 the continent, borne a large share in the work of discovery 
 and civilization. Had the efforts of France been but crowned 
 with answering success, this body of men had given their 
 own religious hue to our territory. Seven years before 
 Plymouth Rock received the disembarking colonists from 
 the May-Flower, and twenty-three before Rhode Island had 
 :ts first European settlers, " France and the Roman religion 
 had established themselves in Maine."* Still sooner, Jesu- 
 its were in Nova Scotia, and in 1625, Jesuit missionaries 
 
 ♦ Bancroft, vol. I., p. 28. 
 
172 THE JESUITS, 
 
 were laboring on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The early- 
 governors of New France were zealous patrons of such mis- 
 sions, and that Chauiplain, whose name is yet borne by one 
 of our lakes, declared that the salvation of one soul is worth 
 more than the conquest of an empire, and that the object of 
 a Christian king, in extending his dominion over an idola- 
 trous country, should be only to subdue its inhabitants to 
 the sway of Jesus Christ.* Not on the course of the St. 
 Lawrence only, but in the remote depths of our wilderness, 
 and on the shores of our great western lakes, the Jesuits had 
 early planted their missions and gathered their converts 
 from the Huron, the Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Illinois, 
 and other tribes of Indians. 
 
 It has been the boast of the order, that Providence made 
 the birth of their own Ignatius Loyola to coincide so nearly 
 with that of Luther, by the same arrangement of divine be- 
 nevolence that is said ever to provide the antidote in the 
 vicinity of the poison. Their writers are also accustomed 
 to say, that in bringing so closely together the rise of their 
 founder and the discoveries of Columbus, God had evidently 
 pointed their way to those missionary labors upon our con- 
 tinent, in which they engaged so early and successfully.! 
 Well may the Protestant, and especially the citizen of these 
 United States, bless in his turn that fatherly care of divine 
 Providence, which neither allowed the era of American col- 
 onization to be hastened, nor that of the Reformation to be 
 deferred. Had these events been differently arranged — had 
 Sjjanish blood and not English flowed in the veins of our 
 first settlers — or had the May-Flower borne to our shores 
 the foundations of a Catholic colony, and had our own Roger 
 "Williams been a Jesuit missionary — or had the schemes of 
 French conquest, that would have made Canada but the 
 starting-point of North American empire, been successful, 
 how diflercnt had been the annals, not of this State alone, 
 but of the whole country, and in truth of our entire race. 
 America had wanted her Washington. The impulse of mod- 
 ern revolutions had remained yet to be given, the name of 
 Lexington had continued still a common and unhonored 
 sound, and the dial of the world had been put back far more 
 than the ten degrees, by which at the prayer of Hezekiah 
 the sun went down on the dial of Ahaz. 
 
 * Games, p. 36S. t Charlevoix, Histoire do Paraguay. 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 173 
 
 The Jesuits, as a missionary order, furnish then a theme 
 in which we have a national interest ; and the subject may 
 well employ for a passing hour the thoughts of an assembly 
 of American Christians. Odious as the society justly became 
 for its acts and its crimes, it had its purer era, when its 
 emissaries were men, not only of singular talent, but of 
 burning zeal, and in some cases even of true piety. If it 
 has had its Escobars, it has also been honored by its Xa- 
 viers, its Riccis, and its Nobregas. Nor is it just, in de- 
 nouncing its shameless casuistry, its mendacious miracles, 
 its remorseless ambition, and its crooked policy, to overlook 
 the usefulness, or deny the virtues that have adorned some 
 among the sons of Loyola. Its eight hundred martyrs prove 
 that its zeal has been of no ordinary kind. Man is but too 
 prone to pour over the checkered good and evil of human 
 character the sweeping flood of indiscriminate praise, or cen- 
 sure as unmitigated. So does not the Judge of all the 
 earth. His tribunal metes out a more exact sentence. And, 
 in his Scriptures, with what impartiality does he detect some 
 good thing to be found towards the Lord God, even in the 
 house of Jeroboam, the corrupter of Israel. Dark as was 
 the depravity of Ahab, " who sold himself to work wicked- 
 ness," inspiration draws no veil over the brief interval of 
 light in his history, that shot, like a moment of unnatural 
 sunshine, across the depth of midnight darkness. And 
 Christ himself, the chiefest missionary of the church, taught 
 his disciples to learn wisdom from the policy of the fraudu- 
 lent steward, and the fears of the unjust judge. Truth, 
 then, may well afl^ord to be just even to error, and to glean 
 even from such fields lessons of wisdom. No missionary 
 undertakings have embodied a greater array of talent, been 
 arranged with more masterly skill, displayed more illustri- 
 ous proofs of courage and of patience, or Mdelded a wider 
 influence, than those of the Society of Loyola. Baxter con- 
 fessed that their labors moved him to emulation, and the 
 Protestant Leibnitz, the scholar, the jurist, and the philoso- 
 pher, the rival of Newton, has been their fervent eulogist. 
 
 The character of Loyola, the founder, was deeply im- 
 pressed on this order. On deserting the military life, he 
 had spent a year in the most revolting austerities, and during 
 this period composed his celebrated treatise. His attention 
 now became turned to the salvation of his neighbor ; before, 
 it had been engrossed by care for his own soul. To profit 
 
J74 THE JESUITS, 
 
 Others, he must relinquish the squalid dress and some of the 
 austere penances of his former course, and he felt also that 
 he must remedy the defects of a neglected education. Now 
 in the prime of manhood, he set himself down, nothing 
 daunted or ashamed, among children, to learn his Latin 
 grammar. His progress was slow and painful. At the Uni- 
 versity of Paris he gathered around him his first associates. 
 Their early design was a mission to Palestine. War frus- 
 trated this. They oftered themselves for the service of the 
 supreme pontilf, at their own charge, in whatever part of the 
 world he might command. This offer won the reluctant 
 consent of the Romish see to their establishment in 1540. 
 They were thus missionaries from their first constitution. 
 Long a soldier, Loyola had felt both the need of discipline 
 and its power. Reminiscences of his military course appear 
 in the whole structure, as in the very title, of his Spiritual 
 Exercises. It seems, from the description given of it, to be 
 but the drill-book of a spiritual regiment. The treatise is 
 said to represent the world as divided into two hosts, the 
 one arrayed under the banners of Christ, and the other up- 
 lifting the standard of Satan ; and, inviting the reader to 
 enlist with his Redeemer, furnishes marks by which he may 
 judge of the work appointed him, and rules for its accom- 
 plishment. Obedience, incessant and implicit, such as is 
 elsewhere scarce found out of a camp, was Loyola's favor- 
 ite lesson. It was in his order the subject of a special vow. 
 They swore it to the pope and to their superior, called their 
 general, who was elected for life, and clothed with absolute 
 power. Ignatius was accustomed to term such obedience 
 the most sublime of virtues, the daughter of humility, and 
 the nurse of charity, a guide that never wandered, and the 
 mark that was to distinguish his order from all others. Ex- 
 acting it most rigidly from others, he displayed it himself, in 
 an implicit deference to his physicians and his confessor ; 
 while to the Roman pontiff so profound was his submission, 
 that he was accustomed to say, at the command of the pope 
 he would embark on a mission for any shore in a vessel 
 without rudder, or sails, or mast, or stores. When the ob- 
 jection was made, that such conduct would be inconsistent 
 with ordinary prudence, his reply was, that prudence was 
 the virtue of the ruler, not of the ruled. His last will, as 
 he termed it, was but an unfinished homily on obedience. 
 Yet in all this, the object of Ignatius does not seem to 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 175 
 
 have been consciously, his own personal aggrandizement. 
 Wealth, fame, and even power he seems to have sought less 
 than usefulness. The first year of his religious course had 
 been one of stormy fanaticism ; the rest of his career breathed 
 a high, sustained enthusiasm. He dreaded, as he often said, 
 worldly prosperity for his order, excluded its members from 
 episcopal preferment, and by earnest remonstrances pre- 
 vented the elevation of two of his early associates, Lainez 
 and Borgia, to the cardinalate. He spent much time in 
 prayer, and laid more stress than many Roman religionists 
 on the prayer of the heart, while Thomas a Kempis was his 
 favorite book of devotion. Simple and severe in his own 
 personal habits, his labors never remitted. Lodging in hos- 
 pitals, tending their sick, catechizing children, seeking the 
 restoration of the profligate, wherever he went, he gave him- 
 self to the toils of benevolence. 
 
 Seeing that the emergencies of the time required not the 
 retired life — the contemplative one, as it was called, of the 
 monastic orders — he desired for his institute a life of active 
 piety. The three great duties of the order from the begin- 
 ning were announced, as being the education of youth, con- 
 troversy with heretics, and the conversion of the heathen. 
 They were to be men of the world, and not of the cloister. 
 Hence he procured them exemption from the chants and 
 choral services customary with many Romish fraternities. 
 " They do not sing," said the enemies of the Jesuits, " birds 
 of prey never do." Yet to maintain their devotional feel- 
 ings, there were many provisions. One especially was, that, 
 for a space of eight days in each year, every member of the 
 order should make " a retreat," as it was called, retiring 
 from the world, and devoting himself to the study of his 
 heart and way, by the help of the Spiritual Exercises. With 
 the zeal of Loyola was mingled much knowledge of the 
 world. With the merchant he spoke of trafl^ic, and with the 
 scholar of books, that he might attract both to religion ; en- 
 tering, as he described it, at their door, that he might leave 
 at his own. What in him, howevei-, seems to have been 
 little more than skilful courtesy not inconsistent with real 
 principle, became, in the latter members of the order, a sup- 
 ple and lithe pliability, alike unprincipled and selfish. 
 
 To exercise and perfect their great principle of obedience, 
 the rules of the society were most skilfully framed. Their 
 colleo-es gave them facilities for the selection of the most 
 
176 THE JESUITS, 
 
 brilliant talents. A long novitiate and varied trials preceded 
 admission to the full privileges of the order. Every one on 
 entering it was required to make a full manifestation, as it 
 was termed, of his conscience, giving the minutest and most 
 private details of his past history and feelings. This was 
 repeated each half year. Each member was constituted a 
 spy upon his fellow. Regular reports of every incident of 
 moment, and of the character and deportment of each mem- 
 ber, were made to the provincial, and from the provincial 
 were transmitted to the general at Rome, to be transcribed 
 into the archives of the order. From the will of this gene- 
 ral there lay no appeal ; complaint was sin, and resistance 
 ruin. In the whole society, there was but cme will, but one 
 conscience, and it was in the bosom of the general. So true 
 a despotism Tiberius never attempted, and Machiavelli him- 
 self could not have imagined. Superstition only could have 
 made men its willing subjects. The individual being was 
 lost in one vast machine, all the parts of which were intelli- 
 gent to observe, the eyes of one soul, and strong to obey, 
 the hands of one will. Limited at first to sixty members, 
 but soon left without such restriction, the order increased in 
 sixty years from ten to 10,000 members, and in 1710 the 
 Jesuits numbered about 20,000 in their wide-spread associa- 
 tion. These, scattered through all countries, men of the 
 finest talents and most finished education, wearing every 
 garb, and speaking every language, formed a body that 
 could oulwatch Argus with his hundred eyes, and outwork 
 Briareus with his hundred hands. It is readily seen what 
 tremendous energies such a system wielded. In every other 
 combination of human efllart, much of power is lost, not 
 only by the resistance to be overcome in the world without, 
 but by the discord and internal weakness of the combined 
 parties within themselves, and the lumbering Aveight of the 
 machinery upon which the motive power acts. The steeds 
 may be the fiery coursers of the sun, with power flaming 
 from every nostril, but where is the mortal hand that can 
 rem the whole into one path, and bring the might of all their 
 sinews to draw in one onward track ? It was not so in this 
 institution. Here, as in the chariot of the prophet's vision, 
 all was mstinct with one will ; " the spirit of the living crea- 
 tures was in the wheels ; when the living creatures went, 
 the wheels went by them, when those stood, these stood ; 
 when the living creatures were lifted up, the wheels were 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 177 
 
 lifted up over against them, and theii- rings were full of eyes 
 round about, and they were so high that they were dread- 
 ful." One soul swayed the vast mass ; and every cog and 
 pin in the machinery consented with its whole power to 
 every movement of the one central conscience. The world 
 neva* had seen so perfect a despotism ; yet never was any 
 government so ardently loved by its earlier members. " If 
 1 forget thee, O Society of Jesus," exclaimed Xavier in 
 India, " may my right hand forget its cunning." 
 
 The man, who thus spoke, is their greatest name ; and 
 he would not have felt this affection, had the order been 
 originally as corrupt as it afterwards became. Gladly, did 
 our limits permit, would we dwell on his history. A man 
 of higher talent than Loyola, a ripe scholar, and of that 
 commanding courage which nothing could daunt, there were 
 also in him a fervent piety, and boundless self-sacrificing 
 benevolence, that all the errors of his faith could not obscure. 
 On the Malabar coast, in the kingdom of Iravancore, where 
 he gave baptism to 10,000 in one month with his own hand, 
 in the Moluccas, and in Ceylon, he labored in perils immi- 
 nent, and amid great privations and difficulties, but never 
 without fruit. His chief triumphs were, however, in Japan. 
 Having seen the principles of his religion spreading rapidly 
 through that empire, he longed next to enter China. With 
 the assurance that it was at the risk of his life, he bargained 
 but to be put ashore on its inhospitable coast. They who 
 were to have done this failed him ; and in sight of the em- 
 pire which he was not allowed to enter, on the small rocky 
 island of Sancian, he breathed his last. Dying thus, with 
 his last and greatest enterprise unachieved, he yet laid his 
 body thus as on the counterscarp, leaving to the ranks be- 
 hind, a name and example that never lost their rallying 
 power, until these ramparts of heathenism were scaled, and 
 China too was entered and won. In Japan, the order fol- 
 lowed up his plans, until their converts had reached the 
 number of 200,000. The Jesuit fathers who succeeded in 
 forcing the barriers of China — Ricci, Scholl, and Verbiest — 
 were men distinguished in science and talent. The manu- 
 scripts left by some of them are said to show too — written 
 evidentlv but for their own use — that they were men of 
 piety. Of some of them at least, Milne, and Morrison, and 
 other Protestant missionaries have thought highly, as men 
 of real devotedness and mistaken piety. At one time, there 
 
 24 
 
178 THE JESUITS, 
 
 seemed reason to expect that the Celestial Empire was to 
 become Christian, the empress herself having joined the 
 Christian Church, the emperor being known as their patron, 
 and Jesuit fathers filling the highest posts at court, and dis- 
 playing their varied attainments as geographers, legislators, 
 philosophers and astronomers, and even as cannon-foui|flers. 
 The same indefatigable community were busily assailing the 
 Fetichism of Africa on the west and east, and its Moham- 
 medanism on the north. They had their missionary enter- 
 prises at Congo and Loango, at Tripoli and Morocco, and 
 Monomotapa and Mozambique, In Abyssinia, after frequent 
 repulses, they acquired at one time the ascendency, and a 
 Jesuit was made the patriarch of the national church ; but 
 his innovations and inquisitorial cruelties soon wrought the 
 indignant expulsion of the religion they were intended to 
 establish. In Egypt, too, their laborers were early found ; 
 and in Asia, besides the points already enumerated, they 
 toiled in India and Persia. In Syria and Thibet, the sons 
 of Loyola were lifting the banners of the Romish church. 
 
 On our own shores, their missionaries, as we have already 
 seen, were found at an early day. They followed the red 
 man to his haunts, paddled with him the rude canoe, reared 
 beside his their hut, and displayed a patient and winning 
 sweetness, that disarmed his ferocity. The tribes beside 
 our great inland seas claimed more than a century ago, the 
 care of the Jesuit fathers. Sault de St. Marie and Mackinaw 
 were sites of their missions ; and yet beyond these places 
 there were points where the wandering son of Loyola reared 
 his wooden crucifix, and built his bark chapel, in regions 
 that even in our own late day the westward wave of emigra- 
 tion has not yet reached. To other parts of North America 
 the same fraternity had expanded their establishments. In 
 the peninsula of California, they gathered villages of con- 
 verted Indians that still exist, although in a declining state 
 and under the charge since of other religious orders. In 
 Mexico, also, they labored for the conversion of the Abori- 
 gines. In the southern portion of our continent were, how- 
 ever, the scenes of their greatest toils and their most glori- 
 ous triumj)hs. They labored in Peru and in Chili. Far 
 more repulsive was the field chosen, however, by those of 
 the Jesuit fathers who, like Ortega and Nobregas, labored 
 among the cannibals of Brazil. Tribes, with whom the flesh 
 of their captives was the choicest of dainties, and whose older 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 179 
 
 women bore to the battle-field the vessels in which the 
 horrid banquet of victory was to be prepared, were compel- 
 led at length to yield to the dauntless zeal of the intrepid 
 missionary ; and, relinquishing their cannibalism, learned 
 gentleness and piety. But their most splendid honors were 
 won in the neighboring country of Paraguay. They found 
 its wide plains traversed by numerous but divided hordes, 
 ignorant of the simplest arts, impatient of restraint, and 
 prompt to deeds of blood. Gathering at first but some fifty 
 families, they reared at last a community which was esti- 
 mated at one time to number 300,000 souls. The Indian 
 was instructed in agriculture and the handicraft arts, in 
 music, and even in painting. Villages, or Reductions, as 
 they were called, rose rapidly, where an Arcadian purity 
 of manners reigned through communities of thousands, who 
 had but recently been roving, lawless savages. They labor- 
 ed for a common stock, and subsisted on the common stores. 
 Never, probably, has the experiment of a comnmnity of pos- 
 sessions been so long tried, and so successfully, as it was 
 there. Yet, beneficent as was the Jesuit rule over these 
 their subjects, it was so absolute, that their converts might 
 be said never to have outgrown the state of nonage. Theirs 
 was a filial servitude. 
 
 In all these their missions, the order displayed an indomi- 
 table energy, and a spirit of most adventurous enterprise. 
 As dauntless as they were versatile, and as unwearied as 
 they were dauntless, the door closed against them was 
 undermined, if it could not be opened, and stormed where 
 it could not be undermined. Martyrdom for them had no 
 terrors. Did the news return to their colleges in Europe of 
 a missionary falling riddled by the arrows of the Brazilian 
 savage, at the foot of the crucifix he had planted, or of 
 scores sent into the depths of ocean by heretic captors, the 
 names of the fallen were inserted on the rubrics of Jesuit 
 martyrs ; and not the students only, but the professors of 
 their institutions rushed to fill the ranks that had been thus 
 thinned. And, turning from their fields of missionary en- 
 terprise in the far East, and in the remotest West, to what 
 they had accomplished in Europe, there was much at this 
 time to stir the Jesuit to self-gratulation. Their science, 
 and address, and renunciation of ecclesiastical preferment 
 had made members of their order confessors to some of the 
 most powerful monarchs. In controversy, they had given 
 
180 THE JESUITS, 
 
 to the Romish church Bellarmine, the ablest of her defend- 
 ers, and, though a Jesuit, perhaps also the most candid of 
 Romish controversialists. To the French pulpit they had 
 furnished Bourdaloue, among its great names no weaker 
 luminary, and perhaps its first reasoner. Their divines, ora- 
 tors, poets, historians and critics were well nigh numberless, 
 the order claiming to have produced more distinguished 
 scholars than all the other Romish communities together. 
 In education, they had been the benefactors of the world. 
 Their institutions are proposed by Bacon as the best of 
 models, and Mackintosh has pronounced the strides made by 
 the society in the work of instruction the greatest ever wit- 
 nessed. But in missions was the beginning of their strength, 
 and the excellency of their glory. The character of Xavier 
 gave to the cause of evangelization an impulse such as it had 
 not received for seven centuries ; and to this day, his church 
 looks in vain for one, who, to his dauntless zeal and his un- 
 tiring patience, has united the splendor of his talents, and 
 his wide influence, that went overrunning a nation like some 
 great conflagration. Through all these fields of labor they 
 continued to difiuse one spirit, not spent by toil, and not 
 diminished by distance from the centre of power. From the 
 man, who sat in a gilded confessional with a monarch for 
 his penitent, amid the splendid luxury of Versailles or Ma- 
 drid, to him who in a wigwam of bark shared the rude fare 
 of the Canadian Indian, sleeping on the skin won in the 
 chase, and lighted by the blazing pine-knot, one soul pos- 
 sessed the entire body. From East to West, from North to 
 South, the sons of Ignatius were pursuing one object through 
 a thousand mazy channels. The motto and device in one 
 of their earlier histories was well illustrated in their conduct. 
 That device was a mirror, and the superscription was " Om- 
 nia omnibus," All things to all men. But what in Paul 
 was Christian courtesy, leaning on inflexible principle ; and 
 what in Loyola himself was probably wisdom, but slightly 
 tinged with unwarrantable policy, became, in some of his 
 disciples, the laxest casuistry, chameleon-like, shifting its 
 hues to every varying shade of interest or fashion. 
 
 There was much in the nature of Romanism itself to make 
 the work of proselytism easy and rapid. The priest went 
 forth a solitary man, with no ties to any spot, with few 
 incumbrances, moving freely and at little cost through wide 
 districts. The rites that he celebrated took the senses of 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 181 
 
 the rude barbarian as by storm. The music, the incense, 
 the gorgeous robe, the golden vessels, the picture, the statue, 
 and the crucifix were to the savage most imposing. Again, 
 no change of heart was requisite to baptism. No long fami- 
 liarity with Scripture preceded entrance to the church. The 
 creed, the catechism,* and a few prayers and hymns were to 
 be translated, and a nation was supplied with its religious 
 literature. Submission to external rites, and a blind defer- 
 ence to priestly authority, threw open the doors of the church 
 as to the rushing feet of a nation. They who entered it, 
 found it was not the holy of holies they had reached. We 
 do not mean to say, that there was no holy fruit in their 
 religion. We would only speak of the low form of Chris- 
 tian chai-acter they had proposed for their converts. Yet 
 we believe the morals of their disciples were generally higher 
 than those of the converts gained by other orders ; and the 
 constancy, with which such multitudes in their Japanese 
 churches endured the most appalling forms of martyrdom, 
 allows us to hope, that under much of superstition and much 
 of ignorance, there was also something of love to Christ. 
 
 Yet from this height of success, and influence, and honors 
 they were doomed to fall, and for a time the world seemed 
 to shake with their far-resounding ruin. In Japan, their 
 200,000 converts, exciting, justly or unjustly, apprehension, 
 of political intrigue in the mind of a native prince, who was 
 consolidating the kingdoms of Japan into one empire, they 
 were exterminated by one of the fiercest persecutions that 
 Christianity has ever experienced. Multitudes perished in 
 prison ; some were buried in ditches, others, immersed in 
 freezing water, died^ death of lingering agony ; some were 
 crucified, others were beheaded ; and large numbers were 
 thrown into one of the volcanic craters of the country, while 
 the crosses of the Jesuit pastors studded the edges of the 
 fearful cavity into which their flocks were hurried. That 
 country has been thenceforward sealed against the gospel 
 more closely than any other heathen land on the earth. It 
 was, perhaps, one instance of those fearful retributions, that, 
 in the language of Bacon, are occasionally written by the 
 hand of Nemesis along the highway of nations, in characters 
 which he that runneth may read, that the Japanese were 
 
 * Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, furnishes a curious specimen of one of 
 the Jesuit catechisms, used among our American Indians. 
 
182 THE JESUITS, 
 
 insti"-ated, in this extinction of the Jesuit churches, by the 
 Dutch, a people who had never forgotten the butcheries of 
 the ferocious Alva, and thus requited on the rising Romanism 
 of the East the wrongs that rehgion had wrought them in the 
 West. In China, contentions with other Romish orders 
 thwarted their labors ; their political power was soon lost, 
 and their converts were driven into concealment. But though 
 denounced by edicts of the empire, and on pain of death ex- 
 pelled from its territories, they have never ceased laboring 
 there, and the Catholic Christians at this hour secreted in 
 the bosom of that nation, are calculated by Medhurst at 
 200,000. In Paraguay and in California, their settlements 
 have been transferred to the charge of other orders, and 
 themselves were exiled, as was also the case in the Philip- 
 pine Islands. Their expulsion from the fields in South Amer- 
 ica, watered so freely with the wealth, and talents, and best 
 blood of the order, grew out of their disgrace in Europe. In 
 France, they had denounced and suppressed Jansenism ; but 
 received in their conflict with that body of most able and 
 holy men, the Port Royalists, a deathful arrow they could 
 never extricate. We need not say we allude to the Provin- 
 cial Letters of Pascal, a work whose mingling powers of wit, 
 and argument, and eloquence, well nigh unrivalled apart, and 
 in their union unequalled, fixed the ultimate fate of the Je- 
 suit order. They stood up, too. in the same country, in the 
 days of their oavu intellectual decrepitude, to wrestle against 
 the young scepticism of the Regency and of the days of 
 Louis XV. Voltaire, and Diderot, and D'Holbach, and Hel- 
 vetius, men educated in their own colleges, overwhelmed 
 their old teachers with sarcasm, and iroijy, and wit, the more 
 burning in its severity often, because it ivas the language of 
 truth. To every state they had made themselves odious by 
 intermingling themselves with political affairs. In their own 
 church they found the bitterest enemies, in the worldly who 
 envied their power, and in the zealous, who detested their 
 lax casuistry and their erroneous doctrine. By principles, 
 which if not their own invention, were at least their favorite 
 implements, they explained away all obligation ; and some of 
 their doctors seemed scarce to have left faith on the earth, or 
 justice in the heavens. In short, they threw conscience into 
 the alembic, and drew from the retort a mixture, like the 
 aqua Tofana of Italian poisons, clear as the water that streams 
 from the rock, but to drink of which was lingering, inevitable 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 183 
 
 death. This laxity of moral teaching was felt to be the 
 more inexcusable, in a body who had constituted themselves 
 the jealous guardians of what they called orthodoxy in doc- 
 trine : " a sort of men," as said the Abbe Boileau, brother of 
 the poet, " who set themselves to lengthen the creed, and 
 abridge the commandments." Casuistry became in their 
 hands, as Bayle has well called it, "the art of cavilling with 
 God." But men, even the vilest, cannot long respect those 
 who pander to their corruptions, and the order soon fell un- 
 der the ban of the human race. Their principles in morals, 
 too, reacted upon themselves. Like the French poisoner, 
 who perished by the fall of his mask, inhaling unexpectedly 
 the fumes of the poison he was compounding for others, the 
 order could not retain its old zeal, and the life of its early 
 fanaticism, while propagating such sentiments. Some, even, 
 of the Jesuit missionaries to heathenism were, it is said, in 
 secret, infidels. At Rome itself, they had become tools more 
 convenient than reputable. None had done more than they 
 to uphold the staggering power of that see ; and no less than 
 ninety bulls issued from under the Fisherman's Ring had 
 attested the esteem in which the Vatican held them, and its 
 resolution to defend them against their embittered foes. But 
 its power now failed. Catholic France, and Portugal, and 
 Spain, were resolutely bent on the ruin of the order. The 
 arts, both of policy and force, they had so long practised, 
 were now turned against them. With a secresy they had 
 never surpassed in their own movements, the measures were 
 concerted for their expulsion from Spain and Portugal. 
 Driven from their colleges and possessions, blackened in 
 character, and destitute, and many of them aged, they were 
 hurled on the charities of a world they had not propitiated 
 by their former conduct. Never slow, in the day of their 
 power, to use the arm of the civil government for the purpose 
 of persecution, they now felt its weight upon themselves. 
 They had instigated in France the bloody massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew, it is said, and had most certainly shared largely 
 in the perfidy, the frauds, and the revolting dragoonades that 
 procured and followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantz. 
 The recompense long accumulating now descended. Reluc- 
 tantly, but necessarily, the Roman court itself withdrew in 
 terror from these its stanchest servants, and pronounced with 
 faltering lips, the dissolution of the order. 
 
 They had forgotten, in their abuse of power, and talent. 
 
184 THE JESUITS, 
 
 arid influence, that there was on high One mightier than all 
 the mighty of earth, whom they had subsidized, or flattered, 
 or corrupted. Providence, an element upon which in their 
 latter days they had forgotten to calculate, was now meeting 
 them at eveiy turn. If they had lost sight of it, never had 
 it lost sight of them. It used no confessors, and they could 
 not guide it ; nor did it wait in its movements for the shuf- 
 fling of the pieces on the checker-boards of earthly cabinets, 
 which Jesuitism watched so narrowly. But when its fulness 
 of times was come, it called, and every stormy passion of 
 human nature rushed at its bidding, eager to do the work of 
 retribution ; while, unpitied, Jesuitism stood to bear, in its 
 loneliness, the meeting vengeance of earth and heaven. 
 
 Never had Romanism progeny that bore more perfectly its 
 own image, or embodied its grand principles so faithfully as 
 did the Jesuit system. The principle of the order was but a 
 reduction to its simplest essence of that one master idea of 
 the Romish creecl — implict faith — unlimited obedience. 
 These are, in justice, due only to a Being of infinite truth, 
 and underived, and unending sovereignty. Nothing less able 
 or less wise, nothing short of the divine wisdom, that cannot 
 mistake, and that will not deceive, is entitled to demand such 
 subjection and confidence. It is the great sin of the Romish 
 apostasy, its npforov ipcvSoi, that it has here arrogated the prero- 
 gative of the Godhead, and in the seat of God given itself 
 out as God over the human conscience and heart. This it is 
 that constitutes the Antichrist, the rival usurping the rights 
 of the Christ. For that Saviour, who created and ransomed 
 the soul, whose eye pervades its depths with a searching 
 omniscience, and whose hand encompasses it in all its wan- 
 derings with an ever-present ahnightiness, is entitled to the 
 absolute rule and dominion of that soul. Romanism has, 
 however, demanded this power. For faith in Christ, as the 
 one condition of salvation, it has substituted faith in the 
 church. Jesuitism, with its wonted sagacity, saw, that in 
 this claim lay the strength of the Romish system. It rose up 
 to preach the doctrine to a world whom the Reformation 
 was fast alienating. It rose up to exemplify the obedience, 
 in its own unreserved, unquestioning submission to its own 
 general, and through him to the Romish see. But while they 
 thus acquired power, they were also sowing the seeds of de- 
 cay. By this implicit obedience, the individual merged his 
 personal rights and his spiritual existence in the society. 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 185 
 
 The mass had a conscience ; but the members had not. But 
 while they fonned thus obedient societies, because there was 
 no individuality of opinion or will, there was as much of in- 
 trinsic weakness, as there was of quiet in the body. Remove 
 the head, and the life had departed from an entire commu- 
 nity. They destroyed, also, by this same process the higher 
 order of talents, which act only in a state of comparative 
 freedom. Splendid as were their scholars in every walk, 
 yet, as Mackintosh has remarked, through two centuries of 
 power and fame, they gave to Europe no genius to be named 
 with Racine and Pascal, men who sprung from the Port 
 Royalists, in the career, both far more brief and far more 
 stormy, of that persecuted community. 
 
 In this, his distinctive trait of chai-acter, the Jesuit stood as 
 the moral antipodes of the Puritan. In the latter, the Re- 
 formation presented its principle, the right of private judg- 
 ment, as displayed in its barest, broadest shape. While, in 
 the Jesuit, the man was nought, and the community was 
 every thing, with the Puritan, on the contrary, the society 
 was comparatively nothing, and the individual all. With him 
 religion was, in its highest privileges, and its profoundest 
 mysteries, a personal matter. He studied his Bible for him- 
 self ; to aid in turning its pages and loosening its seal, God 
 the Son, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, stooped over him 
 as he read ; and to reveal its inner lessons, God the Spirit 
 whispered in his heart, and brooded over the depths of his 
 soul. He profited by the prayers and teachings of his pastor, 
 gave liberally for his support, and received reverently at his 
 hands the sacramental symbols ; but he believed even this 
 his beloved guide, companion and friend, but a fellow-ser- 
 vant, whose help could not supersede his own private studies, 
 and his individual faith. He valued his fellow-Christians, 
 communed with them, prayed with them, shared with them 
 his last loaf, and falling into their ranks, raised with them the 
 battle-cry, " The sword of the Lord and of Gideon !" But, 
 away from pastor and from fellow-Christian, the Puritan 
 turned in the trying hour to his God. It was the genius of 
 this system to develop the individual ; and in every emergen- 
 cy, to throw him in the last resort upon the lonely commu- 
 nings of his own soul with its Creator. It taught him to 
 make religion, in the affecting language of one of the later 
 Platonists, " the flight of one alone to the only One."* To the 
 
 * ^vyrj fiovov Trpoi Tok Movoi'. 
 
 25 
 
186 THE JESUITS, 
 
 place of audience the petitioner went by no deputy ; but the 
 individual man was brought to confront for himself the one 
 Mediator, and to hear for himself the response of Heaven to 
 the prayer of faith. When mind was thus thrown upon its 
 individual responsibility, and came forth from its solitary 
 meditations to the place of conference and action, there was 
 frequent dissonance in- opinion ; and a collision in action, of- 
 ten more apparent than real, threatened at times to rend the 
 social bonds, to break up all concert, and to destroy all 
 power. Yet conscientious men were not likely to differ 
 widely or long. And, on the other hand, take fi-om such a 
 community its spiritual guides, and how soon were they re- 
 placed. Persecute them, and how indomitable was their 
 faith. Scatter them, and how rapidly were they propagated. 
 Jesuitism gathered more numerous and united societies ; but 
 they were societies of men without consciences and without a 
 will, whose judgments and souls were under the lock of the 
 confessional, or were carried about under the frock of their 
 Jesuit pastor. Kind he might be and faithful, but did death 
 remove him, or persecution exile the shepherd and disperse 
 the Hock, they had no rallying power. Like the seeds from 
 which the industrious ant has removed the germinating 
 principle, the largest hoard, when scattered, brought no har- 
 vest. 
 
 It were a curious employment, to trace the unwitting 
 adoption, at times in our own land, of this great principle of 
 Romanism, of which the Jesuit order was the embodiment 
 and incarnation, as if it were one of the radical truths of de- 
 mocracy — we mean, the principle of the absorption of the 
 individual conscience into that of the mass. It is to some an 
 essential law of democracy, that the many have unlimited 
 power over the will and conscience of the (ew. Yet it would 
 require little of time or of labor to show, how fatal is such a 
 principle to the rights of conscience, and the interests of 
 truth. God made man apart. Apart he is regenerated. 
 Apart he dies. Apart he is judged. To each of us his 
 Maker gave a conscience, but to none of us did he assign a 
 conscience-keeper, Man was not made for society, but so- 
 ciety was made for man. Back of its first institution, lie 
 some of his inalienable rights, and his first and most sacred 
 duties. Communities of men, then, cannot receive, and 
 should not ask, any transfer of conscience. Between a 
 man's own spirit and his God, neither king, nor kaysar, nor 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 187 
 
 congress, synod, nor pontiff, voluntary societies, nor compul- 
 sory societies, if such there be, may lay sceptre or crosier, edict 
 or vote. The thing is a grand impertinence. When per- 
 sonal duty is involved, to his own Master the man stands or 
 falls. We mean not these remarks for those duties which 
 man owes to society, and where their laws may rightfully 
 control and punish him. We speak of the far wider field 
 over which some would extend those laws, and where they 
 do not justly come, where a man walks accountable to his 
 God only, and where, if human legislation follow him, it is 
 usurpation upon the rights of man, and impiety against his 
 Maker. We know how irksome to many is all noise of dis- 
 sent and all free expression of private judgment. To remedy 
 and reform all this dangerous independence, this ominous 
 revolt against parental care, was the high attempt of Jesuit- 
 ism. Let those, who envy to that society their fame and their 
 fate, tread in their steps, breaking down the individual man 
 to build up the man social. 
 
 Another remarkable feature in the Jesuit order, illustrated 
 in the history of all their missions, was their fatal principle 
 of accommodation — one in the use of which they alternatety 
 triumphed and fell. The gospel is to be presented with no 
 needless offence given to the prejudices and habits of the 
 heathen, but the gospel itself is never to be mutilated or dis- 
 guised ; nor is the ministry ever to stoop to compliances in 
 themselves sinful. The Jesuit mistook or forgot this. From 
 a very early period, the order were famed for the art with 
 which they studied to accommodate themselves and their 
 religion to the tastes of the nation they would evangelize. 
 Ricci, on entering China, found the bonzes, the priests of 
 the nation ; and to secure respect, himself and his associates 
 adopted the habits and dress of the bonzes. But a short ac- 
 quaintance with the empire taught him, that the whole class 
 of the priesthood was in China a despised one, and that he 
 had been only attracting gratuitous odium in assuming their 
 garb. He therefore relinquished it again, to take that of the 
 men of letters. In India, some of their number adopted the 
 Braminical dress, and others conformed to the disgusting 
 habits of the Fakeer and the Yogee, the hermits and peni- 
 tents of the Mohammedan and Hindoo superstition. Svvartz 
 met a catholic missionary, arrayed in the style of the Pagan 
 priests, wearing their yellow robe, and having like them a 
 drum beaten before him. It would seem upon such principles 
 
188 THE JESUITS, 
 
 of action, as if their next step ought to have been the 
 creation of a Christian Juggernaut ; or to have arranged the 
 Christian suttee, where the widow might burn according to 
 the forms of the Romish breviary : or to have organized a 
 band of Romanist Thugs, strangling in the name of the vir- 
 ffin, as did their Hindoo brethren for the honor of Kalee. In 
 South America, one of the zealous Jesuit fathers, finding that 
 the Payernes, as the sorcerers and priests of the tribe were 
 called, were accustomed to dance and sing in giving their 
 religious instructions, put his preachments into metre, and 
 copied the movements of these Pagan priests, that he might 
 win the savage by the forms to which he had been accus- 
 tomed. In China, again, they found the worship of deceased 
 ancestors generally prevailing. Failing to supplant the prac- 
 tice, they proceeded to legitimate it. They even allowed 
 worship to be paid to Confucius, the atheistical philosopher 
 of China, provided their converts would, in offering the wor- 
 ship, conceal upon the altar a crucifix to which their homage 
 should be secretly directed. Finding the adoration of a cru- 
 cified Saviour unpopular among that self-suflicient people, 
 they are accused by their own Romanist brethren of having 
 suppressed in their teachings the mystery of the cross, and 
 preached Christ glorified, but not Christ in his humiliation, 
 his agony and his death. A more arrogant act than this the 
 wisdom of this world has seldom perpetrated, when it has 
 undertaken to modify and adorn the gospel of the crucified 
 Nazarene. 
 
 But to Robert de Nobilibus, the nephew of Bellarmine, 
 and the near kinsman of one of the pontiffs, a man of distin- 
 guished talent and zeal, laboring in India, it was reserved to 
 exhibit one of the worst instances of this fatal spirit. Find- 
 ing the Bramins in possession of the spiritual power, he pub- 
 lished abroad that the Bramins of Rome were the kindred, 
 but the seniors and the superiors of those of India. Enmity 
 may have charged him falsely, in declaring that he forged 
 deeds, in which a direct descent was claimed for these West- 
 ern Bramins from Brama himself, the chief god of Hindoo 
 idolatry ; but it is certain, that in this or some other mode he 
 made the new faith so popular, that twelve, or as some ac- 
 counts state, seventy of the Indian Bramins became his 
 coadjutors ; and after his death, with the collusion of the Portu- 
 guese priests, the new sect went on still triumphing. But 
 even the Romish sec repudiated such conversions as these ; 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER, ll^y 
 
 and a bull from the Vatican extinguished the new commu- 
 nion. To this same able but treacherous laborer belongs 
 the fame of another kindred achievement. He composed m 
 the language of the country a treatise in favor of Christianity. 
 The work had the title of the Ezour Vedam. It was intended 
 to sap the scepticism of the East ; but so covertly, though 
 with much ability, did it undertake the task, that having been 
 translated and reaching France, where it fell into the "hands 
 of Voltaire, he pounced upon it as an ancient Braminical 
 treatise, full of Oriental wisdom, and proving that Christian- 
 ity had borrowed its chief doctrines from Eastern sources. 
 Thus, while laboring to destroy unbeUef in India, he became 
 in the next century instrumental in aiding its progress in 
 Europe. The Jesuit, caught in his own snare, was made 
 from his grave to lend weapons to the scoffer ; while the 
 arch-mocker, the patriarch of French infidelity, entangled in 
 the toils of that wilful credulity which has distinguished so 
 many eminent unbelievers, quoted the work of modern Je- 
 suitism as an undoubted monument of ancient Braminism. 
 Thus are the wise taken in their own craftiness, when in 
 their self-confidence they undertake either to patronize or to 
 impugn the gospel of the Nazarene. 
 
 We need scarcely to name another defect of the Jesuit mis- 
 sions, which must have occurred to all — their fatal neglect 
 of the Scriptures. Even Xavier translated into Japanese but 
 the creed, the Lord's prayer, and a brief catechism, and after- 
 wards a Life of the Saviour compliled from the Gospels. 
 The Lives of the Saints afterwards appeared in that lan- 
 guage. In the tongue of China the Jesuits acquired such 
 proficiency as to become voluminous authors, writing, it is 
 said, hundreds of books ; but although they translated the 
 ponderous Sum of Theology of Thomas Aquinas into Chi- 
 nese, the Scriptures seem to have been thought a needless or 
 dangerous book, and a compend of the gospel history was, 
 we believe, their chief work in the form of scriptural transla- 
 tion. With no religious light but that emanating from the 
 altar and pulpit, their churches were, when persecution veil- 
 ed these, left in thick darkness. The Jesuits, anxious to 
 shut up their converts into a safe and orthodox submission, 
 seem to have preterred this fearful risk, to the peril of leaving 
 the lively oracles to beam forth their living brightness 
 upon the minds of their people. Hence the Catholics, linger- 
 ing still in the Celestial Empire, and their Indian neophytes 
 
I9Q THE JESUITS, 
 
 in Paraguay and California, have probably never known, 
 scarce even by name, those Scriptures which are the right- 
 ful heritage of every Christian. Nor, for their own use, 
 even, did their missionaries prize the Bible aright. Does the 
 Jesuit father appear in the midst of a savage tribe to harangue 
 them on his religion ; or is he dragged by them a daunt- 
 less victim to the stake ; the one volume, that is seen sus- 
 pended from his neck, is not the Bible, but his breviary. In 
 all this, the Jesuit was but acting with other Romanists, 
 That church has assumed the fearful responsibility of shut- 
 ting out the sunlight of divine revelation ; undertaking, in its 
 stead, to supply the reflected light, the moonbeams of tradi- 
 tion—a gentler brightness, under which no eye will be daz- 
 zled, by which no mind will be quickened into too rapid a 
 vegetation — a dubious gloom, favorable alike to wonder, to 
 fear, to slumber, and to fraud. But as the sun will shine, so 
 the Scriptures live on. They who preach the truth, but give 
 not the Bible, withhold from their own teachings the most 
 authoritative sanction. Those, on the contrary, whose doc- 
 trine is a doctrine of falsehood, contravening and supersed- 
 ing the Scriptures, must yet one day meet that light they 
 would have obscured, and find themselves and all their 
 doings tried by the standard they would have fain displaced. 
 The Jesuit order has been recently revived. Restored in 
 our own times to existence by that see for which they con- 
 tended so valiantly and effectively, it remains to be seen how 
 far they will resume their ancient fields, and with what 
 measure of their first zeal and success. Were they to throw 
 themselves into the current of the age with the sinewy vigor 
 and lithe pliability of former times, they may yet prove most 
 formidable. Their power of attaching the heart is, by all 
 who have closely observed tliem, confessed to be great. But 
 the age is one far diflerent from that in which they began 
 their career, more impracticable, less liable to monopoly, and 
 less patient of control. 
 
 The men of a purer faith may well emulate their fearless 
 heroism, their courtesy, their patience and industry. Amid 
 the snows of Canada and on the fir-clad shores of our west- 
 ern lakes, along the v.-ilds where Orellana 
 
 "rolls his world of waters to the sea," 
 
 on the burning margin of Africa, in the sultry Hindostan, 
 amid the millions of China and Japan, the fathers of the 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 191 
 
 order of Loyola shrunk not from pain, or toil, or want, or 
 death itself. When the plague wasted, and thousands were 
 falling before it, in the deep pestilential holds of the galley 
 where their Christian charge were held in bonds by their 
 Turkish captors ; or in the heathen land when persecution 
 had unleashed all its emissaries of terror and death, the Jesuit 
 missionary was seen manifesting a serene courage, his stanch- 
 est accusers might well envy. Had the order but fixed the 
 cross in the heart, where they reared the crucifix in the 
 market-place, had they given the Scriptures where they scat- 
 tered legends, and labored for Christ as assiduously and 
 boldly as they bled for the delusions of Antichrist, the whole 
 history of the world had been altered. But had they done all 
 this, the work of evangelizing the world would not have been 
 left to become as it is, the blessed privilege of our own age. 
 The failures of others, their corruptions and their deficien- 
 cies, are part of the heritage of instruction that time has 
 been accumulating for the benefit of the modern laborer, like 
 the brass and iron of vanquished Syria, which David pro- 
 vided for the temple that was to be reared by the hand of his 
 son, the favored Solomon. 
 
 The institution, on whose history we have dwelt, shows 
 what a few resolute hearts may accomplish. When Ignatius 
 with his first companions bound themselves, by a midnight 
 vow, at Montmartre, near Paris, on the 15th of August, 1534, 
 some three centuries ago, to renounce the world for the pur- 
 pose of preaching the gospel, wherever the supreme pontiff 
 might send them, the engagement, thus ratified in darkness 
 and secrecy beside the slumbering capital of France, was 
 one most momentous to the interests of our entire race. 
 That company of seven poor students, with but zeal, talent, 
 and stout hearts, and a burning enthusiasm, formed then a 
 bond far more important to the after history of mankind than 
 most of the leagues made by kings at the head of embattled 
 squadrons. We doubt if Talleyrand ever schemed, or Na- 
 poleon, in his highest flights of victory, ever dictated so sig- 
 nificant an act. In its moral sublimity, the act far transceiui- 
 ed that of Cortez and Pizarro receiving the mass in a Spanish 
 church, upon their engagement to set out for the subversion 
 of an American empire. In the shadows of that subterranean 
 chapel, where these first Jesuits thus bound themselves, fancy 
 sees Africa, and Asia, and our own America, watching intently 
 a transaction, that was to affect so deeply their subsequent 
 
192 THE JESUITS, 
 
 history. It remains for those rejoicing in the principles 
 of the Reformation, to bring the devotedness and intre- 
 pidity of the Jesuit to bear upon their own purer system, in 
 the missionary field. With the incorruptible word of our 
 God for our chosen weapon, victories impossible to them 
 may become easy to us ; and what was but too often a for- 
 gotten motto, on the surface of Jesuitism, may become a 
 principle at the heart of the Protestant missionary, "A/Z for 
 the greater glory of God.''''* 
 
 In the missionary toils, that are to aid in ushering in this 
 day, do we expect too much from the youthful scholars of 
 our country? Are not its colleges already sheltering those 
 who are destined to become the heralds of Christianity to the 
 far heathen ? On this theme, we would quote yet again from 
 one on whose own history we should gladly have lingered 
 longer, Francis Xavier. From one of his missions in Cochin 
 China, this apostolic man wrote to the university of the Sor- 
 bonne, then the focus of theological science to Catholic 
 Europe, in language much of which we doubt not a Carey or 
 a Martyn would not have hesitated to adopt. " I have often 
 thought to run over all the universities of Europe, and espe- 
 cially that of Paris, and to cry aloud to those who abound 
 more in learning than in charity, O, how many souls are lost 
 to heaven through your neglect ! Many would be moved. 
 They would say, Behold me in readiness, O Lord ! How 
 much more happily would these learned men then live — 
 with how much more assurance die. Millions of idolaters 
 might be easily converted, if there were more preachers who 
 would sincerely mind the interests of Jesus Christ and not 
 their own." 
 
 The letter was read, admired and copied. We may sup- 
 pose there were those who applauded and transcribed that 
 letter, but failed to obey its summons ; to whose dying pillow- 
 that appeal came back, and sounded through the depths of 
 the soul as the voice of neglected duty. May no such regrets 
 disturb the hour of our dismission. May a life, instinct with 
 zeal for God and love to man, and crowded with effort, make 
 death, whether it come late or soon, the welcome discharge 
 of a laborer found toiling at his post. And, my young breth- 
 ren in Christ, permit a stranger to hope, that among the 
 honors of your Alma Mater, and especially of this missionary 
 
 'Admajorem Dei gloriam," the motto of Loyola. 
 
AS A MISSIONARY ORDER. 193 
 
 association gathered amongst her sons, it may yet be record- 
 ed, that hence went forth men, who, on the stock of a purer 
 faith, grafted the zeal of Francis Xavier, and, emulating his 
 virtues, won a success more durable, because the means they 
 employed were more scriptural — men, who, sitting at the 
 Master's feet, and reflecting his image, and breathing his 
 spirit, were recognized, by an admiring world and an ex- 
 ulting church, &s those who had been much with Christ and 
 learned of him, and who belonged on earth, and would as- 
 suredly, through all eternity, continue to belong, of a truth, 
 and in the highest sense of the words, to " The Society 
 OF Jesus." 
 
 26 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 Among the names which it is good to repeat, we know 
 of none more inspiriting, as an example of ministerial devo- 
 tedness, than that of Richard Baxter. Known to the 
 mass of society, in every land where the English tongue is 
 spoken, as the author of two of the most useful volumes in 
 the religious literature of that language, rich as that literature 
 is, he deserves to be remembered by the youthful pastor as 
 a signal example of ministerial fidelity, and power, and suc- 
 cess, even had he never written the Call to the Unconverted, 
 or that gem of devout genius, the Saints' Everlasting Rest. 
 An-d, bequeathing, as he did, not only the lustre of a brilliant 
 example, but the rules of his own ministerial career, in his 
 treatise, " The Reformed Pastor," he has acquired a title to 
 be among those first named, whenever the eyes of the rising 
 ministry are directed to the earlier worthies of the church. 
 
 There is much in the character of the age to which he be- 
 longed to make it deserving of profound study. Seasons of 
 revolution, by affording the requisite emergencies, and open- 
 ing a freer path to talent, are fertile in great men. His was 
 an era of revolution, alike in the political and in the moral 
 elements of society. The English throne was overturned, to 
 be replaced by a republic, itself followed by the Protectorate, 
 which gave place to a restoration of the Stuarts, soon to be 
 expelled by the revolution of 1688. In science, the methods 
 of Bacon, now first practically applied, were working momen- 
 tous changes. It was the age in which flourished his great 
 disciple, Boyle, and in which were trained up Newton and 
 Locke, who attempted, with such splendid power, to carry 
 out the principles of Bacon into the world of matter and the 
 world of mind. Then, too, it was that Milton gave to the 
 literature of England his great epic, yet standing in unap- 
 proached and unapproachable grandeur. 
 
 To the inhabitants of this country it must ever seem a 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 195 
 
 momentous era, as being the age in English history, out of 
 which the creative hand of Divine Providence took the mass 
 with which he formed the elements of American freedom, 
 and in which lay the germs of our religious, political, and 
 social character. The England of those times was the Eden 
 in which were formed the Adam and Eve of the New Eng- 
 land colonies. And as matter, not of self-gratulation, but of 
 devout oratitude, it deserves to be remembered, that the 
 national mind in our ancestral land was never of such sinewy 
 manUness, so deeply penetrated by conscientious feeling, and 
 so thoroughly suffused with scriptural knowledge, so racy 
 and so pure, as in this, the era of our birth as a people. 
 
 To the Christian scholar, the period is one teeming with 
 interest. In the church, no less than the world, it was an era 
 of remarkable men, and yet more remarkable events. In the 
 interval, stretching from the reign of the First to that of the 
 Second James, there appeared some of the strongest and holi- 
 est minds of the modern church. Never before or since, it is 
 probable, was the Bible so thoroughly and devoutly studied 
 by the British nation, as during that time. The effect was 
 seen in the talent, and principle, and prowess of the states- 
 men, the scholars, the divines, the preachers, and the heroes 
 that then adorned " the sea-girt isle." In biblical science, it 
 was then that Walton elaborated his Polyglott, and Lightfoot 
 accumulated his stores of rabbinical lore, and then, that 
 flourished Castell and Pocock. Usher, and Selden, and 
 Gataker, and Gale, and Pool, the giants of the schools, 
 were in the pulpits, aided by other laborers, whose writings 
 and preachings have scarce been surpassed in power over 
 the conscience and the heart. 
 
 In the bounds of the English Establishment, a memorable 
 revolution was undergone, not less entire or wondrous, and 
 more lasting, than that which tore up the foundations, and 
 for a time'altered the whole frame-work of the national 
 government. The accession of James I. had found the British 
 church divided between two parties. On the one side was 
 the body of the high-churchmen, of whom Laud became the 
 head the friends of arbitrary power, sticklers for order ; in 
 doctrine, the patrons of Arminianism, lovers of ceremony, 
 pomp and tradition, laying the utmost stress upon Episcopa 
 ordination, and carrying to its farthest limits the Episcopa 
 Dower, and accused, not without specious grounds, ol a strong 
 leanino- to Romanism. With them were the court and the 
 
196 
 
 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 star-chamber. On the opposite side stood the Puritans, 
 Calvinists in doctrine, of the most austere morals, and the 
 most exemplary pastors, and the most popular preachers of 
 the country ; many of them friendly to ministerial parity, but 
 all more strenuous for piety of heart, than any external con- 
 formity to the rites of the church ; and, finally, the dauntless 
 advocates of political freedom, to whom Hume traces its 
 origin in the English Constitution. With these were the body 
 of the Parliament, the hearts of the people, and the grace of 
 God. In the days of the Commonwealth, the leaders of the 
 high-church party lost all power. Laud, their chief, perished 
 on the scaffold, and Episcopacy itself was abrogated. The 
 Puritans, those of them at least who favored ministerial 
 parity, were now in prosperity ; but shared it with many 
 new communities, that, scattered by persecution and driven 
 into close retirement during the days of the star-chamber, 
 now burst into notice, and won rapidly both numbers and 
 power. The Restoration di-ove the mass of the Puritans, 
 with these other sects, into nonconformity ; exiling, from 
 the Establishment a body of men as able and pious as it has 
 ever possessed. But the national establishment was thus 
 relieved of one party, only to receive another of far different 
 character. The high-churchmen, of Laud's spirit, triumphed 
 for a time in the court of the restored Stuarts ; but their in- 
 tolerance, and bigotry, and general inferiority of character, 
 soon yielded to the superior talents and reputation of a body 
 that sprung up in the bosom of the church during the Com- 
 monwealth, the latitudinarian divines, as they were com- 
 monly called. The growth of scepticism led them to study 
 the outworks of Christian evidence. Against infidelity and 
 popery they did good service in the cause of truth. Their 
 dread of enthusiasm made them frigid, and their mastery of 
 the ancient philosophy made them profound. Their doc- 
 trines were generally Arminian. Their notions of church 
 power were less rigid than those of the rival party, and they 
 were also more tolerant of difference in opinion. But in 
 their preaching they laid the whole stress, well nigh, of their 
 efforts upon morals, to the neglect of doctrine ; and in the- 
 ology, they attributed to human reason a strength and au- 
 thority, which gradually opened the way to the invasion of 
 the gravest heresies. Of generally purer character than their 
 opponents, they were also abler preachers. But while valua- 
 ble as moral treatises, their sermons were most defective ; 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 197 
 
 for the peculiar doctrines and spirit of the gospel were 
 evaporated. Such were the low-churchmen of this time. 
 The revolution under William threw many of the high- 
 church party into the ranks of the nonjurors, from their at- 
 tachment to the Stuart family, and lost them their posts in 
 the church ; while it left those who remained still in the na- 
 tional Establishment, a weaker and a discredited party. The 
 latitudinarian divines gradually rose to an undisputed ascen- 
 dency, and gave to the whole of the church their principles, 
 until Whitefield and Wesley found the nation, under their in- 
 fluence, and their preaching of a morality well nigh dissev- 
 ered from the gospel of the cross, rocked into insensibility, 
 drenched with spiritual lethargy, and threatened by a wide- 
 spreading profligacy and the rapid growth of infidelity. 
 Thus it was that, with articles and formularies remainina- 
 entirely unchanged, the English Establishment, in the com- 
 mencement of Baxter's day, was divided between the high- 
 churchmen and the Puritans, At the close of his stormy 
 career, he saw it still divided ; but the combatants were now 
 the high-churchmen and their latitudinarian brethren. At 
 the first of his course, the church had been rent between 
 order and piety ; at the last, the controversy was between 
 order and morality. For, excellent as were many of the 
 latitudinarian divines — their Burnets, and their Tillotsons, 
 and their Cudworths — they all resorted too often to the 
 teachings of the Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the Mr. Legality, 
 and that "pretty young man, his son," Mr. Civility, who 
 have become known to us in Bunyan's matchless allegory. 
 The low-churchman of the first period was then a very dif- 
 ferent being from the low-churchman of the second. The 
 former quoted the Scriptures, and clung to the Reformers, 
 and leaned on their own articles and liturgy ; the latter gave 
 to reason luidue honor, and relied too blindly on the aid of 
 philosophy. The revolution thus accomplished in the church 
 is of interest on many accounts. It proves how little power 
 may exist in the boasted uniformity of an Establishment and 
 its unchangeable formularies. It is a study of interest, too, 
 in our days, because the Oxford theology, now so deeply 
 agitating the Christians of England, is but a re-appearance 
 of those high-church principles that culminated under Laud, 
 Parker, and Sancroft, but waning before the superior bright- 
 ness of the rival school, had seemed, for almost an entire 
 century, lost from the heavens, and vanished not to return. 
 
198 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER, 
 
 There were other revolutions in this age of change, of 
 more genial influence on the cause of freedom and human 
 happiness. The most important of these was the discovery 
 and enunciation of that great truth, the right of religious 
 freedom. Religious toleration, promulgated, and to a cer- 
 tain extent practised, under the republic and under Crom- 
 well, cruelly restricted under the Stuarts, was finally estab- 
 lished by the revolution of 1688. In preparing the way for 
 this momentous change, it is the glory of our own denom- 
 ination of Christians to have labored most efficiently. They 
 contended for what was then deemed a portentous heresy. 
 Featly himself, a man of piety, but of bitter zeal, and an 
 inveterate opponent of our body, published that the Baptists 
 were laboring for the utmost freedom of the press, and for 
 unlimited toleration — " damnable doctrines," as he termed 
 them, for which he would have them " exterminated from 
 the kingdom." 
 
 To the Baptist, then, the age of Baxter is a memorable 
 one. The period of the Commonwealth and the Protector- 
 ate was the season in which our distinguishing sentiments, 
 heretofore the hidden treasures of a few solitary confessors, 
 became the property of the people. Through weary years 
 they had been held by a few in deep retirement, and at the 
 peril of their lives ; now they began rapidly working their 
 way and openly into the masses of society. The army that 
 won for Cromwell his "crowning mercies," as he called 
 those splendid victories which assured the power of the Par- 
 liament, became deeply tinged with our views of Christian 
 faith and order. They were not, as military bodies have so 
 often been, a band of mercenary hirelings, the sweepings of 
 society, gleaned from the ale-house and the kennel, or 
 snatched from the jail and due to the gallows ; but they 
 were composed chiefly of substantial yeomanry, men who 
 entered the ranks from principle rather than for gain, and 
 whose chief motive for enlistment was, that they believed 
 the impending contest one for religious truth and for the 
 national liberties — a war in the strictest sense pro aris et 
 focis. Clarendon himself allows their superiority, in mor- 
 als and character, to the royalist forces. In this army the 
 officers were many of them accustomed to preach ; and"both 
 commanders and privates were continually busied in search- 
 ing the Scriptures, in prayers, and in Christian conference. 
 The result of the biblical studies and free communings of 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 199 
 
 these intrepid, high-principled men, was, that they became, 
 a large portion of them. Baptists. As to their character, 
 the splendid eulogy they won from Milton may counterbal- 
 ance the coarse caricatures of poets and novelists, who saw 
 them less closely, and disliked their piety too strongly, to 
 judge dispassionately their merits. 
 
 Major General Harrison, one of their most distinguished 
 leaders, was a Baptist. He was long the bosoxn friend of 
 Cromwell ; and became alienated from him only on discov- 
 ering that the Protector sought triumph, not so much for 
 principle as for his own personal aggrandizement. Favor- 
 able to liberty, and inaccessible to flattering promises of 
 power, he became the object of suspicion to Cromwell, who 
 again and again threw him into prison. On the return of 
 the Stuarts, his share in the death of Charles I., among 
 whose judges he had sat, brought him to the scaffold ; where 
 his gallant bearing and pious triumph formed a close not un- 
 suitable to the career he had run. Others of the king's judges, 
 and of the eminent officers of the army, belonged to the same 
 communion. Some of these sympathized only, it is true, 
 with their views of freedom, and seem not to have embraced 
 their religious sentiments. Among this class was Ludlow, a 
 major-general under Cromwell, an ardent republican, and 
 who, being of the regicides, sought a refuge, where he ended 
 his days, in Switzerland. He was accounted the head, at one 
 time, of the Baptist party in Ireland. Such was their interest, 
 that Baxter complains, that many of the soldiers in that king- 
 dom became Baptists, as the way to preferment. (Orme, 1., 
 135.) The chancellor of Ireland under Cromwell was also 
 of our body ; Lilburne, one of Cromwell's colonels, and bro- 
 ther of the restless and impracticable John Lilburne, was also 
 of their number. Overton, the friend of Milton, whom Crom- 
 well in 1651 left second in command in Scotland, was also 
 ranked as acting with them, as also Okey and Alured. Col. 
 Mason, the governor of Jersey, belonged to the Baptists, and 
 still others of Cromwell's officers. Penn, one of the admirals 
 of the English navy, but now better known as the father of 
 the celebrated Quaker, was a Baptist. Indeed, in Cromwell's 
 own family their influence was formidable ; and Fleetwood, 
 one of his generals and his son-in-law, was accused of leaning 
 too much to their interests as a political party.* The English 
 
 * To their influence as a political party, too, Baxter explicitly attributes 
 that event which caused shuddering on every throne of Europe, ttie execu- 
 
200 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 matron, whose memoirs form one of the most delightful narra- 
 tives of that stirring time, and who in her own character pre- 
 sented one of the loveliest specimens of Christian womanhood, 
 Lucy Hutchinson, a name of love and admiration wherever 
 known, became a Baptist. She did so, together with her 
 husband, one of the judges of Charles I. and the governor of 
 Nottingham Castle for the Parliament, from the perusal of 
 the Scriptures. Of no inferior rank in society, for Hutchin- 
 son was a kinsman of the Byrons of Newstead, the family 
 whence sprung the celebrated poet, their talents, and patriot- 
 ism, and Christian graces, and domestic virtues, throw round 
 that pair the lustre of a higher nobility than heralds can con- 
 fer, and a dignity, compared with which the splendor of 
 royalty and the trappings of victory are poor indeed. 
 
 The ministry of our denomination comprised, too, men of 
 high character ; some, unhappily, but too much busied in the 
 political strifes of the age, but others whose learning and ta- 
 lent were brought to bear more exclusively on their appropri- 
 ate work. Tombes, the antagonist of Baxter, Bampfield, 
 Gosnold, Knolles, Denne and Jessey, all Baptist preachers, 
 had held priestly orders in the English established church ; 
 Gosnold being one of the most popular ministers in London, 
 with a congregation of 3000 ; and Jessey, a Christian whose 
 acquirements and talents, piety and liberality, won him general 
 respect. Kiffin, a merchant whose wealth and the excellence 
 of his private character had given him influence among the 
 princely traders of London, and introduced him to the court 
 of the Stuarts, was pastor of a Baptist church in that city. 
 Cox, another of our ministers at this time, is said by Baxter 
 to have been the son of a bishop ; and Collins, another pastor 
 among us, had in his youth been a pupil of Busby. De Veil, 
 a convert from Judaism, who had, both with the Romish 
 church of France, and in the Episcopal church of England, 
 been regarded with much respect, and, in the former, been 
 applauded by no less a man than the eloquent and powerful 
 Bossuet, became a Baptist preacher, and closed his life and 
 labors in the bosom of our communion. Dell, a chaplain of 
 Lord Fairfax, and who was, vmtil the restoration, head of 
 one of the colleges in the university of Cambridge, was also 
 a Baptist minister. Although they deemed literature no 
 
 tion of Charles I., the monarch whom he loved. To them he also traces the 
 invasion of Scotland ; in short, the chief events which hurried on the sub- 
 version of monarchy and the establishment of a republic. 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 201 
 
 indispensable preparation for the ministry (nor did the church 
 of the first centuries), the Baptists under Cromwell and the 
 Stuarts, were not destitute of educated men. Out of the 
 bounds of England, Vavasor Powell, the Baptist, was evan- 
 gelizing Wales with a fearlessness and activity that have won 
 him, at times, the title of its apostle ; and on our own shores, 
 Roger Williams, another Baptist, was founding Rhode Isl- 
 and, giving of the great doctrine of religious liberty a visible 
 type. Our sentiments were also winning deference from 
 minds that were not converted to our views. Milton, with a 
 heresy ever to be deprecated and lamented, had adopted most 
 fully our principles of baptism. Jeremy Taylor, a name of 
 kindred genius, in a work which he intended but as the apol- 
 ogy of toleration, stated so strongly the arguments for our dis- 
 tinguishing views, that it cost himself and the divines of his 
 party much labor to counteract the influence of the reasonings : 
 while Barlow, afterwards also a bishop, and celebrated for his 
 share in the liberation of Bunyan, addressed to Tombes a let- 
 ter strongly in favor of our peculiarities. Such progress in 
 reputation and influence was not observed without jealousy. 
 Baxter laments that those who, at first, were but a few in the 
 city and the army, had within two or three years grown into 
 a multitude (Works, xx., 297) ; and asserts that they had so 
 far got into power as to seek for dominion, and to expect, 
 many of them, that the baptized saints should judge the world, 
 and the millennium come. And BailHe, a commissioner from 
 Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, a man of strong 
 sense, and the ardor of whose piety cannot be questioned, 
 though he was a bitter sectarian, complained that the Baptists 
 were growing more rapidly than any sect in the land ; while 
 Lightfoot's diary of the proceedings of the same Assembly 
 proves that similar complaints were brought before that 
 venerable body. 
 
 Some w^ould naturally, as in the history of the early Chris- 
 tians, be attracted to a rising sect, who were themselves 
 unprincipled men. Lord Howard, the betrayer of the patriot 
 Russell, w^as said to have been, in one period of his shifting 
 and reckless course, a Baptist preacher. Another, whose 
 exact character it is difficult to a.scertain, perverting, as roy- 
 alist prejudices did, even his name for the purposes ot ridicule, 
 Barebones, the speaker of Cromwell's parliament, is said to 
 have been a Baptist preacher in London. Others, agam, ot 
 the body were tinged with extravagances ; some joined with 
 
 27 
 
203 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 other Christians of the time in the confident expectation of 
 what they termed the Fifth Monarchy, Christ's personal 
 reign on the earth. In the changes of the day, and they 
 were many and wondrous, they saw the tokens of Christ's 
 speedy approach to found a universal empire, following in 
 the train of the four great monarchies of tlie prophet's vision. 
 It is to the credit of Bunyan, that he discerned and denounced 
 the error. Then, as in all ages of the church, it was but too 
 common for the interpreters of prophecy to become prophets. 
 Others, again, were moved from their steadfastness by Qua- 
 kerism, which then commenced its course ; while others 
 adopted the views of the Seekers, a party who denied the 
 existence of any pure and true church, and were waiting its 
 establishment yet to come. In this last class of religionists 
 was the younger Sir Henry Vane, the illustrious patriot and 
 statesman so beautifully panegyrized in a sonnet of Milton, 
 and from his talents dreaded alike by Cromwell and the Stu- 
 arts, and the friend of Roger Williams. The founder of 
 Rhode Island seems himself, in later life, to have imbibed 
 similar views. 
 
 Yet with all these mingling disadvantages, and they are 
 but such heresies and scandals as marked the earliest and 
 purest times of Christianity, that era in our history is one to 
 which we may well turn with devout gratitude, and bless 
 God for our fathers. In literature, it is honor enough that 
 our sentiments were held by the two men who displayed, 
 beyond all comparison, the most creative genius in that age 
 of English literature, Milton and Bunyan. In the cause of 
 religious and political freedom, it was the lot of our commu- 
 nity to labor, none the less effectively because they did it 
 obscurely, with Keach, doomed to the pillory, or, like De- 
 laune, perishing in the dungeon. The opinions, as to religi- 
 ous freedom, then professed by our churches, were not only 
 denounced by statesmen as rebellion, but by grave divines 
 as the most fearful heresy. Through evil and through good 
 report they persevered, until what had clothed them with 
 obloquy became, in the hands of later scholars and more prac- 
 tised writers, as Locke, a badge of honor and a diadem of 
 glory. Nor should it be forgotten, that these views were 
 not with them, as with some others, professed in the time of 
 persecution, and virtually rAracted when power had been 
 won. Such was, alas, the course of names no less illustrious 
 than Stillingfleet and Taylor. But the day of prosperity and 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 303 
 
 political influence was, with our churches, the day for their 
 most earnest dissemination. Their share, in shoring up the 
 falling liberties of England, and in infusing new vigor and 
 liberality into the constitution of that country, is not yet 
 generally acknowledged. It is scarce even known. The 
 dominant party in the church and the state, at the restoration, 
 became the historians ; and " when the man, and not the 
 lion, was thus the painter," it was easy to foretell with what 
 party all the virtues, all the talents, and all the triumphs, 
 ■would be found. When our principles shall have won their 
 way to more general acceptance, the share of Baptists in the 
 achievements of that day will be disinterred, like many 
 other forgotten truths, from the ruins of history. Then it 
 will, we believe, be found, that while dross, such as has 
 alloyed the purest churches in the best ages, may have been 
 found in some of our denomination, yet the body was com- 
 posed of pure and scriptural Christians, who contended 
 manfully, some with bitter sufl'erings, for the rights of con- 
 science, and the truth as it is in Jesus : that to them English 
 liberty owes a debt it has never acknowledged ; and that 
 amongst them Christian freedom found its earliest and some 
 of its stanchest, its most consistent, and its most disinterested 
 champions. Had they continued ascending the heights of 
 political influence, it had been perhaps disastrous to their 
 spiritual interests ; for when did the disciples of Christ long 
 enjoy power or prosperity, without some deterioration of 
 their graces? He who, as we maybe allowed to hope, loved 
 them with an everlasting love, and watched over their wel- 
 fare with a sleepless care, threw them back, in the subse- 
 quent convulsions of the age, into the obscure and lowly 
 stations of life, because in such scenes he had himself de- 
 lighted to walk, and in these retired paths it has ever been 
 his wont to lead his flock. 
 
 We may have seemed to wander far from our topic ; but 
 the digression may be forgiven, as illustrating the circum- 
 stances of Baxter's time, and the influences to which he 
 with others was subjected ; the conflicting tides along which 
 he floated, or Avhich he strenuously bufleted ; while showing 
 also why to the Baptist his age must be ever full of interest. 
 Let us pass to consider the man himself. 
 
 Born'in the year UH5, of a father who was a respectable 
 freeholder, Baxter found in the piety of home some counter- 
 poise to the profanity of the neigliborhood, and the negligence 
 
204 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 and dissoluteness that infested even the pulpits of the sur- 
 rounding district. Although he showed much of serious- 
 ness in early life, reproving the sins of other children, he 
 did not believe himself converted until attaining the age of 
 fifteen ; when books, to which he elsewhere declares he 
 owes the chief advantages of his life, fixed his impressions. 
 The work of a Jesuit, revised by a Puritan, was the first of 
 these treatises ; and the writings also of Sibbes greatly ben- 
 efited him. His early education was irregular ; and, though 
 afterwards prepared for the imiversity, he never entered it, 
 owing his chief attainments to the resolute application of 
 later years. Like his contemporary, Bunyan, he met, in his 
 opening course as a Christian, one of the severest of trials, 
 in the apostacy of an intimate friend, who sank back into 
 irreligion, and became an open mocker of that piety he had 
 once seemed to exemplify. Just at the date of his conver- 
 sion, he was offered an introduction at court ; but soon for- 
 sook an atmosphere little congenial to his feelings. Failing 
 health and the expectation of early death, gave to all the 
 studies in which he now plunged a practical tendency. It 
 is the snare, even of the best conducted and best guarded 
 forms of theological education, that the scholar may insen- 
 sibly learn to fix his mind but on the theory of religion, and, 
 losing its spirit, forfeit its blessings. The man who sees the 
 grave at his feet is less likely thus to err. Death in near 
 view gave to Baxter a conscientiousness in the selection of 
 his themes of study, and a devout earnestness in their med- 
 itation. Redemption and judgment were not mere theories 
 to a man who looked soon to swell the harpings of the ran- 
 somed, or the bowlings of the lost. From the age of twen- 
 ty-one to twenty-three, he hardly expected to survive a 
 single year. Still, anxious to employ the little fragment of 
 time that might remain, he entered the ministry, receiving 
 Episcopal ordination. It was afterwards his regret, that he 
 had not duly studied the question of Episcopacy. His first 
 labors were at Dudley, where, for a year, he was also the 
 schoolmaster, and where his studies began to incline him to 
 Nonconformity. New oaths, imposed on the clergy to re- 
 press the spirit of Puritanism, yet more revolted him. At 
 Bridgnorth he labored with applause, but without fruit, 
 among a people already hardened by a faithful ministry, that 
 had not profited them. He soon became, however, lecturer 
 and curate at Kidderminster, with a people rude and ignorant ; 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 205 
 
 but whom he preferred, from a resolution he had made 
 never to settle with a people whose conscience had been 
 once hardened under an awakening ministry. In this field 
 he labored at first but two years, when the civil war broke 
 out, and the more disorderly of his hearers, incensed against 
 him for his faithfulness, made his stay at Kiddernnnster 
 dangerous ; for, from the basest slanders, they proceeded 
 actually to attempt his life. Thus driven from a station which 
 was yet to become memorable as the parish of Baxter, he 
 labored for two years in Coventry, receiving but a bare sup- 
 port. Here he disputed strenuously against the Baptists, 
 then making proselytes. Cox, his antagonist, and whom 
 Baxter describes as no contemptible scholar, and as the son 
 of a bishop, was thrown into prison, though not with the will 
 of Baxter. The result of this unhappy appeal to that royal 
 syllogism, the argument from compulsion, was the plantino- 
 of a Baptist church at Coventry, which has continued to our 
 times. Baxter now consulted with his brethren in the min- 
 istry as to his entering the army, there to counteract the 
 sectarian influence that was rapidly triumphing. His zeal, 
 and piety, and popular eloquence, and powers of disputation, 
 seem to have made him already eminent. By the advice of 
 his friends, he became a chaplain in the regiment of Col. 
 Whalley, a kinsman of Cromwell, one of the judges on the 
 trial of the king, and the same whose flight to our country, 
 and concealment here, forms one of the most romantic inci- 
 dents in the early history of New England. Cromwell, who 
 knew Baxter's dislike to his views of general toleration, now 
 looked coolly on the man whom he had once admired, and 
 had invited in earlier years to become the chaplain of his 
 own regiment. At the close of the war, Baxter returned 
 again to his beloved Kidderminster, where he remained now 
 about fourteen years ; and, by a series of pastoral labors of 
 surpassing faithfulness, made the connection between his 
 own name and the parish an inseparable one in the memory 
 of the church. Such may be the mighty effects of a few 
 years in the career of a zealous pastor ; for the whole term 
 spent by Baxter in this, the vineyard of his affections, com- 
 prised little more than a fifth of his lifetime. His memory 
 is yet most fragrant there, after the lapse of more than a 
 century ; and the fruits of his influence are said to be yet 
 traceable. He had found the spot a moral waste. He toil- 
 ed, prayed, wept, gave and endured, until the wilderness 
 
206 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. ^ 
 
 blossomed as the garileu of the Lord. Profanity and irreli- 
 gion possessed it at his lirst entrance. In the civil wars, how- 
 ever, the same brutish herd that had driven their pastor from 
 his post, nearly all perished ; and, on his restoration to his 
 parish, these former obstacles were found to have disap- 
 peared. He had at first found scarce a family in an entire 
 street, who were accustomed to the regular worship of God 
 in the home. Ere he left, there were many streets in which 
 not one family was without its altar ; and the passing stran- 
 ger heard the chorus of prayer and praise swelling on either 
 hand, as he walked past the threshold. In a parish of eight 
 hundred families, numbering four thousand souls, his com- 
 municants became in number six hundred; of whom there 
 were, he declared, scarce twelve, of whose conversion he 
 had not good hope. Incessant and systematic visitation, and 
 the catechetical instruction of every family, whatever their 
 ages, were united to much earnest preaching. His labors 
 were amazing. He gave himself to the ministry of the word, 
 to prayer, and to fasting. In addition, Baxter ministered 
 freely to the wants of the poor among his flock from his own 
 substance ; while of his small stipend, through his lenity in 
 exacting his legal dues, not one half ever reached his hands. 
 He educated, too, poorer children ; and some, having been 
 thus brought by him through the university, entered for 
 themselves upon the ministry. All this was not enough to 
 satisfy his heart of fire and occupy his iron diligence. For 
 the space of five or six years he was the physician of his 
 flock, not to eke out by its revenues a scanty stipend, but 
 from mere kindness ; for his advice and aid were alike with- 
 out charge. When he looked round upon his congregation, 
 he saw in the greater part those who had owed health, and 
 many of them life, to his assistance. This could not but 
 endear him to the most insensible. He was, amid all this, 
 a writer ; and of each of his smaller works, gave one copy 
 to every family of his charge ; while each poor household, 
 unable themselves to obtain it, he supplied with a Bible. 
 Nor did he limit his labors to these bounds. He preached 
 with the neighboring ministers in surrounding districts : and, 
 as an author, he became famous through the land ; while 
 his example of pastoral fidelity and success excited many to 
 admire, and some to imitate, his methods. Such was Rich- 
 ard Baxter amid his people ; and, had his infirmities been 
 both more, and more aggravated than they were, devotedaess 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 207 
 
 SO rare must win from every number of the true church,- 
 whatever his name among men, an earnest and emphatic 
 blessing. God grant to every evangeHcal community many 
 in his likeness. 
 
 During the Protectorate, Baxter never disguised his ad- 
 herence to the royal family ; preached against Cromwell ; 
 and, when once admitted to an interview with the man whose 
 very name made Mazarine to turn pale, and whose power 
 awed all Europe, Baxter told the Protector, with his usual 
 intrepidity, that the people of England believed their ancient 
 monarchy a blessing ; nor did they know what they had 
 done to forfeit its advantages. "When the Restoration was 
 now concerted, Baxter was selected to preach before the 
 Parliament, when preparing for the act. Upon the return 
 of Charles II., he was appointed a chaplain to the king, and 
 was ofl'ered a mitre in the establishment, if he would con- 
 form. But the Episcopal crozier and stall had no tempta- 
 tion to such a spirit. He asked but for the privilege of re- 
 turning to his beloved Kidderminster ; and when this was 
 denied" sued for permission to labor there without a stipend. 
 But it was in vain ; and this man, whose loyalty had been 
 so eminent, was permitted to preach but twice or thrice to 
 these, his attached and beloved flock. Returning now to 
 London, he continued to preach as he obtained opportu- 
 nity. On St. Bartholomew's day, the decree of stern ex- 
 clusion drove from the communion of the Established Church 
 two thousand of her worthiest and ablest ministers. , 
 
 Their altars they forego, their homes they quit, 
 
 Fields which they loved and paths they daily trod, 
 
 And cast the future upon Providence. Wordsworth. 
 
 Among these confessors, Baxter, the man who had re- 
 jected a bishopric for conscience' sake, was found al)andon- 
 ing, what he prized far more highly, the liberty of preachmg 
 the gospel. Removed to London, he still continued to 
 publish his message as a Christian minister, amid continual 
 risks and vexations, watched by informers, and accused of 
 sedition. Five times in fifteen years thrown into prison, his 
 goods distrained, and driven from one residence to another, 
 amid weakness, and pain, and persecution, Baxter toded on. 
 From his books, of which he says in language oi simple 
 pathos, there was little he valued more upon earth, he was 
 separated. Compelled first to conceal, and afterwards to sell 
 
208 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 them, he describes himself as being for twelve years driven 
 more than one hundred miles from his library. He seemed 
 to regret it, even when drawing near the end, to use his own 
 words, " of that life that needeth books." The times in 
 which he lived were full of gloomy omens. A dissolute 
 court, where the royal mistresses rioted in scenes of the most 
 aggravated profusion and profligacy; a king who, while 
 sworn to guard the liberties of Britain, was receiving the pay 
 of France, and while presiding at the head of a Protestant 
 establishment, Avas, in truth, long since united to the Romish 
 church ; a divided cabinet, and a persecuting hierarchy, and a 
 most debauched nobility, were not the only evils that sadden- 
 ed the heart of the Christian patriot. The judgments of God, 
 signal and wide spread, had fallen on the chief city of the 
 empire ; and plague and fire seemed commissioned to punish 
 what could not be reformed. When a measure of liberty 
 was given, Baxter procured a meeting-house ; but was again 
 sued, fined and cast into prison. In the reign of James II., 
 he was selected as a great Nonconformist leader, to become 
 the more eminent victim, and an example of terror to the 
 land. His Notes on the New Testament were searched for 
 passages to which a seditious tendency might be imputed. 
 Bitter might well be the language in which he there occa- 
 sionally spoke of Christian dignitaries, thus restricting from 
 their beloved work men, their equals in talent, and often far 
 their superiors in piety and usefulness. He was brought 
 beforQ the inhuman Jeffreys, one of the most brutal judges 
 that ever disgraced the English bench, even in that day of 
 judicial corruption ; a man of coarse strength of mind, the 
 vigorous and unscrupulous tool of tyranny. Threatened and 
 maligned with the coarsest virulence, he was sentenced to a 
 heavy fine ; the infuriated Jeffreys regretting only that it was 
 not in his power to hang him. Baxter now spent about two 
 years in prison ; but amid sickness and pain, and the gather- 
 ing evils of age, Baxter was a laborer still, and still cheerful. 
 "What could I desire more of God," said he to a friend, 
 "than having served him to my utmost, now to suffer for 
 him?" A change in the measures of the court, opened his 
 prison doors. He lived to see the revolution, and survived 
 that day of deliverance to the Nonconformist churches three 
 years ; having reached, through sufferings, perils and toils, 
 the age of seventy-six. 
 
 Amid the anguish of complicated disorders, his death-bed 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 209 
 
 was a scene of serene triumph. When asked in his latter 
 days, as his strength waned and the hour of his dismission 
 drew nigh, how lie found himself, his usual reply was, " almost 
 \vell." He had lived the theme of many tongues: min- 
 gled admiration, contempt, hate, reverence and aflection, 
 were lavished upon him. But multitudes, even of other 
 communions, acknowledged his rare worth. Hale, the bright- 
 est name in the records of the English Themis, was his friend, 
 scarce refraining from tears when told of his imprisonment ; 
 and bequeathing to him a legacy, trivial in amount, but valu- 
 able, as the expression of esteem and love, from such a man. 
 Usher, the most learned and pious prelate of his age, it was, 
 that urged Baxter to write the Call to the Unconverted. 
 Wilkins, also of the Episcopal bench, declared that had 
 Baxter lived in primitive times, he would have been a father 
 of the church ; and that it was glory enough for one age to 
 have produced such a man. Boyle, the devoutest, as he was 
 among the greatest of English philosophers, said of him, 
 that he was better fitted than any man of that age to be a 
 casuist ; for he feared no man's displeasure, and sought no 
 man's preferment. And Barrow, whose own powers as a 
 reasoner and prejudices as a churchman give double force to 
 his testimony, declared of him that his practical writings 
 were never mended, and his controversial ones seldom con- 
 futed. 
 
 It will be seen that his life was no long dream of lettered 
 ease, spent amid the quiet of a settled home, and all the aids 
 of academic retirement. His was a troubled course ; and, 
 in the agitations of a changeful time, when the foundations 
 of many generations were upheaved by the rising tide of 
 revolution, when every day bore the news of recent, or the 
 omen of coming change, busiest among the busy, Baxter 
 seemed the sworn foe of repose ; and, in the spirit of old 
 Arnauld, the great champion of Jansenism, to have ex- 
 claimed, " Shall we not have all eternity to rest in ?" Ac- 
 tive by constitution, connected with the political parties in 
 power, sometimes their adviser, more often their victnn, 
 Baxter was yet, with these entangling engagements about 
 him, the diligent student and the faithful pastor. He was, 
 too, a most voluminous writer. His practical writings alone 
 fill twenty volumes. Were his controversial and nnscella- 
 neous productions added, the collection would extend to 
 sixty goodly octavos. Many a minister, we fear, lives and 
 
 28 
 
210 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 dies without reading as many pages as Baxter wrote. As a 
 casuist, he was among the most renowned of the age. For 
 seven years he had stood in doubt of his own salvation 
 (xxiii., p. 1, and xvii,, p. 276) ; and his anxious scrutiny of 
 his heart and way, had qualified him to guide others. His 
 Christian Directory remains yet, a work of great value, enter- 
 ing into religious duties with a minuteness of detail, a fulness 
 of illustration, and a niceness of discrimination, that leave the 
 reader astonished at the copious resources of his mind. As 
 a controversialist, his pen had both power and weight ; and, 
 into all the leading questions of the age, he brought a strength 
 of logic, and a scholastic acuteness, that made him to the most 
 doughty of polemics no contemptible foe. Yet withal he was 
 earnest for conciliation among Christians, anxious to find a 
 middle way for contending theologians, and to effect a union 
 among jarring sects : declaring often that he would as freely 
 be a martyr for charity, as for any article in the creed. He 
 attempted poetry, not that he sought fame, or had studied 
 harmony ; but because he loved the songs of the sanctuary, 
 declaring that he knew no better image of heaven, than a 
 whole congregation heartily singing the praises of God ; 
 because, too, he loved God with an ardent affection, and his 
 feelings found natural vent in verse more pious than poetical. 
 Two of his lines have, however, gained a currency, they are 
 likely never to lose. They are those in which he describes 
 himself, 
 
 " Preaching as if I ne'er should preach again, 
 And as a dying man to dying men." 
 
 Blessed the pulpit where this motto shines : to the world it 
 will be as an echo of Mount Sinai ; to the church, a tower 
 on the heights of Mount Zion. 
 
 But the chief distinction of Baxter in authorship is as a 
 practical writer. His topics were themes of universal con- 
 cernment, such as he advises the youthful minister to select 
 for his sermons ; themes drawn from the creed, the com- 
 mandments, and the Lord's prayer ; of, as he happily ex- 
 pressed it, the things to be believed, to be done, and to be 
 desired. Such are the subjects that must " come home to 
 men's business and bosoms." Some of these compositions 
 stand yet unrivalled for energy and urgency. The writer 
 hurls himself against the heart of the reader with the force 
 and directness of a battering-ram. Yet some were written 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 211 
 
 under circumstances that would have sentenced others to 
 helpless inactivity, and been pleaded as reasons sufficient for 
 drawling out a life without effort or purpose. The Saints' 
 Everlasting Rest was the work of the last months in his 
 military career ; with the noise of camps yet in his ears, 
 separated from all his books, his health apparently fast failing, 
 and eternity rising before him. But if ordinary helps were 
 wanting, other and higher aid was not withheld. The church 
 has few volumes written like that, as on the very summit of 
 the delectable mountains, where the eye could trace the 
 outlines of the New Jerusalem, and the ear already caught 
 the thunder of the harpings of its many harpers. Fame or 
 profit was not the object of his authorship. His course 
 shows the sincerity of a declaration prefixed to one of his 
 sermons, that he would rather see his books carried in ped- 
 lars' packs to the fairs and markets of the country, than 
 standing on the shelves of the rich man's library. 
 
 As a preacher and pastor, it is scarcely possible for the 
 youthful pastor to select a higher model in the modern church. 
 His published works caused Doddridge to call him the 
 Demosthenes of the English pulpit. There is much in his 
 writings to redeem the epithet from extravagance, whether 
 we look to the vigorous simplicity of style, their burning 
 logic, set on fire by strong passion, his sustained enthusiasm, 
 or the tremendous iterations of his earnestness in dealing 
 with the heart. Before Cromwell or the national parliament, 
 the judges at their circuit, or the simple tradesman of his 
 own Kidderminster, he seemed alike raised above all fear 
 of man; elevated by the responsibility of his office and the 
 view of his final audit at the bar of Christ, to a point, where 
 the voice of fame died away on ti. ear, and the gauds and 
 toys of earth showed in their native littleness. He was not 
 only in request as a preacher, but as a disputant, holding 
 public conferences with our own denomination, with the 
 Quakers, and with bishops of the Establishment. But it is 
 as a pastor, that the lesson of his life has its chief value. He 
 brought his parish into a regular system of visitation ; himself 
 and his assistant visiting fourteen families previously desig- 
 nated, in each week, and devoting, every week, two entire 
 days to the employment. Prolonged conversation with each 
 individual, and the catechetical instruction of the whole fa- 
 mily, were the exercises in which the time was spent. He 
 counted his visitations greater labor, than his preparations 
 
212 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 for the pulpit. Their effects were remarkable. To the 
 young he showed special care. It was a favorite sentiment 
 with him, that, were Christian parents but faithful to their 
 duties, preaching would remain no longer the chief instrument 
 of conversion. He saw the benefits of toil bestowed upon 
 children, in its reaction upon the parents. Some of his 
 older parishioners, long incorrigible and insensible, were 
 hopefully converted at the age, in some cases, even of eighty, 
 in consequence of beholding the effects of piety in their chil- 
 dren and grandchildren. In the Reformed Pastor he has 
 urged the duties of the ministry with such power, that some 
 theological instructors have recommended a yearly perusal 
 of the work to every one occupying or expecting to fill the 
 ministerial office. 
 
 Another memorable feature in his history is the manner in 
 which he threw his mind into various channels without dissi- 
 pating its strength. The peculiar circumstances of our age 
 seem often to require this of pastors. Many and dissimilar em- 
 ployments must be mingled. Was it that his devotion gave 
 tone and tension to his mind, such as no other discipline than 
 that of the closet could have supplied, and that, basking on 
 the loftiest heights of divine meditation, he came down to 
 the strifes and toils of the plain beneath with a strength which 
 could be obtained only in this near approach to the throne, 
 or in whatever nn)de we account for it, his name stands high 
 among the few, who, in varied fields, have in most been 
 eminent, and in none contemptible. Now engaged in pre- 
 paring for the nursery the " Mother's Catechism," or putting 
 on the shelf of the cottager the " Poor Man's Family Book," 
 he was seen anon issuing some ponderous tome of theology 
 or polemics, where the acuteness of a schoolman was sustain- 
 ed with no despicable stores of knowledge, and no vulgar 
 eloquence. He blended qualities of mind and heart often 
 deemed incompatible, because so seldom found in union. 
 With much metaphysical subtlety, he used the simplest and 
 most popular language, and retained his power of holding an 
 audience spell-bound by appeals of stirring vigor and familiar 
 illustrations. Bunyan, coming up from the shop, and the 
 highway, and the market-place, into the pulj)it, could not 
 preach more plainly, or draw to his aid illustrations more apt 
 or homely. Public spirit in him was united with personal 
 watchfulness ; and his continual labors for others had not 
 relaxed his attention to his own heart and way. The life of 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 213 
 
 the statesman, the traveller, and the merchant, is sometimes 
 thought to excuse, from its peculiar emharrassments, a lower 
 stan(fard of holiness in the Christian who occupies such a 
 place in society. But Baxter's cares, and correspondence, 
 and labors, might have wearied many a merchant, and seemed 
 too intricate for a cabinet minister, while oft he found himselt 
 with no certain dwelling-place, travelling perforce now to 
 reo-ain health, and now to escape persecution; yet the 
 refirement of the closet and the culture of the heart seem 
 never neglected. He was like Daniel, who, with the cares 
 of an empire resting on his shoulders, was still m his cham- 
 ber the man greatly beloved of Heaven; and, hke Nehemiah, 
 when amid the luxury and pomp and honor of his station, 
 his eye saw through the gilded lattices of Shushan, not the 
 tufted palm, or the splendid pillar, or the fragrant garden, 
 but one object still arose, dark and distant before his eye, 
 theblackened walls of the distant Jerusalem. 
 
 It enhances yet more the value of his example and its 
 singularity, that all these were the doings of an invalid He 
 belonged to that class from which some woukl expect little 
 of ener<Ty or achievement, whose conversation is in some 
 cases only of still recurring ailments, and their care is still 
 some new remedy for the old disease. Scarce could this 
 class produce, from their most extreme cases, one who.e 
 bod 1/ disorders were so numerous, distressing and long 
 continued, as the complicated maladies that had met in e 
 shattered tabernacle which housed the spirit of Baxter L k e 
 his illustrious contemporary, when remembering his bhnd- 
 ness, he 
 
 "Bates not a jot of heart or hope, but still 
 Bears up and steers right onward. —Milton. 
 
 Enterino- the ministry with what would now be termed the 
 syn p oms%f a confirmVl consumption, Baxter bat led ri^t 
 manfully his way through languor and P^^"' ""t^\/^\^,^^^ "^^ 
 passed the usual bound of threescore years and ten, allotted o 
 Sur : ay on the earth. When others would have quit e^^^^^^^^ 
 field to occupv the hospital, and when many would ha^ e du 
 died away into shivering and selfish valetudmariaj tlie^m 
 pu^e of high conscientiousness and sustaining f ^h ^^"l^,^ 
 This mal. on to the last, an efiicient laborer. An wh^ , -Uh 
 Paul he knew what it was to be "in deaths olt, «'""','; 
 Tp'sae also" could he claim to be " in labors more abundant. 
 
214 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 He had his errors. Many he detected, and, like Augustine 
 in all candor, retracted. Others he knew not until he reach- 
 ed that land where all the followers of Christ will have so 
 much to learn, as well as so much to enjoy. Among the 
 imperfections of this excellent man, some may be palliated 
 as the result of natural temperament or bodily weakness. 
 Of ardent and irritable character, his vehemence became at 
 times undue severity. His prejudices were strong, and his 
 feelings perhaps often tinged with bitterness from the auste- 
 rity of his life and his frequent sicknesses. With great 
 metaphysical acuteness he refined and distinguished, until 
 truth was perplexed, and error found shelter under heaps of 
 ingenious distinctions. He confessed that he had an early 
 and strong love of controversy, which he sought to restrain. 
 But, even in his attempts to end, he sometimes created dis- 
 putes, and added but a new term to the Avatchwords of theo- 
 logical strife already too numerous. His middle path became 
 but the means of exciting new contentions, or forming one 
 more sect. Thus Baxterianism, as others have called it, or 
 the system by which he would harmonize the Calvinist and 
 the Arminian, became, in his own and the subsequent gene- 
 ration, but the occasion of a new and embittered controversy. 
 Hence he complained, late in life, that he had been making 
 his bare hand a wedge to part the gnarly oaks of controversy, 
 and the result was, where he would have separated contend- 
 ing parties, they closed upon the hand of the peace-maker ; 
 united in endeavoring to crush it, if disunited in all else. 
 Writing rapidly and on every theme, his expressions could 
 not always have been duly weighed, and often clashed 
 apparently with each other. This was a charge of his ene- 
 mies, and was wittily urged against him by L'Estrange, who 
 compiled M'hat he supposed contradictions from Baxter's 
 numerous books, and entitled the work, "The Casuist un- 
 cased, or a dialogue betwixt Richard and Baxter, with a 
 moderator between for quietness' sake." He was also 
 accused of egotism ; and his great contemporary, Owen, has 
 broadly charged him with this fault. But it seems rather the 
 childlike openness of a mind that thought aloud, and knew no 
 disguises, than the fruit of conceit. A graver fault was his 
 dislike of toleration. It was, however, the fault of his age 
 and his sect ; for the Presbyterian body to which he belonged, 
 with all their excellences, and they were many and rare, 
 were, as a denomination, the zealous opponents of religious 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 215 
 
 freedom, and incurred for this, as for other causes, the indig- 
 nant satire of the muse of Milton. 
 
 In this and other questions, nothing is more common, yet 
 nothing more unjust, than to try the men of former ages by 
 the light of our own times. But the men of that day rea- 
 soned thus. Every man is bound to use his influence in the 
 extension of religion. He is not the less bound to do so, 
 because he wears a crown. In what way could a king pat- 
 ronize, but by paying, its ministry, and guarding its creed. 
 They read, too, in the Scriptures that kings were to be the 
 nursing-fathers of the church ; and seeing, in the Jewish 
 dispensation, that God had united the civil and religious 
 polity of his own people. Scripture and reason seemed to 
 unite' in requiring that the state should become the patron of 
 the church. In addition, the practice of ages was with the 
 advocates of these views. Where were the people, Christian 
 or heathen, in whom the civil government and the priesthood 
 did not recognize a mutual dependence, each on the other, 
 and lend alternate aid ? They who forget how deeply these 
 prejudices were imbedded in the minds of mankind, and who 
 condemn the intolerance of the Puritans without mercy, act 
 unjustly ; and if Baptists, are unjust also to the merit of their 
 own fathers, whose honor, received from God, it was to 
 discover a truth long forgotten, and on its reappearance 
 universally suspected ; and one too, not at first sight so ob- 
 vious, but that much might be plausibly urged against it. 
 
 On the other hand, some few among the Baptists of the 
 continent and England early held that all magistracy was 
 sinful ; that no Christian could accept it. They argued from 
 the declaration of him who said, " My kingdom is not of 
 this world ;" and especially they relied on a perverse mter- 
 pretation of that Scripture still so often misunderstood— like 
 some parts of the ocean, beautifully clear, yet unfathomably 
 deep— the Sermon on the Mount. These arrived at a true 
 result, that religion was not to be the creature of the state ; 
 but it was by a most erroneous process. The argument vvas 
 that all states and governments were unlawful. As civil 
 government was itself sin, Christ could not accept Belial as a 
 coadjutor, nor the church the aid of the civil power Ihis 
 was liberty, blundered upon by the gropings of falsehood. 
 Others of the Baptists saw the truth, that civil magistracy 
 was an ordinance of God, not only allowable, but necessary 
 and most righteous, if justly administered. But the> saw, 
 
216 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 also, that the Saviour's rule differed from that of earthly 
 princes in its subjects and in its laws ; in short, in its entire 
 genius. They declared ttiat to blend the two was tyi-anny 
 against man, and it was treason against God. When this 
 bold truth burst to light from the lowly walks of society, its 
 effect was most startling. Like other truths, it carried to 
 many minds its own evidence. But others saw in it the seed 
 of all license, the subversion of all morality, the setting up 
 ■n the state of a government without God, and in the church 
 the desertion of truth to perish, an unregarded stranger in 
 the streets. Their very piety made them the more strenuous 
 in opposition ; and the more they dreaded and abhorred the 
 heresies to which they supposed it would give universal 
 currency, the more did they labor, and argue, and pray 
 against an unlimited toleration. We may see their error, 
 and yet respect, and even revere their motives. Of this 
 character was the holy man who gives occasion to these 
 remarks. Seeing the Baptists in an error, as he deemed it, 
 and especially zealous in breaking an inlet for all errors, he 
 did perhaps, in some of his works, intemperately excite the 
 magistrate against them. But, in later years, we rejoice to 
 believe, that further acquaintance with some of their excel- 
 lent leaders had weakened his prejudices; and, towards the 
 close of his course, he was in favor of a very restricted tol- 
 eration for all evangelical sects, in which he would now in- 
 clude even the Baptists. It was not, however, until he en- 
 tered heaven, that he understood that great truth — to him 
 so hard, to us so simple — that Christ, the potentate of the 
 universe, cannot be the stipendiary of any earthly kingling ; 
 and that the state, which assumes to patronize Christianity, 
 corrupts it. 
 
 It were an interesting task to remember and compare some 
 of the guiding spirits of the age in which he lived, with Bax- 
 ter. He brought not the rich erudition of many of his coe- 
 vals to the study of the Bible. He could not boast the 
 powers of Chillingworth as a reasoner ; he did not emulate, 
 and perhaps from conscience would not have used, the gor- 
 geous imagery of Jeremy Taylor. Owen was a sounder 
 theologian, and Howe had more both of the sublime and the 
 profound in his writings. Yet in how many points did all 
 these men stand far behind the pastor of Kidderminster ! 
 In style, Barrow was not more nervous than he, nor was 
 Tillotson more clear on any practical theme. Milton probably 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER, 227 
 
 disliked his stern Presbyterianism ; and he had probably as 
 little taste as the mass of the nation in that age for the mao-- 
 nificence of Milton's epic. He would have turned in prefer- 
 ence to his own favorite George Herbert, with quaintncsses 
 innumerable, but withal, a deep, heart-felt piety, that would 
 have commended to Baxter the verses of a bell-man. With 
 the saintly Leighton he seems not to have met : their paths 
 did not cross, until both had terminated in heaven. Of 
 Bunyan we have met no mention in his writincrs ; nor docs 
 the honest pastor of Bedford, in any of his works, refer to 
 Richard Baxter. Both served God zealously and with every 
 faculty. Both contended earnestly for a union anion o- 
 Christians, more desirable than practicable, and sought it by 
 methods that were unwise. Both were confessors for truth 
 in the dungeon ; and, had persecution led them to the stake, 
 neither would have faltered before the terrors of a fiery 
 martyrdom. In the union of strong reasoning powers with 
 an active imagination, the tinker of Elstow more nearly ap- 
 proached Baxter than might at first have seemed probable. 
 And in Bunyan's sermons, there is a force of homely illus- 
 tration, a mastery of the vernacular English, and a terrific 
 closeness and pungency in dealing with the sinner's con- 
 science, as well as a high standard of Christian morality urged 
 upon the professed disciple, reminding any reader of Baxter's 
 best works. Baxter micrht have learned to advantaire from 
 his humble contemporary to insist more than he did on the 
 doctrines of grace, as the only ground of the sinner's hope, 
 and the grand motives to a Christian practice. Both have 
 met in heaven, and rejoice we doubt not, continually in the 
 multitudes whom their labors that survived them have already 
 drawn, and are each day attracting thither, to swell the train 
 of the ransomed, and the glories of the Redeemer. 
 
 Contrasted with the greatness of this world, how does the 
 character of Baxter rise and tower in surpassing majesty, 
 whether we consider the purity of his motives, or the high 
 excellence of his private life, the nature of the influence he 
 exerts, the labors accomplished by him, or the sufferings by 
 which he was perfected. Voltaire, born the year after Bax- 
 ter's death, resembled him in the quenchless fervor of his 
 spirit, his promptitude and his stirring restlessness, the ver- 
 satility of his powers, and their continuous exercise through 
 a long life. But when the eflects produced on the human 
 character, and on the happiness of the individual, and the 
 
 29 
 
218 LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 
 
 family, and the nation, by the philosopher of Ferney, and 
 the Kidderminster pastor, are brought into view together, 
 how is the lustre of infidel genius rebuked ! The gigantic 
 sceptic dwindles and wilts before the holiness that inspired 
 the genius of Baxter, like Satan, when touched by the spear 
 of Ithuriel, cowering in deformity and shame. To sneer, to 
 chatter, and to mock, were the favorite employments of the 
 one, flinging filth and breathing venom on every side. The 
 other was, indeed, imperfect ; but still it is seen, that the 
 mind which was in him was the mind that was in Christ : 
 and beneficence, and truth, and purity, piety toward God, 
 and justice and mercy toward mankind, streamed from his 
 heart, his lips, and his eyes, over a world that was not wor- 
 thy of him. 
 
 Imagination might ask, what would have been the cho- 
 sen pursuits of such a spirit as Baxter's, had his lot been 
 cast in our times, and his home been fixed upon these western 
 shores. Would he have given his life to the heathen ? He 
 loved them. And while Owen, his gifted compeer, thought 
 it not the duty of the church to undertake missions to the 
 heathen without some new call from heaven, Baxter judged 
 more rightly, that the only impediment was the want of 
 the requisite love and faith in the church. When silenced 
 in England, he declared that years and the difficulties of a 
 new language only prevented him from going to preach 
 Christ to idolaters. We may well suppose, that, in whatever 
 field he had been fixed, he would have thrown the whole 
 weight of his energy into the missionary enterprise. In the 
 labors of the Tract and Bible Society, he had within his 
 parochial limits anticipated the schemes of our day. But 
 with the widening facilities now afibrded for the work, how 
 efficient might he have been, and how effective a writer of 
 tracts was Baxter qualified to become. And had he enjoyed 
 the light of those truths, now the common heritage of the 
 age, but, then, hidden from some of the ablest and best of 
 mankind — had he known the powers of an emancipated 
 church — had he understood the sanctity of conscience, how 
 much of misspent labor might have been preserved for wiser 
 nses. But here as elsewhere, God, who would not have the 
 fathers perfect without us, had reserved for us some better 
 thing. Rich is our inheritance. And did Richard Baxter 
 see as we do, a country opening before him, not a narrow 
 and rock-bound isle, but a massy continent, soon to ^e belted 
 
LIFE AND TIMES OF BAXTER. 219 
 
 by our republic — did be behold what our eyes witness, the 
 railroad and the canal, shooting their lines of electrical com- 
 munication across the face of our broad territory — did he see 
 steam yoking itself to the chariot, and urging the vessel with 
 a speed that leaves the wildest hopes of early projectors 
 lagging far behind — and did he see our language, his own 
 nervous and masculine English, spreading itself not only 
 through Britain and America, but to their colonies and con- 
 nections on every shore, would he not have deemed these 
 redoubled opportunities of influence a call to yet redoubled 
 zeal? Yet more, had he seen travel and history bringing 
 every day new testimonies to swell the growing mass of 
 prophesies accomplished, and to heighten and strengthen the 
 walls of Christian evidence — did he hear from the southern 
 seas, then unknown, the cry of nations turning from the idols 
 of their fathers, would not even his zeal have received a new 
 impulse, and the trumpet at his lips have blown a blast 
 waxing yet louder and louder? Whatever was his duty, is 
 not the less ours. The contemplation of such an example 
 reproves us all. But the Master's promised presence and 
 the inexhaustible graces of that Spirit Avhich has been the 
 Teacher of the church, and her teachers in all ages, these 
 may well stimulate to the loftiest aims, and revive the falter- 
 ing hopes of the faintest heart. Let us not then, in beholding 
 the graces that have adorned the former servants of our 
 common Lord, be ready to deem all emulation impossible. 
 In regarding the character and achievements of Baxter, we 
 may not hope to possess his singular talents ; but all may 
 imitate his holiness, his zeal, his resolute patience, his dili- 
 gence, and his flaming charity. And if ever the standard 
 seem too elevated, and our eyes are dazzled as we look at 
 its tall summit, bright with heaven's own light, let us remem- 
 ber, that even this does not reach the full height of our 
 privileges and our obligations. For it was no disputable 
 authority that spake, and in no dubious language, when the 
 Lawgiver and the Redeemer proclaimed it as the rule of his 
 household, "Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven 
 is perfect." 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 " And he said unto them, Let us go into the next towns, that J 
 
 MAY PREACH THEKE ALSO : FOE THEEEFOHE CAME I FORTH. — Mark i. 33. 
 
 It is ever delightful to the Christian, that he can trace, in 
 the way along which he journeys, the footsteps of his Sa- 
 viour preceding him. The labors, the sorrows and the joys 
 of his course all become hallowed, when it is seen that the 
 Master has first partaken of them. The cup of affliction is 
 less distasteful to the believer, because our Lord has himself 
 drunk of its bitterness, and left on the brim a lingering fra- 
 grance. In prayer, he approaches to God with greater con- 
 fidence, because he names as his intercessor one who him- 
 self prayed while upon earth, with strong crying and tears, 
 watched all night in supplication on the lone mountain side, and 
 bowed to pray, beneath the olives of Gethsemane, with the 
 bloody dews of anguish on his brow. And the preaching of 
 the word derives its highest glory from the fact, that He 
 who descended into the world to become its ransom, was 
 himself a minister of that Gospel he commissioned others to 
 preach. In the words before us we have Christ's own testi- 
 mony, that the very purpose of his coming was to preach 
 from town to town of his native land. Jesus Christ was, 
 therefore, a Home Missionary. To this end, blessed Savi- 
 our, "camestthou forth." To thy servants, who have at 
 this time for the like purpose gathered themselves together, 
 wilt thou not then give thy presence and favor, Head of thy 
 Church as thou art, Master of all her assemblies, and the 
 only eflectual teacher of all her pastors and evangelists? 
 
 Aid me, my brethren, with your prayers, while from these 
 words I would commend to your notice the resemblance 
 
 BETWEEN YOUR OWN LABORS, AND THE PERSONAL MINIS- 
 TRY OF YOUR Lord and Saviour as performed in the 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 221 
 
 FIELD OF Home Missions ; and while I urge the conse- 
 quent DUTY OF THE ChURCH TO CONTINUE AND ABOUND 
 IN THE LIKE GOOD WORK. 
 
 I. The title of Missionary denotes, as you know, one sent 
 forth, and especially belongs to one whose errand it is to 
 propagate religion. You need not to be reminded how often 
 Christ announced to his hostile countrymen the fact, that he 
 was sent from God, to declare the Father, from whose bosom 
 he came forth, whom no man had seen or could see. The 
 title of apostles, by which he saw it meet to designate his 
 twelve chosen disciples, is, as you are aware, but the render- 
 ing into Greek of the same idea, which, borrowing the word 
 from the language of the Romans, we express by the term 
 missionary ; and the Saviour himself is by Paul described as 
 the great Apostle of our profession, or in other words, the 
 chiefest Missionary of the Church. Now the field of his 
 labor and his missionary character may assume different as- 
 pects, according to the point of view from which our obser- 
 vations are made. If we look to the original Godhead of the 
 messenger, and to the glory which he had with the Father 
 before the foundation of the world, his mission was a distant 
 one. To bring the glad message to our earth from the far 
 Heavens, he emptied himself of glory, became a voluntary 
 exile from tlie society of the pure and the blessed, and taking 
 on him the nature of sinful man, became the sharer of his mis- 
 eries, and the perpetual witness of his iniquities. In this 
 sense it was to a foreign shore that he came, and to an alien 
 race that he ministered; and thus considered, his labors more 
 nearly resemble those of the foreign missionary. But if we 
 confine our regard to the mere humanity of our Lord, his 
 missionary toils assume another aspect. His personal minis- 
 try was far more limited and national in its character, than 
 was his message. Although in his relation to our race of 
 every kindred and of all lands, he is the second Adam, and 
 the nature which he took upon him was that common to our 
 whole kind, he was yet born in the land of promise, under 
 the law given to Moses, and within the range of the covenant 
 made with Abraham. By these bounds his personal ministry 
 was for the most part limited. 
 
 It might have been otherwise. The same indwelling 
 Deity, that enabled him at an early age to confound the doc- 
 tors of his nation, beneath the shadow of their own proud 
 temple, might have been displayed, had he chosen it, at a 
 
222 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 Still earlier year of his life ; and the holy child might have 
 preached the gospel to that heathenish Egypt, in which his 
 infancy sought refuge. The Being, before whose eye, in the 
 wilderness of temptation, were brought all the kingdoms of 
 this world, with all the glory of them, might, had he so willed 
 it, have traversed all those kingdoms in his own personal 
 ministry. Clothing himself, had he chosen it, with those 
 same miraculous gifts which he reserved for his kingly ascen- 
 sion, then to be showered down on his Pentecostal Church, 
 he might have visited land after land, declaring to every tribe 
 of mankind, in their own dialect, the truths he came to re- 
 veal. He might have been the first to carry the gospel to 
 imperial Rome, and hunting the hoary profligate and dissem- 
 bler Tiberius to his guilty retreat at Capreae, he might have 
 reasoned before the crowned i-uler of the world, of righteous- 
 ness, temperance, and judgment to come, until he too, like an 
 inferior ruler in after times, had trembled on his throne. He 
 might have anticipated the labors of his servant Paul, by 
 bearing the news of the unknown God, and the resurrection, 
 to the philosophers of Athens. To the Roman people he 
 might have declared himself as that great Deliverer, of w horn 
 their Virgil had already sung ; and the sages of Greece might 
 have been compelled to own in him that Heavenly Teacher 
 for whom their Socrates had longed. And the nations of the 
 East now intently looking for the advent of a king, whose 
 dominion should be a universal one, might have learned 
 from our Lord's own lips, the spiritual and eternal nature of 
 that kingdom they justly but blindly expected. And thus 
 having filled the whole world with the echo of his fame, as a 
 preacher of repentance ^nd of faith, he might have returned 
 to Jerusalem, out of which her prophets might not perish, 
 there to consummate the atoning sacrifice of which he had 
 testified. 
 
 We say, Jesus Christ might thus have carried abroad the 
 word of salvaticm to many nations. Instead, however, of 
 doing this, he confined himself in his personal instructions to 
 the bounds of Palestine, one visit to the coast of Tyre and 
 Sidon excepted, and even of this it is most probable that he 
 taught in that region only the Jews there scattered. In his 
 occasional retirement from the violence of his enemies, he 
 neither wandered to Arabia and its roving hordes of the race 
 of Ishmael, on the south ; nor did he travel into the country 
 of that powdf ful people, whose territories skirted Judea on 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 223 
 
 the east, the Edomites, who were the kindred of Israel, as 
 being the posterity of Esau. When the appeals of distress 
 were made to him by those of another race, he himself drew 
 attention to this restriction as being laid upon his own minis- 
 try, declaring that he was not sent, but to the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel — was not sent, or in other language, his 
 commission as a missionary preacher, went no further. To 
 their relief he confined well nigh all his miracles. With the 
 devotedness of a true patriot, he labored for the good of his 
 own, although his own received him not. And to the end he 
 persevered in this course. In the last week of his mortal 
 career, when to his divine prescience the awful scenes of the 
 betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, and the crucifixion were 
 already present, as a vivid reality — when, seated with his dis- 
 ciples on the sides of Olivet, he looked, with them, upon the 
 city with its battlements and turrets, its long drawn terraces, 
 and its gorgeous temple, spread out on the opposite heights, 
 but saw what their eyes could not see, and heard what their 
 ears could not hear — when, in the garden that lay at his 
 feet, his prophetic eye already discerned the bloody agony 
 soon to bedew it, and viewed in the palaces of Herod and 
 Pilate rising before him, all the scenes of ignominy and tor- 
 ture he was soon there to encounter — when along the streets, 
 now sending up but the hum of cheerful industry, his pro- 
 phetic ear even now heard resounding the yells of the multi- 
 tude, as they rushed from the place of judgment to the hill of 
 Golgotha — even with these sights and sounds around him, 
 from the thought of his own overwhelming baptism of an- 
 guish, he could turn aside to weep over favored but guilty 
 Jerusalem, with as ardent an affection as had ever filled the 
 heart of a Hebrew, when his eye caught the first glance of its 
 turrets on his yearly pilgrimage, and he hailed it in inspired 
 song, as the city of the great King, seated on the sides of tlic 
 norUi, beautiful for situation, and the joy of the whole earth. 
 And after he had wrought out the great work of redemption, 
 and gave his apostles, before his ascension, charge tu bear his 
 gospel among all nations, however remote, and however bar- 
 barous, he yet added the restriction, that their labor should 
 begin at Jerusalem. 
 
 We are ready to admit that all this was needed for the 
 accompUshment of the prophecies that went before concern- 
 ing him. But Christ had, it should be remembered, the 
 orderino- of those very prophecies, for Jiis was the Spirit that 
 
224 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 prompted them. To refer this restriction of the field of 
 Christ's labors to prophecy, is then only to make his plan of 
 Home Missions a few centuries the older, and leave it still 
 the work of his mind. Into the purposes which may have 
 guided the Saviour in thus acting, we would not here enter. 
 Whatever his intent, in thus narrowing the field of his toils 
 as a preacher, the fact is evident that to the land of Canaan, 
 or the bounds of his native country, his ministerial labors 
 were confined, and Jesus Christ, while upon earth, was a 
 Home Missionary. Now a work which occupied the greatest 
 of preachers, can never be unimportant, and a plan of benev- 
 olent eflbrt, which marked the first ages of the Church, and 
 was commended by the example of its great Head, can never 
 become obsolete. 
 
 Nor is this, beloved brethren, the only point of contact 
 between the ministerial labors of Christ, and the work in 
 which you are engaged. We have seen how far resemblance 
 to him may be claimed by your society in the scene of your 
 labors. Bear with me, while I proceed to consider the com- 
 mission under which he acted, the message he bore, the 
 manner in which he published it, and the mode in which his 
 labors were sustained. 
 
 2. Of the commission under which he labored, it may in- 
 deed be said, that it was peculiar to himself, and may be 
 claimed by none others, that he spoke by his own authority. 
 It was the natural result of his Deity as the equal Son of the 
 Eternal Father, The scribe and the pharisee quailed before 
 the self-sustained dignity of his teachings. Thus your Mis- 
 sionaries may not teach. They may promulgate only the 
 things His word contains, and in no other name than his are 
 they to speak, or is the Church to receive their testimony. 
 But in this respect they may claim to act under the same 
 commission with Christ, that they are embraced within its 
 ample provision of gifts and blessings to the Church. As 
 the Father hath sent me, said he to his disciples, so send I 
 you. To them thus sent he promised his own perpetual 
 presence and aid. Lo I am with you always, even unto the 
 end of the Avorld. Again in the mission of the Saviour, he 
 inherited, as a qualification for its varied tasks, the Spirit with- 
 out measure, and with him is its inexhaustible residue. Now 
 of this Spirit, in its due and needed measure, he has vouch- 
 safed to communicate to the Church and its teachers. To 
 communicate it to his apostles, he employed forms on which 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 225 
 
 the Church dared never venture, and which well betokened 
 his own self-derived and incommunicable right, as God, to 
 dispense it. The apostles were wont, by the imposition 'of 
 hands, an act ever accompanied with prayer, to confer the 
 gifts of the Spirit, acknowledging thus that to God they 
 looked up for the blessing. He, on the contrary, breathed 
 on the twelve, as if to show its native and perpetual in-dwell- 
 ing within him, and in a brief sentence, which, were lie not 
 God, would be condensed and inspissated blasphemy, said • 
 " Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Although not thus given,' 
 you believe that the same Spirit yet remains to teach and 
 bless the Church. Did not that Spirit, as you trust, first 
 endow them, your Missionaries would not have been accepted. 
 Did he not attend them, and work with them, they could not 
 be prospered. May it not then without irreverence be claimed, 
 that the rnen sustained by your alms in the mission field, go 
 forth under the same commission with Christ ; since he him- 
 self construed that commission as including the subordinate 
 laborers of all times, whom he should raise up — since he 
 has himself promised his personal aid and presence with 
 these to the end of time — since the Spirit that first endowed, 
 and that yet prospers them, is all his own — and is one with 
 that Spirit by which he himself was anointed for his great 
 work, under the commission by him received of the Father ? 
 3. As to the message which he bore, its great burden was 
 repentance and faith, as ushered into the kingdom of God. 
 He taught this truth by his herald and forerunner John, and 
 continually reiterated it in his own ministry. He veiled it in 
 his parables — he mingled it with his miracles of mercy — 
 he spoke it in the ears of his favored apostles — he published 
 it on the house-top to the indiscriminate multitude. On the 
 mountain side, or sitting in the ship, in the way as he walked, 
 or leaning in weariness on the brink of the well, in the home 
 of his poorer disciples, or the banqueting chambers of 
 some richer host, still this was his theme. And what other 
 dare your missionaries substitute ? Varied as may be the 
 garb into which it is thrown, man's corruption and condem- 
 nation, the need of repentance and faith, that faith in Clirist 
 as a King, and a Redeemer as well — are not these the top- 
 ics still applicable and never trite, of which the Church shall 
 not have exhausted the glories, or fathomed the mysteries, 
 ages after the world shall have been consumed, and all its 
 tribes shall have been adjudged to heaven or to hell for ever? 
 
 30 
 
226 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 Your laborers then in the far West are yet carrying abroad 
 the same gospel which Christ bore in weariness to the city 
 of Samaria, and scattered along the shores of the lake Gen- 
 nesareth, and published as he walked the streets of Jerusa- 
 lem, or stood and ci'ied in the thronged courts of the temple. 
 4. But in the manner, too, in which he published his mes- 
 sage, it was said that our Lord had shown himself the great 
 exemplar of the Home Missionary. In this single feature, 
 had he manifested no other claim to a divine mission, our 
 Lord proved himself endowed with superhuman wisdom. 
 We refer to the means he selected for propagating his reli- 
 gion amongst mankind. There had lived in the Gentile 
 world men of high intellectual endowments, who had dis- 
 cerned the ignorance and corruption of their age, and aspired 
 to become its reformers. But although some were deified 
 for their fancied success, futile had been their endeavors ; 
 and most cumbrous yet most imbecile the instrumentalities, 
 upon which they had chosen to rely. Some had been legis- 
 lators, bequeathing to their fellow-citizens new forms of gov- 
 ernment ; others, warriors appealing to brute force, and im- 
 posing by the strong hand of power their improvements upon 
 the feebler race whom they had subdued ; others resorted to 
 what they deemed allowable and pious frauds, forging proph 
 ecies, inventing mysteries, and bribing oracles ; others phi 
 losophized, and yet others employed the elegant arts to soften 
 and to better the human character. But none of them knew 
 aright the might of the Leviathan they affected to curb and 
 tame. Man, though disguised by civilization, and adorned 
 by science and art, was still the same selfish and godless 
 savage at heart, that he had ever been. Mutually wronged 
 and wronging, the race was yet, as Paul too truly described 
 them, hateful and hating one another. Of the depth of cor- 
 ruption into which alike the Jew who boasted of a law he 
 would not keep, and the Gentile, whom he seemed, were 
 sunk at the time of Christ's coming, Paul has told us in lan- 
 guage of fearful significancy. How dreadfully the history of 
 the world fdled up the gloomy outlines that master-hand had 
 drawn in the opening of his epistle to the Romans, I need 
 not say to you. And yet all this went on, in spite of efforts 
 the most earnest, the most varied, and the most costly, to 
 check, or at least to conceal the evil. But it was only to 
 varnish putridity, and to gild over decay, that these earthly 
 reformers came. Of ever profiting the vast mass of the 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 237 
 
 people, the most intelligent of these sages despaired. They had 
 no hope except for the wise and the lettered portion of soci- 
 ety. To these they spoke in veiled and guarded language. 
 For these, their select hearers able to bear it, they had an 
 internal or esoteric doctrine. To the multitude they held 
 out doctrines often utterly the opposite of these their private 
 teachings ; and the poor and the ignorant they looked upon 
 as an inferior kind, like the "brute beasts made to be taken 
 and destroyed;" to be entrapped by error, and given over to 
 uupitied ruin. As the larger portion of mankind will ever 
 be found in the classes of neglected and restricted education, 
 to despair of the poor and of the many, was virtually to de- 
 spair of the well-being of the race.* 
 
 Another obstacle, which these reformers felt themselves 
 incompetent to assail, was found in the false but received 
 religions. To change the religion of a whole nation, when 
 once established, was deemed an impossibility. Plato, among 
 the wisest of Grecian schemers, makes it an axiom in his 
 celebrated treatise of a republic, " that nothing ought to be 
 changed by the legislator in the religion which he finds al- 
 ready established ; and that a man must have lost his under- 
 standing to think of siLch a project.''''] Yet not to change 
 the religion of one nation only, but of all nations, is Jesus 
 Christ come. Look at the varied forms of error that met 
 him, all obstinate by the force of ancient and inherited pre 
 judices, and by the violence of the passions they indulged 
 and sanctified, and made venerable in the eyes of the people 
 by the lapse of time. In his own nation he encountered 
 truth tenaciously held, but held perversely and partially, and 
 in all unrighteousness. In the lettered classes of the Roman 
 
 * A similar feeling with regard to the multitude, the reader may remember, 
 has marked many of the reformers of modern times, who have claimed to re- 
 lease the world from the dominion of Christianity. The private correspond- 
 ence of the patriarch of French infidelity — whom his disciples were accus- 
 tomed to hail, in language borrowed from that Bible at which they scoffed, 
 as their " Father of the Faithful" — contains the following passage. It is in 
 a letter to his fellow-laborer D'Alembert, and when congratulating his friend 
 on the progress of their principles : " Let us bless this happy revolution, that 
 has within the last fifteen or twenty years taken place in the minds of all 
 xes^ecxab\c \)eoY)\e {tons les honnetes gens). It has outrun my hopes. As to 
 the rabble, I meddle not wilh them ; the rabble they will alicays remain. lam 
 at pains to cultivate my garden, but yd it will hate its toads; they should not 
 however prevent my nightingales from singing." Lettres de M. de Voltaire 
 et de M. d'Alembert, 211. 
 
 t Warburton's Divine Legation, Book iii. § 6. 
 
228 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 empire, he saw a band of learned and acute triflers, addicted 
 to a heartless and endless scepticism, or of debauched error- 
 ists, in whose mind atheism and profligacy, in drunken alli- 
 ance, leaned each upon the other. The mass of the nation 
 were the corrupt votaries of paganism, in its most corrupt 
 forms ; sensual and sanguinary, they had become enervated 
 by luxury, and yet were ravening for blood. Equally fierce 
 and cruel, if not alike sensual, were the superstitions of the 
 savage hordes whom they held in check, or retained in their 
 pay on the borders of the empire. In the East were the 
 worshippers of fire. Arabia, and Persia, and India, and 
 Scythia, and Egypt, all had their national idols. The in- 
 quiry had been made by Jeremiah six centuries before, " Pass 
 over the isles of Chittim and see ; and send unto Kedar and 
 consider diligently and see if there be such a thing. Hath 
 a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods ?" And 
 the inquiry, made as if to challenge an instance of its occur- 
 rence, had remained unanswered. Yet the reputed son of a 
 carpenter, a man of Nazareth, the most despised city of the 
 Jews, the most despised of nations, rises up to make the 
 attempt. And what are his resources ? Is he patronized by 
 kings ? Is he levying armies, and equipping fleets, or is he 
 compiling new codes of law, or dispatching ambassadors and 
 forming treaties ? None of all these things. But perhaps 
 he has won to his party the sophists of Greece, and the schol- 
 ars of Athens, the learned, and acute, and eloquent disciples 
 of Epicurus, and Zeno, and Plato, are retained in his inter- 
 ests, and are disseminating his peculiar sentiments? — Not 
 so. The wisdom of this world he has counted foolishness, 
 and his doctrine teaches that the most labored result of 
 human intelligence has been confirmed ignorance, as to the 
 first and most obvious of all truths — that the wise have failed 
 to spell out the handwriting and superscription of a Creator, 
 though found upon all his works — and the world by wisdom 
 knew not God. But he has converted, perhaps, the Sanhe- 
 drim, and the Rabbies of Israel ; the lights of the law and 
 the oracles of the people are with him ? No, he has de- 
 nounced them with fearless severity, and they are plotting his 
 death. But Herod is in his favor, and Pilate is his friend? 
 No, Herod is seeking to see him, in vain, dreading in him 
 the resurrection of the Baptist he had slain ; and Pilate is 
 neither concerned nor able to give him protection from the 
 fury of his own nation. But the Reformer moves on. 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 229 
 
 nothing daunted. Unlike all others who despised the people, or 
 despaired of them, he addresses himself to the poor and the 
 ignorant. It is the mass of the nation he hopes first to reach. 
 But what are his arts of persuasion with the people ? Does 
 he hold out the lure of wealth, or earthly honors, or pleasure ? 
 Is he slipping the leash of law and order from the passions 
 of the multitude, and cheering them on to the prey that is 
 before them in the possessions of the wealthy ? He honestly 
 assures his auditory that they must expect to lose all in fol- 
 lowing him, that his poorest followers must become yet 
 poorer, and that his disciples are doomed men, bearing their 
 own crosses on their way to death. He writes no books. 
 He forms no plots. He meddles not with political strife ; 
 nor interferes with religious sects, but to denounce them all, 
 and to turn their combined enmity on his single and unshel- 
 tered head. And the weapon by which he is to foil all his 
 enemies, and to subdue the world to the obedience of the 
 faith, is — hear it, O heavens, and be astonished, O earth ! — 
 the foolishness of preaching — the plain tale of man to his 
 fellow-men concerning God and his Christ. By the preach- 
 ing of the word, and especially to the poor, Christ is come 
 to change the face of society. Jesus Christ was, indeed, the 
 discoverer of these two great truths, that all reformations 
 must begin with the lower classes, and that preaching is the 
 grand instrument of changing the opinions of a nation. The 
 latter had indeed been used in the older dispensation, but its 
 applicability to such a scheme as that of the world's conver- 
 sion, had never been suspected. Yet how well established 
 are both now become. The man, who in endeavoring to 
 heat a mass of water, should build his fire above the fluid, 
 would in physics be but as absurdly employed, as the man 
 who in morals looks to the highest points of a corrupt society 
 as the first to be reformed. As in the heated liquid, the lower 
 stratum when warmed passes upward, and gives place to 
 another still cold, which is in its turn penetrated with heat, 
 and then displaced by the descending of yet another ; so in 
 the moral world, the only efficient reforms are the reforms 
 that begin at the lower portion of society, and work upward. 
 It was so in the first preaching of the gospel. It was so in 
 the English Reformation. It was so in the religious influence 
 that followed the labors of "Wesley and Whitefield. And 
 Jesus Christ first discovered and first applied this great but 
 simple principle, that to the poor the gospel should be 
 
230 
 
 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 preached. Again let us consider the character of the instru- 
 mentality he selected. It was the cheapest of all implements. 
 And where the many were to be reached by many laborers, 
 and the poor by the poor, its cheapness was a matter of no 
 little moment. A book would be worn out, ere it had taught 
 a thousand readers, or travelled a hundred miles. The liv- 
 ing teacher might go on from land to land, and instruct myr- 
 iads after myriads. If the book were unskilfully composed, 
 its errors must remain unchanged. If addressed to one class 
 originally, one class only it continued to the end to interest. 
 The living evangelist varied his message and form of address, 
 as varying circumstances required, and appealed in different 
 modes to the differing habits of the regions and classes through 
 which he passed. The book might meet many who knew 
 not how to read, but all might hear the living voice. The 
 book could not solicit the careless to hear, or pursue the 
 wanderer who fled from reproof. The living teacher sought 
 his auditory in the retreats whither they betook themselves. 
 The book was a cold and unimpassioned abstraction. The 
 preacher was a living, breathing thing, appealing to all the 
 sympathies of man's nature. His countenance, his gestures, 
 his tones, all sought and won him the attention of men. 
 And it was left for Jesus Christ to discover that this was the 
 great instrumentality for correcting the popular faith of a 
 nation, as being the cheapest, and as having the widest range 
 of influence, the utmost variety in its applicability, and the 
 greatest power and life in its appeals. We speak consider- 
 ately when we say, that the institution of preaching as the 
 great means of national illumination and conversion, is not 
 one of the least among the evidences of the Saviour's super- 
 human wisdom, and consequently another argument for his 
 divine mission. 
 
 Now while the stationary pastor, in the more abundantly 
 supplied districts of a Christian land, may claim to labor in 
 this our Lord's appointed mode, the preaching of the word, 
 may you not assume, that to the Home Missionary belongs 
 eminently the honor of preaching to the poor, and of caring 
 for the neglected and destitute, the class to whom Christ 
 himself chiefly addressed his gospel, and in its being addressed 
 to whom, he bade the anxious Baptist and his disciples re- 
 cognize one of the many proofs of his Messiahship ^ The 
 laborer in the field of Home Missions is applying therefore 
 the favorite instrumentality of his Lord in his Lord's favorite 
 
* CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 231 
 
 mode. And upon this instrumentality, it is your instruction 
 to them that they chiefly rely. And while they may scatter 
 the tract, and gather the Sabbath school, and use every other 
 means that may aid man in the knowledge of his God, their 
 main business, and your great charge to them given, is that 
 " as ye go, preach.^'' 
 
 5. We have seen that in the manner of publishing his 
 message, our Lord was not unlike the laborers whom you 
 employ. Let us lastly observe the comparison you may in- 
 stitute with the ministry of our Lord, in the similar means 
 adopted for the support of the laborer. Christ did not, then, 
 like the established priesthood of Israel, find himself sustained 
 by the tithes of the land. No State furnished from her rev- 
 enues the endowments of his mission, or taxed her subjects 
 to secure through his means their spiritual good. The free 
 contributions of those whom he instructed, enlightened and 
 saved, were the only revenues to which he looked. And 
 these, you will observe, were given not to sustain him in his 
 labors for the donors, so much as to aid him in journeying 
 onward to benefit others. The frugal meal and the shelter- 
 ing roof were the reward that poverty gave for words such 
 as never man spake. Salvation came to the house he visited, 
 and when he parted, his blessing was left with its inmates. 
 But in addition, he seems to have received, from time to time, 
 of the free-will ofl'erings, which, from their abundance or their 
 penury, his disciples contributed, to meet the wants of the 
 morrow, when he should have reached a distant hamlet, and 
 be discoursing to a new auditory. These contributions one 
 of the apostles bore, and dispensed to meet the necessities of 
 that wayfaring company. Pious women followed him min- 
 istering of their substance. 
 
 Now it is to such resources that your enterprise looks. 
 You have not been subsidized from the national treasury. 
 Nor have your missionaries been empowered, or been willing, 
 to sit them down at the receipt of custom, collecting from the 
 traffic of the land a stinted tithe, in acknowledgment of the 
 temporal blessings with which the gospel has enriched every 
 walk of society. To the free gratuities of Christians, them- 
 selves benefited by the gospel, and anxious to spread before 
 others the word that God has made the power of salvation 
 to their own souls — to their spontaneous alms, gathered 
 unequally and rather according to the willingness of the heart, 
 than the fullness of the hands, you have been compelled to 
 
232 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 look as your only treasures. And though the store has often 
 seemed well nigh spent, ever wasting, it has been ever re- 
 newing itself, like the widow's cruse, still as it was emptied, 
 still by the goodness of Providence mysteriously replenished. 
 And the relief thus given has resembled that which sustained 
 our Lord's own personal ministry, in the fact, that it was not 
 the giver's own benefit that was immediately sought. The 
 Christian supports at home his pastor to preach to himself 
 and to his children, but he supports the Home Missionary to 
 preach to his destitute neighbors. It was in this way that 
 the disciples of our Saviour sustained their master, not ex- 
 pecting it as the condition of their gratuities, that he should 
 continue day after day to bless with his lengthened stay their 
 own hamlets and households, but that he might journey on- 
 ward from village to village, and city to city of their native 
 land. 
 
 The Redeemer, then, in his own personal efforts as an 
 evangelist, gave himself to the very work in which your 
 Society is toiling, the supply of the religious destitutions of 
 your own land. And ere we pass, let it be remembered, that 
 upon principles unlike the timorous and stealthy policy, 
 which his church in the days of persecution adopted, of 
 choosing rather as the scene of her labors, the retired valley, 
 and the remote and safe wilderness, Christ, as we see in the 
 words of our text,* and in the whole record of the gospels, 
 sought to plant his word, though in the face of fiercer oppo- 
 sition and surer and greater risk, in the towns and cities of 
 the land. He bade his disciples, in times of persecution in 
 one city, to flee indeed, but it was only to another city ; and 
 their ministry he at the same time describes, as a going over 
 the cities of Israel. He chose these as the scenes of labor, 
 for his work was with men, and men were there to be found 
 in the greatest number. He did so, because his hours were 
 few, and there the greatest effects might be wrought in the 
 shortest time. He did so, because his gospel was the remedy 
 of human depravity and misery, and in the crowded dwellings 
 of man, his depravity assumes its most aggravated forms, and 
 
 * See also Luke iv. 43. How rigidly the early preachers adhered to our 
 Lord's plan in the dissemination of the gospel, appears from the fact, that the 
 inhabitants of the cities in the Roman empire had become nominally Chris- 
 tian, while the rural population remained yet plunged in idolatry, and the 
 word Pagan, or villager (paganus) became synonymous with heathen. 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 233 
 
 his sufferings are most intense and distressing. He did so, 
 because these are the points of radiation, around which the 
 character of the whole nation crystalizes and becomes fixed, 
 and in ancient as in modern times, the impress of the metrop- 
 olis is to some extent seen upon the most distant and rude 
 of the rural population. Ever then may it be the prayer and 
 the policy of this Society, acting upon the like principles, to 
 plant its missionaries in the towns and cities of our land, till 
 they be fully supplied with the preaching of the gospel. 
 
 Yet let it not be supposed, that we would exalt'' the impor- 
 tance of Home Missions at the expense of the foreign field. 
 We believe the latter, if a division and a choice were admis- 
 sible, (which they are not,) we should believe the latter, the 
 more needful work of the church. It was indeed one of the 
 characteristics of the superiority of the new over the older 
 dispensations, that it looked beyond all the former boundaries 
 of national prejudice and selfishness, and taught men that the 
 field of benevolence is the world. Our Saviour liimself, 
 during his own more restricted ministry, alluded to these 
 designs of mercy for the Gentile. In his discourses at Naz- 
 areth he called his hearers to observe, that the Gentilewidow 
 of Zarephath had been honored by entertaining a prophet of 
 God, when the many widows of Israel were passed by, and 
 that the leprous nobleman of heathenish Syria had been 
 miraculously healed, while the many lepers of Israel were 
 left unrelieved. This was a theme the Jews could least of 
 all things endure. They thrust the Saviour from their city,. 
 and would have killed him, just as in succeeding years, their 
 countrymen at Jerusalem heard Paul patiently, until he 
 mentioned a divine mission to the Gentiles, when they ex- 
 claimed. Away with him, he is not fit to live. Christ from 
 the beginning contemplated foreign missions as the field of 
 his church ; but his own was a Home Mission. And while 
 the church, from his teachings, and the example of his apos- 
 tles, learns to regard Foreign Missions as her chief care, she 
 cannot sever it from the work of Home Missions. They are 
 indissolubly united, and each needs the otlier — the farther 
 and the nearer sides of the same great net ; the fishers of 
 men are needed alike, to bear the one into the bosom of the 
 deep, and to guard the other along the edge of the shore. 
 The true interests of each are necessarily advanced by the 
 growth of the other. 
 
 II. We have seen our Lord himself devoting the years of 
 31 
 
234 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 his personal ministry to the preaching of the gospel through- 
 out his own country. With such a sanction of your endeav- 
 ors, what motives are needed to impel you ? His example 
 to guide, His presence to uphold, and His Spirit to prosper 
 you — if tlie Lord be thus for you in the splendor of his ex- 
 ample, for you in his promises, and for you in his wonder- 
 working Spirit, who can be against you ? Whether we look 
 to the advantages which our nation presents for such labor, 
 or to its peculiar necessities, to our duty as Christians, or 
 our interests as men loving their country, to the general ob- 
 ligations of the church, or our own personal and special 
 privileges and responsibilities, — on every hand are teeming 
 incitements to energy and liberality, to perseverance and 
 courageous devotedness. 
 
 1. Do we speak of the advantages, which our wide-spread 
 land presents for labor of this kind ? We cannot forget, that 
 here are none of the impediments of an adverse government, 
 and an alien nation suspicious of your missionaries as foreign 
 emissaries — impediments with which the laborer abroad 
 must ever contend. From the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of 
 Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, and 
 yet onward to the coasts of the Pacific, a broad and goodly 
 land is open or opening before you, — not the land of stran- 
 gers, but your own native soil, blest with free institutions, 
 and a government springing from and accountable to the 
 people. Its free institutions invite the free and glad labors 
 of the Missionary. The national appetite for knowledge, 
 and the many endowments and appliances for the diffusion 
 of knowledge, promise you aid, in bringing before the na- 
 tional intellect the only knowledge that is of unmingled truth 
 and immutable value. The land is inhabited by a people, 
 not divided and isolated, as are the possessors of equal spaces 
 of territory in the old world, by the varieties of dialect and 
 languages, which make man seem as a barbarian to his neigh- 
 bor, separated from him but by a river, or a range of moun- 
 tains. The language of your forefathers, the language in 
 which your household bibles are written, is that which its 
 cities, and its hamlet, and its farm-houses alike acknowledge — 
 which its colonists are carrying into the depths of the forest, 
 and the seeds of which its adventurous mariners are scatter- 
 ing along every shore smitten by their keels. To make yet 
 more plain your duties, and to render the wise and beneficent 
 purposes of his Providence yet more easy of translation to 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 235 
 
 the reason and the conscience of this people, God has made their 
 country the point of attraction to the oppressed or the needy 
 of other lands, and the eyes of many and distant nations are 
 fixed upon you. Our Heavenly Father has made us a na- 
 tional epistle to other lands. See that you read a full and 
 impressive comment to all lands, of the power of Christian 
 principle, and of the expansive and self-sustaining energies of 
 the gospel, when left unfettered by national endowments, and 
 secular alliances. The evangelical character of our land is to 
 tell upon the plans and destinies of other nations. See to it, 
 that the men, who quote your democracy and your enter- 
 prise, your energy and your increase, be compelled by glar- 
 ing evidence, which they may not dispute, and cannot conceal, 
 to add, that for your freedom and all its better fruits, you are 
 indebted to the religion of the Saviour borne throughout the 
 length and breadth of your land. And last among the advan- 
 tages with which God has endowed you, and bound you, as 
 it were, to this work, let me name the amount of uneducated 
 or perverted mind, which He is daily quarrying from the 
 mines of European superstition, and from the place where 
 Satan's seat is, and casting down upon our shores to be in- 
 serted into the rising walls of your republic. At home it 
 was comparatively beyond your reach. The jealousy of 
 priestly and of kingly rule guarded it from your approach, 
 God has brought it disencumbered to your shores. Will you 
 meet it with the gospel? — will you follow it to its western 
 homes with the Missionary ? Your prayers have ascended 
 to God in behalf of those perishing in the darkness of false 
 religion in other lands. Your prayers have been answered, 
 as God is wont to answer even his own people, in the mode 
 and the hour they were perhaps least prepared to expect the 
 boon ; and while your souls thought only of the subjects of 
 your petitions, as dwellers on a foreign shore. He has in his 
 wondrous working made them already the denizens of your 
 own land, and the crowds, to whom you had hoped to send 
 the Foreign Missionary, have already besieged your door3 
 to ask the easier, and the cheaper, care of your Home Mis- 
 sions. Their souls are evidently as valuable here, as they 
 would have been if sought out by your messengers on their 
 native soil, and there won to the fiiith of Christ. You know 
 not, but that, although transplanted to this soil, they may 
 still retain a hold so strong on the affections, and an influence 
 so controlling on the character and destinies of the kindred 
 
236 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 and countrymen they have left behind, that converted here 
 by the labors of your Home Missions, they may become the 
 allies, or the channels, or themselves the chosen instruments 
 of your Foreign Missions to the lands whence they came. 
 It was thus in the declining ages of the Roman empire, that 
 the hordes of Paganism, disgorged from their own native 
 seats upon the imperial territories, became themselves chris- 
 tianized by the nation they had invaded, and evangelized the 
 paternal tribes they had quitted. Let us, then, regard the 
 emigrants around us, not as invaders, but as the exiles of a 
 country, of which they or their children may yet become the 
 evangelists. Let us count wisely and gratefully the number 
 of the deathless spirits, who have thus been ushered, under 
 the most favorable circumstances, into our borders. Many 
 of them have been the nurslings of a corrupt or careless 
 hierarchy ; and torn from the breasts of European error, they 
 are now committed by the hand of Providence to the foster- 
 ing care of your Sabbath Schools, and Bible classes, and the 
 pioneer churches planted and watered by the care of your 
 Missionaries. 
 
 2. As to the advantages, so to the necessities of our case 
 we need ever to look. We may not forget, or hold negligently 
 the civil privileges, the envied but the fragile inheritance 
 which our fathers have bequeathed us. The strangers day 
 by day wafted to your shores become your fellow sovereigns. 
 They choose with you the law-makers. They interpret and 
 modify, sustain or subvert your Constitution. If not con- 
 verted, under God, by you to the faith, they will with the 
 characteristic energy of evil, sacrifice your dearest earthly 
 interests to their passions, their superstitions and their crimes. 
 Your written constitutions, your declarations of right and of 
 national independence, your books of statute law and of pre- 
 cedent, contain in themselves no inherent principle of vitality. 
 They operate and have life, but in proportion as that life is 
 infused into them by the feelings and conscience of the nation. 
 The reign of violence has passed ; men talk now of the reign 
 of written constitutions. But parchment and paper cannot 
 give freedom, or uphold it when given. Ours is a govern- 
 ment of public opinion, and each day the channels, by which 
 that public opinion may act upon the laws, tribunals and 
 treaties of the nation, seem shortening and widening, turning 
 each day a fuller and more direct and more rapid stream upon 
 the ostensible rulers, and the written laws of the nation. In 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 237 
 
 the formation of this sovereign principle of opinion, your new- 
 found fellow-citizens wish to share, and cannot but share, 
 even did they not wish it. If not educated and sanctified, 
 they will only lower and dilute the tone of public morals, 
 already, alas, too evidently declining ; and a vitiated public 
 opinion will send its reeking corruption into your senate- 
 chambers, your halls of justice, your schools, your ware- 
 houses, and your homes, until licentiousness, and profaneness, 
 and violence, like the curse of Egypt, be found a croaking 
 and slimy plague infesting the whole land. Nor may we 
 hide from ourselves the fact, that unfriendly influences of the 
 most seductive character are busy — that the work of natural 
 corruption is not left to its own natural course, but supersti- 
 tions, which have in other lands and ages held the widest 
 sway, are assiduously engaged in the work of education and 
 proselytism amongst us ; 
 
 " And bold with joy, 
 Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, 
 (Portentous sight,) the owlet Atheism, 
 Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon. 
 Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close. 
 And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, 
 Cries out, " Where is it f* 
 
 And yet amid these dangers, that self-gratuktion " which 
 goeth before a fall " as surely in a nation as in the individual, 
 is so evident, as to be imputed to us as a national foible. 
 Privileges, singular and great, we indeed have ; but the only 
 light in which it is safe to view them, is that of the corre- 
 sponding obligations they impose. Signal mercies, if misused, 
 must provoke judgments as signal ; and American Christians, 
 if unfaithful to their high trust, will be made examples of 
 God's sore indignation. And among the difliculties of our 
 situation, felt not indeed except by the church, let us remem- 
 ber the demands of the Foreign Mission field, each day in- 
 creasing. To meet these, the Home Mission enterprise must 
 be sustained by the churches at home, until made by its in- 
 fluence united, intelligent and devoted, they become the 
 camp and armory, from which shall be sent forth yet other 
 and more numerous levies of conscripts for the foreign service 
 of the Church of Christ. . 
 
 3. The motives which urge you to the work, m view ol 
 these considerations, will naturally suggest themselves to all. 
 
238 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 and are alike varied and powerful, Self-inierest and the love 
 of kindred furnish them. The more aged among us cannot 
 but desire to transmit to the coming generations, unimpaired, 
 the immunities and blessings they received themselves from 
 those who went before. To the young men of our churches, 
 we might speak of the peculiar interest which, as the future 
 inheritors of the land, they have, to escape the evils of igno- 
 rance and irreligion, and to avert, if it may be, the storm 
 that will descend on the quiet graves of their fathers, but which 
 they still surviving must buflet for themselves, or be swept 
 before its violence. We might appeal to your love of man 
 as such, or to your love of country, and ask on these grounds 
 your alms and your prayers in this good work. But if the 
 Roman patriot could say of the paramount force and en- 
 grossing character of that high motive — love to our coun- 
 try : — " Dear are the charities of home ; dear are parents, 
 and dear are our children ; but our one country, yet dearer, 
 combines all the charities of us all ;" — I would speak to you, 
 brethren, of a higher love, blending with and absorbing as 
 well this as all minor charities. As lovers of your country I 
 might urge, and as lovers of your kind I might require you ; 
 but by a love which sanctifies, and itself surpasses all others, 
 I beseech you ; as the lovers of Christ, or rather let me say 
 as the beloved of Christ, whom he has loved to the death, 
 has ransomed and is sanctifying ; give to this work your 
 prompt aid, your prayers and your efforts. And while some 
 give of their substance, and some add their counsel, and all 
 their prayers, are there not yet others here, who are girding 
 themselves to a costlier offering, and who are prepared to 
 become themselves a whole burnt-offering upon the altars of 
 the church, and as a living sacrifice to spend and be spent, 
 in the personal labor of bearing the gospel to the destitute ? 
 In the consuming flames of divine charity, our Lord be- 
 came himself a willing victim, and the zeal of his Father's 
 house devoured him. To reach and rescue you, he shrunk 
 from no sacrifice. Requite him by love intense and absorb- 
 ing, like that love which it reflects. And to those here, who 
 are themselves honored by their personal engagements as the 
 missionary preachers of the church, let me say: Brethren, 
 remember in your most painful sacrifices, in the most distress- 
 ing repulses that your efforts may encounter, you can never 
 know the peculiar agony of soul which our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 as a Home Missionary, endured. Among the most afl'ecting 
 
CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 239 
 
 pages in the history of David Brainerd, is the journal of that 
 Sabbath which he spent amid the idolatrous revellings of the 
 heathen, who had refused to listen to his teachincrsr Desti- 
 tute of all Christian society, he had retired to the forest, and 
 there in desolate loneliness sat him down with his Bible in 
 his hand, while at a little distance, they yelled and danced 
 in honor of their demons. Even that "devoted man sunk in 
 the trial, and describes the absence of all sympathy and 
 Christian society, as making this the most burdensome Sab- 
 bath he had ever known. Now this loneliness, which for 
 the time crushed even the spirit of a Brainerd, was felt by 
 our Lord, as none else could feel it. There was no heart 
 even among his disciples, with whom he could have true and 
 entire communion. Omniscient, he read perpetually the evil 
 in the breasts of all that surrounded him. All was naked 
 and opened to him. The ambition, the jealousy, the distrust, 
 and the avarice of his own apostles, the malignant hatred to 
 God and all goodness that filled the souls of the impenitent 
 around him, were necessarily and ever present to his view. 
 And he himself was all purity, entirely and intensely abhor- 
 ring evil in its slightest stains. This healthful and sensitive 
 purity was condemned to be continually jostled by our de- 
 pravity, and how harshly, in the rude collision, must it have 
 been rasped by the hard, dry scurf of our moral leprosy. 
 His was indeed a peculiar solitariness, as he moved a sinless 
 one among sinners. The anguish of this loneliness, this 
 daily death, endured by our Master, we may never know. 
 But of these the sacrifices of his love we do well often to 
 think, that our own may be rekindled. 
 
 There are those here, who giving of their substance and 
 their cares to the good work, withhold their own hearts. 
 The yoke of Christ, which is easy, their necks do not yet 
 wear ; and his burden, which is light, they refuse to assume. 
 Dwelling in cities each one of whose moving multitudes lives, 
 moves, and has his being in God — or the tillers of fields 
 which He only has blessed with fruitful seasons, filling your 
 hearts with food and gladness — in the enjoyment of a plenty, 
 a freedom and a peace which Christ's providence gave — in 
 the daily hearing of his commands, and with his sacrifice for 
 sin hourly before your view, you yield him no love, and act 
 as if you owed him no allegiance. The Giver is shut out 
 from the heart by barriers which his own gifts have been 
 employed to form. O, remember that a land which sends 
 
240 
 
 CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY. 
 
 forth the gospel to other lands, a community that sustain the 
 missionary to labor amid their own and foreign destitution, 
 as they are the most favored, so they may be also the most 
 guilt\ of all lands and of all communities. Remember the 
 curse of Jerusalem, and the plagues of the nation whose hills 
 had been traversed by a Saviour's feet, and the field of whose 
 home missions a Saviour's own tears and blood had watered. 
 Christ's word and Spirit have come nigh you — your own 
 kindred and friends are found in his church. And God grant 
 that the Redeemer who has thus taught in your streets, and 
 wrought wonders even in your own homes and households, 
 stand not up in the last day, an incensed and inflexible Judge, 
 to condemn you for that gospel which you have sent to others 
 but rejected for yourselves. 
 
THE PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN TRACT 
 SOCIETY. 
 
 The Christian Library, 45 vols., 400 pages each.— The Evangelical 
 Family Library, 15 volumes.— The Youth's Christian Library, 40 
 volumes. 
 
 The American Tract Society has been for years a familiar 
 and cherished name with our churches. But many, even of 
 intelligent Christians, have probably scarce made themselves 
 conversant with its varied publications, or considered duly 
 the influence it was likely to wield over the religious litera- 
 ture of our own and other lands. They have thought, per- 
 haps, of the Institution as furnishing a few excellent Tracts, 
 in the form of loose pamphlets, and suppose these, with some 
 children's books, to constitute the entire sum of its issues ; 
 while in truth, the Society, noiselessly following the beckon- 
 ing of Divine Providence, has been led to undertake the 
 publication of volumes, and to furnish Libraries for Christian 
 churches, schools, and households. These heedless observ- 
 ers have thought of it mostly in connection with a few 
 fiivorite Tracts written in our own vernacular language, 
 while, in fact, the Society has come to be engaged in the 
 circulation of books and Tracts in more tongues than the 
 richest Polyglott comprises, and is extending its operations 
 through lands more numerous and remote than any one pro- 
 bably of the most widely-travelled of its readers has ever 
 traversed. The moral and intellectual character of the relig- 
 ious literature thus widely diffused deserves some thoughts.* 
 
 The various publications of the Society in our own land, 
 
 * It was made recently the subject of e.xamination. At a special meeting 
 of the Society and its friends, convened in the city of New York a few months 
 since, several subjects were presented for consideration, as bcarinsr on the 
 character, plans, and duties of the Society. Amongst these was " The evan- 
 gelical character of the Publications of the Society^and their adaptation to 
 the wants of the present generation of mankind, at home and abroad." Upon 
 the subject so assigned to the writer, the following remarks were prepared. 
 
 32 
 
242 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 if we include its issues of every form and size, from the 
 handbill and the broad-sheet, up to the bound volume, already 
 number one thousand. In foreign lands it aids in issuing 
 nearly twice that number, written in some one hundred of 
 the different languages and dialects of the earth. Amongst 
 ourselves, in the seventeen years of its existence, it has al- 
 ready, by sale or gift, scattered broadcast over the whole face 
 of the land, in our churches and Sabbath-schools, through 
 our towns and villages, among the neglected, in the lanes 
 of our large cities, where misery retires to die, and vice to 
 shelter itself from the eye of day ; and amidst the destitute, 
 sparsely sprinkled over our wide frontiers, where the min- 
 istry has scarce followed, and the church can scarce gather 
 the scattered inhabitants, some two millions of books and 
 some sixty millions of Tracts. This is no ordinary influence. 
 It must find its way into nearly every vein and artery of the 
 body politic. Whether it be of a pure and healthful charac- 
 ter, is an inquiry of grave moment to the churches who sus- 
 tain this enterprise, and to the country, which receives this 
 literature. If baneful, it is a grievous wrong to the commu- 
 nity ; if merely inert and useless, it is a fraud committed upon 
 the benevolence of the churches. 
 
 I. Whether these publications deserve the confidence of 
 Christians, may be ascertained by the answer which is given 
 to one question : Do they preach Jesus Christ and him 
 CRUCIFIED? He must be the theme of every successful 
 ministry, whether preaching from the pulpit or through the 
 press. The blessing of God's Spirit is promised only to the 
 exaltation of the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. 
 "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." When 
 Paul describes the peculiarities of his own successful minis- 
 try — a ministry that shook the nations — a ministry that car- 
 ried the blazing torch of its testimony from Illyricum to 
 Spain, he compresses these into a very brief space. He was 
 determined to know nothing but Christ Jesus and him cru- 
 cified. In Christ he found the motive which stimulated all 
 his fervid and untiring activity, and the model upon which 
 was moulded every excellence of his character. "To me to 
 live is Christ." Only so far as the issues of this Society 
 cherish this same principle does it ask, and only so far can it 
 deserve from the churches of our Lord Jesus Christ that 
 cordial support and that large extension of its labors which 
 it solicits at the hands of the religious community. 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 243 
 
 And not only is it necessary to the success of such ministry 
 of the press, that it should make the crucified Saviour the 
 great theme of its teachings ; it should also present this theme, 
 as far as possible, in a scriptural manner. By this we mean, 
 not a mere iteration of the words of sacred writ, but that the 
 mind of the writer should be so imbued with the si)irit of 
 the Scripture, and so possessed by its doctrines, and so 
 haunted by its imagery and illustrations, as to present, natu- 
 rally and earnestly, the great truths of the scheme of salva- 
 tion, in that proportion and with those accompaniments which 
 are found in the inspired volume. His thoughts must all be 
 habited, as far as it may be, in the garb, and breathe the 
 spirit of that only book to which we can ascribe unmingled 
 truth. 
 
 That the works of the American Tract Society are thus 
 evangelical in their character, would seem scarce needing 
 proof, since none, as far as we know, have yet questioned it. 
 Amid the fierce and imbittered controversies, from which the 
 church has never been exempt — and certainly not in our own 
 times — we know not that any, among the several bodies of 
 Christians generally recognized as evangelical, have arisen to 
 impugn in this respect the character of the Society's issues. 
 This has not been because these books have been secretly 
 circulated. They have been found every where, dropped in 
 the highway and lodged in the pastor's study, distributed in 
 the nursery, the rail-car, the steamboat, and the stage-coach, 
 as well as exposed on the shelves of the bookstore, and they 
 have challenged the investigation of all into whose hands 
 they have come. Denominations of Christians, divided from 
 each other by varying views as to the discipline and })()lity of 
 the church of Christ, and even holding opposite sentiments 
 as to some of the more important doctrines of the Gospel, 
 have yet agreed in recognizing in these publications the 
 great paramount truths of that Gospel, and have co-operated 
 long, liberally, and harmoniously, in their distribution and 
 use. 
 
 The names of the authors whose volumes are found in 
 friendly juxtaposition, standing side by side on the shelves 
 of the libraries the Society has provided for the Christian 
 household and school, seem to furnish another strong pledge 
 to the same effect. Doddridge, Baxter, Edwards, Owen, 
 Flavel and Bunyan, are names that seem to belong less to 
 any one division of the Christian host than to the whole 
 
244 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 family of Christ. They are the current coin of the church, 
 which have passed so freely from hand to hand, that the 
 minuter superscription of the sects to which they may have 
 belonged, the denominational imprint seems to have been 
 worn away in the wide, unquestioned circulation they have 
 received. And they have been acknowledged by evangeli- 
 cal believers, wherever the English language and literature 
 have gone, as faithful and most powerful preachers of the 
 Gospel of Christ. They have received higher attestation 
 even than that of having their "praise" thus " in all the 
 churches." The Head of the church has not withholden his 
 benediction and imprint. The influence of his Spirit has 
 long and largely rested on the written labors of these his 
 servants ; and, while the authors themselves have been in 
 the grave, their works are yet following them in lengthening 
 and widening trains of usefulness. Multitudes have been 
 converted, and thousands of others have traced to these books 
 their own growth in Christian holiness. Some of these 
 writers were, while upon the earth, not inactive or unsuc- 
 cessful as preachers with the living voice ; yet it may be 
 questioned whether all the seals of their living ministry 
 would equal the tithe of the seals which God has continued 
 to set to their posthumous ministry in the volumes they have 
 bequeathed to the woi'ld and the church. 
 
 II. But how far are they adapted to the wants of the 
 PRESENT GENERATION OF MANKIND? We kuow that in the 
 varying tastes and habits of society, and its ever-shifting cur- 
 rents of feeling, new channels of thought are scooped out, 
 and new forms of expression become popular ; and the writer 
 whose compositions present not these forms and move not 
 in these channels, may find himself deserted as obsolete. 
 His works are consigned to the unmolested and dusty shelves 
 of the antiquarian, while other and fresher rivals grasp the 
 sceptre of popularity and usefulness that has passed from his 
 hands. Nevy conditions of society and new institutions also, 
 may require another style of address and another train of in- 
 struction than those which, once indeed, were most salutary and 
 seasonable, but are so no longer. If other classes of litera- 
 ture become antiquated, and the old give place to the new, 
 may it not be so with religious literature ; may it not be so 
 with much of the literature from which the American Tract 
 Society is seeking to supply the Christians of the present 
 age ? 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 245 
 
 1. What, then, are the wants of the present age? Re- 
 ligion, it should be i-emembered, if true, must be in its great 
 principles unchangeable, and the same in all eras of the 
 world's history. 
 
 " Can length of years on God himself exact, 
 And make that fiction which was once a fact." 
 
 A revelation, from its source and the nature of its contents, 
 possesses, therefore, a fixedness and constancy that can be. 
 long to no science of merely human origin. The Bible 
 stands apart from all the literature of man's devising, as a 
 book never to be superseded — susceptible of no amendment, 
 and never to be made obsolete whilst the world stands. The 
 book of the world's Creator and the world's Governor, the 
 record of the world's history and the world's duty, the world's 
 sin and the world's salvation, it will endure while that world 
 lasts, and continue to claim its present authority long as that 
 government over the present world may continue. Religious 
 works, therefore, the more profoundly they are imbued with 
 the spirit of the Bible, will the more nearly partake of its in- 
 destructibility. Hence the Confessions of Augustine, written 
 so many centuries ago, are not yet an obsolete book, nor can 
 be while the human heart and the Christian religion continue 
 the same that they now are. In their religious literature, 
 the church and the world in the nineteenth century must, 
 therefore, in most respects, have the same wants as the 
 church and the world in earlier ages. 
 
 It will be allowed, however, that there are certain pecu- 
 liarities in the history and character of an age that may make 
 one form of address and one style of discussion much more 
 useful and reasonable in its religious literature than another. 
 Has our country at this period any such peculiar wants ? 
 We might refer to many circumstances in its government 
 and its people, their pursuits and their character, which dis- 
 tinguish, and, as it were, individualize our land and our age. 
 But to sum them all in one word, we suppose the main dis- 
 tinction and boast of our people is, that they are a practical 
 race. Others theorize ; they act. Visionary reforms and 
 schemes of society, that might in other regions be nunscd for 
 centuries in the brains of philosophers, and be deemed prac- 
 ticable only because they have never been reduced to prac- 
 tice, if they find proselytes amongst us, are soon brought to 
 the test of actual experiment ; their admirers here act upon 
 
246 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 the theories, which, elsewhere, are but reasoned upon, and 
 the system exploding in the trial, refutes itself. Our coun- 
 trymen, the colonists of a wide and fertile territory, the 
 mariners whose keels vex every shore, and whose sails 
 whiten the remotest seas, inherit the solid sense, the sober 
 judgment, the energy, daring, and perseverance of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race ; and their political institutions and the broad 
 territory yet to be subdued and peopled, here give full scope 
 to these traits of character. We are as yet, though a nation 
 of readers, not a nation of students ; but much more a nation 
 of seamen, farmers and traders. Our very studies are prac- 
 tical ; and the cast of character which distinguished the Ro- 
 man from the Greek mind, and which made the former the 
 masters of the world — the practical character of the mind 
 and its pursuits — belongs, in all climes and on every shore, 
 to the Saxon race. If we, as a nation, have in this era of 
 our history specific wants, we want, then, a practical litera- 
 ture in religion, as in other branches of knowledge — a relig- 
 ious literature, adapted with practical wisdom to the peculiar 
 duties and snares, the prevalent errors, and the popular insti- 
 tutions of our time. Has this Society furnished such ? 
 
 That portion of its publications which are of American 
 origin, and which its exertions have been the means of call- 
 ing out, or of diffusing more widely where they already existed, 
 all its books that are of recent and domestic origin, may be 
 supposed naturally to possess some tolerable degree of adap- 
 tation to our own national wants, the prevailing sins and 
 follies of the times, and the peculiar responsibilities and priv- 
 ileges of Christian churches in the United States, in the 
 nineteenth century. The writers are of us, and wrote for 
 us ; and we may suppose that these productions at least are 
 not wanting in such adaptation. Their currency and their 
 usefulness, the souls which, by the blessing of God, they 
 have converted, and their influence on the faith, zeal, and 
 purity of the churches, afford evidence of the same kind. 
 Of the 430 pamphlet Tracts in the English language, issued 
 by the Society, more than one half are of American origin. 
 It was not so in the earlier years of the Society's history. 
 Of the first one hundred Tracts on the lists of this Society, 
 more than two-thirds were republications from works of British 
 Christians, of the richest character, indeed, but they were 
 the siftings of a rich religious literature more than two cen- 
 turies old. Of the last one hundred of these 430 Tracts, on 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 247 
 
 the other hand, more than three-fourths were by American 
 Christians. We have not pursued the investigation into the 
 bound volumes of the Society ; but we suppose that there a 
 similar result would be reached, although the proportion of 
 American authorship is not yet as large, perhaps, as in the 
 pamphlet Tracts. Here also it is increasing, however, and 
 one-third of the volumes may be regarded as of domestic 
 origin. It would be found, we suppose, that the Society, 
 in the brief period of seventeen years, has done much to 
 create a national religious literature. 
 
 To effect any literary changes, seventeen years, it should 
 be remembered, is a very brief period. As far, then, as 
 adaptedness to the special wants of this country can be de- 
 cided by the domestic or foreign authorship of its publications, 
 it would appear that the Society has, with great rapidity, 
 exerted a most perceptible and powerful influence on the 
 writers and readers of our churches. It has elicited and dif- 
 fused a literature that is emphatically /o/" us, inasmuch as it 
 is from ourselves. The intelligent Christian can never wish 
 to see his denomination or his country confining its sympa- 
 thies and its studies to the literature of the sect itself, or of 
 that one country, thus shut up in the narrow circle of its own 
 writers. Christianity is free, genial, and philanthropic — it 
 loves the race. Christianity is the only true citizenship of 
 the world, and it hails the writings and the history of all lands 
 and all kindreds, when imbued with the spirit of the com- 
 mon Saviour. But yet there may be certain evident advan- 
 tages in having, for some purposes and Avithin certain limits, 
 a denominational and also a national literature in our churches. 
 For this object of a national literature the American Tract 
 Society may claim to have done much, and to have done it 
 well. They have furnished a body of Tracts, popular in 
 style, pungent and faithful, pithy, brief, and striking, that 
 are singularly adapted to the moral wants of our community, 
 and many of which, from their high excellence, would bear 
 transplantation into the literature of almost any other Chris- 
 tian country. 
 
 2. As to the adaptedness for usefulness amongst our 
 churches and people of those volumes and Tracts which the 
 Society has derived from the rich Christian literature of 
 Great Britain, it may be deserving of remark, that the more 
 distinguished of these works are derived mainly from three 
 memorable eras in the religious history of that country. 
 
348 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 The first of these was the age of the Puritans and Non- 
 conformists. Into the merits of their controversy with the 
 Established Church of England it is no part of our design 
 here to enter. They were, by the admission of the candid 
 in every party, men of powerful intellect and ardent piety, 
 whose principles had been tried and strengthened in the fierce 
 collisions of their age, and whose character received, in con- 
 sequence, an energy it might else have wanted. The meas- 
 ures of government, that threw the Non-conformists out of 
 their pulpits, were fitted to produce an admirable class of 
 writings, such as the church has not often enjoyed. Many 
 of these devout men, mighty in the Scriptures and incessant 
 in prayer, had they been left to the quiet discharge of their 
 pastoral duties, would have kept the noiseless tenor of their 
 way, and the world would probably have heard little or 
 naught of their authorship. Preaching would have absorbed 
 their minds, and consumed all their strength. The mere 
 preacher has little leisure, and often little fitness to be a suc- 
 cessful writer. Thus the published remains of Whitefield 
 are of little value, compared with the writings of many men 
 far his inferiors in the pulpit and in its immediate results of 
 usefulness. Had, then, the edicts and policy of the Stuarts 
 left the Non-conformist fathers to their own chosen course, 
 they would, many of them, have died and bequeathed no 
 literary remains ; or those remains would have been com- 
 paratively meagre and jejune, from the want of leisure in a 
 life of active and unremitted pastoral toil. But, on the other 
 hand, had the rich and varied writings of that class of men, 
 who, from the prison or beside its very gate, sent out their 
 treatises to their peeled and scattered churches, been com- 
 posed by mere students, men of the lamp and the closet, they 
 would have been deficient in their popular style, their ear- 
 nestness, and their apt familiar illustrations. None but pas- 
 tors, acquainted with the people and familiar with the popular 
 modes of communicating religious truth, could thus have 
 informed the deepest truths of theology and morals with a 
 racy vivacity, and surrounded them with such simple and 
 every-day imagery. 
 
 Thus, only men who had been bred pastors could have 
 written some of these works. And, on the other hand, had 
 they continued pastors, they could not have written them 
 for want of leisure, inclination, and even perhaps mental 
 power. But when the prison and the pillory shut them in, 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 249 
 
 and the pulpit had shut them out, these resohite and holy 
 men resorted to the only channel left them for conununieating 
 with the hearts and consciences of men. It was the press. 
 Had Baxter been a mere student and not a pastor, he would 
 probably have made all his writings thorny, al)strnse, and 
 sterile, as the works of those schoolmen whose writings he 
 seems so fondly to have loved and studied so closely. ^And, 
 in that case, where had been the usefulness of the Saints' 
 Rest and the Call to the Unconverted ? Had he continued 
 always a pastor, he would have preached much mor<' to the 
 men of the 17th century ; but it is very questionable whether 
 he would have preached as well or as much to the men of the 
 19th century as he now does. Here, then, is a class of 
 writers in whose history God seems to have made special 
 provision that they should be trained to become eflcctive as 
 the practical writers of the church, bringing to the experience 
 of the pastor all the leisure of the scholar, and grafting upon 
 the meditations of the study all the unction, the simplicity, 
 and the popular tact of the pulpit. 
 
 In addition to these peculiar preparations for general use- 
 fulness, the writings of the Puritans and Non-conformists 
 come to us, as Americans, commended by considerations of 
 singular force. The fathei-s of New England were of that 
 class of men. The Adam and Eve of those regions were 
 fashioned of Puritan clay; and many of our peculiar institu- 
 tions and our distinctive traits of national character may be 
 traced, through that New England ancestry, to the character 
 of the Puritans of England. We have a hereditary right in 
 their works and memory. Their writings are moulded by 
 peculiar influences, that have yet left their traces upon our 
 mental idiosyncrasy as a people. Connected as then the 
 Puritans of the mother country were with our progenitors 
 by every tie of piety and blood, their voice comes upon the 
 ears of American Christians like a testimony from the graves 
 of those revered forefathers, who planted upon our rugged 
 northern shores the germs of our freedom, our knowledge 
 and our arts, while seeking only in the desert a refuge from 
 persecution, and freedom to worshij) God ; but who left, 
 where they sought merely a shelter, the foundations of a new 
 empire, stretching its territories already from the Atlantic to 
 the Pacific, and shedding the influence of its conuncrce and 
 its freedom over either continent. 
 
 The second of these eras, which have contributed to the 
 33 
 
250 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 Christian literature of this Society, is that of the great revi- 
 val of religion, under the labors of Whitefield and the 
 Wesleys in England, and the elder Edwards and the Ten- 
 nants in our own country. It was a great religious move- 
 ment, awakening from lethargy and recalling from perilous 
 errors a portion of the English establishment, infusing a new 
 life of piety into the English dissenters, as in Our country it 
 supplied the destitute and awakened the formal from Georgia 
 to New Hampshire. It was an era, both here and in the 
 parent country, of bitter controversy. The truths, recalled 
 from their long concealment and urged with new zeal, were 
 to be defended from the press, as well as from the pulpit or 
 the open field, where so many of those preachers delivered 
 their testimony. To this day it is that we owe the works of 
 Doddridge and Edwards, that work of Venn which the Society 
 has very recently republished, and the memoir of Edwards' 
 disciple and friend, the glowing, suflering David Brainerd. 
 In the necessities of that time we see, though to a less ex- 
 tent, a combination of the same causes which made the Non- 
 conformists' writings what they were. The preacher was 
 grafted on the student. Had not Edwards had the experience 
 of those glorious revivals God permitted him to witness and 
 to record, he could, perhaps, still have written the work "On 
 the Religious Affections ;" but it would have been a very 
 different book. Without the resources of his rich pastoral 
 experience it might have been as profound as the immortal 
 Analogy of Butler, and as little fitted as that work to be gen- 
 erally popular with the great mass of readers. 
 
 The third of these memorable eras may be designated as 
 the era of modern Christian enterprise. We know no fitter 
 epithet to describe its varied activity, and its aggressive action 
 on the ignorance of nominal Christendom and the wide 
 wastes of heathenism. It began shortly after the breaking 
 out of the French Revolution. It was an age when God 
 seemed for a time to allow a new " hour and power of dark- 
 ness,'"' akin to that which brooded over the world Avhen its 
 Redeemer was about to suffer. Then boiled up from the 
 lower deeps of the human heart floods of corruption, that, in 
 ordinary ages, slumber on, dark and unseen, in their quiet 
 concealment. Then steamed up, as it were from the nether- 
 most abysses of hell, strange and hideous errors, that gen- 
 erally avoid the light of day, and the world was aghast at the 
 open appearance of atheism, and the rejection by a great 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 251 
 
 nation, as in mass, of their old ancestral foith. But, as if to 
 illustrate his own government of the universe, then, to meet 
 this revolt, rose up, from quarters the most distant, and some 
 of them the most obscure, designs for good and enterprises 
 of benevolence, of which the world had long seen no parallel. 
 The Foreign Missions of the Christian church, the Sabbath- 
 school, the Tract Society itself, and the Bible Society, burst 
 up, as in quick succession, and ere the carnival of thepit was 
 ended, and while Satan seemed yet triumphing in his antici- 
 pated conquest of the world to impiety, the Christian faith 
 received a fresh impulse, and the cause of the Saviour as- 
 sumed an aggressive energy it has never since lost. To this 
 period belonged Buchanan and Pearce. In this period Wil- 
 berforce published that View of Religion in the higher classes, 
 which was, in the judgment of the commentator Scott, the 
 noblest protest in favor of the Gospel made for centuries — a 
 book that consoled and delighted that eminent statesman 
 Burke on his dying bed, and that gave to the church of Christ 
 the lamented and beloved author of that immortal Tract 
 "The Dairyman's Daughter," Legh Richmond. Pelted by 
 Parr with learned Greek, and assailed by the Socinian Bel- 
 sham, it went on unimpeded, and did its work. Its influence 
 was most decisive, under God, in aiding the great work of 
 reform, the effects of which are visible in the middle and 
 higher classes of England. Then, too, wrote and labored 
 Hannah More, and to the same period may be added Henry 
 Marty n. 
 
 All these three were periods of conflict. In the first and 
 in the third, political contentions were intermingled with 
 religious controversies. Wars and rumors of wars exaspe- 
 rated the fierce collisions between rival sects, or the strife 
 that was waged between Christianity and those who cast off 
 all fear, and mocked to his face their Maker and Judge. 
 The second was indeed exclusively a period of religious 
 controversy ; but the points at issue were so momentous, 
 and the zeal exhibited so ardent, that England and America 
 were filled with the noise of inquiry and dispute, as the Gos- 
 pel went on winning new and glorious triumphs amid fierce 
 opposition. There was, as in the apostolic history, a wide 
 door opened, and there were also " many opposers," and both 
 Whitefield and Wesley were more than once, in Christian 
 Britain, on the eve of a su.mmary and ferocious martyrdom. 
 
 All these three eras were then eras of moral revolution. 
 
252 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 It is a familiar fact that revolutions produce great characters. 
 Their great emergencies awaken feeling and develop talent. 
 Some mighty crisis paralyzes the weaker crowd, and sum- 
 mons forth the master-spirit who can meet its demands, and 
 reveals thus to the world his merits and his powers. And it 
 is also true, that, although the highest works of science do 
 not issue from such times, the most stirring and popular 
 books are often the progeny of such an age of turmoil and 
 conflict. These orgasms of feeling, that shoot through the 
 whole frame of a nation, may bring out much that is crude 
 and extravagant, but they also lead to exertions of more than 
 wonted power, and results of more than vulgar splendor. 
 The best efforts of the best writers are sometimes traceable 
 to the excitement of some such stirring era. Pascal's Pro- 
 vincial Letters, in which wit, argument, and eloquence are 
 so splendidly blended, and, leaning on each other, group 
 themselves around the cross of Christ, could not have been 
 produced in the holiday leisure of some peaceful era. It 
 needed the fierce controversies in which Jansenism lay bleed- 
 ing under the feet of triumphant Jesuitism, and struggling 
 as for its life, while it testified, as from the dust, in behalf 
 of many of the great truths of the Gospel — it needed, we say, 
 such a conflict and such a peril to draw out a production so 
 impassioned and so powerful even from the mighty heart and 
 the massive intellect of a Pascal. 
 
 There are works that seemingly can exist only as the birth 
 of the throes and death-pangs of some great era of change 
 and moral renovation. Such were the three eras to which 
 we have alluded, and their character was imprinted on many 
 of the works they produced, and which this Society reprints 
 and disseminates. No other age, no lighter emergency 
 could have called forth such intellectual strength and such 
 depth of feeling, and made the volumes so well fitted as they 
 are to tell upon the heart of an entire nation. Works then 
 written have the energy of the conflict, and breathe for ever 
 its strong passions. Their words are often battles. Had 
 Bunyan never inhabited a dungeon, we question whether the 
 Pilgrim's Progress v,'ould have had its beautiful pictures of 
 the land of Beulah, a land of freedom, light, and beauty, and 
 we doubt whether that allegory had ever existed. Had Bax- 
 ter never been an army chaplain, who must talk strong truths 
 in plain terms, we question whether his works would have 
 had all their passionate energy and their strong simplicity. 
 
THE AMEKICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 253 
 
 With regard, therefore, to those portions of the Society's 
 publications which proceed from American authors, their 
 origin is some evidence in favor of their adaptedness to our 
 peculiar wants. With regard to all those works of British 
 origin that came from either of the great eras upon which 
 we have remarked, we have in favor of their influence not 
 only the character of the writers, but the character of the 
 age in which they wrote and did battle for the truth of God 
 as they believed it. 
 
 Taking now the literature of the Society, as prepared for 
 this country in mass, we find in it evidently a variety and 
 fulness of subjects that would seem to meet the varied de- 
 mands of the church and the nation. For missionary litera- 
 ture, it has the memoirs of Brainerd, Buchanan, Schwartz, 
 Henry Martyn, and Harriet Wiuslow. Does a pastor seek 
 to train his llock to higher devotedness, where could be found 
 a better manual than Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, writ- 
 ten, as it would seem, under the golden sky of the Delectable 
 Mountains, and in full sight of the Celestial City ? Where 
 better companions than the biographies of Leighton, and 
 Payson and Pearce, and J. Brainerd Taylor? Against infi- 
 delity we have Bogue — the work that was read, and with 
 some considerable impressions of mind, by Napoleon, in his 
 last days — and Morison, and Keith, and the treatises of Leslie 
 and Watson, while others, on the same subject of Christian 
 evidences, commend themselves as the works of writers who 
 were themselves recovered from infidelity, as the writings 
 of Lyttelton, West, Jenyns, and our countryman Nelson. 
 There is provision ifor every age : for the child, the Society 
 has furnished the touching biographies of Nathan Dickerman, 
 John Mooney Mead, and Mary Lothrop, with the juvenile 
 works of Gallaudet, and some of those by the Abbotts. For 
 those who love profound thought it has Foster, and for the 
 lovers of brilliant imagination and glowing eloquence, the 
 German Krummacher. Of the Non-conformists and of the 
 contemporaries of Edwards, we have already spoken. Few 
 writers of our time have caught so successfully, on some 
 pages, the spirit of Baxter as J. G. Pike, three of whose 
 works the Society republishes. As models of usefulness m 
 the various walks of life, and in either sex, we have the bi- 
 Qoraphies of Normaiid Smith, the example of the Christian 
 tradesman ; and of Harlan Page, the private church-member 
 laboring for souls ; of Kiipin, of Hannah Hobbie, and ot 
 
254 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 Caroline Hyde. The child just tottering from its cradle is 
 met by the Society with the half-cent Scripture Alphabet; 
 while, for the last stages of human life, they have Burder's 
 Sermons to the Aged, printed in type that suits it to the 
 dimmer eyes of old age. Furnished at every variety of price, 
 and in every form and size, as are the Tracts of the Society, 
 the Christian traveller who would scatter the seed of truth 
 as he journeys, and the Christian father who would furnish 
 his children with a librar}' of devout and wise authors ; the 
 Christian minister who would train himself and others to 
 higher devotedness and usefulness ; the Christian mother 
 desiring aid to order her useful charge aright, and the young 
 disciple requiring a guide to the formation of a character of 
 intelligence and consistent piety — all find their wants met. 
 Against Romanism and intemperance the Society have fur- 
 nished a quiver of polished arrows in their bound volumes 
 of Tracts on each subject, in addition to the separate volume 
 of Beecher on the one, and of the lamented Nevins on the 
 other. They have Mason's Spiritual Treasury for the family 
 altar and the closet ; and for the pilgrim gathering up his 
 feet into his couch to die, they have the Dying Thoughts of 
 Baxter. They leave behind, after the funeral ceremony has 
 been performed, the Manual of Christian Consolation, by 
 Flavel the Non-conformist, and Cecil the Churchman, They 
 instruct the active Christian with Cotton Mather's " Essays 
 to do Good," the book that won the praise and aided to form 
 the usefulness of our own Franklin. They assail the covet- 
 ous and hard-handed professor with the burning energy and 
 eloquence of Harris' Mammon. But the time fails to review 
 separately all the varied themes of their publications and the 
 varied channels through which they are prepared to pour the 
 same great lesson of Christ the only Saviour, the Sovereign 
 and the Pattern of his people. 
 
 3. But what evidence have we that these volumes are fit- 
 ted for the present generation of men in other lands 1 
 Many, then, of this class of publications are written by mis- 
 sionaries abroad, conversant with the field they till, and 
 anxiously and prayerfully addressing themselves to its wants. 
 In Burmah and Siam, in India and in China, the Society is 
 thus assailing the favorite idols and delusions of the heathen, 
 in the manner which men who have given their lives to the 
 work deem most suitable. The Society is thus, at the same 
 time, proclaiming the Gospel before the car of Juggernaut 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 255 
 
 and around the Areopagus where Paul preached ; and many 
 of their Tracts have already been blessed, to the conversion 
 of the readers, and to shake, in the minds of thousands be- 
 sides, the old traditional idolatry received from their fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 Others of these compositions are translations of works 
 written in England or America, and many of them are in the 
 number of the Society's English publications. It may, to 
 some minds, seem veiy doubtful that any work, prepared 
 originally for the Christians of Great Britain, or our own 
 land, can, by any possibility, be intelligible or useful to hea- 
 then nations trained under different influences and strangers 
 to our modes of thought and expression. 
 
 But it should be remembered, that the good efi'ects of some 
 of these translations have been put beyond doubi by the tes- 
 timony of missionaries as to the interest they have excited, 
 and even by the conversion of some of the heathen. One 
 of the works of Baxter — we believe it was his Call — was 
 translated in his lifetime by our own Eliot for the use of his 
 Indian converts ; and a youth, the son of one of their chiefs, 
 continued reading the work with tears on his death-bed. 
 The pastor who talked to the carpet-weavers of Kiddermin- 
 ster could, it seems, speak as Avell to the savage hunters and 
 fishermen of Natick and of Martha's Vineyard. The Dairy- 
 man's Daughter was early translated into Russian by a prin- 
 cess of that country, and has been acceptable and useful. 
 The freeborn English maiden that lived and died amid the 
 delightful scenery of the Isle of Wight has told her tale 
 effectively to the serfs and amid the snows of Russia. Ful- 
 ler's Great Question Answered, another of the Society's 
 Tracts, was crowned with striking success in a Danish ver- 
 sion, and it was found that the pastor of the inland English 
 village of Kettering was still a powerful preacher in the new 
 garb and tongue that had been given him for the inhabitants 
 of Copenhagen. Others have gone yet further. We name 
 the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan as an illustration, because 
 none of the religious works of" Europe has been so widely 
 translated. In English, the Society has printe(l it not only 
 in the ordinary style, but in the raised and tangible charac- 
 ters used by the blind. Little did the tinker of Elstow ever 
 dream that his matchless allegory should ever be translated 
 into the tongue of the false prophet Mnhomet. Yet it has 
 appeared in Arabic ; and Joseph Wolff, in his travels m \e- 
 
256 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 men, distributed copies of the version in that ancient and 
 widely-spoken language. In seven at least, if not in more, 
 of the dialects of India, it has made its appearance ; in the 
 Oriya, the Tanuil, the Hindustani or Urdu, the Mahrathi, 
 the Malay, the Bengali, and very recently in the Burman. 
 
 Fears, at the time when an Indian translation was first 
 proposed, that its European ideas and imagery would be un- 
 intelligible to the native of the East, led a popular female 
 writer to prepare in its stead her pilgrim of India, with its 
 Hindoo phrases and metaphors. But the original Pilgrim 
 has been permitted now to speak, and he has spoken not in 
 vain. The number of the London Evangelical Magazine for 
 the present month, (Oct. 1842,) contains the memoir of 
 Daniel, a Hindoo convert, written by himself. From this it 
 appears that the work of Bunyan was a powerful instrument 
 in his conversion : " At this period a gentleman put into my 
 hand a book called the Pilgrim's Progress, which I read. 
 Partly by reading this book, and partly by the remembrance 
 of all the labor which had been expended on me at Coimba- 
 toor, I began to feel that the Christian religion was the only 
 true religion, and that Christ was the only sinless Saviour." 
 This was, probably, the Tamiil version. 
 
 A translation was made by the British missionaries into 
 the Malagasy language, for the use of the Christian con- 
 verts whom God granted to their labors in the island of Mad- 
 agascar. Of the hold which the volume took upon their 
 hearts, we may judge from the language of the letters ad- 
 dressed by some of these converts to their missionary pastors 
 when expelled from the island : " We are impressed and 
 delighted when we read the Pilgrim's Progress." And at a 
 still later day, when the storm of persecution beat yet more 
 heavily upon them, and some were executed for the profes- 
 sion of their faith, it is said that while awaiting death they 
 felt inexpressible peace and joy, and said one to another, 
 " Now are we in the situation of Christian and Faithful, 
 when they were led to the city of Vanity Fair." A Euro- 
 pean book, thus quoted by African martyrs when about to 
 die, must be of singular merit. 
 
 The same book has been translated into Finnish, for the 
 use of the region verging on Lapland, and printed in Dutch, 
 for the use of the missions in South Africa. A version has 
 been made into Hawaiian at the Sandwich Islands ; and one 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 257 
 
 in Tahitian, for the Society Islands, though we do not know 
 that the hvtter has as yet been pubUshed. 
 
 A book which could thus interest the fur-clad peasantry of 
 the frozen North in their smoky huts, and the tawny Caffre 
 or Hottentot in the midst of his sandy, sunburnt plains ; 
 which delights in the cabins of our own West and in the far 
 Hindustan, must have some elements that lit it for use every 
 where. The nature of man is one in all climes. Conscience 
 may be drugged and mutilated, but its entire extirpation seems 
 impossible, and it lives under the pressure of error and amid 
 torpor, to witness for truth, and right, and God, in quarters 
 where our unbelief and fear would expect to find it, if not 
 utterly wanting, at least utterly inert. The same heart beats 
 under the tattooed skin of the New Zealander as under the 
 grease and ochre with which the Tambookie of Soutli Africa 
 delights to adorn his person, under the silks of the Chinaman 
 and the furs of the Laplander. It has every where the same 
 depravity, that no grade of civilization or refinement can so 
 adorn as to lift beyond the need of the renewing gospel, and 
 that no brutalism can so degrade as to put below the reach 
 of the same efficacious remedy. Religion, it should be re- 
 membered again, is not mere abstract speculation ; it is also 
 emotion. With the heart man believeth. Now science and 
 literature, strictly so called, may be an affair of certain civ- 
 ilized nations, and of them only ; but poetry and passion are 
 of all lands and of all kindreds of the earth. And how largely 
 do these enter into the structure of the Gospel, of tlie book 
 revealing that Gospel, and of all Christian writings modelled 
 upon that Bible. There are, it must be allowed, in the pro- 
 duction of Bunyan's genius, excellences and peculiarities 
 that do not exist to an equal extent in many of the other 
 publications of the Society, adapting it to interest mankind 
 in every grade of civilization and under all the varieties of 
 custom and taste that culture or neglect, error or truth may 
 have produced. Yet it will, in all probability, be found, 
 when the trial shall have been made by competent transla- 
 tors, that many other of the favorite books of British and 
 American Christians are fitted to become nearly as much the 
 favorites of the converts whom the grace of God shall gather 
 in the ancient East, or in the islands of the sea. 
 
 Our hope, that much of the literature of European or 
 American origin may thus become at once available for the 
 spiritual wants of the converts from heathenism, rests not on 
 
 34 
 
258 THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 the peculiar talent of the works so much as on their subject 
 and structure. Their theme is Jesus Christ, the character 
 and the history devised by infinite wisdom, with the express 
 intention of winning its way to the sympathies of man, under 
 all the varieties of complexion, caste, lang-uage, laws and lit- 
 erature. This theme has proved its power to exorcise super- 
 stitions the most foul and inveterate, and to raise from the 
 deepest and most hopeless degradation. Pervaded and sat- 
 urated as so many of the Society's works are with this sub- 
 ject, we have confidence that the divine grandeur of the theme 
 will, to some extent, compensate for the defects of the human 
 authorship. The idols of all lands shall totter from their 
 shrines, and yet be broken before its might ; and we look 
 for the shattering of all by the faithful and full presentation 
 of this truth, Christ and him crucified — ^a truth that is to be 
 the great iconoclast principle of the age ; for it is God's 
 own device, and carries with it God's own promise and the 
 irresistible energy of his benediction. 
 
 We have reason, again, to expect the adaptation of much 
 of the religious literature of our own country and Britain to 
 the wants of the foreign missionary, from its close assimila- 
 tion to the character of the Scripture. This is a book carry- 
 ing one of the evidences of its divine origin upon it, in its 
 power of interesting all grades of society and all ages of 
 mankind. Far as any religious writer becomes penetrated 
 by its spirit, and transfuses, as many of the Society's authors 
 have done, its imagery and train of thought into his own 
 compositions, so far he prepares them for acceptableness and 
 favor among eveiy tribe of mankind. If the Scriptures look 
 with special favor on any class of our race, it is on the East- 
 ern portion of the world. The Bible is an Oriental book, as 
 far as it is the book of any one region or race. It would 
 have been, in style and imagery, a very difl^erent volume had 
 the Anglo-Saxon race been left to prepare it. And as far as 
 it should have partaken of their marked peculiarities it would 
 have been less fitted for one great errand it has in this age 
 to accomplish. The missions of our times are pouring back 
 from the favored West and from the tents of Japheth the 
 light of salvation on the long-neglected habitations of Shem, 
 its original seats, and upon the millions of the East. It is 
 some advantage, then, that we go to them with a book that, 
 if it favor any class, is more Eastern than Western in char- 
 acter ; and that we carry with the Bible a biblical literature 
 
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 259 
 
 that, from the book on which it has been founded, has, in 
 many of its specimens, caught a tinge of similar feelintrs, and 
 imaoer}^ and style. 
 
 In that body of religious literature whose evangelical and 
 practical character we have thus imperfectly examined, the 
 Society have done much. But it would be doing them and 
 their objects gross injustice to suppose that they present it 
 as a complete body of religious reading for all the wants of 
 the age. Its publications may have some inequality of merit. 
 What collection is otherwise ? The lingering and fitful 
 charities of the churches may forbid their enlarging it as they 
 desire, and as the wants of our own and foreign lands require. 
 The Non-conformist literature has many volumes they would 
 gladly add to their existing collection. There arc two other 
 great eras of religious conflict and effort, from the literature 
 of which the London Tract Society has drawn largely, and 
 this institution as yet not at all. We allude to the era of 
 the stormy infancy of the Scottish National Church, and the 
 works of its Rutherford, its Guthrie, its Binning, its Andrew 
 Gray, and its Durham. The other greater and earlier era 
 is that of the English Reformation. Of the M'orks of the 
 English reformers our British brethren have published sev- 
 eral volumes. As to the present availableness of this latter 
 literature, we are aware that there is division of opinion ; but 
 its history would be valuable, if not its remains. 
 
 Nor is the American Tract Society to be judged as if it 
 had completed its own designs, or finished its mission as 
 respects a native religious literature. Its power to elicit 
 works drawn up with peculiar reference to our position and 
 habits as a people, has as yet been shown but in a small de- 
 gree. The churches of this country are capable of much 
 more, and need much more ; and if duly sustained, the So- 
 ciety may proceed in this work to a point far beyond the 
 limit of its present attainments. Will the churches afford 
 this aid ? Here, at least, they will have — if they choose, by 
 prayer, and effort, and liberality, to secure it — they will have 
 a literature all that they can wish, as to its national adaptation. 
 
 And if our country and others that have been long favored 
 with the serene and pure light of the Gospel, are yet to 
 know days of dark and stormy controversy with error; il 
 over the once peaceful encampments of our churches is 
 spreading the hum that betokens an approaching combat; 
 if, as some fear, we are entering, in our times, upon a stern 
 
260 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 
 
 and close conflict with Romanism or with scepticism, or with 
 both ; or are to stand up for our national morals and national 
 existence against the floods of a frivolous and profligate lit- 
 erature, that now drowns the minds of our youth as beneath 
 a rushing deluge of inanity, and fiUh, and venom, we have 
 little fear as to the result. We cannot distrust the powers 
 and the triumphs of Scripture, the safety and ultimate vic- 
 tories of the Church. In the God of the Bible and the Head 
 of the Church, we need not fear to place the most unques- 
 tioning and imperturbable confidence. He who gave the 
 Bible will guard the gift ; and he who built will watch, as 
 with a wall of fire, around the city of his own chosen Jeru- 
 salem. And, from all the past history of the Church, we 
 augur that out of this or any other conflict that maybe await- 
 ing us in the interval between our times and the final glory 
 of Christ's kingdom, there may grow some of the richest 
 productions of that literature which the Church is yet to 
 enjoy ; a literature as yet unwritten, and which this institu- 
 tion, we trust, will, with others, aid in educing, diff'using, and 
 perpetuating. Some of the I'ichest legacies which sanctified 
 genius has ever bequeathed to the Christian church, are like 
 that more cherished portion which the dying patriarch gave 
 to his favorite son, his Joseph : " One portion above thy 
 brethren, which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with 
 my sword and with my bow ;" the spoils plucked as out of 
 the very teeth of the destroyer, the trophies of a late and 
 hard-won victory. 
 
INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY TO THE SUC- 
 CESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 
 
 " But having hope, when your faith is increased, that we 
 
 bhall be enlarged by you according to our rule abundantly, to 
 
 PREACH THE GosPEL IN THE REGIONS BEYOND YOU." — 2 Cof. X. 15, 16. 
 
 The language of the Apostle evidently implies a gentle 
 reprehension of the Corinthian church. The poverty and 
 imbecihty of their faith embarrassed him in his ardent aspi- 
 rations after more extended usefulness. He was anxious to 
 enter upon a new field, and to proclaim the Gospel through- 
 out other and more destitute regions. But he must await in 
 prayerful hope the increase of their faith, and at their hands 
 expect an enlargement. This enlargement might be, on 
 their part, an advancement and contirmation in Christian 
 doctrine, which should permit him to transfer the charge of 
 these, his children in the faith, into the hands of less skilful 
 pastors ; or a rapid growth in Christian holiness, which should 
 justify the Apostle in presenting them as his epistle, to be 
 seen and read of all men, attesting alike the power of the 
 Gospel, and the reality of his mission. Or he might desire 
 the vindication of his own apostolical character, which had 
 been cruelly assailed in their midst, and ask the transmission 
 of his name, with its well-won honors, to the neighboring 
 heathen. Or it had been, perhaps, his hope, from their lib- 
 erality and wealth, to have received aid in his missionary 
 journeyings ; or he had anticipated from their position in a 
 great commercial metropolis, assistance in their sending the 
 Gospel to other havens and cities of the empire. Whether 
 he expected from their increased and matured faith, any one, 
 or the union of all these advantages, and whatever be the 
 decision as to the mode in which enlargement was sought by 
 him, one fact stands forth on the face of these words, mani- 
 fest and unquestionable. He was now fettered in his plans 
 of benevolence, and it was from the Corinthian disciples that 
 
262 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 he expected his release. Either from their confirmation in 
 the truths he preached, or in the holiness he enjoined and 
 exemplified ; or from their assertion of his just honors as an 
 apostle ; from the bestowment of their free alms, or the em- 
 ployment of their mercantile influence, he hoped to obtain the 
 removal of the restraint from himself, and to secure for their 
 pagan neighbors blessings untold and priceless. The ful- 
 filment of his hope depended upon their progress to higher 
 attainments in faith. There is involved, then, in these words 
 of an inspired and most successful missionary, a principle 
 which we would now endeavor to bring before you, that 
 
 The missionaries of the church require at her hands, for 
 the extension and success of their efforts, an increase of 
 faith. 
 
 Looking to the divisions and scandals he had so sternly 
 rebuked, and to the peculiar temptations of the infant church, 
 which had been gathered amid the luxury, gayety, and profli- 
 gacy of the licentious Corinth, we might have expected, from 
 one versed as was Paul in the weakness of our nature, and 
 in the wiles of its great adversary, that he would have chosen 
 to specify, instead of the one evil of unbelief, other and nu- 
 merous impediments to his success. And using the term 
 here employed by him, as we too often do, to describe a 
 knowledge merely speculative and theoretical, we should 
 have supposed that in a community indoctrinated by the per- 
 sonal labors of an apostle, as well as in the churches of our 
 own age and land, the deficiencies of Christians were to be 
 sought, rather in their works of obedience, than in the amount 
 of their faith. Yet such was not the fact then. Such is not 
 the root of the evil now. It is in faith that we are wanting. 
 Tlie elder and parent grace is maimed and infirm, and the 
 whole family and sisterhood of the Christian virtues languish 
 as she decays, and can be reanimated only by her restoration. 
 Having considered, therefore, 
 
 I. The nature and importance of true faith, 
 
 II. The intimate connexion between its higher de- 
 grees AND the missionary EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH will 
 
 naturally follow and prepare us to examine, 
 
 III. The DEFECTIVE FAITH OF OUR OWN CHURCHES, AS 
 INTERPOSING A HINDERANCE TO THE TRIUMPHS OF THE GOS- 
 PEL OVER HEATHENISM. 
 
 And may the Father of lights, by His own Spirit of illu- 
 mination and power, unfold to the mind, and impress upon 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS, 203 
 
 the heart, the humbHng but the sahitary truth contained in 
 these words. 
 
 I. The importance of faith may be discerned from the 
 dignity and rank, assigned it throughout the New Testament. 
 In the commencement and at the close of our Saviour's min- 
 istry ; in his own private conference with the anxious, but 
 irresolute Nicodemus, and in the public message with which 
 his apostles were charged, as he sent them forth to the evan- 
 gelization of the world, it is alike represented as the only 
 mode — the one condition of salvation. He that exercises it 
 is not condemned, while he that believeth not shall be damned. 
 To this principle is ascribed our immunity from the terrors 
 of the law, for we are juslitied by faith. As a shield, it re- 
 pels the fiery darts of temptation that come from the great 
 adversary of God and man ; while within, it purifies the 
 heart, working by love ; and, in our contest with the ungodly 
 precepts and example of our fellow-men, "this is the victory 
 that overcometh the world, even our faith." The long and 
 glorious list of its strifes and its trophies, contained in the 
 closing portion of the Epistle to the Hebrews, commences 
 with the announcement that faith is the substance of things 
 hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ; and is terminated 
 with the triumphant recapitulation that all these, the worthies 
 of the earlier dispensations, obtained their good report through 
 the same simple, but mighty principle — that of faith. 
 
 And although the world are accustomed to dispute the 
 necessity of this principle, when exercised respecting the 
 realities of a world as yet hidden and invisible, they are per- 
 petually employing it with regard to the visible but transient 
 scenery of the present life. Compelled to give their faith to 
 testimony as to those things which might be seen, and often 
 giving it even where they might substitute personal observa- 
 tion for faith in the evidence of others ; they refuse to extend 
 it to those objects which, from their very nature, cannot be- 
 come the subjects of immediate vision and examination. 
 Yieldin<r credence to the testimony of their fellow-mortals, 
 thoucrh the witnesses are alike fallible and perfidious, they 
 refus^e it to the revelation of their God. Preferring to give 
 it where it is often not required, (did they choose to employ 
 their own natural faculties,) they withhold it where it is 
 inevitably necessary. All the commerce of tins world is 
 predicated on the faith which man puts in the skill, mtegrit), 
 and dilicrence of his fellow-man ; and a writing, of wfiicli fie 
 
264 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 never saw the author, shall be to him a sufficient warrant for 
 transmitting, far beyond his own sight and control, his whole 
 property. By the exercise of a just and sober faith in the 
 testimony brought into her halls, the national jurisprudence 
 administers to our citizens the redress of their wrongs, and 
 the punishment of their crimes. The learning dispensed in 
 our colleges is, by the mass of minds, received without per- 
 sonal examination, upon the credit given to the ability and 
 honesty of previous investigators. And all education, whether 
 in the most recondite science, or in the most humble and 
 handicraft art, proceeds upon the faith which the pupil is 
 required to exercise in the superior skill of his* instructor, 
 and in the value of the knowledge his teacher is preparing 
 to communicate. 
 
 It is only by the confidence they have learned to place in 
 the narratives of the traveller, that the majority of society 
 know the nature and extent of the country, of which they are 
 themselves the inhabitants ; or that they can form any idea 
 of the great and magnificent cities, the goodly prospects, and 
 the splendid wonders that adorn some foreign and unseen 
 coast. And with regard to the facts which we have thus 
 gathered, we feel no suspicion, but use them as the current 
 coin of the mind, both in our private meditations and our 
 social intercourse, without fear as to their genuineness and 
 validity. Even the sceptic, loud and boisterous in his rejec- 
 tion of all faith, as being an invasion of the province, and but 
 a usurpation upon the rights of human reason, is most rigid 
 and constant in exacting from his trembling child an obedi- 
 ence to his will, and a subjection to his opinions, which can 
 rest only upon the faith, the tacit but implicit faith, which he 
 requires his family to exercise in his superior wisdom and 
 larger experience. 
 
 And if it be objected, that the faith of the gospel differs 
 widely from that which we so readily and commonly render, 
 in that it brings to our minds deep and difficult mysteries, we 
 answer that it would be less evidently the work of God, if it 
 did not come, contradicting the first and rasher conclusions 
 of human ignorance. It would be a departure from the an- 
 alogy which exists among all the works of our God, did it 
 only reveal what man had previously conjectured, and were 
 Faith employed merely to endorse and register, in silent ac- 
 quiescence, the rescripts which had been prepared for her 
 by human reason. And even in the sciences of this world, 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHIMSTIAN MISSIONS. 265 
 
 narrow and near as is the field of their labors, there are the 
 same inscrutable yet inevitable difficulties, of which the scep- 
 tic complains in religion. We expect it of a cultivated and 
 advanced science, that it should assail and overturn many 
 opinions, which to the first glance of ignorant presumption 
 seem indisputable truths. Contradicting the first and incom- 
 plete testimony of our senses and the general impressions of 
 mankind, Geography comes back from her voyages of dis- 
 covery with the annunciation that the earth is not an extended 
 plain, but one vast sphere. And though the eye sees no 
 motion, and the foot feels no unsteadiness, and no jarring is 
 perceived within or around us, Astronomy comes back to 
 the inquirer with the startling assurance, that, notwilhslanding 
 all these seeming evidences to the contrary, the earth on 
 which he reposes is ceaselessly and most rapidly whirling 
 along its trackless path in the heavens; and that, moment 
 by moment, he is borne along through the fields of space 
 with a fearful and inconceivable velocity. And whoi, Irum 
 further wanderings, but on better testimony — when from a 
 higher and stranger world, but with fuller evidence and with 
 more indubitable tokens of her veracity. Faith comes back, 
 bringing assurances that tally not in all things with our pre- 
 conceived conjectures, shall she be chidden and blasphemed 
 for the difficulties that arise from our own ignorance? Without 
 the mysteries of the Gospel, revelation would be unlike all 
 the other provinces of human knowledge, and the domains 
 of Faith would be dissimilar from all the rest of the handi- 
 work of God. 
 
 But although the importance of faith is thus apparent from 
 the rank assigned it in the scriptures, and from its necessity 
 even in the petty concernments of this present life, we shall 
 learn to appreciate true belief yet more highly, when we see 
 mankind, by a heedless but perpetual infatuation, allowing 
 themselves in errors the most absurd and dangerous, with 
 regard to its character and claims. By some it is confounded 
 with a blind and irrational credulity, although evangelical 
 faith is based only on evidence the most satisfactory and suf- 
 ficient ; and although the book of God, when demanding our 
 credence, proffers to the inquirer testimony, not merely abun- 
 dant, but overwhelming, as to the nature of its authorship. 
 It is as adverse to the character of scriptural faith to believe 
 without a divine warrant, upon authority that is merely tra- 
 ditionary and human, as to refuse the assent of the soul where 
 
 35 
 
266 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 God has spoken. True Faith is not more allied to supersti- 
 tion than she is to scepticism ; and, determined as he is to 
 believe all that God has testified, the Christian, wherever 
 the oracle is silent, suspends his decision, and anxiously ex- 
 cludes from his creed all the inventions of man, whether they 
 come from the school, the synod, or the council. 
 
 Others delight to speak of faith in the religion of our Lord, 
 as if it were but an opinion, and the religion it embraces but 
 a hypothesis, of little practical moment or influence ; while 
 on the contrary, the faith of the Gospel is as rigid and exper- 
 imental in its character as the strictest science of the schools. 
 It makes no arbitrary assumptions, rests on no disputed axi- 
 oms, but, upon the foundation of facts of the most impressive 
 and varied character, it builds up, patiently and surely, its 
 doctrines and its precepts ; invites the most searching scrutiny 
 into the testimonials which it adduces ; and having by them 
 established its first principles, gives not only for its funda- 
 mental axioms, but for its every inference, and for each sub- 
 sequent deduction, the word of a God. As well might we 
 call arithmetic or history a mere theory, as to apply that title 
 to the religion which is embraced by our faith. Do the self- 
 satisfied philosophers of this world tell us of the necessity of 
 facts ? We answer, the incarnation, the personal character, 
 the crucifixion and resurrection of the Saviour, are facts most 
 fully proved, and standing alone, would be in themselves 
 sufficient to prove the divinity of the revelation that is en- 
 twined about them, and of which they constitute the central 
 supports, the chief and favorite theme. And every convert, 
 ransomed by the power of this faith from the tyranny of evil 
 habits, affords in himself a new fact, augmenting the mass of 
 her evidences, and swelling her far-spreading and splendid 
 "cloud of witnesses." 
 
 Nor are those men safer or wiser than the undisguised 
 scofl'er, who, professing to receive the religion of the Bible, 
 flatter themselves that a mere assent of the understanding to 
 the historical portions of the record, constitutes that faith 
 which shall justify at the bar, and admit them to the heaven 
 of Jehovah. The Bible is to be regarded as a whole, and 
 as such is to be received and obeyed. The Gospel is a code 
 of laws, no less than a volume of annals. It has not only 
 narratives, but precepts, and asks the consent of the whole 
 man, and his entire soul, to its undivided and unmutilated 
 contents. And as that man could not maintain his arrogant 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 267 
 
 pretensions, who should claim the honors of devoted patriotism 
 merely because he had studied intently the annals of his 
 country's history, whilst he was trampling upon her laws, 
 and imprinting every leaf of her statute-book with the hoof 
 of swinish indulgence, thus must the man fail of sustaining 
 his claim to the character of Christ's disciple, who, professing 
 to credit and revere his record, treads down into the mire his 
 laws, and has but the faith of historical assent for the narra- 
 tive, without the faith of love for the precepts, and the faith 
 of affectionate conformity for the character of the Saviour. 
 The Bible contains not only the story of our creation, ruin, 
 and recovery, but it includes as well the indictment of our 
 crimes, and the proclamation of our pardon ; and there is no 
 true reception of the history, unless there be also, personally, 
 the humble confession of the imputed guiltiness, and the 
 grateful pleading of the proffered discharge. 
 
 Equally erroneous, and chargeable with a kindred folly, is 
 the man, who, passing beyond the vain figment of a faith 
 merely historical, professes to receive the whole system of 
 revelation, in its doctrinal, no less than its narrative portions, 
 and triumphing in the orthodoxy of his tenets, seems anxious 
 to shelter himself from the practical influence of faith, by 
 pleading the freeness of the salvation it brings. The whole 
 necessity of salvation grew out of the practical depravity of 
 man's nature, and the whole errand of the Bible was but the 
 restoration of practical holiness. For this end prophets and 
 apostles wrote ; for this it was that a Saviour descended and 
 bled — rose, and reigns, to furnish, to bestow, and to fidfil that 
 Bible. And until this effect be wrought, nothing is gained ; 
 and if this be refused, the very object and intention of the 
 religion is rejected. It is surely vain toil to implant in the 
 mind a faith, the vital germ of which is carefully removed, a 
 dead root, which shall never send forth the springing leaf, or 
 bear the ripened fruit. 
 
 An error now popular, and not less fatal, is one which the 
 sceptic has borrowed from the armory and champions of the 
 truth. It consists in a perversion of the great scriptural truth, 
 that it is God who worketh in us to will and to do. and that 
 all our thoughts are under his control. Using the theological 
 labors of Edwards for a purpose, which that holy and master 
 mind never intended, the advocates of this dangerous error 
 contend that our belief is beyond our control, that faith is not 
 voluntary, and unbelief is therefore not criminal : forgettmg. 
 
268 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 that, though a gift of God, faith is withal an act or habit of 
 the human mind ; that, like every other virtue, it is on the one 
 hand, a boon of heaven, and on the other, the exercise of 
 unfettered human agency — that it is the natural result of 
 evidence duly and impartially considered, and that no man 
 can be guiltless who wilfully turns away from the contempla- 
 tion of that evidence. The religion of God asks but a ver- 
 dict according to the weight of proof which she brings. To 
 prevent the admission of that evidence, or wilfully to pro- 
 nounce a decision against its weighty and sufficient testimony, 
 would not be deemed guiltless in any cause that should be 
 brought before an earthly tribunal ; nor shall it be held a 
 venial offence at the bar, and by the laws of an insulted 
 Deity, 
 
 From the errors which human perverseness has invented 
 to obscure the character of faith, we turn to review its true 
 nature and office. It is most simple, as much so as the con- 
 fidence of a prattling child in his father's kindness and wis- 
 dom ; yet at the same time as expansive in its views, as the 
 loftiest science that ever tasked the powers of a created intel- 
 lect. It is but a hearty assent to the whole testimony of 
 God — a submission of the entire soul, not of the intellect 
 only, but also of the affections and the imagination, to the 
 testimony of God ; whether that testimony be employed in 
 prescribing a duty, or in establishing a privilege. It is the 
 acknowl-edgment of human ignorance, united with the pro- 
 fession of confidence in Divine wisdom, and of subjection to 
 Divine authority. Making no reservations, prescribing no 
 terms of limitation, claiming no power of revoking or abridg- 
 ing its grant, it is a surrender of the intelligent spirit to the 
 word of God as its rule and its stay ; in conformity to it as 
 the one standard of human conduct, and in dependence upon 
 it as the only fitting nutriment of the spiritual life. It thus 
 restores again the communication which at the fall was sev- 
 ered. In his temptation Satun persuaded our parents to 
 discredit the testimony of God ; and the consequent inter- 
 ruption of faitli was the hewing away of that channel, through 
 which they had heretofore received from their God know- 
 ledge, truth, and love. The human mind became at once an 
 exhausted and rifted reservoir, " a broken cistern," into which 
 no longer welled the outgushing streams from " the Foun- 
 tain of living waters." By faith the communion is restored, 
 and man is again the dependent and pupil of his God. 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 269 
 
 It is his natural and rightful state, not for this life only, but 
 forever. The apostle, when enumerating the graces that 
 abide, has spoken of faith as if it too continued. Indeed, the 
 very nature of a created and limited intelligence, involves the 
 necessity of continued faith. Long as we are not omnipres- 
 ent, and cannot perceive with our own eyes what is every 
 where transacted — long as we are not omniscient, and there 
 
 are portions of knowledge, which we have not yet acquired 
 
 long as man is not invested with the attributes of the Deity, 
 so long must we depend upon His testimony for the truth of 
 that which He has seen and we have not seen ; so long must 
 we learn from Him the nature of that which He has known, 
 but which we may know only from his words. The perfec- 
 tion of the heavenly world does not imply illimitable know- 
 ledge, either as to the present or the future ; and as to all 
 those portions of God's ways, which thus remain concealed 
 from our personal examination, the spirits of just men made 
 perfect will, with their first-born brethren, the angels that 
 have kept their original estate, remain the pensioners of 
 faith, dependent upon the declarations of God for continual 
 instruction. 
 
 And how glorious are the objects w^hich faith brings into 
 the mind of man, even during his sojourn here. He learns 
 from her the secret of his own misery and guiltinesss, and its 
 remedy. He is told of a law condemning irrevocably for the 
 first offence, yet now fully satisfied for his hourly infraction 
 of its precepts — a Saviour divine to redeem and human to 
 compassionate — a salvation not of his own procurement — 
 the Spirit of God descended to be his teacher and consoler — 
 troubles sanctified — snares broken — and an eternity of purity 
 and blessedness made his certain inheritance ; and are not 
 these truths of surpassing splendor and inestimable worth? 
 They enter into the soul, not so much destroying as be-dwarf- 
 ing its former ideas, and the original furnittire of the mind, 
 which it has obtained from the knowledge and literature of 
 this world. Faith has sudderdy widened the mental horizon, 
 letting in the vision of realities before present, but hiiherto 
 unseen. Or rather, as has been beautifully said, it is tlie 
 floating into view of another and a lovelier world, with its 
 glories and its harmony drowning the din and beclouding the 
 splendor of these terrestrial sceaies. 
 
 The believer judges by a new standard ; sees by a new and 
 heaven-descended light ; and lo, in the change, " all things 
 
270 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 have become new." And though the men of this world may 
 question and deride the renovation, because the man's earthly 
 condition, and the powers olhis mind remain apparently the 
 same ; it is evident to those who will reason, that the man is 
 essentially renewed ; for his views, his feelings, his hopes 
 and fears, his prospects and his purposes, his conduct and 
 language, have undergone a marked and strange modification. 
 True it is, the man's garb is still coarse, and his person un- 
 gainly, and his mind is not graced with the refinements and 
 adornments of education ; but the change is as yet merely 
 initial. Death and the resurrection shall consummate it. 
 And even already the internal process is to his own mind 
 alike evident and delightful ; and with tears of gratitude he 
 receives it as the earnest of that thorough renovation, which 
 shall transform him, body, soul, and spirit, into the likeness 
 of his Lord. Thus might we imagine an aged and lonely 
 cottager, musing at nightfall in his desolate home upon the 
 partner of his bosom, now tenanting the grave, and his chil- 
 dren, who have long since wandered from his hearth to a 
 distant land, and are there regardless or ignorant of the sor- 
 rows with which his declining years are darkened. And as 
 he cowers over his scanty fire, the unbidden tear will fall, and 
 his heart is full of the bitterness of despair. But enter with 
 the unexpected tidings that his children live ; that, prospered 
 and wealthy, they are yet affectionate ; that their hearts still 
 yearn towards their early home and the parent who holds it; 
 that they are even now on their way to soothe and gladden 
 his few remaining days : and although you have made no 
 immediate change in the man's lot — although the hovel is 
 yet dark and cold, and the embers emit but the same dull and 
 saddening light ; the whole scene is changed to his eyes, and 
 instead of its former desolateness, it has become radiant with 
 the lustre of his new-found happiness. A new element is 
 poured into his mind, and the faith of your message has 
 changed his whole soul. Is there no reality, no enjoyment 
 in this translation from despondency to hope, from comfort- 
 less and unpitied helplessness to the glad expectation of at- 
 tached and watchful children? Yes; let his lot remain long 
 but what it had been, he feels, and you cannot but feel, that 
 the credence given to your tidings has renewed his youth 
 within him, and thrown a new coloring over the whole scene 
 of squalid poverty that surrounds him. And, if you deny 
 not the reality of the happiness because of the absence or 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 271 
 
 present delay of any outward change, should you dispute the 
 reality of the believer's peace, because as yet he is but the ex- 
 pectant heir, and not the joyous possessor, of a heavenly 
 mansion ? 
 
 Of a principle thus efficient and delightful, what shall secure 
 the preservation and increase ? Divine truth is its aliment, 
 and the Holy Spirit its author and upholder. In the lan- 
 guage of scripture it will be observed that the term faith, (as 
 in the instance of the exhortation to contend earnestly for it, 
 as it was once delivered to the saints,) is employed not only 
 in the sense above given, but also to describe a system of 
 doctrines ; but it is as the food of that s])iritual principle 
 which we have endeavored to describe. And as the principle 
 of life, and the mode or means by which it is sustained, may 
 be, and, in common speech, often are confounded ; so is the 
 same word used in the New Testament to signify both the 
 truth received, and the temper or habit of mind receiving it. 
 But the two dissimilar ideas are not to be blended ; nor are 
 we to suppose that the form of sound doctrine will necessarily 
 insure a living faith in the heart. The experiment, often and 
 anxiously repeated, has ever failed. Creeds and confessions 
 have been adjusted and balanced with the utmost nicety of 
 discrimination, and with the greatest precision of language. 
 But in the church at Geneva, planted and watered by the 
 cares of Calvin and Beza, and in the English Presbyterians, 
 the descendants of the holy non-conformists, it has been but 
 too fully proved, that correct symbols of faith may be inher- 
 ited from a pious ancestry and for a time be retained with 
 great reverence, but without any portion of the indwelling 
 spirit which once framed and pervaded them. Indeed, in the 
 history of Protestant Germany, it has been found that the 
 fallen and corrupted fragments of a traditionary " form of 
 sound words," have been most prolific in the i)roduction of 
 heresies, alike strange and revolting. The fat and heavy soil 
 of an inert and " dead orthodoxy," was to that national church 
 the hot-bed of scepticism, nurturing errors of the rankest 
 growth, and the most deadly nature. The stubble, which had 
 well sustained the former and the proper harvest, but served 
 to enrich the field for an after-growth of weeds the most nox- 
 ious and luxuriant. However useful in its place, (and, pro- 
 perly employed, its usefulness is great,) the most correct and 
 scriptural creed is but the outward and inanimate portraiture 
 of an inward and living laith ; and it is as idle to expect that 
 
272 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 confessions and symbols, alone and unaided, should create 
 faith, as to imagine that a definition of honesty and benevo- 
 lence, rigid and accurate, should of itself be sufficient to re- 
 form the inmates of our prisons. 
 
 " Leviathan is not so tamed." 
 
 It is not with such weapons that the enemy is to be van- 
 quished, or a living faith perpetuated from age to age. The 
 aflections, no less than the intellect, must be reached and 
 won. The continual interposition of the Holy Spirit, the 
 renewed and personal application of truth to the human con- 
 science, are requisite to attain the end. And it is only from 
 a personal faith, in all her members, thus produced — thus 
 fostered — and continually increasing, that the church can 
 expect prosperity. It is thus that she is to be prepared for 
 conflict with her internal foes, and for the subjugation of new 
 territories to the obedience of the cross. From a faith thus 
 established and made general, what may not be hoped — 
 what conquest shall seem too arduous, and what peril too 
 fearful ? 
 
 We have seen the dignity of faith and its simplicity ; the 
 errors which misrepresent and assail it ; its nature ; the mag- 
 nificence of its efiects ; its necessity and eternity ; and the 
 mode of its preservation. It remains now to examine, 
 
 II. The intimate connection existing between this 
 
 FAITH AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 Having observed that this principle is the source of know- 
 ledge, and the parent of motives and feelings to the Christian, 
 it is at once evident that the largeness or the narrowness of 
 the knowledge thus gained, the weakness or the strength of 
 the feelings thus excited, and of the motives which are in this 
 mode implanted, will constantly alTect the character of all 
 the Christian's doings, but especially those which depend most 
 upon faith for their inception and completion — his doings in 
 behalf of his impenitent fellow-men. 
 
 Upon the enterprises of the church, it is immediately ap- 
 parent, whether the faith of the believers who compose that 
 body is in a state of feebleness and declension, or of energy 
 and growth. He who looks much to the parting, command- 
 ment of his Lord for the universal proclamation of his truth, 
 and much to the repeated assurance of his Lord that his truth 
 shall prove itself mighty, and his word not return void, will 
 be prepared to hope and to attempt much, in obedience to the 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 273 
 
 commandment and in inheritance of the promise. He, on 
 the contrary, who sees eternity but indistinctly, seldom and 
 afar, and whose faith takes but short and occasional flights 
 into the enduring world of realities that surrounds us, will be 
 -prone to exhibit in his plans timidity and despondency, in 
 his eftbrts remissness and apathy. And if we look, to the 
 period when the limits of the church were most rapidly and 
 widely extended, it will be found not the era when the world- 
 ly power, the learning and the wealth of the church were at 
 their highest elevation, but in the age when, though lacking 
 all these, by the energy of an overmastering faith, she rose 
 superior to every impediment, and destitute of all earthly aid 
 and encouragement, dared to hope in God. Wise in His 
 wisdom, and strong in His might, she devised her plans of 
 conquest upon the broad and magnificent basis of the Sa- 
 viour's promises, and then, in humilitv, diligence, and simple 
 devotion, called upon the Saviour's faithfulness to accomplish 
 the plans His own word had warranted, and His own Spirit 
 incited. And in most of the great revivals of faith and god- 
 liness in the modern church, it will be discovered that the 
 rising flood of religious feeling has opened anew, or found 
 and followed the already open channel of missionary enter- 
 prise. The revival of religion granted to the early labors of 
 the Puritan fathers in New England, saw also the rise of Eliot 
 and the Mayhews, the first evangelists of our Indians. The 
 energetic fa'ith of Wesley sought for its first field a mission 
 to the savages of our southern coast. The era of Edwards, 
 when the faith and love of the church received so wide and 
 mighty an excitement, was also the era of Brainerd, his friend 
 and disciple, a missionary of the rarest endowments. The 
 revival of faith in Protestant Germany under Francke, Spener, 
 and the Pietists, founded the Orphan House at Halle, and 
 saw go forth from its walls Swartz and others, his associates, 
 to labor amid the heathenism of India, The accession of 
 strength to the faith of the Moravian brethren, by the labors 
 of Zinzendorf, soon found an outlet in missionary enterprises 
 of apostolical simplicity and successfulness. The established 
 church of England, in her recent return to the faith of her 
 early founders, has also been aroused to the cause of missions, 
 and already rejoices in the record of her Heber, her Bu- 
 chanan, and her Martyn. And in our own division of the 
 Christian host, the energetic labors of the elder Hall, Fuller, 
 and the younger Ryland, to restore to the faith of our churches 
 
 36 
 
 J 
 
274 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 its proper and practical character, were soon followed by the 
 establishment of those missions, which have given, as we 
 trust, an impulse to the energies of the church that shall go 
 on, with greater extension and deepening intensity, until the 
 time of the Messiah's second advent. 
 
 The same increased faith which excites the enterprise, 
 serves withal to multiply the resources of the church for the 
 successful development and prosecution of the plans she has 
 formed. Consecration to God of our hearts and our sub- 
 stance will produce a liberality which would, to a lukewarm 
 age, seem fanatical and extravagant. Living as in the con- 
 stant view of the last judgment ; estranged from the world, 
 and thus exempted from the various and costly sacrifices it 
 requires to fashion, to pride, and to luxury ; the conscien- 
 tious frugality of the church would enable the poorest and the 
 richest members to unite in habitual contribution. A simple- 
 hearted faith would banish also from the confines of the church 
 that pretended spirituality which anxiously excludes religion 
 from the scenes of business, and shuts her out from all inter- 
 ference with pecuniary matters, under the pretext of guard- 
 ing her sanctity, but in truth for the protection of a hidden 
 covetousness. In the better and happier era of her history 
 it is found that religion is a familiar and every-day guest, 
 visiting not the chamber of social or secret prayer and the 
 sanctuary only, but passing through all the scenes of human 
 industry, and shedding over every occupation her mild and 
 hallowing influence. Systematic contribution to every form 
 of religious benevolence, will then be regarded as a necessary 
 mark of true piety. But the chief treasures of the church 
 are not her stores of silver and gold, but her living members, 
 with their spiritual endowments of varied character and 
 grades. And how greatly would a revival of primitive faith 
 draw upon these her spiritual resources, for the supply of 
 the perishing heathen. The missionary cause would not be 
 considered as making well nigh its exclusive appeal to min- 
 isters of the church ; but the merchant, the artisan, and the 
 tiirmer, each anxious to give himself to the Lord's service, 
 would present not a stinted tithe of his earnings, but himself, 
 his personal labors, and his life, as an offering to the great 
 work of evangelizing the heathen. 
 
 How evident and vast the increase of missionary power 
 given to the church, in the influence of a purer and simpler 
 faith upon her doctrines. We have viewed incidentally the 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 275 
 
 errors that usurp the name of Christian faith. When these 
 shoukl have been outgrown and superseded by a true and 
 hearty acceptance of God's whole testimony, how immense 
 the amount of moral power thrown into benevolent action. 
 Again, even where true faith exists, it is now embarrassed in 
 its operations by its union with more or less of error. Every 
 admixture of human tradition, and each addition of extrane- 
 ous and irrelevant authority, has served but to disfigure and 
 weaken the truth it was intended to adorn. When the«e 
 cumbrous appendages shall be relinquished, and the oracles 
 of truth shall be consulted more habitually in prayer for the 
 teachings of the Spirit, what may not be hoped from the 
 blessing of that God who is jealous for the honor of His own 
 word ? What may not be hoped from the temper and edge 
 of the sword of the Spirit, when it shall have been disencum- 
 bered of the scabbard, that has so long served only to conceal 
 and corrode its brightness? 
 
 The transition is a natural one from the doctrines of the 
 Gospel to the motives which they suggest and sustain. And 
 much aid will have been won for urging onward the cause of 
 the Saviour in heathen lands, when a higher standard of faith 
 shall have trained up the church in greater simplicity of pur- 
 pose, and in pure and single-hearted desire for the glory of 
 God. How much effort is now lost to the world and the 
 church, because polluted by motives which God cannot deign 
 to bless. When this transparency of purpose shall become 
 prevalent, how strong and general the tendency towards a 
 cordial union of all Christians in the common cause. How 
 much of the time and strength of brethren is now wasted upon 
 unbrotherly divisions. Bigotry and partizaiiship are dividing 
 those who should never have been sundered. And how 
 much useful and needed power is now withholden, because its 
 possessors are at present unwilling to bestow it, accompanied, 
 as it would be, with an exposure of their personal inferiority. 
 The talent being but one, they deem it but Christian modesty 
 to enwrap and inter it. A faith which shall purge the heart 
 of these base and earth-born feelings, and make the motives 
 of action necessarily more powerful, as they were more sim- 
 ple and pure, would evidently strengthen the aggressive 
 energies of the church for her inroads upon the dominions of 
 spiritual darkness. 
 
 The force of pious example in the Christian church, as 
 influencing the world, is yet but scantily developed. But 
 
276 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 when there should prevail a general union amongst the disci- 
 ples of our Lord, one of the most common topics of reproach, 
 employed by the world, would be taken away. Affecting, 
 also, as an increase of faith would do, the personal character 
 of each member in the various divisions of the Christian 
 church, what would be the influence of the resplendent and 
 consistent holiness thus cherished, upon the families and de- 
 pendents, the neighbors and friends of Christians ! And 
 this influence would be felt, not merely inviting their co-op- 
 eration in the missionary alms of the church, but attracting 
 and awakening them to inquiry and repentance, and drawing 
 them into the same bonds of tender and heavenly brother- 
 hood. How much of the reasoning and zeal and energy of 
 the church is now wasted, because counteracted by the luke- 
 warm remissness or the undisguised scandals exhibited in 
 multitudes wearing the Christian name. And when a vigor- 
 ous and wholesome faith should purify our churches ; when 
 the unhealthy and diseased portions should be seen sloughing 
 away under the searching influence of Christian discipline, 
 and the fiiithfulness of an evangelical ministry ; and the 
 church should shine forth in the healthful beauty and symme- 
 try of holiness ; what would be the boldness of her advocates, 
 the power of her appeals, and the confusion of her enemies !, 
 And all these would be felt immediately in the fields of mis- 
 sionary labor ; the Christian mariner, the Christian merchant, 
 and the Christian traveller, would strengthen by a holy ex- 
 ample, in the sight of the heathen, the hands of the Christian 
 missionary. 
 
 But the most important advantage thus gained, for the 
 cause of our Lord in unevangelized lands, would be the en- 
 larged channel for the communication of the Divine Influ- 
 ences. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Great 
 faith delights, as a weak and narrow ftiith dishonors and 
 grieves Him. And when the thousands of Israel shall go up 
 with the ardent though humble expectation of receiving an 
 answer to their prayers, whilst the supplications of primitive 
 faith should again ascend, who shall say that the wonders of 
 the early church may not return ; and men, in the spirit and 
 power of the early believers, rise up to become the heralds 
 of salvation to the most distant and most brutified tribes of 
 mankind? Assuredly those who shall honor Him by a child- 
 like dependence, would be lionored of Him. Then, as the 
 early and the latter rain descended, and when the " fountains 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 277 
 
 of the great deep" of moral power now unemployed, should 
 be broken up from beneath in a wrestling church, and " the 
 windows of heaven " be opened from above by a favoring 
 God ; how rapidly would the waters of salvation rise and 
 swell and diffuse themselves, till the knowledge of the Lord 
 should cover the earth, 
 
 " And like a sea of glory, 
 It spread fiom pole to pole." 
 
 III. From this review of the possible and legitimate fruits 
 of Christian faith, let us turn to its actual results in our midst, 
 that we may learn the deficiencies in our faith which 
 
 RETARD the TRIUMPHS OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH OVER ITS 
 ANTAGONIST ERRORS. 
 
 We are accustomed to look abroad to the mass of evil with 
 which the Christian missionary must contend in heathen 
 lands, and to suppose that here are the chief obstacles to his 
 success. The language of the text and the previous consid- 
 erations brought before you, would lead to the conclusion 
 that this is not the truth. Not in the gorgeous temples, and 
 the costly images, and all the imposing pageantry of idolatry, 
 by which he is environed ; not in the wiles and violence of 
 an organized and interested priesthood ; not in the deep hold 
 which a false religion has taken upon the arts, and customs, 
 and literature, and every institution, political and social, oi 
 the nation; not in any of these, nor in all of them united, is 
 the most formidable resistance to his labors to be found. The 
 stress of battle is in a remoter and unobserved portion of the 
 field. His foes and his hinderances are rather to be sought 
 in the land he has left, and in the very bosom of the church 
 which has commissioned and dispatched him. It is because 
 their faith is not increased adequately to sustain him, that his 
 heart languishes, and his soul is faint within him ; and while 
 he calls upon the obstinate and besotted pagan before him to 
 repent of his unbelief, he sends back over the intervening 
 ocean, to the churches of his native land, an appeal not less 
 earnest and yet more touching, that they too repent of the 
 poverty and pettiness of their faith, and that they eidarge 
 him in his labors according to the apostolic rule, and upon 
 the primitive model. • r n 
 
 The existence of such deficiencies in our faith is pamlully 
 evident, in the inadequacy of the views which that faith min- 
 isters, of the external fruits which it produces, and of the 
 
278 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 internal spirit which it breathes ; or in its influence upon 
 the intellect, the conduct and the affections. 
 
 1. The views with which their faith furnishes the majority 
 of those attached to our churches, are then singularly inade- 
 quate with regard to the miseries of the world. Of the fear- 
 ful condition of the vast mass of our race, the hundreds of 
 millions ignorant or neglectful of the Gospel, we think little 
 and inquire still less. Of temporal suffering — of the anguish 
 which ignorance, vice, and unrestrained passion are working 
 merely for this life, how immense is the amount ; for gross 
 darkness covers the nations, and the dark places of the earth 
 are necessarily and ever full of the habitations of cruelty. 
 How fatal is the influence upon human happiness, even for 
 the iew days of our earthly career, of vice, not merely legal- 
 ized, but sanctified and deified in the national idols, as we 
 find it under every form of paganism. But what is even this, 
 compared to the hopeless and unending woe into which death 
 shall hurl the tribes of heathenism. And yet those, who thus, 
 whilst groaning under present misery, work out fiercer suf- 
 ferings for eternity, are our brethren, like us fallen and vicious, 
 but like us, immortal and accountable. Of this fearful wretch- 
 edness our perception is indistinct and transient. We have 
 no deep and abiding conviction of the evil of sin, and the 
 necessary misery of its captives. 
 
 There is equal deficiency in our views of the promises of 
 Scripture. How large a portion of prophecy is given to the 
 glories of the Messiah's kingdom ! They occupy a promi- 
 nent room and large space in the brief form of supplication 
 given by our Saviour to his disciples. Redolent as these 
 promises are of the most delightful hopes, how seldom do we 
 remember, and how faintly plead them; though the kingdoms 
 of the world shall become the kingdoms of God's Son, the 
 Gentiles shall be his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of 
 the earth are his assured possession. 
 
 Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, 
 Receive yet one, the crown of all the earth. 
 Thou who alone art worthy ! — 
 The very spirit of the world is tired 
 Of its own taunting question, aslced so long, 
 "Where is the promise of your Lord's approach?" 
 Come then, and, added to thy many crowns, 
 Receive yet one, as radiant as the rest. 
 Due to thy last and most effectual work, 
 Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world. 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 279 
 
 Nor are our views more just and complete as to our own 
 obligations and vows. Altliough our entrance upon the 
 course of Christian profession was by devoting ourselves to 
 the service of the Lord, and having given ourselves to Him, 
 we gave ourselves into the church by His will ; has not the 
 dedication been forgotten, or practically revoked by too many 
 of our number? The lights of the earth — we are shedding 
 around but a dim, flickering, and uncertain lustre. The salt 
 of the world — who has perceived in us the savor of Christian 
 vitality? 
 
 But especially do our views assume the appearance of 
 meagre insufiiciency, in the estimate they afford of the pecu- 
 liar opportunities of the age for Christian usefulness. " Ye 
 hypocrites," exclaimed our Lord, " can ye not discern the 
 siccus of the times ?" Are the larger number of Christians 
 at all awake to the fact, that the signs of our times call upon 
 the believers of the nineteenth century for unprecedented 
 exertions ? The advance of popular freedom and general 
 education, the unrestrained commercial intercourse of nations, 
 the wide-spread peace now enjoyed, the improved speed and 
 lessened expense of travelling, the newly-developed powers 
 of the press, the powers each day more apparent of voluntary 
 associations, the extensive and daily extending use of the 
 language we have inherited from England, and which is now 
 becoming intelligible in the chief maritime ports of the world 
 
 all require at the hands of American Christians no ordinary 
 
 exertions. The daily enlargements of the mission field, and 
 the success of truth's first onset upon the powers of darkness, 
 are summoning us most impressively to action. The institu- 
 tions of Hindooism, of such vaunted antiquity, and rooted in 
 the veneration of ages, seem already tottering to their over- 
 throw, ere the generation is gone from the earth that first 
 sapped their base. The barrier which long closed the vast 
 empire of China is now found to be but the brittle seal of an 
 imperial edict, unsustained by the national feelings. The 
 word of God, as recently translated and published in lan- 
 guages never before taught the name of Jehovah, is calhng 
 for the living preacher to scatter and to interpret it. Amid 
 all these omens of good and incentives to diligence, are we 
 found awake to the fact, or conscious of the majesty and 
 splendor of the scenes now opening? On the contrary, is 
 not the church protracting her slumbers, while the whole 
 heaven above her is reddening with the dawn of that ha} , 
 
280 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY 
 
 which shall usher in her restoration and the redemption of 
 all the earth ? 
 
 But the most afflictive defect in our views, is the slight and 
 irreverent estimate we form of our Divine Ally. The King 
 of kings is our intercessor, the Omniscient Spirit is our 
 teacher ; and we are invited to counsel with Divine Wisdom, 
 and to stay ourselves on the arm of Creative Power. Yet 
 how do we narrow down the magnificence of the Divine 
 promises, and compress the hopes, large and grand, offered 
 by the gospel, into some petty and pitiful request, that, as we 
 imagine, bespeaks Christian humility, but in truth displays 
 contemptuous unbelief. What ! when God is for us, is it not 
 most guilty to hesitate and linger in minor and facile enter- 
 prises ? What would have been thought of him whose mem- 
 ory we are wont to hail as the Father of his country, if, when 
 joined by the fleets and army of our foreign ally, he had 
 gathered the combined host to the siege of some petty bar- 
 rack, garrisoned by a ie\w disbanded invalids ? The great- 
 ness of the God we serve, demands on our part a large and 
 manly, a far-sighted and far-reaching faith. 
 
 2. The same odious discrepancy between its privileges and 
 doings, its powers and its results, is seen in the external 
 fruits of our faith, or its influence upon the conduct. In the 
 prayers of the church, as offered in her solemn assemblies, 
 is there the due and earnest remembrance of the missionary 
 laborer, who has, like Jonathan and his armor-bearer, clam- 
 bered up into the high places of heathenism, and finds him- 
 self alone in the very midst of the enemy? In the Monthly 
 Concert, that touching union which brings the Christians of 
 every hue, and language, and kindred, into one assembly, and 
 blends their hearts in the utterance of one petition, is the 
 meeting maintained with that general and devout attendance 
 demanded by the beauty of its conception and the grandeur 
 of its object? Of the alms of the church — how pitiful the 
 amount compared with the free and glad sacrifices made on 
 the altars of dissipation and intemperance, in games of chance, 
 in fashionable equipages, furniture, and dress, in the support 
 of the theatre, the race-course, and the lottery, in the ex- 
 travagance of our tables, and the sumptuousness of our 
 homes. Of that which is given, how much is the niggardly 
 parings of a plentiful income. We have begun by devoting 
 to God the choicest of the herd and the firstlings of the flock ; 
 and have finished by laying on His altars but the offals of the 
 
TO THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 281 
 
 victim. In our labors and our sacrifices for the cause of God, 
 how rarely is found the noble disinterestedness, or the hum- 
 ble and retiring generosity that distinguished the faith of the 
 primitive times. But, above all, is there not need of a wide 
 and deep renovation throughout the mass of our churches, 
 ere the standard of personal holiness can be deemed at all 
 comparable with that which sprung from faith, as apostles 
 preached it, and as its first confessors received it? 
 
 3. The internal spirit which it breathes, was spoken of as 
 betraying a deficiency in the faith of modern believers. If 
 love to man be the second great commandment of the Scrip- 
 tures, is it sufficiently awakened within us, and in proportion 
 to the dignity which revelation has thus assigned it I But in 
 love to God, in anxiety for continued communion with Him, 
 and deepening conformity to His image, in desire for the 
 honor of His name, are we not verily guilty of a fearful de- 
 ficiency, and needs not our laith immediate renovation and 
 increase ? Have we that intense fear and abhorrence of sin 
 which a lively faith ever dis|)lays ? The confidence of the 
 faithful anciently inspired them with a holy and dauntless 
 courage, as they faced and rebuked the world. Is ours thus 
 operative ? Theirs was a humility, which, springing from 
 conscious weakness, clung the more closely to God, and amid 
 the largest success, resigned to Him the undivided glory ; is 
 our faith thus lowly in its spirit and tendency ? The voice 
 of inspiration has said, " If any man have not the spirit of 
 Christ, he is none of his." Is the faith, in the possession of 
 v/hich we exult, thus attended and verified ? Have we been 
 fashioned into his likeness and imbibed his temper? Is ours 
 the life of cross-bearing and watchfulness and prayerfulness? 
 if not, is it a life of discipleship to Christ? — is it the race of 
 faith, swift, direct, and onward ? and shall it win at last the 
 crown of the triumphant believer ? 
 
 Church of the living God, is there not utterly a fault 
 amongst us in this matter ? And until our faith increase, can 
 we hope that, according to the rule of Paul's apostolic labors, 
 the destitute Gentiles should be evangelized? Is not an en- 
 largement now demanded and now due in the labors, prayers, 
 and alms that go to sustain the cause of Christian missions ? 
 and what but the renovation of faith shall work that enlarge- 
 ment? Let us not contrast our sacrifices and zeal merely 
 with those of the Master whose name we bear, and whom we 
 have avouched as our Great Exemplar : let us but measure 
 
 37 
 
382 INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY. 
 
 our endeavors, in their number, and in the prudence, liberal- 
 ity, and perseverance that mark them, with the efforts and 
 spirit of the men of this world, who are without hope and 
 without God. Yielding up the comforts of home and the 
 society of friends, forswearing ease, periling character, lav- 
 ishing life, and venturing even upon eternal ruin, as they do, 
 the walks of this world's business and of this world's pleas- 
 ures are strewed with the voluntary and costly sacrifices of 
 time, property, comfort, life, and salvation. But we, with a 
 soul to save, a heaven to lose or win, a Christ to publish, 
 and a God to serve — how shamefully calm are we found, and 
 timid and half-hearted ! And this, while the world is rushing 
 into ruin, and bearing on its swollen and rapid stream our 
 friends, our neighbors, and our children ; — while the earth 
 which God has promised to bless, (and that by human instru- 
 mentality,) lies as yet, prostrate and groaning, under the curse 
 poured out through all her coasts. The time is coming, and 
 prophecy has foretold it, when in every land there shall be 
 offered to God a pure offering — when, from the closet and 
 the sanctuary, from the hill-top, the field, and the forest-side, 
 where the children of God shall, like Isaac, walk forth at 
 eventide to meditate, the voice of pious supplication shall 
 ascend in one continuous stream ; until our globe, as it rolls 
 along its orbit, shall seem but a censer revolving in the hand 
 of the Great High Priest, and pouring out at every aperture 
 a cloud, dense and rich, of incense, fragrant and grateful to 
 God. But, as yet, the ascending cloud is one of far other 
 kind. Its skirts are dark with sullen gloom, and its bosom 
 is charged with indignation and vengeance. Wailing and 
 blasphemy, oppression and outrage, pollution and falsehood, 
 have swollen and blackened it ; and with it, a cry goes up, 
 like that from the cities of the plain, piercing the ear of God. 
 Day unto day uttereth speech of human wretchedness, and 
 night unto night showeth knowledge of human wickedness. 
 Wliat has our faith, my brethren, done for its relief? What 
 will be the fruits of our belief in the alms and the prayers 
 now demanded ; what its share in the services of this assem- 
 bly ? Shall we not exclaim, reviewing the greatness of the 
 task, on the one hand, and, on the other, the greatness of 
 the guilt which has neglected it, as did the apostles, whilst 
 their Lord was enjoining a duty alike necessary and difficult, 
 "Lord, increase our faith?" 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL 
 ACCURSED. 
 
 "I MARVEL THAT YE ARE SO SOON REMOVED FROM HIM THAT CALLED YOU 
 INTO THE GRACE OF CheIST UNTO ANOTHER GosPEL : WHICH IS NOT ANO- 
 ther ; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the 
 Gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach 
 ANY other Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto 
 
 you, let HIM BE accursed. As WE SAID BEFORE, SO SAY I NOW AGAIN, Ip 
 ANY MAN PREACH ANY OTHER GoSPEL UNTO YOU THAN THAT YE HAVE RE- 
 CEIVED, LET HIM BE ACCURSED." — Galatians i. 6-9. 
 
 How full are these words of force and solemnity. Let us 
 fix the mind on them until we feel their significancy. Is it a 
 profane blasphemer, who opens his mouth only to pour forth 
 execrations, who has " clothed himself with cursing as with a 
 garment," and whose malignant feelings towards his fellow- 
 man assume the awful form of an appeal to heaven ? No ; 
 it is one who delighted rather in blessing ; and who, cruelly 
 as he was hated by his own nation, requited their enmity 
 only with the most earnest wishes for their salvation, though 
 he were himself accursed to obtain it. Is it the hot haste of 
 a good man speaking unadvisedly, and rather according to 
 the infirmity of the man than the sobriety of the saint I The 
 very form into which it is cast, and the calm, firm repetition 
 of its tremendous denunciations, stamps it as the language of 
 deliberation. Far from being an outburst of human passion, 
 the language is that of one full of the Holy Ghost, of one 
 selected and sent forth by Christ to be an authoritative teach- 
 er of the churches — an inspired apostle. They are not the 
 words of human infirmity, but the utterances of a holy God 
 and a true — his unerring and " lively oracles." May, then, 
 that Spirit which spoke in Paul hearken in us. The truth 
 here taught us, if awful, is yet a salutary and timely one. 
 "We learn, 
 
284 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 I. That it is possible to ascertain what the true Gospel is ; 
 
 II. That the Gospel is unchangeable ; 
 
 III. And that they who pervert it are accursed. 
 
 1. It is possible to acquire certainty as to the true nature 
 of the Gospel. Paul's language throughout the epistle 
 implies this. It would have been most unreasonable and 
 most cruel thus to denounce those whose doubts as to the 
 real purport of the Gospel were unavoidable and excusable. 
 He makes no exceptions for ignorance, and prejudice, and 
 heedlessness. He needed to make none. He had creden- 
 tials, such as none of their false teachers brought, that Christ 
 had sent him to preach the Gospel. Miracles, prophecies, 
 and the moral results of his preaching, proclaimed him one 
 commissioned of God. As to the doctrines he had taught, 
 they could be left in no doubt. He assumes that the dis- 
 tinction between his own gospel and that of the rival teach- 
 ers was palpable on the most cursory examination ; and that 
 his rudest hearers were competent to perceive the diifcr- 
 ence between the opposing doctrines, and were bound to 
 make the requisite discrimination. He had spoken clearly 
 and without reserve ; consistently and without variation. 
 He had in Galatia, as every where else, taught that men 
 were sinners and could not be saved by their own good 
 deeds; but that Christ ^^ gave himself for us,^^* and hav- 
 ing died as the sacrifice, arose as the High Priest ; and that, 
 repenting and believing, men might be justified freely in his 
 righteousness, and accepted through his mediation. He had 
 taught that by nature all inherited and deserved the wrath 
 of God ; but that through Jesus the Holy Spirit was given, 
 producing a change of heart. He had taught that the fruit 
 of the Spirit thus given would be necessarily holiness of life 
 in each true convert. Christ, the crucified Redeemer, the 
 Holy Spirit, the great renewer and enlightener of the world, 
 were the theme of his familiar converse, his ministrations 
 and his writings. There was no want of certainty, then, as 
 to what he had taught, and what they should believe. 
 
 2. But we find men, often excusing themselves for having 
 spent a whole lifetime in a state of spiritual irresolution, or 
 what is rather indifference to all religion, sheltering them- 
 selves under the plea, that amid contending systems and 
 warring pulpits they cannot ascertain what the Gospel really 
 
 * Galatians i. 4. 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 285 
 
 is. Some, calling themselves Christian teachers, assure 
 them that there is no hell, but that death is to every man 
 the gate of heaven. Others contend that Christ had no in- 
 herent deity, and made no propitiatory sacrifice. He was 
 but a wise and good teacher, and if men are saved, it is not 
 by his atonement or by any other substitute sacrificed in 
 their stead. Others, again, teach that Christ di<l indeed die 
 for our salvation, but that it is our own meritorious conduct 
 and character that entitle us to his salvation, or in other 
 words, we are saved by our own righteousness. Amid the 
 teachers who thus stand contending with each other, and 
 contradicting the testimony of the great body of Christians 
 in all ages, these irresolute men profess to be at a loss what 
 sentiments to receive. And sometimes they wish that they 
 had lived in the primitive ages of the church, and could have 
 heard the Gospel from the lips of the apostles themselves. 
 
 Let such remember, then, that in the apostles' times they 
 would have been subjected to the same perplexity of which 
 they complain in our own. Let them remember, also, that 
 they would then have found relief only from the same sources 
 to which they are directed now. If they are distressed by 
 the many and contradictory teachings of human guides, the 
 Galatians were exposed to the same trial. While the apos- 
 tles yet lived, the churches they had themselves planted and 
 instructed were visited by those who taught another Gospel. 
 Paul had taught a righteousness by faith in Christ that mag- 
 nified the cross. These false teachers taught a righteousness 
 that was of the law, making void the cross of Christ. In 
 what way were the Galatians to know the truth ? The apos- 
 tle was not always with them. They had his teachings 
 treasured in their memory, and as recorded in his epistles. 
 They had the teachings of other apostles, and of uninspired 
 teachers known to accord in their doctrines with the inspired 
 and authoritative guides of the church. And they had the 
 Scriptures of the Old Testament. But above all these they 
 had unimpeded access to God, and the Spirit of God was 
 their counsellor. Under what process of teaching, and in 
 what type of doctrine had they received this Spirit? In 
 that teaching and doctrine let them persevere. That Spirit, 
 sought in prayer, would explain the Scriptures, and gujde 
 rightly and safely. If we are in the providence of God 
 brought into similar conflicts from the opposing dogmas of 
 men, we have the same resort in the Scriptures, and the 
 
286 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 like refuge in the Spirit of Goil. The volume gives no 
 uncertain response ; the Holy Ghost is no tardy or inefficient 
 instructor, 
 
 3. Now is it not most irrational — we appeal, my fellow- 
 immortals, to your own consciences — is it not most irration- 
 al to stun and weary your ears with the din of human 
 controversies, while you make no appeal to the original 
 authorities? Are you sincerely in quest of truth? Had 
 you been told of an estate bequeathed you by some distant 
 friend, and one informant spoke of it as small in amount, 
 and another described it as being of great value, and you 
 found yourself involved in a whirlwind of contradictory state- 
 ments ; would you compare and collate the rumors on every 
 side, and form your opinion from them, or appeal at once to 
 the written will and the surrogate ? If you were told that 
 your home was in flames, would you go around questioning 
 those who had left the scene as to its origin, and extent, and 
 ravages ; or would you not rather cast aside all other en- 
 gagements, and rush to the rescue of your property and 
 your family, to see with your own eyes, and toil with your 
 own hands ? And are salvation, and the soul, and heaven 
 worth so little that they do not require the like personal 
 investigation, the like decisive appeal to the ultimate authori- 
 ties? 
 
 Prophets and apostles, and the Lord of apostles and the 
 Master of the prophets, hold in this case but one language. 
 They refer you to the record. " To the law and to the tes- 
 timony," cried the pi'ophets ; if your teachings — if your 
 teachers speak not according to tliese, it is because " there 
 is no truth in them," " Search the Scriptures," is the com- 
 mand of Christ ; " which are able to make you wise unto 
 salvation," respond the glorious company of the apostles. 
 Do you complain of dulness and weakness of mind? they 
 reply, " If any man lack wisdom let him ask of God, who 
 giveth liberally, and who upbraideth not ;" and a louder and 
 sweeter voice than theirs is heard, continuing the strain — • 
 " The Spirit shall lead unto all truth ;" — while the prophets, 
 catching and re-echoing the invitation thus addressed to weak 
 and erring man, exclaim, " The wayfaring man, though a 
 fool, shall not err therein." 
 
 Until the Scriptures, therefore, are abrogated, and until 
 the Spirit of God has abdicated his office as teacher of the 
 church, you cannot be at a loss, if disposed, in a candid and 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 287 
 
 docile spirit, to learn what are the real doctrines of the 
 Gospel. If a man will not ask that Spirit, indeed, he may- 
 have the ablest of human teachings, and bring to the book an 
 intellect of angelic power, and yet the result be but error 
 and darkness. But if he will come in the name of Jesus, 
 imploring the Spirit, idiocy itself shall not prevent his learn- 
 ing tlie way of salvation. If he refuses thus to come, and 
 will not study the book of God in God's own appointed way, 
 he is not entitled to complain of uncertainty as to his reli- 
 gious opinions, much less to dogmatize in his scepticism. 
 Let us, then, in this matter be honest to our own souls, for 
 death is on his way : a judge is even now at the door, who 
 will not stoop to answer our cavillings ; and wret(;hed then 
 will be the fate of that man, who, with the open Bible before 
 him, and the hovering dove of the S[)irit above him, has 
 neglected the one and repelled the other. 
 
 Make but the experiment in the temper of a little child, 
 and a certainty, sure and unshaken as the everlasting hills, 
 shall possess your souls, while truth darts in upon the dark- 
 ened mind, and in the light of God you see light — the 
 uncreated, undeclining glory of God, in the face of his Son. 
 Then shall you know that Gospel which Paul preached, and 
 whose promises he is now iidicriting. 
 
 II. But again, the reHgion of which we may thus obtain a 
 certain knowledge is uiichansrcahle in its character. We 
 hear men, sometimes, in forgetfulness of this character of 
 Christianity, exclaiming, " Shall science and art go on, from 
 day to day altering their forms and extending their bounda- 
 ries, and i-eligion alone receive and admit no improvement?" 
 If they mean that the language of the Bible may be better 
 understood, and that new researches of the antiquarian and 
 traveller, and new fulfilments of prophecy, may throw new 
 and yet increasing light on the pages of the sacred volume — 
 if they mean only, that in days of higher devoledness, such 
 as the church is yet to see, there may be a, more th()rough 
 mastery of the doctrines and a more resplendent exhibition 
 of the morals of Christianity — this no Christian denies; but 
 that the facts of Christianity can be modified, its morality be 
 amended, or its doctrines altered, is impossible. Those who 
 suppose it, forget that the Gospel is not a discovery but a 
 revelation. 
 
 2. The Gospel is not a discovery l)ut a re\eIation. By a 
 discovery we mean what man's intellect has found out by 
 
288 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 its own efforts : by a revelation, what God's intellect has 
 communicated to man's intellect, and what, if not thus aided, 
 man could not have discovered for himself. The one is the 
 fruit of man's labor, the other the gift of God's grace. Now, 
 what man's intellect has discovered, man's intellect may 
 investigate more thoroughly and understand more perfectly. 
 But what man has learned only from God's disclosures, he 
 can of course understand no further than he finds it on the 
 face of those disclosures. He cannot go up to the original 
 truths themselves upon which God drew, and thus improve 
 on the Divine communications. Some of the disclosures 
 thus made are, from the very necessity of our nature, or 
 from a wise regard to our present interests and duties, im- 
 perfect revelations, leaving portions of the subject shrouded 
 in darkness. These imperfect revelations are called myste- 
 ries. With the limits set by the Divine mind to his revela- 
 tions, our investigations must terminate : the attempt to pass 
 beyond these is not only temerity, it is folly and ruin. The 
 adventurer dashes himself to his own destruction against the 
 impassable barriers of the human intellect. 
 
 When Columbus found our continent, it was a discovery. 
 Where one man had gone, other men might follow, and 
 inquire more fully, and learn more correctly than did the 
 original discoverer, and thus our knowledge of America may 
 be destined to receive daily improvements. But when Paul 
 was rapt into the third heaven, and saw and heard wiuit it 
 was unlawful to utter, it was a revelation. No mortal foot 
 could follow him, to pursue and improve his account. Now, 
 had it been permitted Paul to describe in writing the celes- 
 tial glories thus unveiled to him, those who wished to un- 
 derstand the nature of that upper world would have but one 
 course left for them to pursue. They must investigate 
 Paul's character for veracity, and the evidences he adduced 
 that the Most High had conferred on him so transcendaut a 
 favor as to be permitted to become a visitant there. When 
 they had settled these questions, all that their philosophy 
 could do would be but to explain Paul's language as they 
 found it in his descriptions. They could not hope for fur- 
 ther knowledge of the world described, unless God should 
 choose to make a fresh revelation to another Paul. No tel- 
 escope could read what his vision had left unread — no crea- 
 ted wing could bear the student up the pathless skies to 
 investigate what Paul had left untold : no stretch of human 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 289 
 
 sagacity could add to the record as the apostle left it. With 
 the first discoverer of our western world it was diirereiit : 
 his account sent back to Europe could be continually amend- 
 ed and enlarged ; and the school-boy of our times niay know 
 more of the new world than did the sagacious navigator wlio 
 first conjectured and then establisbed its existence. 
 
 III. Now, the Gospel is strictly a revelation. It tells us 
 of a world which we can enter for ourselves oidy by dying : 
 it tells us of the nature and will of our God what none but 
 he could tell, and of which we can know only as mucli as 
 he has chosen to tell. As the human intellect did not dis- 
 cover the Gospel, so no advancement of the human intellect 
 can amend or alter it : but we have heard and read of men 
 who have dared to say, " Christ came to set up a dispensa- 
 tion ; it is now past ; it has done service in its day, but its 
 day is now gone by. The Gospel needed by our refined 
 and scientific times must be a new dispensation." We 
 shudder at the profanity of the spirit that can vent itself in 
 language of such impious arrogance ; for no man may claim 
 to come with a new dispensation, unless he comes heralded 
 by such prophecies as ushered Christ's way, and attended 
 by such miracles as marked the whole course of the Re- 
 deemer. We say to the sophists and dreamers who talk 
 thus madly of the perfectibility of hvmian nature, and its 
 need of a new and amended Gospel, " Produce your wit- 
 nesses ; let the winds obey your bidding, and the waves 
 become the fixed and stable pavement of your feet ; give 
 gyes to the blind, and call the dead from their tombs ; speak, 
 as Christ spoke, the words of Divine wisdom ; and read, as 
 did he, the secrets of the heart. Die as Christ died, with 
 the earth heaving beneath, and the heavens darkened above, 
 to attest their sympathy with, and their subjection to, the 
 mighty sufferer. And having done this, you have but half 
 done your mission : show the niche in ancient pro])liecy 
 reserved for your coming. When Jesus appeared, he came 
 in the train of a long procession of pro])hcts, who had before 
 witnessed of his coming, and carried the line of their testi- 
 mony, in unbroken continuity, from Eden up to Calvary. 
 He "did, indeed, supersede a former dispensation ; but that 
 very dispensation had predicted its own departure and de- 
 scribed Christ's advent. Does the present disj)ensatiuu, that 
 of Christ's Gospel, speak of itself as being thus transient 
 and temporary ? No, it claims to endure till von sun shall 
 
 38 
 
290 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 have forsaken his station : the Gospel is an everlasting Gos- 
 pel, Does Moses or does Christ foretell your new Gospel ? 
 The Bible has else no room for it. Yes, they do foretell it ; 
 but it is in the language of Enoch ; it is the Gospel which 
 the seventh from Adam foretold — the Gospel ' of hard 
 speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against the 
 Lord,' and of which the Lord ^ -when he cometh with ten 
 thousand of his saints,^ shall '■convince the vngodly,^ ''''* 
 Mad were the builders of Babel, when they would raise the 
 tower, whose foot was on the earth, up to the heavens ; but 
 they who would, by human discoveries, build up a new and 
 better Gospel, are the builders yet more insane of a Babel 
 yet more impious. 
 
 IV. But it will be urged that there have been men of very 
 considerable austerity of morals, and of high pretensions to 
 wisdom, who have taught a gospel very difl'erent from Paul's. 
 Were it not uncharitable to condemn them ? We will not 
 undertake, for ourselves, to answer this question. To their 
 own Master they stand or fall ; but if their Master have 
 spoken, in his own oracles, in reply to this question, we 
 must not suppress or condemn the response that has been 
 given. By his Spirit, then, in his servant Paul, he has 
 replied, and his language is, " Bur though we, or an 
 
 ANGEL FROM HEAVEN, PREACH ANY OTHER GOSPEL UNTO 
 YOU THAN THAT WHICH WE HAVE PREACHED UNTO YOU, 
 
 LET HIM BE ACCURSED." Wc are taught in the Scriptures, 
 by men's moral fruits, to judge whether they are true disci- 
 ples of the true doctrine ; but we are not allowed, merely 
 by their fruits, to judge of their doctrine itself. We must 
 bring this to the test of the Scriptures as well; and, if re- 
 jected by this test, whatever the comparative excellence of 
 deportment in the teachers, they and their doctrine are dis- 
 allowed. The apostle puts the case, in favor of a false 
 teacher, into the most authoritative form, surrounding him 
 with the highest splendor of moral character and the most 
 plausible show of a heavenly mission. He imagines his 
 own appearance as the promulgator of a new Gospel. 
 Should the convert whom Christ's glory smote down on the 
 highway to Damascus — he who had been in labors more 
 abundant, and in deaths oft, whose were miraculous tongues 
 and miraculous works — should he bring to the Galatian 
 
 * Jude 14, 15. 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED, 291 
 
 church " another gospel," they were to turn from it and 
 from Its teacher without hesitation. He proceeds further : 
 as if to put the decision into the strongest possible form, he 
 imagines a teacher, possessing not merely the imperfect 
 sanctity of erring man, but one invested with the lioliness 
 oi an angel from lu aven. His words do not describe Satan 
 corning up out of the pit, and disguised as an angel of light ; 
 but he conceives an event yet more dazzling in its seduc- 
 tions, yet more perplexing and ensnaring to the mind of the 
 learner. Should an angel from heaven, one yet recent from 
 those glorious courts, and with the brightness of its moral 
 splendor and itfe " beauty of holiness" still clinging about 
 him, venture to sin, and commence his fall by preaching to 
 our race another gospel, let him be accursed. 
 
 V. Paul did not think lightly of those benign and blessed 
 spirits that are ministering to the heirs of salvation. They 
 had often appeared to the apostles, and interposed elfectually 
 in their behalf Paul knew their might and wisdom ; he 
 admired and emulated their holiness, their zealous obedience, 
 their untiring diligence ; but, in comparison with Christ and 
 his truth, Paul loved not even angels. One of these beings 
 had appeared to Peter, sleeping in the inner prison and 
 chained between two soldiers, and" rousing him, had led him 
 forth through guards and barriers to liberty. When Paul 
 was himself on ship-board, sailing towards Ronie, an angel 
 of God appeared to him, promising him the preservation of 
 his own life and the lives of all his companions ; and the 
 promise was kept : but had Peter's deliverer, on their way 
 after passing through " the iron gate that led into the city," 
 commanded him to preach another gospel than Christ's, 
 Peter would have rebuked his deliverer, and used to the 
 tempter the rebuke he had once received himself from his 
 Master, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Had the minister- 
 ing Spirit who cheered Paul on his voyage stayed to preach 
 to Paul's fellow-voyagers another gospel, Paul would have 
 denounced the new system as a doctrine of devils : for no 
 angel appeai-ing from heaven could bring for his revelation 
 the force of evidence we have for Christ's revelation, in its 
 countless miracles, its accomplished prophecies, and the 
 moral renovations wrought by its influence. And no angel 
 has been promised those full influences of the Holy S|)irit 
 that were assured to the apostles for the benefit of the church. 
 Were it possible, then, for one of these holy beings to fall 
 
292 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 away and become a preacher of heresy, great as might have 
 been his splendor and wisdom, and his former holiness. Paid, 
 the sinner — Paul, the forgiven persecutor, would have with- 
 stood and cursed him. The apostle was but a frail man ; 
 his body, like ours, a tabernacle of clay, crushed before the 
 moth ; yet, in all his weakness, had he met an angel of the 
 highest rank in heaven, one of those " that excel in strength," 
 returning from a mission like that to Sennacherib's camp, 
 his right hand yet red with the blood of a hundred thousand 
 warriors, and had that angel sought to turn the apostle from 
 the truth as it was in Jesus, Paul would not have feared to 
 denounce him in the name of their common Lord, and dust 
 and ashes would have confounded the archangel. 
 
 What cause have we for gratitude that angels have not 
 endeavored thus to subvert our faith. They have, on the 
 contrary, given their constant attestation and subjection to 
 Christ. They with songs announced his birth to the shep- 
 herds of Bethlehem. They ministered to him in the wilder- 
 ness of temptation, and in the sorer agony of Gethsemane. 
 Had he but summoned them, twelve legions had flown to his 
 side ; they guarded his tomb, and when it was visited by the 
 weeping disciples, they tesiitied his resurrection. When he 
 ascended on high, they attended him ; and when he shall 
 return to judgment, they will troop around him. Mean- 
 while the mighty angel seen by John flying through heaven, 
 was not seen denying, but publishing the everlasting Gospel; 
 and such is their attachment to our Lord, that every sinner 
 believing in him has angels to rejoice in his conversion, and 
 angels to minister to his onward course, to guard his depart- 
 ing spirit and to reclaim his deserted clay from the sepulchre. 
 Their testimony, then, is ever for Christ : they enforce the 
 witness of apostles, and by all their demeanor they bid man 
 do what they have themselves done at the bidding of the 
 Father — worship the Son ; for, " when he bringeth in the 
 first-begotten into the world, he saith. Let all the angels of 
 God worship him."* Rejecting that adoration when prof- 
 tcred to themselves, they cheerfully yield it to the Redeemer. 
 He, then, that substitutes another Gospel for that of Paul, 
 cannot plead angelic patronage or instruction. They adore 
 where he blasphemes. 
 
 If true at all, then the Gospel is unmingled and immutable 
 
 * Heb. i. 6. 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 293 
 
 truth : no events can occur, no evidence be adduced, author- 
 izing us to modify that system which was given of God, and 
 which God guards, and that, like its Divine author, chiinis a 
 perfection that admits neither amendment nor decay, the 
 one unchangeable Gospel "WHICH is not another.'' 
 
 VI. Those perverting the Gospel are accursed, not be- 
 cause fallible man has willed it, but God the Holy Ghost has 
 pronounced the curse ; and who may annul or dispute it? 
 The tearful doom is not unmerited. Whatever the external 
 recommendations of any such system, or of its advocates, 
 did their show of excellence equal that of an angel, as yet 
 but in the first hour of his fall, they inherit a fearful curse, 
 because of the crime they commit and the mischief they 
 occasion, 
 
 1. Of the greatness of the crime we form but inadequate 
 conceptions, from the blindness produced by our share in the 
 guilt of our race, and also from the faint and remote views 
 we have of God. Yet what arrogance is it, evidently, to 
 alter the teachings of the Unerring and the Onmiscient, the 
 Holy One of Israel— what the fearfulness of the prcsumi)tion, 
 that would correct infmite wisdom and contradict the God 
 of truth ! There is something most daring and j)orlentous in 
 the ingratitude of the creature that would di(;late and pre- 
 scribe to the Creator v/ho has made him, and the unwearied 
 Benefactor whose sleepless vigilance protects him from 
 destruction, and whose untiring bounty is daily supplying 
 him. And how aggravated the sin of rejecting, on any pre- 
 text, the plans and the gifts of that Redeemer who has died 
 for us, and of grieving that Spirit which would have recon- 
 ciled and sanctified us. And what language can describe the 
 aggravated cruelty of thus counterworking God's designs of 
 mercy in the Gospel ? It is a revelation of grace, in which 
 wrath was to be appeased, that mercy might have its free 
 course over the miseries of a groaning world. They who 
 set aside this Gospel, remove or clog the channel of God's 
 mercy, that his vengeance may have its original scope, and 
 roll its consuming deluge over a world of sin. The man 
 who would cut off the supplies of food from his faniislud 
 fellow-creatures in a besieged town — the wretch who should 
 in wantonness destroy all the remedies provided for a hos- 
 pital in which crowds were tossing in agony — agony that, 
 unrelieved, must issue in death, but which these remedies 
 could not only relieve but remove — such a destroyer, such a 
 
294 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 traitor were surely not as cruel as the man who sets aside 
 the true Gospel. For the religion of Christ is the food of 
 the soul and the bread of heaven ; and the atonement of 
 Christ, as Paul preached it, is the one remedy for the 
 wretchedness and sin of our race, and apart from it there is 
 no salvation for the soul to all eternity. 
 
 2. The greatness of the mischief is necessarily incalcula- 
 ble. For all earthly powers must fail to span and to gauge 
 that eternity, into which death ushers us, and for which the 
 Gospel is to prepare us. To pervert that Gospel is to aid 
 Satan in thrusting down our race to misery unremitting and 
 unimaginable. What is a conflagration that lays a city in 
 ashes, or a plague sweeping over the breadth of the land — 
 what is loss of freedom, or reputation, or life, compared 
 with the loss of the soul ? And he who sets aside the Gos- 
 pel ruins not one soul but many. " Their word will eat as 
 doth a canker." Error is contagious. The victim of delu- 
 sion will seek to quiet his conscience, and increase the 
 influence of his system, by swelling the number of proselytes 
 to his party from every side. Who can calculate the blind, 
 led by the blind, that have already entered the pit, and are 
 now even rejoicing on their way thither? To have any 
 share in producing such mischief, is to aid in feeding the 
 worm that never dies, and to heap fuel on the flame that is 
 never quenched. May the mercy of God save us from such 
 sin. Better were it to beg crumbs with Lazarus, and sit 
 with Job on the dunghill, than to share riches, honor and 
 power here, on condition of preaching another gospel, and 
 prophesying smooth things, and crying "peace, peace," 
 while God's own voice proclaims, " There is no peace to 
 the wicked." 
 
 With these views, then, of the character of the Gospel, 
 let us ask ourselves, as in the sight of God, Have we the 
 Gospel that Paul preached, or do we receive another ? If we 
 receive that which he preached, do we obey it ? If it be our 
 hope and guide, let us hold it fast with an unwavering confi- 
 dence, and defend it by a fearless profession, though man 
 cavil at, or an angel contradict its testimonies ; content with 
 the assurance that what the Scriptures teach and the Spirit 
 seals shall stand, though the elements melt with fervent heat, 
 and the heavens pass away as a scroll when it is rolled to- 
 gether. 
 
 1. It is evidently the interest and duty of every hearer of 
 
THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 295 
 
 the Gospel to ascertain that he is receiving that system of 
 truth which the apostles taught. The word of God allows 
 not, nor will his bar acquit those who have trusted indo- 
 lently in the numbers attached to their sect, or in the wisdom 
 or piety of their teachers, while careless as to their own 
 personal experience of religion, and neglect the earnest 
 study of those Scriptures that are to try every doctrine and 
 judge every spirit. In Paul's time the Gospel had its 
 opposers among the Jews who sought after signs, and among 
 the Greeks who looked for wisdom. And men now reject 
 or modify the Gospel for the same causes. Should modern 
 systems, therefore, demand our faith and claim to supplant 
 the Gospel of Paul, either because of the signs and wonders 
 that attest them and the new revelations they boast to have 
 received, on the one hand, or because of the superior wis- 
 dom, refinement and philosophy of those who defend them, 
 on the other hand ; we do well to remember that we receive 
 such systems at our peril. And the wo that smites the 
 teachers of these errors will not spare their followers. 
 
 2. Errors in religion are neither rare nor harmless. If 
 even in apostolic times there were not wanting heresies of 
 the most fatal character, we have no reason to expect that 
 they should become less numerous or less fatal, now that the 
 age of miracles is past, and the presence of inspired and 
 infallible teachers is withdrawn. And if, from these varied 
 forms of religious belief, some would infer the harmlessness 
 of error, and teach us that every system, calling itself Chris- 
 tian, has in the main the great truths necessary to piety here 
 and happiness hereafter, we need but bring their theory to 
 the test of the text before us. The teachers opposing Paul, 
 those at least in Galatia, preached apparently the same God 
 and the same judgment and eternal retribution, as did the 
 apostle ; nor is there any evidence that they disputed the 
 divine mission of our Saviour. But there was an entire 
 difference of statement as to the way of salvation. How did 
 Paul act? Did he respect the independence of those who 
 thus differed from him, and assert their essential union with 
 himself in the great matters of the faith? The course that 
 he pursued so resolutely himself, and so impressively urged 
 upon others, was far different. Instead of dwelling on the 
 opinions held in common, as furnishing a sufficient basis lor 
 concord, and acknowledging in the truths they yet retained 
 the basis of a common Christianity, he denounced, without 
 
296 THE PREACHING OF ANOTHER GOSPEL ACCURSED. 
 
 compromise or qualification, the opposing doctrine as being 
 "another gospel." For it taught error as to the fundamen- 
 tal truth, the mode of a sinner's acceptance with God. 
 
 3. There are truths in religion of such vital importance 
 that departure from them must destroy the soul. The holi- 
 ness that the Gospel came to foster is the effect of truth 
 received in the love of it. And this truth is in its own 
 nature harmonious and one. Truth cannot contradict itself: 
 nor in science or art can there be two opposed and warring 
 truths. So is it also in religion. The singleness of truth 
 constitutes the basis of its exclusiveness. It claims for itself, 
 exclusively and without rival, the faith and obedience of 
 mankind ; a claim that is exclusive because it is just, and 
 that could not be consistent without requiring thus the rejec- 
 tion of all error. These exclusive claims are often misrep- 
 resented as involving the most odious intolerance and illiber- 
 ality. But in truth there is no more a possibility of the 
 existence of several true religions, than there is of the exist- 
 ence of more than one God. From the one Jehovah there 
 can emanate but the one truth — developed, indeed, in differ- 
 ent degrees at different ages, in Judaism the bud, in Chris- 
 tianity the expanded flower — but essentially, and in all ages, 
 the one unchanged and unchangeable religion, revealing for 
 man the sinner, salvation, through an atonement and Medi- 
 ator of Divine appointment. Much of error may be mingled 
 with this truth in various minds ; but there are vital errors 
 which the word of God has doomed as the seals of ruin in 
 those who retain them. It recognizes in the church of God 
 one head and one foundation, and those only are acknow- 
 ledged as the heirs of life who build on this foundation, and 
 
 " WHO HOLD THE HEAD." 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 (Delivered at the time of a Collection made for the American Seamen's Friend Society.; 
 "And the sea gave up the dead which were in it." — Rev. xx. 13. 
 
 The resurrection was a favorite theme with the apostles. 
 The fact of Christ's having risen, was with them the crowning 
 miracle of his earthly conrse, and an irrefragable ar<rnmcnt 
 of his divine mission. The resurrection of all mankind by 
 Christ's power, to be judged at Christ's bar, was one of the 
 truths upon which the first ministers of the gospel sought to 
 turn the eyes of all their hearers. Peter preached this doc- 
 trine to the scribes of Jerusalem, and Paul proclaimed it amid 
 the philosophers of Athens. And what thoughts struggle 
 within us, as we look forward to such a change ! These 
 corruptible bodies shall stand again in the closest companion- 
 ship with the souls that once inhabited them — that at death 
 deserted them, but which now have resumed them. Accord- 
 ing to the deeds done in the body, men are to be judged. 
 Tlie term of probation closed when the spirit quitted the 
 body, and dropped it into the grave. The time of judgment 
 begins when that grave is opened and that body reanimated, 
 " that every one may receive the things done in his body."* 
 We are prone, perhaps, to think too nuich of these perishable 
 tabernacles of clay. But we do not, my beloved hearers, 
 think enough of them, unless we think of them often and 
 vividly, as bodies that are one day to rise again, endued 
 with an indestructible existence, and capacitated for the end- 
 less bliss of heaven, or the eternal misery of hell. 
 
 I. This great doctrine, the resurrection of the body, seems 
 yet better titled than the kindred truth of the immortality of 
 the soul, to make a powerful impression on the mind of man, 
 when receiving the gospel for the first time. The heathen 
 may have heard of the existence after death of the inmiaterial 
 
 * 2 Cor. V. 10. 
 39 
 
298 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 spirit within him ; but he thinks of that principle as some- 
 thing impalpable and unearthly, that he has never yet seen, 
 and that is scarce the same with himself. He may have 
 heard even that after death he should still have a body. He 
 may have been taught, as many an idolatrous creed teaches 
 its votaries, that the soul shall pass after death into other bo- 
 dies of the higher or the lower orders of being. But this doc- 
 trine of the transmigration of souls cannot take the same hold 
 on his mind as does the scriptural truth, teaching him the 
 resurrection of the existing body. The thoughts of the man, 
 his fears, his hopes, and his plans, have had reference chiefly 
 to the body. Bring him to look upon it as possible, that 
 this — the material frame-work in which he has enjoyed or 
 suffered, by which he has labored and acquired, which he 
 has clothed and fed, and in which he has sinned — this body, 
 which, in most of his thoughts, has been regarded as the 
 whole of himself — is to live again beyond the grave, and he 
 is startled. Talk to him of the inward man of the soul, and 
 he listens, as if you spoke of a stranger. But bring your 
 statements home to the outward man of his body, and he 
 feels that it is he himself, who is to be happy or to be wretch- 
 ed in that eternity of which you tell him. Hence a living 
 missionary, in his first religious instructions to the king of a 
 heathen tribe in South Africa, found him indifferent and cal- 
 lous to all his statements of the gospel, until this truth was 
 announced. It aroused in the barbarian chief the wildest 
 emotions, and excited an undisguised alarm. He had been 
 a warrior, and had lifted up his spear against multitudes slain 
 in battle. He asked, in amazement, if these his foes should 
 all live. And the assurance that they should arise, filled him 
 with perplexity and dismay, such as he could not conceal. 
 He could not abide the thought. A long slumbering con- 
 science had been pierced through all its coverings. Well 
 do such incidents illustrate the fact, that He who gave the 
 gospel knew what was in man, and infused into the leaven of 
 his own word those elements that are mightiest to work upon 
 all the powers of man's soul, and to penetrate with their in- 
 fluence the whole mass of human society. And in our an- 
 nouncement of that gospel, we do well to adhere to the scrip- 
 tural pattern given us by the Author of the gospel. Many of 
 the other doctrines of Christianity are almost insensibly 
 modified, in our mode of presenting them, by the natural re- 
 ligion which intimates, if it does not establish, these or similar 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 299 
 
 truths. But the doctrine of the resurreetion of the body is 
 not a doctrine of natural religion. It is purely a doctrine 
 of revelation, and becomes known to us merely from the 
 living oracles of Scripture. And as man's reason did not 
 discover it, it is not for man's reason to aher or amend the 
 doctrine according to his caprices and prejudices. 
 
 In what glorious and terrific imagery does the Scripture 
 before us array the scenes of the resurrection. In the hea- 
 vens, thronged by angels in all their glory, is seen the de- 
 scending throne. Upon it, in his own and his Father's glory, 
 sits the Son of Man, the crucified Nazarene, now the judge 
 of quick and dead. Before him the material heavens are 
 rolled together as a scroll, and the elements melt with fer- 
 vent heat. The creation caimot abide the dread presence 
 of its Creator, " from whose face the earth and the heavens 
 fled away;" and yet they cannot escape it: "and there was 
 found no place for them." His bare word had accomplished 
 the miracle of creation, and now, by a kindred act of power, 
 his mere glance shakes the world, and awes it into prepara- 
 tion for the judgment. The old heathen talked of their 
 " cloud-compelling Jove," whose eye gathered all the storms 
 of the skies. But how mean is all this to the scriptural ima- 
 gery of a world-compelling Christ. The trumpet sounds. 
 The earth shakes with inward commotions. Its dead — its 
 ancient dead — all the buried of forgotten tribes, and of ante- 
 diluvian times, are coming; more numerous than the hosts 
 ever mustered by earthly captain to the battle, yet all their 
 numbers infuse into them no courage in meeting their judge. 
 They have no thought of resisting his power. Whatever 
 the gods in whom they trusted once, they feel now the pre- 
 sence, and await the fiat of the one true God, Maker and 
 Judge of heaven and earth. The patriarchs, who lived when 
 the world was young, and the coming generations to be born 
 long after our death, who shall have lived when that world 
 had grown old, shall, with us, stand before the judgment 
 seat. From this tribunal there lies no appeal, and of the 
 sentence now to be uttered there can be no reversal, and no 
 revision. 
 
 It will be a scene of solemn interest, not only as the meet- 
 ing of man with his Redeemer and Judge, but from the 
 meeting of mankind together. The scriptural accounts of 
 the judgment represent it as an occasion when we shall know 
 ourselves at least. From their descriptions of that day, as 
 
300 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 a day of disclosures, when the secrets of all hearts shall be 
 made manifest, they seem also to imply that we shall know 
 others, and be known by them. Without our consciousness 
 of our own identity, there could evidently be no sense of 
 guilt; and without our knowledge of the identity of our fel- 
 low-sinners, it seems to us, there could be no disclosures, 
 such as the Bible predicts. Man then, in that gathering, 
 will not only know himself, and know his God, but he will 
 know his race. And this, to the sinner, will add inconceiva- 
 bly to the terrors of that assembling. The ungodly will 
 meet there the righteous, who warned him in vain, and all 
 whose warnings are about to be verified. Long forgotten 
 emotions, and privileges undervalued and misiniproved, will 
 flash upon the memory, as the eye glances on the face of 
 some dead friend, with whom those feelings and opportunities 
 were associated. The unconverted child of the Sabbath 
 schools shall face his faithful teacher ; and parents and chil- 
 dren, pastors and people, all the connections which death 
 had for a time sundered, shall there recognize each other. 
 It will be to some a fearful meeting, as they encounter there 
 for the first time those whose deaih they had occasioned. 
 The murderer will confront his victim. Cain and Abel, who 
 have been, perhaps, parted from each other since the hour 
 when the fratricide fled from the scene of his crime, and the 
 body of his brother lay breathless in the dust, will now meet 
 again. The body which sunk beneath that murderous blow, 
 dealt by a brother's hand, and the hand which inflicted that 
 blow, will be there, gathered again from the indiscriminate 
 dust over which the world has trodden for scores of centuries. 
 But if it be fearful to meet, thus, any on whom we may have 
 brought temporal death, how much more may the scene be 
 dreaded, by those who have occasioned the spiritual death of 
 others, as the scene of their meeting with the proselytes and 
 admirers, whose souls they aided in ruining for ever. It will 
 be sad for (Jaiaphas to meet the innocent Messiah whom he 
 adjudged to death, though it was but the death of the body ; 
 but it would seem almost equally sad for the Jewish High 
 Priest to face there his kindred and friends, whose unbelief 
 his arguments sealed, and whose impenitence his example 
 served to render obdurate and final, for upon them he will 
 have brought the death of the soul. The meetings of the 
 resurrection will form, then, no small portion of its terrors. 
 This is the truth, upon which we would chiefly insist, from 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DFAP. 301 
 
 the part of Scripture now before us. We have considered, 
 generally, the resurrection of the dead. Let us proceed next 
 to consider the dead of the sea, who are in our text distin- 
 guished from the rest of the dead ; and thence let us pass to 
 the effects of their re-union with the rest of mankind, who 
 ended their mortal career elsewhere than on the deep. Our 
 remaining divisions will be, therefore, 
 
 II, The sea giving up its dead. 
 
 III. The meeting of the dead, so given up of the sea, 
 with the dead of the land. 
 
 II. The sea will be found thickly peojded with the mortal 
 remains of mankind. In the earlier ages of the world, when 
 the relations of the various nations to each other were gene- 
 rally those of bitter hostility, and the ties of a common bro- 
 therhood were little felt, the sea, in consequence of their 
 comparative ignorance of navigation, served as a barrier, 
 parting the tribes of opposite shores, who might else have 
 met only for mutual slaughter, ending in extermination. Now 
 that a more peaceful spirit prevails, the sea, which once serv- 
 ed to preserve, by dividing tlie nations, has, in the progress 
 of art and discovery, become the channel of easier intercourse 
 and the medium of uniting the nations. It is the great high- 
 way of traffic, a highway on which the builder cannot en- 
 croach, and no monarch possesses the power of closing the 
 path, or engrossing the travel. Thus continually traversed, 
 the ocean has become, to many of its adventurous voyagers, 
 the place of burial. But it has been also the scene of battle, 
 as well as the highway of commerce. Upon it have been 
 decided many of those conflicts whicli determined the dynasty 
 or the race, to whom for a time should be committed the 
 empire of the world. It was on the sea, in the fight of Sala- 
 mis, that the fleets of Greece and Persia contended, whether 
 the despotism and wealth of the East should extend their 
 widening sway over the freedom and arts of the West. It 
 was in the sea-fight of Actium, that the imperial power of 
 Rome, then claiming dominion over the world, was assured 
 to Augustus and his successors, and the way was prepared 
 for the universal peace that reigned at our Saviour's birtli. 
 On this element was fought the battle of Lcpanlo, where the 
 right arm of the Ottoman was broken. And, as we come down 
 to our own times, the fights of Aboukir, Trafalgar, and Na- 
 varino, all contests upon the sea, were battles aUVcting in no 
 slight degree the destinies of all Europe, and the civilized 
 
302 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 world. All these have served to gorge the deep with the 
 carcases of men. It has had, again, its shipwrecks. Though 
 man may talk of his power to bridle the elements, and of the 
 triumphs of art, compelling all nature to do his work, yet 
 there are scenes on the sea in which he feels his proper 
 impotence. And when God lets loose his winds, and calls 
 up his billows, man becomes sensible of his dependence. 
 How many in all ages, since commerce lirst began her voy- 
 ages of profit or discovery, have perished in the waters, 
 foundering in the midnight storm, driven on the unsuspected 
 rocks, engulfed by the whirlpool, or dashed by winds 
 against some iron-bound coast. Even in our own times, 
 with all our improvements in the art of navigation, and with 
 all the expenditures that are incurred to increase the mariner's 
 security, it has been calculated by some, that each year one 
 thousand ships are lost at sea. 
 
 The sea, then, has its dead. And when the trump is blown, 
 the archangel's summons to the judgment, the sea shall 
 give up these its long-buried treasures. The gold and the 
 jewels it has accumulated, the "buried argosies," with all 
 the rich freight which it has swallowed up, will be permitted 
 to slumber unreclaimed; but no relic that has formed part 
 of the corpse of a child of Adam will be left unclaimed or 
 unsurrendered in that hour. The invalid, who, in quest of 
 health, embarked on the sea, and perished on the voyage, 
 committed to the deep with the solemn ceremonies of reli- 
 gion — the pirate, flung into the waves from a deck which 
 he had made slippery with blood — the emigrant's child, 
 whose corpse its weeping parents surrendered to the deep on 
 their way to a land of strangers — the whaler, going down 
 quick into death midst his adventurous employment — the 
 wretched slave, perishing amid the horrors of the Middle 
 Passage — the sailor, dropt from the yard-arm in some mid- 
 night gale — the wrecked, and the dead in battle, all will arise 
 at that summons. The mariners of all times, who have died 
 on their loved element, those who rowed on the galleys of 
 Tyre or Carthage, or manned the swift ships of Tarshish, 
 will be there, together with the dead of our own days. The 
 idolater, who sunk from some Chinese junk while invoking 
 his graven images; and the missionary of the cross, who, 
 like Coke, perished on his way to preach the gospel to the 
 heathen, or who, like Chamberlain, compelled to return from 
 the field of missionary toil, with shattered health, and all 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 303 
 
 wearied and spent with labors for Christ, has expired on his 
 homeward way — all, all shall be there. As these shall re- 
 appear from the entombing waters, will their coming have 
 no eH'ect upon the multitudes who died on the shore, and 
 whose bodies also the cemeteries and sepidchres of earth 
 shall on that day have restored ? We have thus reached the 
 last division of our subject. 
 
 III. The meeting of the dead of the sea with the dead of 
 the land. 
 
 1. There must be, then, in this resurrection from the sea, 
 much to awaken feeling in the others of the risen dead, from 
 this, if from no other cause: these, the dead of the sea, will 
 be the kindred and near connections of those who died upon 
 the land. Among those whom the waters shall in that day 
 have restored, will be some who quitted home expectinsr a 
 speedy return, and for whose coming attached kindred and 
 friends looked long, but looked in vain. The exact mode, 
 and scene, and hour of their deaths have remained until that 
 day unknown to the rest of mankind. And can it be, with- 
 out feeling, that these will be seen again by those who loved 
 them, and who through weary years longed for their return, 
 still feeding " the hope that keeps alive despair?" The dead 
 of ocean will be the children and pupils, again, of the dead 
 of the land. Their moral character may have been formed, 
 and their eternal interests affected, less by their later asso- 
 ciates on the deep, than by the earlier instructions they 
 received on shore. They may have exhibited on the deck 
 and in the forecastle only the examples they witnessed in 
 the nursery, and the tempers they cherished, and the habits 
 they formed in the home. When these are restored, they 
 are restored to witness for or against their parents, and the 
 associates of their childhood and youth. These last may 
 have died on shore, but by their influence on the mariner, 
 they have transmitted their own spirit and moral character 
 over the wide waste of w^aters, to remote and barbarous 
 shores. It cannot, in the very nature of the human soul, its 
 memory, its affections, and its conscience remaininir what 
 they now are — it cannot but be a scene of solenni interest, 
 when the dead of the land shall behold their kindred dead of 
 the sea, 
 
 2, Let it be remembered, again, that a very large propor- 
 tion of those who have thus perished on the ocean, wdl 
 appear to have perished in the service of the landsman. 
 
304 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 The mariner will appear very generally, we say, to have 
 found his watery grave while in the service of those dwelling 
 upon shore. Some in voyages of discovery, despatched on 
 a mission to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, or to 
 discover new routes for commercial enterprise, and new 
 marts for traffic. Thus perished the French navigator La 
 Peyrouse, whose fate was to the men of the last generation 
 so long the occasion of anxious speculation. Still greater 
 numbers have perished in the service of commerce. The 
 looms and forges of Britain could not continue to work, and 
 famine would stalk through her cities, did not her ships bear 
 abroad the manufactures of her artisans to every clime. It 
 is to the sailor we owe it that the cottons of Manchester, and 
 the cutlery of Birmingham reach even the wigwams of our 
 western Indians. Literature employs and needs the seaman, 
 and the scholar beyond the AUeghanies studies books that 
 were purchased for him in the book-fairs of Germany, and 
 brought across the sea by the adventurous mariner. And 
 look to the home, and see how many of its delicacies, and 
 luxuries, and adornments arc brought to us from abroad by the 
 sailor's skill and enterj)rise. And our agriculture needs his 
 aid. The grains of the North, and the cotton of the South 
 would find little vent, were not the swift ships ready to bear 
 them to a market. They have served the church also. By 
 them the Pilgrim Fathers reached a refuge on these shores, 
 and found a home. By them the missionary has been wafted 
 to his station in the heathen world. As a people we are 
 under special obligations to the art and enterprise of the 
 navigator. We are a nation of emigrants. The land we 
 occupy was discovered and colonised by the aid of the mari- 
 ner. The seaman has, then, been employed in our service. 
 And as far as he was our servant, doing our work, we were 
 bound to care for his well-being; and if he perished in our 
 service, it was surely our duty to inquire whether he perish- 
 ed in any degree by our fault. The ten commandments 
 describe the duties of the employer as well as those of the 
 parent. Care for the servant as well as the child was one of 
 the lessons of Sinai. And though literally the servant named 
 in the Decalogue might be only the servant of the household, 
 not he who does service for us at a distance; yet the spirit 
 of these commandments is not to be confined by so close and 
 literal an interpretation. When our Saviour was asked, 
 "Who is my neighbor ?" he pointed the inquirer to tlie 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 305 
 
 remote and alien Samaritan. All whom we can roach, and 
 all whom we use in service, mediate or immediate, we should 
 seek to benefit, as far as our power and influence extend. 
 
 3. Others of those buried in the waters have lost their lives 
 in defence of those upon the shore. In the last of our wars 
 with the mother country, the navy was regarded as the right 
 arm of our defence, under God, from the foreign foe. And 
 
 #0 it has been with other lands. Their possessions, their 
 liberties, their families and homes, have been protected by 
 the deaths of those whom they have never known, but who 
 expired, fighting their battles, leagues away, on the deep sea. 
 Are no obligations imposed on us, in behalf of those who 
 have thus befriended us, and in behalf of their successors and 
 associates? Can a nation claim the praise of common hones- 
 ty or gratitude, who neglect the moral and spiritual interests 
 of these their defenders? 
 
 4. Let us reflect, also, on the fact, that many of those who 
 'have perished on the waters will be found to have perished 
 through the neglect of those living on shore. We allude 
 not merely to negligence in providing the necessary helps 
 for the navigator. The Government, that should leave the 
 shoals and reefs in its harbors unmarked by buoys, and that, 
 along a line of frequented but dangerous sea-coast, should 
 rear no light-houses, would be held guilty of the death of all 
 shipwrecked in consequence. But may there not be other 
 classes of neglect equally or yet more fatal? The i)arent 
 who has neglected to govern and instruct his child, until that 
 child, impatient of all restraint, rushes away to the sea as a 
 last refuge, and there sinks, a victim to the sailor's sulTerings 
 or the sailor's vices, can scarce meet, with composure, that 
 child in the day when the sea gives up its dead. Or if, as a 
 community, or as churches, we shut our eyes to the miseries 
 of the sick and friendless seaman, or to the vices and oppres- 
 sions by which he is often ruined for time and eternity, shall 
 we be clear in the day when incpiisition is made for blood? 
 No, unless the church'does her full duly, or in other words, 
 reaches in her eff'orts the measure of her full ability, for the 
 spiritual benefit of the seaman, her neglect must be chiirge- 
 able upon her. Now, in the Saviour's description of the 
 condemnation of sinners at the last day, it will be observed, 
 that he selects instances, not of sins of commission, but ol 
 sins of omission, as destroying the world. " In as much as 
 ye did it notr is the ground of the doom pronounced. 
 
 40 
 
306 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 May not the perishing sailor take up most of the items of 
 that sentence, and charge them home upon many of the 
 professed disciples of Christ? Neither by influence, nor 
 prayers, nor alms, did they relieve his temporal and spiritual 
 destitution, when hungry, or thirsty, or sick, or naked, or 
 in prison. And far as this neglect operated to form the 
 habits that hastened his death, and led, perhaps, to his eter- 
 nal ruin, so far it cannot be desirable to think of meeting 
 him again, among those who shall rise in the last day from 
 the ocean depths, to stand with us before the judgment seat. 
 5. Many, we remark lastly, of the dead of the sea will be 
 found to have been victims to the sins of those upon shore. 
 Those who have perished in unjust wars waged upon that 
 element, will they have no quarrel of blood against the 
 rulers that sent them forth ? The statesmen, the blunders 
 or the crimes of whose policy the waters have long con- 
 cealed, must one day face those who have been slaugTitered 
 by their recklessness. How many of the victims over whom 
 the dark blue sea rolls its waters, have perished, year by 
 year, in the nefarious slave trade. Such is the large propor- 
 tion of the miserable children of Africa who die on the voy- 
 age, that, along the ordinary course of the slave ship from 
 the eastern shores of Africa to our own continent, the deep 
 must be strewn, and the bottom of the sea, at some portions 
 of the way, paved with the remains of those who have been 
 torn from their country and home, by the orders or conni- 
 vance of the slave-trader, to perish on the ocean. In the 
 day of the resurrection that galaxy of skeletons will rise ; 
 and the voice of wailing and accusation, stilled for centuries 
 beneath the waters, will be lifted up to be stilled no more 
 for ever. And so it may be said of every other form of wick- 
 edness, of w^hich those that sail in our sliips are rendered the 
 instruments or the victims. The keeper of the dram shop, 
 or the brothel, where the sailor is taught to forget God and 
 harden himself in iniquity, will not lind it a light thing, in 
 that great day of retribution, to encounter those whom he 
 made his prey. The seaman may not have died on the pre- 
 mises of his tempter, in drunken riot; but out upon the far 
 ocean he may have carried the habits there acquired, and 
 died, the victim of intemperance, or profligacy, in a climate 
 far removed from that where he was first lessoned in the 
 ways of ruin, sinking perhaps in a shipwreck, caused, as many 
 shipwrecks have been caused, by the intoxication of the 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 307 
 
 commander or his crew. But the sea does not contain all 
 the victims among its sons, who have thus been destroyed 
 by the vices learned of the landsman. Many a sailor thus 
 corrupted has perished on shore in a drunken broil, or pined 
 away in some foreign hospital, or ended his days in a prison. 
 Human laws seized not on those who first ensnared him ; 
 but will divine laws be equally indulgent, or equally remiss ? 
 The literature of the shore will be called to account for its 
 influence on the character and well-being of the seaman. 
 The song writer, who, perhaps, a hungry and unprincipled 
 scribbler, penned his doggrel lines in some garret, little careful 
 except as to the compensation he should earn, the dirty 
 pence that were to pay for his rhymes, will one day be made 
 to answer for the influence that went forth from him to those 
 who shouted his verses, in the night watch, on the far sea, 
 or perchance upon some heathen shore. The infidel, who 
 may have sat in elegant and lettered ease, preparing his 
 attacks upon the Bible and the Saviour, thought little, proba- 
 bly, but of the fame and influence he should win upon the shore. 
 But the seeds of death which he scattered may have been 
 wafted whither he never thought to trace them. And in 
 that day of retribution, he may be made to lament his own 
 influence on the rude seaman whom he has hardened in blas- 
 phemy and impiety; and who has sported with objections 
 derived by him at the second hand or third hand from such 
 writers, whilst he figured amongst his illiterate and admiring 
 companions, as the tarred Voltaire or Paine of the forecastle 
 and the round top, the merriest and boldest scofl'er of the 
 crew. 
 
 The meeting, then, of the dead of the land with the dead 
 of the sea will be one of dread solemnity, because of the ties 
 of kindred and influence that bound them together — and 
 because multitudes of those buried in the deep died in the 
 service of the landsman, or in his defence, many by his ne- 
 glect, and many as the victims of the varied wickedness in 
 which he had instructed, hardened, or employed them. 
 Those who have been allied in sin, and accomplices in trans- 
 gression, will find it one of the elements of their future 
 torment, to be associated together in the scenes of the last 
 judgment, and in those scenes which lie beyond that day. 
 The animosity, revenge, and hate of the unregenerate heart, 
 then released from all restraint, and exasperated by despair, 
 
308 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 will find vent, and rage uncontrolled through the sinner's 
 ]i)ng eternity of wo. 
 
 In conclusion, let us dwell on some of the practical results 
 of the theme we have considered. 
 
 1. The dead shall rise, all shall rise, and together. From 
 the land and from the sea, wherever the hand of violence, 
 or the rage of the elements have scattered human dust, shall 
 it be reclaimed. And we rise to give account. We rise to 
 be judged. If, my hearers, we would anticipate that judg- 
 ment, we might, as the apostle assures us, escape it, "for if 
 we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged."* If, 
 feeling our sins, we do, as penitents, confess and forsake 
 them, and flee to Christ and implore the Spirit, the dawn of 
 that day will bring to us no terrors, and the sound of that 
 trump be the welcome summons to a higher degree of 
 blessedness. Cleansed in the Saviour's blood, renewed by 
 the Spirit, and arrayed in the righteousness of Christ, we 
 may in that day stand accepted, confident, and fearless. But, 
 out of Christ, judgment will be damnation. 
 
 2. If the re-appearance from the seas of the sinner, who 
 perished in his sins, be a thought full of terror; is there not, 
 on the other hand, joy in the anticipation of greeting those 
 who have fallen asleep in Christ, but whose bones found no 
 rest beneath the clods of the valley, and whose remains hav^e 
 been reserved under the waters until that day, while, over 
 their undistinguished resting-place, old ocean with all its 
 billows has for centuries pealed its stormy anthem? Then 
 to see them freed from decay, and restored to the friends in 
 Christ who had loved and bewailed them — this will be joy. 
 Ensure, Christian parent, the conversion of your sea-faring 
 child, and then, whatever may betide him, it shall be well. 
 His body may rest as safely amid coral and sea-weed as in 
 the church-yard; and his soul fly as swiftly to the bosom of 
 Christ from the midst of engulfing waters, as from a death- 
 bed, attended by all the watchfulness and all the sympathy 
 of weeping friends. 
 
 3. This community especially owes a debt to that class of 
 men, who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in 
 the great waters. The providence of God seems to indicate 
 that our city is yet to become the Tyre of this western world. 
 Some have estimated the seamen who yearly visit our port 
 
 * 1 Cor. xi. 31. 
 
THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 309 
 
 at more than seventy tliousand, and suj)pose the average 
 number constantly in our harbor to be from three to five 
 thousand. Contributing as they do to tlie comforts and pros- 
 perity of every home, and guarding, as in time of war they 
 do, this commercial metropolis, do they not demand and 
 deserve a still increasing share in our sympathies and aid I 
 
 4. It is, again, by no means the policy of the church to 
 overlook so influential a class, as is that of our sea-faring 
 brethren. They are in the path of our missionaries to the 
 heathen. If converted, they might be amongst their most 
 efficient coadjutors, as, whilst unconverted, they are among 
 the most embarrassing hindrances the missionary must en- 
 counter. They have, it should be also remembered, in their 
 keeping, the highways of the earth, along which travel its 
 literature, its commerce, and its freedom. What would be 
 thought of the statesmanship or patriotism of the man who, 
 in time of war, would propose surrendering to the enemy 
 all the roads and bridges of the land, in hopes of retaining 
 possession of the rest of the territory? The mere proposal 
 would be regarded as combining folly the most absurd, and 
 treason the most disastrous. Yet what else is the church 
 doing, if she relinquish the sea-faring class to the influence 
 of sin and to the will of the destroyer of souls ? She would 
 be proposing virtually a most ruinous truce with Satan, when 
 resigning these to his unresisted control, and ofiering to 
 abandon to his keeping the keepers of the highways of the 
 nations. 
 
 5. While humbled in the review of her past negligence, 
 and in the sense of present deficiencies, as to her labors for 
 the seaman, the church has yet cause for devout thankfulness 
 in the much that has recently been done for the souls of 
 those who go down to the sea in ships, and in the percei)tiblc 
 change that has already been wrought in the character of 
 this long-neglected class of our fellow-citizens and fellovv- 
 immortals. God has poured out his Spirit even on the inci- 
 pient and uncertain eflbrts of his people ; and from many a 
 cabin and forecastle the voice of prayer even now ascends, 
 and on many a deck the words of this salvation arc read. 
 " Let us not be weary in well-doing." 
 
 6. And now, lastly, we ask each of you : In that day, 
 when earth and sea shall meet heaven in the judgment, 
 where do you propose to stand ? Among the saved, or the 
 lost— the holv, or the sinful— at the right hand of the Judge. 
 
310 THE SEA GIVING UP ITS DEAD. 
 
 or at his left? Purposes of partial reformation or of future 
 repentance cannot save you. Christ is now waiting to be 
 gracious. He who will at last appear as the Judge, now 
 comes as the Redeemer. He is now an Advocate ; soon he 
 will be the Avenger. Heaven stoops to win you. Hell 
 rises to allure and destroy you. Oh, yield not to Satan. 
 Reject not Christ; for the Judge is at the door. And not 
 this soul only of yours, but this body also must live — must 
 live for ever ; and can you wish it to live in endless, hopeless 
 misery ? A throbbing brow, or an aching tooth, are now 
 sufficient to embitter all the enjoyments of life. What will 
 it be when the whole body is cast into torment? Can you 
 desire to meet your impenitent friends, to spend an eternity 
 together in growing hate and mutual recrimination — to face 
 your pious friends, a godly father, or a praying mother, and 
 catch your last glance of hope, your last sight of happiness, 
 as you see them mounting to glory, whilst you sink your- 
 selves into the sea of fire — the lake that burneth with fire 
 and brimstone for ever and ever ? 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY* 
 
 "Ok those eighteen, upon whom the tower op Siloam fell, and 
 
 BLEW them, think YE THAT THEY WERE SINNERS ABOVE ALL MEN THAT 
 
 DWELT IN Jerusalem 1 I tell you, Nay ; but, except ye repent ye 
 
 SHALL ALL LIKEWISE PERISH." Lulce XllL 4, 5. 
 
 It was one of the characteristic excellences which marked 
 the teachings of our Saviour, that he preached, in the high- 
 est and best sense of that phrase, to the times, and his minis- 
 try was thus a word in season. He addressed himself to 
 men's present duties, and their present sins and snares ; and 
 the passing events of the day, or the scenery of the spot 
 where he taught, furnished him with ready and apposite illus- 
 trations. The news of a cruel butchery, or a melancholy 
 calamity ; the tidings that told of the Galileans slaughtered 
 over their sacrifices ; or of the unhappy viciims in Siloam, 
 crushed by a falling tower — the news that for the time was 
 the burden of all tongues, and made all ears to tingle, was 
 seized by him as affording the occasion of riveting some keen 
 truth upon the memory and conscience of the multitude. 
 And thus it might be, and ought to be, with us. The jour- 
 nals of the day, too often taken up but in the gratification of 
 an idle curiosity, that seeks ever to learn and tell some new 
 thing, might preach to us of Providence and Eternity. We 
 might consult them to see, in the changes they record, how 
 God is governing his own world, with a care that never slum- 
 bers, and a wisdom that never falters. For all that occurs, 
 from the fall of a dying sparrow to the crash of an empire 
 overthrown, is but as He bids or permits it, who " doeth 
 
 * A Discourse, on occasion of the explosion in the U. S. ship of war, 
 Princeton, near Washington, on the 28th of February, 1S44, by which the 
 Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, vviih others, lost their 
 lives. Delivered before the Amity Street Baptist Church, Sabbath morning, 
 3d March, and before the Oliver Street Baptist Church, Sabbath evening, 
 10th March, 1844. 
 
312 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the 
 inhabitants of the earth."* 
 
 An event such as that upon which our Redeemer comment- 
 ed, has occurred amongst ourselves. In the metropolis of 
 our nation, the seat of our government, where so much of the 
 intellect of the nation is congregated, and whence so wide 
 an influence goes forth to the ends of our land, death has 
 made recently its fell inroads. The shadows of the sepulchre 
 have fallen, as in sudden and disastrous eclipse, upon the 
 high places of our republic. A new vessel of war, built 
 with lavish expenditure, in which science had shown her terri- 
 ble skill in inventing new engines of death of fearful potency, 
 had become to that city the theme of general curiosity and 
 admiration. Hundreds of guests thronged her decks. Some 
 of them were the young, the gay, and the fashionable ; others 
 were the aged, the experienced and the influential, citizens 
 distinguished by the station they occupied, or the talents they 
 had displayed. Little did that stately vessel, beneath a bril- 
 liant sky, in her holiday trim, and with her exulting company, 
 seem the fitting scene for auguries of disaster, or the intru- 
 sion of distress. Below, all was merriment and gaiety, 
 whilst the laugh, the jest, and the song, were intermingled 
 with their feastiiigs. The spot consecrated in the hearts of 
 this nation, as that of the abode and last resting-place of the 
 Father of his country, was near. The memory of the mighty 
 dead was not forgotten by the inmates of that vessel as she 
 floated along. But alas ! death was much nearer to that re- 
 joicing throng, than in the tomb where reposed the mortal 
 remains of Washington. " Couched in grim repose," the de- 
 stroyer had already marked fresh and nearer prey. Above, 
 on the deck of that majestic ship, preparations are made to 
 discharge anew the piece of ordnance already so famed for 
 its ilestructive power, but soon to obtain yet more disastrous 
 fame. Men eminent in station, acting some of them in the 
 cabinet of our Chief Magistrate, as his chosen advisers, and 
 one of their number but a i'ew days installed in his high trust, 
 had gathered around. The discharge took place. Amid the 
 smoke and din, shrieks were heard. When that smoke had 
 passed away, the newly invented engine of destruction was 
 seen itself a ruin, after having made that deck a scene of des- 
 olation and carnage. Two of the ministers of our govern- 
 
 * Daniel iv. 35. 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 313 
 
 wTfhVtt' ^^^fV''^'«^ State, and the Secretary of the Navv 
 
 b pat er"d 3 ck 1 f "^"t^'"; "■^'^^^' '"' "" ''^^ ^^ 
 Despattered deck disfigured and nuitihited, cither breathless 
 
 or gasping their last. How startling and hileou he contlrt 
 
 men separated ; the mangled, the dying and the dead wl... 
 were above it, and their nearest relatives,^heir dau'h r's a d 
 l.heirwives, who cheerful and unconscious, were o^'l e ed n 
 
 ing iealit> Those thus suddenly deprived of friends h,d 
 discerned, in the shock of the dischafge, no unwonted d 
 foreboding sounds, nor ,lid they dream of the irreparable he- 
 reavement that one brief moment had brought upin it win's 
 
 th 1 rj- '"^ r' t"" T'' ''" ""^^"'^'^ ^^ =- altached Wfe 
 hat had gone forth in the morning radiant in happiness and 
 hope, but who was now to return at evening to a desolate 
 homeandan orphan charge, a new-made widow, meeting her 
 fatherless babes with the cry of Naomi in her heart: "Call 
 me Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me 
 for I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again 
 empty ;' of daughters held back by friendly violence, from 
 the sight of a father's mangled remains-of children left in 
 an instant fatherless, and of friends who had gone forth to 
 begin together a day of rejoicing, but its eveniuir closed oa 
 the survivor mournfully bringing back his dead. The station 
 ot several of the victims, the presence of their dearest kin- 
 dred and the festive occasion that had assembled them all 
 heightened the horror of the scene. In the tumultuous and 
 irrepressible distress of the hour, the mercy might perhaps 
 be forgotten that was yet intermingled with the calamity— 
 the guardian care that had given to the multitude endaiurcred 
 so narrow an escape. For the time, dismay, amazemen't and 
 horror, filled all hearts. Yet, as it is now easy to see, mercy 
 had watched even over that scene of carnage, and lightened 
 the weight of the infliction, or how easily might a far more 
 sweeping desolation have occurred; and of the hundreds 
 there embarked, but a few frenzied survivors only might 
 have escaped the general wreck, each ready in his distractTon 
 to deem himself alone in his deliverance, and each eager to 
 say in the language of those messengers who came" with 
 heavy tidings to the patriarch : " I only am escaped alone to 
 tell thee." 
 
 " Hear ye the rod," cried the prophet, " and who hath 
 41 
 
314 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 appointed it." Such is the command o[ our God, by his serv- 
 ant Micah, to the community thus suddenly and sorely visited. 
 Does calamity befall us, it is not voiceless. It was no blind 
 chance that launched the bolt. Trouble springs not out of 
 the dust, nor is it dumb. The Scriptures give speech and 
 articulate utterance as it were, to each such bereavement ; 
 and, as the tomb opens to receive its new tenants, a still, 
 small voice is heard issuing from its dim chambers, a voice 
 of remonstrance and warning, of tender expostulation and 
 compassionate entreaty. And as our text shows us, we have 
 not only the warrant of our Saviour's example, for making 
 such seasons the occasion of religious instruction ; but we 
 have here, in the records of the evangelist, the exact lessons 
 which such scenes of sudden and public calamity were intend- 
 ed to illustrate and to enforce. May His Spirit enable us 
 rightly to read, and honestly to apply them. 
 
 Some of the judgments of the Divine Providence need no 
 interpreter. Sorrow and guilt are, in the natural workings 
 of man's conscience, and in the general estimate of mankind, 
 closely conjoined. And there are times, as when a Nadab 
 perishes before the altar he has desecrated, or an Uzzah is 
 blasted beside the ark — as when the storm of fire comes 
 down upon the cities of the plain, or the ark of Noah rides 
 on the whelming waters past the hapless and despairing sin- 
 ners who had derided his warnings — when God's judgments 
 follow so closely man's transgressions, that he who runs 
 may read the purport of the visitation, and see in the pecu- 
 liar guilt of the sufferers, the reason of their peculiar fate. 
 But it is not always so. Men are, in our days, as in the 
 times of the Saviour they were, prone, on hearing of some 
 strange and sudden calamity, to indulge themselves in rash 
 and uncharitable judgments. They think of the suffer- 
 ers as more careless or more criminal than others, and sup- 
 pose them to have become thus the victims of an avenging 
 Providence. Judging of character as the mass of mankind 
 do, merely from the success which attends it, attributing 
 excellence when they see prosperity, and imputing guilt or 
 weakness where they discover the presence of adversity, they 
 adopt the rule on which Job's friends so tenaciously and 
 cruelly insisted, that calamity is proof of crime ; a rule that, 
 in the use of it by those misguided patriarchs, God so signally 
 disavowed and rebuked. It was on this same false principle 
 that the Saviour himself was judged by his own countrymen 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 315 
 
 and cotemporaries, " We," said the prophet, speaking by 
 anticipation in the name of his people— *' we did esteem^'hirn 
 stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. " And was he not 
 heavily afflicted, stricken most sorely, and was it not God 
 that smote and bruised him ? It was 'indeed so ; but not, as 
 they supposed, for the peculiar sins of the sufferer himself. 
 "The Man of Sorrows," on whom all griefs centered, was 
 yet "holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners." 
 In our text, the Redeemer, as he speaks of the slauffhtered 
 Galileans, and of the falling tower, rebukes this spirit of rash 
 judgment. He does not deny, indeed, that sin was found 
 in Pilate's victims, and in those who died at Siloam : but he 
 asks ; " Were they sinners more than others ? Were they 
 more deserving this fate than yourselves ? Except ye repent, 
 ye shall all likewise perish.'' The connection which the mind 
 of man traces, instinctively as it were, between sin and suf- 
 fering, is not to be made to concentrate upon the individual, 
 but rather to rebound back on the conscience of the race ; 
 not to rest on the head of the stranger who perishes, but 
 rather on the heart of the survivor who witnesses it, and who, 
 were God but strict in the immediate exaction of punish- 
 ment, deserves to share the ruin which he has but beheld. 
 
 We cannot, then, misinterpret Providence, when we have 
 thus the comments of the Lord himself, who wields the scep- 
 tre of the universe. It is the Legislator of the world, sitting 
 to interpret his own statutes, and to expound the reasons of 
 his own procedure. He leaches us, that the fate of one is 
 the desert of all ; that as sinners we all merit a sudden and 
 violent end, and that except we repent, we ultimately and 
 universally perish. These are humbling truths, it must be 
 confessed, but they are salutary. Let us ponder them, in the 
 order in which our Saviour's language presents them. 
 
 I. All of us are sinners. 
 
 Christ's hearers were such as well as the Galileans, the 
 survivors as well as the sufferers, and we as well as those 
 whose death we deplore, 
 
 II. All of us are liable to sudden death. 
 
 III. Death to the impenitent sinner is destruction. 
 
 IV. Repentance is our only safeguard from eventual ruin. 
 I. We are all sinners. ♦' Think ije they were si/ifu-rs above 
 
 all men ? I tell you. Nay : but except ye repent, ye shall all 
 likewise perish." 
 
 The fact of man's sinfulness is one scarce needing to be 
 
316 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 argued. The conscience of the world and the history of the 
 world, are here in accord with the Scriptures of the world's 
 Maker and Judge. Our own observation and the experience 
 of those around us, who have been most and longest conver- 
 sant with Human Nature, and our complaints against our 
 fellow-men, attest the melancholy truth which Scripture ut- 
 ters in no dubious terms. When God looked down from 
 heaven to behold the children of men, he saw " none good, 
 no, not one." We are each, by nature, the children of wrath, 
 even as others. We may dispute the statement as to our- 
 selves, and a few select favorites, but we are generally prone 
 not only to admit but to assert it of the mass of society. 
 Our complaints of governments and whole classes of society 
 and entire nations, show that we do not deem the multitude 
 of mankind faultless. What page of the world's history is 
 not blotted with tears and stained with blood — tears which 
 man's misconduct has wrung from the eyes of suffering 
 weakness — blood which man's violence has shed? But we 
 need not go to men's vices to prove their sinfulness ; it is 
 proved too sufficiently by their very virtues. For what vir- 
 tue save that exhibited in the one character of Christ, is per- 
 fect, symmetrical, stainless? The confessions of men, like 
 Daniel, the man greatly beloved of heaven, under the old 
 dispensation, and the defects of John, the beloved disciple 
 of Christ under the new dispensation, are decisive as to the 
 defective and imperfect character of man on the earth. And 
 if not sinners, what need, again, had the race of a Redeem- 
 er 1 By the heights of glory from which the Ransomer 
 needed to plunge when he rescued us, I may gauge the 
 depths of debasement and guilt into which the ransomed had 
 sunk ; and the moral demerit of the first Adam may be in- 
 ferred from the tremendous sacrifice, and the infinite dignity 
 demanded in the second Adam, who came to deliver and to 
 save him. Let us remember our sinfulness, that we may know 
 our true position before the Holy Ruler of the universe. 
 We are not the innocent beings which He at first made us. 
 We were formed upright, but we have " sought out many 
 inventions," and perverse and rebellious inventions they 
 have been. The guilt is our own, an invention of mankind. 
 Hence it is, and not by any original perversion in our crea- 
 tion, that sorrow and anguish have entered our world, and 
 become the heritage of our race. Bereavement and death 
 are strangers, who have intruded into God's happy universe, 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 317 
 
 and for whose admission into our own world, our own hands 
 have torn a pathway. The very presence of death is evi- 
 dence of sin. " Death" entered '" by sin, and so death passed 
 u{)on all men for that all men have sinned."* And when 
 we view its ravages in those we love, or but read its record 
 in the obituary or up(m the gravestone, we are admonished 
 afresh of that truth uttered beside the cross of the worlil's 
 Redeemer. The lips of the dying thief then, at least, spoke 
 truly, and what he said to an expiring companion, belongs 
 as justly to each one of our dying race, "Thou art in the 
 same condemnation." Afflictions and bereavements, the 
 removal of our friends, the calamities witnessed in the hi<rh 
 places of our land, are proofs of imr common sinfulness. 
 
 But though afflictions prove our common, sinfulness, they 
 afford in this world no test as to our comparative sinfulness. 
 The man less afflicted here on earth is not therefore more 
 holy than his neighbor who is more afflicted. The towers 
 of Siloam fell, while turrets in more guilty districts of .Jeru- 
 salem stood immovable. The hapless Galilean mingled his 
 blood with his sacrifices at the altar, while the more guilty 
 Caiaphas was permitted to wear undisturbed his pontifical 
 tiara, and the wretched Judas yet possessed, in comparative 
 security, the dignity and privileges of the Apostleship. But 
 the death of the poor peasants from the shores of (lennesa- 
 reth, on the one hand, and the lengthened life of the high 
 priest, and of the false apostle, on the other hand, were no 
 proofs that the earliest victims were the chiefest sinners. 
 Pilate, who had commanded the massacre, was doubtless, 
 in the sight of God, although still surviving, a greater of- 
 fender than those men whom he had butchered. When our 
 Heavenly Father singles out a man, as the subject of an 
 afflictive dispensation, it is no proof that he is peculiarly 
 guilty above all his fellows. 
 
 Again, when God sends a sweeping visitation on a people, 
 he often involves the righteous and the wicked in an indis- 
 criminate death. It is not, indeed, always so ; at times God 
 sees fit to make distinctions even in this life in behalf of his 
 servants that fear him. This it was for which Abraham 
 pleaded when tlie storm was gathering over the devoted 
 cities of the plain. " To slay the righteous with the wicked 
 — that be far from thee : shall not the Judge of all the earth 
 
318 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 do right?" This it was in which the Psalmist trusted, and 
 in which he exhorted others to trust. " A. thousand shall 
 fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand ; but it 
 shall not come nigh thee." And thus it was that the three 
 Hebrew children walked unharmed in the heart of that fur- 
 nace, whose tiery mouth destroyed others that came near 
 only to feed its flames. And thus it was that Daniel sat 
 unharmed amid lions who brake of his adversaries every 
 bone in their body ere they reached the bottom of the den. 
 God may specially preserve his servants from afflictions that 
 destroy others. He did it, perhaps, more under the Old 
 Testament dispensation than under the New, because the 
 earlier dispensation was especially one of temporal rewards 
 and deliverances, and of prompt punishments. But under 
 either economy, God often has seen fit to make the righteous 
 and the sinner fall indiscriminately in some common calam- 
 ity. It had been so in the days of Soh)mon, and he observ- 
 ed it : " All things come alike to all. There is one event 
 to the righteous and to the wicked — to him that sacrificeth, 
 and to him that sacrificeth not."* He observed it, we say, 
 and not yet having reached the conclusion which he ulti- 
 mately attained, and with which he shuts up his book,t the 
 bringing of every work in eternity to a just judgment ; not 
 yet having found (for the book is a diary of doubts ending 
 in certainty, and inquiries that grope after and at last clutch 
 the truth) — not yet having gained the clue to the mystery, 
 and the solution of his ditficulties, a clue and solution which 
 he afterwards found in the retributions of the last judgment, 
 he for the time exclaimed, as he beheld the common fate of 
 the good and the bad : " This is an evil among all things 
 that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto 
 all. "I In days long preceding those of this wise monarch, 
 the same fact had been perceived and lamented. Job mourn- 
 fully exclaimed, that in times of sudden and general calam- 
 ity, the righteous perished with his ungodly neighbor. "If 
 the scourge slay suddenly, he (it) will laugh at the trial of 
 the innocent."^ In other words, when the instrument of 
 the divine vengeance is uplifted, be the rod what it may, it 
 makes a wide and fell swoop, and it scorns to linger that it 
 may draw distinctions between the innocent and the guilty. 
 The distinction is left to the eternal world. It is drawn 
 
 * Eccles. ix. 2. t Eccles. xii. 13, 14. t Eccles. ix. 3. § Job ix. 23. 
 
^ THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 3]9 
 
 sufficiently at the bur of Final JudirnKMit. " Then shall ye 
 return and discern between the righteous and the wicked ""• 
 For piety in the best is no safeguard from deatli, or from a 
 sudden, a violent, a painful, or a shameful end. 
 
 Often, in fact, the guilt of a sinful community may fall 
 most heavily on the heads of its most innocent 'menibers 
 When the righteous Josiah fell in battle with the kin-r of 
 Egypt, the sins of the guilty Jews lighted on the head of 
 their pious monarch. And so when Nabnth perished in the 
 days of Ahab, and Zachariah was stoned between the porch 
 and the altar, and James the Apostle was beheaded by 
 Herod to please the people of the Jews, each of the victims 
 was taken away, in fact, not so much because of his own 
 sins, as because of the sins of others who survived him. 
 "The righteous is taken from the evil to come." The 
 nation is left with an intercessor less to avert the coming 
 vengeance ; and often with one enormity more to swell their 
 coming account. One more twig is withdrawn from the 
 lessening dyke that as yet shuts out the rising ilood of wrath 
 and ruin from a guilty land. 
 
 A similarity of fate is then no proof of an equal sinfulness. 
 Go with me to the camp of Israel as they are entering the 
 Promised Land. A curse from God has' retarded the ad- 
 vance of their armies. They have selected one individual 
 as the cause of their disasters. And they are stoning him 
 in the valley of Achor. Let us go down some centuries 
 later in the stream" of their history. Accompany me again, 
 and without the walls of Jerusalem I show you a similar 
 victim enduring the like fate. But the resemblance in their 
 fate proves no similarity in their character; for the one of 
 these hapless sufferers is Achan, the troubler of Israel, and 
 the other is the righteous Stephen, who dies with his face 
 shining like that of an angel, blesses with parting breath his 
 ferocious murderers, and lifts heavenwards eyes that have 
 been already purged from earthly films, to discern the Son 
 of Man standing in glory and power at the right hand of the 
 Father, a Saviour waiting to welcome and to crown the pro- 
 tomartyr of his Church. The same disaster that sweeps one 
 soul away to the horrors of eternal despair, may waft an- 
 other to the endless harpings of heaven : and angels and de- 
 mons may hover over the same field of death, commissioned 
 
 * Malachi iii. 18. 
 
320 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 the one to bear their exulting charge to the Father's home, 
 the other to drag their despairing prey to the abodes of wail- 
 ing, to be plunged into the pit of unquenchable lire. 
 
 While death, then, proves us all sinful, the mode of our 
 death affords no standard of our relative sinfulness. The 
 murderer may, like the elder Herod, die on his pillow, while 
 tfie martyr of Christ expires on the rack. And the same 
 judgment which admits one of its victims to the rest of 
 Paradise, may consign another, who perished at his side, to 
 the flames of hell. 
 
 If any of my hearers are slow to allow their own sinful- 
 ness, slow to feel the justice of the Saviour's warning as to 
 their own case, and that, except they repent, they shall like- 
 wise perish, we would urge upon their consideration but 
 one more fiict as bearing on the question of their sinfulness. 
 Your dread of death, that instinctive horror of the grave 
 which all feel, what is it but an implied confession of un- 
 worthiness and want of moral fitness for the change dissolu- 
 tion brings? Man's fear of death is itself, we say, proof of 
 sin. For believing, as well nigh all of us do, that death will 
 bring us nearer to God, and place us more immediately than 
 before in his presence, we must also acknowledge that He 
 to whom death thus approximates us is the holiest, and best, 
 and happiest of beings. To enjoy the nearer society of such 
 a being, must then be increased felicity to all the good. If 
 we were really holy, would not the anticipation of such ad- 
 mission to the presence of God be the highest solace to be 
 found amid the cares and conflicts of life I Should we not 
 long for the day of our introduction to the presence-chamber 
 of the great King ; and, in the language of the poet of 
 Methodism, should we not "press to the issues of death?" 
 Should we not habitually, with Paul, long to depart? But 
 we do, in fact, dread death. And that we do thus shrink 
 from it, involving, as that event does, a nearer approach to 
 God, is in itself an impeachment of our moral character. 
 To have a dislike of God's society is in itself a sinful state 
 of feeling. It is a confession, on our part, of the want of 
 holiness, and of the requisite sympathy with pure and heav- 
 enly beings. This dread of death may be regarded as an 
 unconscious reminiscence of our old and original state of 
 sinlessness, and its forfeited privileges. Then the presence 
 of God, when he vrsited the garden of Eden, was the delight 
 and glory of our unfallen parents. But soon as they sinned 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 321 
 
 His presence became formidable. It was that of the rJptn.t 
 
 Tp rltrol-^r = ^'^•'■^''^•>' '"'^^^ from the^biatof r/es 
 too pure to look upon iniquity. Lot men talk as thov inav 
 
 of their own moral blamelessness before Go.l an of h'l 
 Tu^utTr':^' ^^^^'^'" general .Iread of e this n 
 exist in a sinless being. It is this sense of moral defect and 
 demerit that arms the destroyer with his terrors an that 
 points and envenoms the dart with which he thi^at is us 
 1 he sfm^ of death is sin. 
 
 one^'of^ir '^' ''""' "^ ''"' "'^"'"^"'^ ^'"^"l''^^^ ^^e pass to 
 one of Its consequences, our common liability to a death 
 that may be unexpected and violent. We are 'all liable to 
 sudden death "Except ye repent, ye shall all liknoile 
 perish. ' And this is the second division of our ivinarks 
 
 1 hat each of us is exposed to sudden death is a truth none 
 wdl dispute, yet, like other undeniable truths, it is not suf- 
 ficiently remembered. As death is the original penalty of 
 sin, and the first existence of sin in us incurred that dread 
 punishment, God has at any time, and however suddenlv, a 
 right to exact from us the penalty. And there is wisdom 
 and mercy in his making the execution sudden. It is the 
 more startling to others, our fellow-oircnders. The possi- 
 bility of It, and our apprehension of it, may restrain us from 
 many a sin into which we might else have rushed, had we 
 been assured of any long term of impunity, or any protract- 
 ed interval between our transgression and our removal. It 
 IS kind, we say, in our heavenly Father, by these sudden 
 deaths, to set up mementoes, as it were, of man's mortality, 
 m all our scenes of business and amusement; that we may 
 thus in no spot feel ourselves entitled to forget him ; and 
 that he may thus hedge up the way of the transgressor with 
 salutary terrors, by letting in upon every point the dread 
 light of eternity, and making each eminence along the path- 
 way command the prospect of an opening grave. ° 
 
 And in the accomplishment of that sentence of death 
 vvhicli man's sin has provoked, how various are the means 
 employed. Naught is so trivial but that God can make it 
 the executioner of his rengeance, be it the worm that smote 
 the pride of Herod, or the smooth pebble of the brook that 
 cleft the brow of GoHah. Naught is so vast and uiuvield\-, 
 but that it readily lends itself to accomplish suddenly man's 
 removal into eternity. The air, with all the winds and 
 
 42 
 
322 
 
 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 storms that store its arsenals, the waters, and the solid earth, 
 are ready to do his bidding, and avenge his quarrel with his 
 creature, man. The iirst deluge of water, and the last del- 
 uge of fire, either serves, at his pleasure, to purge his earth 
 of sinners. But, besides these more stately and solemn 
 messengers, how many less noticeaj^le emissaries has he at 
 his command. The starting of a horse, the obstructed valve 
 of an engine, a failing plank in the vessel's side, a sunken 
 rock no navigator has discovered and designated on no 
 chart, a misplaced step, a falling tile — all may be his effec- 
 tual messengers. And so in any scene, the ball-room, the 
 theatre, the warehouse, or the highway, as well as in the 
 home, we may be summoned. Death has all seasons and 
 all scenes for his own. Invited to a festive excursion, we 
 may, for aught that we know, be but decking ourselves as 
 smiling and garlanded victims for the place of sacrifice. 
 Such was the coming of the last messenger to those whose 
 death has cast a gloom over the face of our land. 
 
 Now, if death be ever terrible, he is especially so when 
 his coming is sudden. When, instead of making sickness 
 and slow decay his forerunners, he dispenses with these 
 harbingers and appears unannounced, his coming makes 
 many a stout heart quail. The thread we had looked to see 
 slowly attenuated and long drawn out, is snapped, as with a 
 stroke, rudely and for ever. Life, with its cares, and hopes, 
 and vanities, and eternity, with its tremendous retributions, 
 are brought into startling proximity, and seem the more 
 strongly contrasted. But chiefly is sudden death terrible, 
 because many, even of those habitually ready for another 
 world, feel as if they would wish some interval between the 
 secular business of this life and its close, some span, not only 
 to set their house in order, but to scrutinize their own hopes 
 for eternity, and fit the soul for its dread change as it hov- 
 ers on the verge of another world. But to the sinner how 
 awful is it to be cut off" from his cherished hope that he may 
 be allowed, before quitting earth, a brief preparation ! 
 This great work, which should be his first care, he, from a 
 desire of enjoying the w^orld, makes his last ; and defers to 
 the hurry, delirium, and feebleness of a death-bed the great 
 business of a life-time. To cut him off* suddenly is, then, to 
 deprive him of his favorite resort, and to flood, in stern ven- 
 geance, that refuge of lies in which he had proposed to take 
 a final shelter from the wrath of God, when he might no 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 323 
 
 longer enjoy his idols. He had purposed to give to tlie 
 ways of sin the strength of his faculties, and to pour on 
 God's altars the last pour dregs of the wine-cup of life : to 
 make youth, and health, and zeal, and influence, and energy 
 a burnt-offering to 8atan, and then to carry the poor offals 
 of the sacrifice, age, feebleness, and sickness, to Christ. An 
 unexpected death shuts him out from this refuge, where he 
 has risked and lost his all. 
 
 But there are those to whom death, and even sudden 
 death, is not terrible. Some, like the British Christian, 
 whose frequent prayer, answered as it was in the mode of 
 his removal, is inscribed on his tomb, have longed for an in- 
 stantaneous summons, and exclaimed, " Sudden death, sud- 
 den glory." To them the King of Terrors had lost his 
 ghastliness, and seemed, in their eyes, but the angel Death, 
 commissioned by the Father to release them from cares and 
 sins, enfranchise them from all the assaults of temptation, 
 and admit them, introduced by the hand of the Mediator, to 
 all the glories and all the joys of tlie beatitic vision. 
 
 It is not then the circumstances of our death, be it vio- 
 lent and disastrous, or otherwise — be it sudden or lingering, 
 that should be the chief question. It is rather the character 
 of the dying man, the moral image he carries into the world 
 of spirits. What are his relations to God ? Let me die the 
 death of the righteous, be it violent or peaceful, be it slow 
 decay or some sudden stroke, be it solitary or amid compan- 
 ions and friends, be it a rude and agonizing dislodgement of 
 the soul from the body, or a gentle and noiseless lapse, as 
 of one falling asleep in Christ. 
 
 III. For, and tliis is the third division of our remarks, 
 death to the sinner is destruction, and consequently sudden 
 death is, to such, but sudden damnation. This is implied in 
 the Saviour's language: " Ye shall all likewise perish.'" 
 
 Now, this could not mean the future destruction of the 
 Jewish people in the fall of Jerusalem, for many sinners 
 among his hearers died in their beds before the storm of 
 God's wrath burst in all its fierceness upon that guilty and 
 doomed city, and ere there were seen yet, even as specks in 
 the distant horizon, the Roman eagles gathering eagerly to 
 the prey. Nor could it be a violent death, by sword or fall- 
 ino- tower, like that of the Galileans or the people ol Siloam ; 
 for we cannot suppose, with any show of reason, that all the 
 enemies of Christ among the Jews, who did nut perish by 
 
324 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 the Roman war, died by some other painful end. Nor could 
 it be any mere death of the body that he intended, for he 
 speaks of it as something which repentance, and repentance 
 alone, could enable them to avoid. Now, from the death 
 of the body, repentance does not save the man. The peni- 
 tent must enter the shroud and the coffin as well as his un- 
 godly neighbor. But the evil from which repentance does 
 save us, is eternal destruction ; and this, therefore, our Sa- 
 viour intends when he uses the word '■'■perishing." It is 
 the eternal ruin that awaits the dying sinner. 
 
 Death, although often used but in that narrow sense, in- 
 cludes more than the corruption and decay of the body. 
 We are in arrears to a violated law. The dissolution of the 
 body is but the first instalment of our debt. Death is often 
 spoken of as the debt of nature. More justly it might be 
 termed the debt of sin ; for our nature, while sinless, as it 
 came from the Maker's plastic hand, was not mortal. The 
 destruction of the body, then, is but a partial satisfaction of 
 the debt which sin owes to the justice of God. And if you 
 observe the margin of our text, you will perceive that a 
 literal rendering of the word is : " Were they debtors more 
 than others ?" The diseases and pains, the decay and disso- 
 lution of the body, are but the earlier instalments of the vast 
 penalty. Behind it comes the loss of the soul when in the 
 resurrection the body has been revivified and re-united to 
 the soul, its old associate in sin, and both are cast into the 
 lake of fire. This is the second death, and with it eventu- 
 ally sinners " perish " by a ruin endless, remediless, and 
 hopeless. 
 
 The death of the body is but a transient act, the portal 
 through which we pass into the far eternity beyond. It 
 puts, indeed, an indelible imprint on a man's character. It 
 leaves the filthy eternally filthy, and the holy unalterably 
 holy ; stripping the one of all hope, as it exempts the other 
 from all fear of a change. It snaps for ever the bond that 
 binds the believer while on earth, to care, and temptation, 
 and conflict ; and it also sunders the ties of opportunity, 
 mercy, and hope, that surrounded and held up the unbe- 
 liever, while in this world of probation. Death is not, as 
 the journalist too often in the case of the suicide terms it, 
 "a termination of existence." This is phraseology said to 
 have come in upon us with the Atheism of the French 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 325 
 
 Revolution.* Man, at death, it may rather be said, but be- 
 gins to exist, in the highest sense of that word. lUs being 
 is developed, and he has higher powers, and wider know- 
 ledge, and keener feelings, when made a disembodied spirit. 
 And when scepticism would write, as did Revolutionary 
 France, over the gateway of the cemetery, the inscrijjtiun : 
 ^' Death is an eternal sleep," the saddened eye of faith reads, 
 in its stead, the more true but melancholy sentence over the 
 graves of those who have lived and died without liope and 
 without God in the world : " And I looked and beheld a pale 
 horse ; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell 
 followed with him.'''] On the dissolution of the body, fol- 
 lows, in the case of the ungodly. Hell with all its trooping 
 terrors, though its fulness of anguish and its last torments 
 may be reserved for the day of judgment. 
 
 How awful is the exchange which the sinner makes at 
 death! "In that very day his thoughts perish;" his vain 
 expectations of worldly enjoyments, of imjjunity in sin, and 
 of a final season and space for repentance ; his earthly plans ; 
 and all his rivalries, hopes and fears, which regarded exclu- 
 sively the life that then suddenly closed its gates on him and 
 closed them for ever. For his pleasures he has endless pain. 
 During life, nothing could utterly extinguish hope within 
 him ; now, during eternity, nothing can rekindle it. From 
 a world of religious privileges, and sacred times, and gra- 
 cious invitations, he goes to a world that has no Sabbaths, 
 no mercy-seat, no Advocate, no influences of the Spirit, not 
 a promise, not a hope. On making the sad exchange, how 
 must his forfeited and vanishing blessings brighten in his 
 view, as they take their everlasting flight. How strangely 
 contrasted, though drawn by the same hand, would be the 
 two pictures of this world drawn by the sinner's spirit, when 
 as yet without, and again when passed within, the veil that 
 hides the eternal world. While yet in the body, and on 
 this side the intervening barrier between the world of sense 
 and show, and the world of reality, sense and self were all ; 
 time was as eternity, and eternity was brief and valueless as 
 time. But now, entered on the further world, and when 
 both are known by experience, eternity appears in its true 
 infinitude, and time shrinks and dwindles into its proper 
 littleness. Now Heaven and Hell are no longer dreams, 
 
 * President Dwi^ht. t Rev. vi. 8. 
 
326 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY, 
 
 and Christ is recognized as really a Saviour, King, and God ; 
 but a God now alienated, a King defied and incensed, whose 
 power pervades all space and permits no escape, and a Sa- 
 viour whose favor is forfeited irrecoverably and for ever. 
 
 Well were it for us if we kept these consequences of death 
 more steadily before us. For this purpose, our Heavenly 
 Father makes the lessons of our mortality so frequent, im- 
 pressive, and various. The dead are quietly glancing upon 
 the student from the shelves of his library. History is but, 
 in a great measure, spoils won from the grave, or a compi- 
 lation of the epitaphs of those who have gone before us. 
 Nor is it literature only that is thus redolent of the tomb. 
 Each scene of retired and domestic life has its avenues of 
 memory and regret that lead back to the grave. Every 
 household has its seat by the table and the hearth now 
 vacant, where once was seen a face now hidden and buried 
 out of sight, and where once was heard a voice now stilled 
 in the silence of the sepulchre. Who may build himself a 
 mansion, however stored with all that can adorn or gladden 
 life, and say. Over this threshold the coffin shall not pass ? 
 The funeral hearse rolls on its way past the doors of the 
 ball-room and the theatre. In the pulpit and at the bar, in 
 the Senate chamber or on the main-deck, we see the place 
 of the departed, or the scene, it may even be, of their de- 
 parture. Thus " Wisdom crieth without ; she uttereth her 
 voice in the streets ; she crieth in the chief place of con- 
 course ;"* and death is made to unroll its solemn commis- 
 sion, and publish its stern testimony in our thronged thor- 
 oughfiires. Thus, in our own city, the most populous of 
 our grave-yards, with vegetation all rank, and a soil fattened 
 by the accumulated corpses of a century, draws its sad 
 length beside our most crowded street, as if it would throw 
 out a dyke to stem the torrent of frivolity and fashion, each 
 day rushing by ; and the field of death looks down from its 
 silent eminence, upon the long line of banking-houses, and 
 the street of our busiest trafficking, as if a skeleton hand 
 were beckoning from the spirit land to our merchant princes, 
 and bidding them witl- all their gettings to get wisdom, and 
 to consider their latter end that they may be really wise. 
 For death to be unprepared is the shipwreck of all hopes 
 
 * Prov. i. 20. 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 327 
 
 and the destruction of all happiness. But how shall we be 
 prepared ? 
 
 IV. And thus we reach our fourth and closing division. 
 Repentance is our only safeguard. " Except ye'repent, ye 
 shall all likewise perish." 
 
 To prepare for death, the world knows no fitter method 
 than to forget what cannot be evaded, and to drown all se- 
 rious reflection in the din of business and amid the tumult 
 of revelry. It is like bandaging the eyes to screen us from 
 an exploding battery. The less we reflect, the greater, in 
 fact, our danger of rushing blindfolded into ruin. It is such 
 preparation as Joab gave Amasa when he grai-ped his beard 
 as in friendly greeting, and asked of his health, whilst seek- 
 ing the fata] spot where a single stroke would be sure and 
 speedy death — a preparation it is that disarms, indeed, of 
 anxiety and suspicion, and relieves us of intrusive fears, but 
 that, at the same time, robs us of life and seals us to ruin. 
 Not such the method of Scripture. It may alarm, but it 
 alarms to save. It bids you prepare for death by retreating 
 for protection from the impending destruction to that im- 
 pregnable refuge, the Saviour's cross. There the penitent 
 finds balm for his wounds, pardon for his sins, and life, eter- 
 nal life, for his death. 
 
 For " the sting of death is sin." To remove sin is, there- 
 fore, the only mode of depriving the grave of its victory, and 
 rendering the King of Terrors not only harmless but benefi- 
 cent. How shall sin be removed but by renouncing it ; and 
 how can we renounce it but in Christ's strength ; or how 
 can our repentance be accepted but througli his intercession, 
 or our sins be forgiven but through his righteousness, or our 
 bodies, once consigned to the grave, be released from its 
 prison, but as his resurrection becomes the pledge of ours ? 
 A true repentance grasps the cross. 
 
 Death, then, preaches repentance. What John the Bap- 
 tist cried in the wilderness, and Jesus of Nazareth in the 
 streets of Jerusalem, this recent visitation of Divine Provi- 
 dence is proclaiming throughout our land, as from its high 
 places of dignity and influence : '• Repent ye. The axe is 
 laid at the root of the trees. Except ye repent, ye shall all 
 likewise perish." 
 
 Let the community repent, like Nineveh at the preaching 
 of Jonah, and she may escape sore and impending judg- 
 ments. What woes were those that overtook the Jewish 
 
328 THE LESSONS 6F CALAMITY. 
 
 people because they refused the command and repented not? 
 Let a nation be exalted and enriched, as is our own, with 
 physical and moral advantages, with all religious and civil 
 privileges, an impenitent and godless spirit is yet sufficient 
 to squander them all, and leave corruption, disunion, decay 
 and subjection, as her final heritage. Let her, on the other 
 hand, however afiiicted and debased, but repent ; and God 
 can restore her from the deepest degradation, exalt and bless 
 and establish her, till she that was servant of servants comes 
 to sit as a queen among the nations. 
 
 Let the individual sinner repent. It is, by the will and 
 the oath of God, his only hope of escaping the second death 
 and evading the horrible pit of hell, on whose verge his un- 
 happy step already wanders. It assures him of his ultimate 
 deliverance, not only from the fear of death, but from all 
 fears and all care, temptation and sin ; and it houses the 
 fugitive, at last, in the bosom of God. Does he ask : How 
 am I to repent? We answer: Not of some sins only, but 
 of all sins. Renounce your idols. Turn to Christ for par- 
 don. Resolve in his strength. Plead his merits and trust 
 his cross. In his name ask for light, and follow it when 
 given. And not only clasp but wear the cross, making it 
 your badge before the world, as well as your plea before 
 God ; and this done, the earth sinks subjected beneath your 
 feet, hell withdraws baffled of its aim and spoiled of its prey, 
 and Heaven comes nearer the nearer you draw to the inevi- 
 table tomb. 
 
 Are you a penitent? Then, however young and feeble 
 and obscure you may be, you are contributing to avert, as 
 the impenitent is contributing to attract, the clouds and the 
 resounding tempests of God's wrath. Are you careless? 
 Careless amid death and bereavement and danger? Careless 
 amid Sabbaths and Bibles and the Saviour's invitations, and 
 the Spirit's stirrings? Recollect that it is no vain word, no 
 braggart threat, but the stern law of the skies : " He, that 
 being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be 
 destroyed, and that without remedy." 
 
 Let the world tell you what it will of natural innocence, 
 and a morality of your own with which God cannot be 
 angry, remember the world is not the law-giver or the judge 
 in this matter. It must itself bide the law and face the 
 Judge. That law is : Turn or perish ; Repent and live. It 
 is the fiat of your Creator, Saviour and Judge. Repent, 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 329 
 
 then, we entreat you, and be saved ; foi- it is mercy that 
 calls, an infinite and divine forbearance that yet waits, and 
 Heaven itself stoops to allure, to welcome and to shelter 
 vou. 
 
 Thus have we reviewed the lessons of eternal truth our 
 Saviour has annexed to such dispensations of his Provi- 
 dence, as that which we are now rcmembcrinjr. We have 
 seen how each such calamity proclaims man's sinfulness, 
 reminds us of our common and continual exposure to an end 
 as sudden, bids us remember the destruction that waits on 
 the death of the impenitent, and commands us to exercise 
 that repentance which alone saves from Hell and fits for 
 death. Each such dispensation reveals to us, as by a sudden 
 flash, the benighted sea of life which we arc traversing, and 
 the dim shores of the eternity we are nearing. It comes 
 from God as on a mission to man, and while it recalls to him 
 his sin and his danger, it also announces his one hope and 
 salvation, and bids the penitent see in the cross and tomb of 
 his Redeemer the gates of Paradise opened anew on Calvary, 
 to a doomed and dying race ; while to the impenitent, it 
 tells of a death of despair, and shows below the yawning 
 tomb a lower depth and the lurid fires of its torments. It 
 compresses our business in one world, and our prospects 
 for the next, into three brief words : Repent or Perish. 
 
 In conclusion, we would remark : 
 
 1. First, on the si/is of the nation; for each such visita- 
 tion calls us to remember these. Have we not, in many 
 things, declined from the ways of our forefathers 1 Could 
 any candid and intelligent observer claim, for the mass of 
 the statesmen of this country in our times, the high charac- 
 ter for integrity and moral principle accorded to the fathers 
 of the Revolution? Virtue and talent there are ; but is the 
 average of right principle in our great political parties equal 
 to that displayed in the times of our forefathers ? In the 
 crowing rapacity and corruption of public servants ; in the 
 violence o.f party discord and" its venality ; and in the mad- 
 ness of passion seen disgracing even the halls of nalional 
 legislation by brawls ; are there auguries for good, as to the 
 destinies of the nation thus guided, and of the rising genera- 
 tion, thus to be trained and moulded? The desecration of 
 the Sabbath ; our national eagerness for gain— our growing 
 luxury— the character of our widely spread and clicapcr lit- 
 erature, much of the best of it frivolous, and much of it 
 
 43 
 
330 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 worse than frivolous, "sensual and devilish " — are not all 
 these causes for humiliation and alarm, and do they not 
 afford on such an occasion as this, materials for heart-search- 
 ing inquiry and profound and penitent meditation ? We 
 have, as a people, many and rich mercies, but they are re- 
 viewed with safety when regarded as heightening our re- 
 sponsibility, and, if neglected and perverted, as enhancing 
 the more the darkness of our guilt, and the severity of our 
 punishment. We are a young nation, and, to the community 
 as to the individual, youth is the season of ardor, hope, and 
 boastfulness. If there has been justice in the charge other 
 nations have made against us, that we are given to vaunting, 
 has not God, in the disaster with which he has now visited 
 us, occurring as it did in the Navy, the pride of the nation, 
 and not long after another of our vessels of war had perished 
 in a night at the mouth of the Mediterranean, taught us how 
 powerless for our defence, and how powerful for our ruin, 
 he may make our very armaments and ships of war? 
 
 "They trust in navies, and their navies fail, 
 God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail." 
 
 In the anxiety which some display to entangle our country 
 in war, is there not shown a recklessness greatly to be 
 deprecated ? We believe government endowed, by the law 
 of God, with power to take away human life — the life of the 
 individual in the case of crime, and the lives of multitudes 
 in the case of a just war. But seeing the butchery, profli- 
 gacy and wretchedness which war, even when most just, 
 must bring in its train, neither humanity nor piety allows us, 
 for any petty cause, to employ this melancholy and last re- 
 sort. We may not lightly spread through our borders such 
 scenes as God has lately made us to behold on the deck of 
 the Princeton. To rebuke the spirit of war may have been 
 one merciful design of the recent calamity. It may be easy 
 to unleash the hounds of war and give them course over 
 some distant territory, by issuing, amid the quiet scenes of 
 legislation and diplomacy, the act that exposes leagues of 
 defenceless coast to the marauder, or consigns some obscure 
 and remote home, upon our frontiers, to pillage and slaugh- 
 ter, and all the tender mercies of the savage, the scalpiug- 
 knife and the firebrand. It is not ^s easily borne to see the 
 ruin entering our own habitations, and the slaughter spread 
 around and upon us. And now that God has permitted, in 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 331 
 
 his wisdom, one of these gory and hideous spectacles, that 
 are but the ordinary accompaniments of battle, to be pre- 
 scnted m a time of profound peace, and almost beneath the 
 shadow of our Capitol, let us pray that the lesson may not 
 be lost on the law-makers gathered in those halls, but that 
 by Its severe, yet salutary schooling, it may " teach our sen- 
 ators wisdom."* We believe war, in a just cause, not inde- 
 fensible : but It may not be lightly undertaken. It is in no 
 careless mood, and for no trivial reasons, that the rulers of 
 this people may bring such scenes as those recently witness- 
 ed into the houses and the peaceful commercial marine of 
 our country; — make multitudes of their countrywomen as 
 suddenly widows ; and doom, by hundreds, unconscious and 
 prattling infants thus summarily to orphanage, and to all 
 the multiform sorrows and perils" that beset the path of the 
 fatherless. 
 
 2. Next, let us not forget that we have, as a nation, re- 
 ceived from the Most High loud and mrmorable learnings. 
 In commercial reverses, has not God checked our reckless 
 love of gain? In the death, shortly after his installation, of 
 a former Chief Magistrate, the first instance in the history 
 of our country of one dying while administering that hiirh 
 office, and in the subsequent removal of inemijers both from 
 the executive and from the legislative departments of our 
 national government, and now again in this startling calami- 
 ty, is not God reading to us, as a people, lessons of humility, 
 dependence, and penitence? In the history of our present 
 Chief Magistrate, distinguished as he has been by the fre- 
 quent and near approach of mortality to his person, whilst 
 he himself has been spared, how has (Jod spoken to him, 
 and to the whole land, of the uncertainty of life, and that a 
 higher power than man's controls the affairs of the world ! 
 Having seen, as he has done, death vacating the Presidential 
 chair for his occupancy, and soon after vacating again, by 
 the death of the statesman who took it, the chair of the Vice 
 Presidency he had quitted ; — his predecessor in the first 
 office of state falling on his right hand, his successor in the 
 second station of dignity in the land falling on his left hand ; — 
 bereaved, as he has been, by the incursions of death into the 
 circle of his friends ; bereaved in his home of a consort, 
 who, from sharing his exaltation, passed soon to the tomb ; 
 
 * Ps. cv. 22. 
 
332 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 and bereaved in his cabinet, tirst, of Legare, rich in promise, 
 talents, and acquirements, and smitten down in the I'ulhiess 
 of his strength ; and now of Upshur and Glhiier, his personal 
 as well as political friends, men of principle and talent, and 
 possessed of the confidence of the people ; — is there not 
 much to awaken in his behalf the sympathies and prayers of 
 the churches ? Commanded as we are in Scripture to pray 
 for them that are in authority, should not the wish of each 
 Christian patriot be, that a course so singularly marked may, 
 by the grace of God, be sanctified to teach him who has run 
 it, the uncertainty of all earthly honors, held as they are by 
 the tenure of a life so soon spent, and often so suddenly ter- 
 minated ; and should' not our prayer be that he who has 
 been, like Paul, " /'/i deaths oft,'''' may also, with the Apos- 
 tle, be able to say, as he reviews the course and purpose of 
 his life, " to me, to live is Christ,''' and with Paul to add, 
 as he looks fearlessly towards its close, '■'■ and to die is 
 gain?'" For difticult as is ever and in all conditions the 
 Christian's path, and glorious as is his triumph over the 
 world in any lot, the difficulty and the glory are each en- 
 hanced in the case of exalted station. To serve God and 
 his generation faithfully, not in the less embarrassed walks 
 of private life, but in a position of eminence, amid the strife 
 of tongues, the collisions and wranglings of parties, and the 
 thronging snares, the incessant and wasting cares, and the 
 heavy responsibilities of public life, needs no ordinary meas- 
 ure of divine grace. And happy, as rare, is the worldly 
 greatness that does not, in consequence, peril the soul of its 
 possessor. And whether tempted unduly to envy or rashly 
 to blame those in eminent stations, are we not as a people 
 warned, by so many deaths in the high places of our land, 
 when not, as is most generally the case, single victims, but 
 whole clusters and groups are reaped for the grave — are 
 we not warned less eagerly to covet distinctions death so 
 soon levels, and more habitually to trust, and more faith- 
 fully to serve, that God who only is great, for he is the 
 unchangeable and the Almighty one " who only hath immor- 
 lality ?" 
 
 3. Again, do not incidents of this kind loudly call upon 
 the Christians of the land to know their rights ami duties? 
 Are they not warned, that they never, amid the fierce con- 
 flicts of party, and the din and routine of business, forget 
 their one profession, and the high principles it involves ? 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 333 
 
 Ever is the Judge at hand. His comin<r is near; and that 
 servant Uibors most wisely and most safely who does it con- 
 tinually, as under his Great Taskmaster's" eye. In the con- 
 tentions of the day, political or religious, is' it not well that 
 the image of death should often interpose itself, casting its 
 chill and calming shadow over the feverish strifes of the 
 hour, lest we cherish against those who oppose us such feel- 
 ings as we should not wish to recall over their graves, or to 
 be surprised by the summons of death while indulging I It 
 seems but too evident that the churches of our day can 
 retain their hold upon some great and vital truths only at the 
 price of earnest controversy. Yet inevitable as it may be, 
 and in its results most beneficial, it must also be admitted, 
 that most adverse to piety and happiness are the feelings it 
 too often engenders. How harshly do the censures that 
 political antagonists or religious controversialists may utter 
 against their opponents, sound on the ear, when once the 
 subject of them is suddenly entombed ; and how pitiable, as 
 we now look back upon them, the exasperated personal 
 bickerings of writers, housed in a common sepulchre. It 
 was an afiecting regret of an eminent scholar — it is Erasmus 
 of whom we sjjeak — in the davs of the Revival of Letters, 
 that one of his opponents had been snatched away by death, 
 before they could exchange forgiveness for their mutual 
 offences against the law of charity. And if to the political 
 contests, ever eager and rife amongst us, must in this age be 
 added the social agitation, produced by churches " contend- 
 ing earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," it 
 will be, as in the near prospect of the grave, and as in con- 
 stant preparation for a sudden departure, that Christians will 
 best be harnessed, manfully yet meekly, to defend the truth 
 a Saviour bequeathed to their charge, the legacy of a Master 
 who overcame by suffering, and who built, as it were, out 
 of the cross upon which he had hung, the steps of thai 
 throne where he sits a crowned conqueror. Above all, let 
 Christians remember their duties to their country in the 
 closet. That hand, out of which the prophet saw streaming 
 beams of glory, where are the hidings of Divine Power, is 
 opened in blessings to the believer kneeling in his retire- 
 ment. And when the churches invoke it, that hand arms 
 itself, as with gauntlet and glaive, for the defence of the 
 land, or, as the Psalmist prayed, " takes hold of shield and 
 
334 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 buckler, draws out also the spear, and stops the way "* of 
 the adversaries. Thus works the Almighty where men are 
 found who make his right arm their reliance, and who, like 
 Daniel, greatly beloved of Heaven, are, like him, constant 
 in supplication before the throne, for themselves, and for 
 their people, and for the Israel of God. 
 
 4. Death, in all its aspects, is formidable to man the sin- 
 ner, except as it is viewed in its relation to the death of 
 Christ. And if, from all the scenes of worldly pomp and 
 rejoicing, from earth's high places of coveted dignity and 
 influence, and from its lowliest nooks of retirement, a path 
 is ever found leading to the grave ; so, to the eye of the 
 believer, from every scene in life, and from every theme in 
 morals or religion, there is opened a broad and direct avenue 
 to the grave of his Saviour. The cross of Christ is the 
 world's hope. He who became the 
 
 •' Death of death, and Hell's destruction," 
 
 was revealed to destroy the works of the devil, " and that 
 through death he might destroy him that had the power of 
 death.^j To know him is life; to reject him is the seal of 
 the second death, and the earnest of eternal ruin. Well, 
 then, may Christ's sacriflce receive the prominence given it 
 in Scripture and in the scenes of the eternal world. His 
 death was the theme, as Moses the receiver, and Elias the 
 reviver, of the law, talked with our Lord, on the mount, 
 and "spake of his decease which he should accomplish at 
 Jerusalem."! ^^ ^^ ^^^^ glorying of the ransomed before the 
 throne of light. When heaven visits earth, as on the moun- 
 tain of transfiguration, and when earth visits heaven, as in 
 the ascension of the emancipated and glorified spirit to the 
 general assembly and church of the first-born, this one event 
 is the bond of their common fellowship, and the death upon 
 Calvary is the basis of their common happiness. Exulting 
 in this, the saint looks forward to the last trial as but brief, 
 and its issue as sure and peaceful. The sinner, rejecting 
 the benehts of this sacrifice, does it amid a world which, in 
 spite of his irreligion, is none the less a world of bereave- 
 ment and death ; and on the verge of another world, in 
 which, because of his irreligion, death can never be unstung. 
 
 ♦ Ps. XXXV. 2, 3. t Heb. ii. 14; 1 John iii. 8. t Luke ix. 31. 
 
THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 335 
 
 whose ruin has no redemption, and on whose dark and heav- 
 ing sea of woe breaks no sohtary beam of hope. 
 
 5. It is, lastly, the wisdom of man, born as he is the heir 
 of mortality, to be living in a state of constant preparation 
 for his great change. It was said by that sweet singer of 
 our modern Israel, Dr. Watts, in the latter years of his life, 
 that each night he composed himself to siundjcr, little anx- 
 ious whether he awoke in time or in etennty. Of that orna- 
 ment of the English bench, the Christian magistrate, !Sir 
 Matthew Hale, it is said that he was once administering jus- 
 tice, when a strange darkness overspreading the country, 
 joined with some idle predictions that had become current, 
 filled men's minds with alarm, as if the end of the world had 
 come. The devout judge proceeded calmly in the disciiarge 
 of his office, wishing, if the world ended, to be found in the 
 assiduous fultilment of his duties. A habitual preparation 
 for sudden death would be itself a sufficient preparation, and 
 the best, for that judgment which some of oiu- erring breth- 
 ren announce as near. 
 
 Are there any scenes or employments in which we shoidd 
 not wish to be surprised by the messenger of death ? It is 
 scarce safe to be employed in them for any time, however 
 brief, for that brief hour may bring the close of our days, 
 and seal up our history to the time of the end. Let us not 
 indulge in those things, or busy ourselves in those employ- 
 ments, to be surprised in which would be our shame and our 
 ruin at the hour of death, lest we be like " the wicked, 
 driven away in his wickedness." And what can be more 
 tremendous in prospect than this I Let poverty the 
 most grinding afflict me — let me be racked by disease — 
 let helplessness, exile, and shame wait around my death-bed ; 
 but let not sin, unrepented and unforgiven sin, be the com- 
 panion and curse of my dying hours, for then I perish. 
 The trembling Esther, as she went, in peril of her life, to 
 urge her request, exclaimed, "If I perish, I perish," but 
 perished not. The timorous disciples, as they saw tlie 
 waters tempestuous, and the vessel ready to be filled, ex- 
 claimed to their Lord, " Master, we perish ;" and he arose 
 and spoke, and the waters were calmed, and the disciples 
 saved. But if sin be my master, cherished, trusted, and 
 idolized, no such peradventure as encouraged Esther remains 
 for me. I perish without an alternative, inevitably, and for 
 ever. No deliverance like that which rescued the Apostles 
 
336 THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY. 
 
 will be wrought for me. For if sin be my master, it is a 
 master that cannot save. And the God of heaven and earth 
 will say to the impenitent sinner as said his servant Peter to 
 the sorcerer Simon, " Thy money " — thine idol, be it what 
 it may — "•perish with thee.'''' Death is on the way, and hell 
 following with it ; and if sin rule in us, the ruler and the 
 ruled, the master and the servant, the idol and the idolator, 
 must sink together into endless perdition. Now by lessons, 
 therefore, in the opening leaves of the volume of Providence, 
 that enforce and repeat the admonitions of the volume of 
 Scripture ; and now by lessons in Scripture that illustrate 
 and interpret, in their turn, the visitations of Providence ; 
 by the mutual and reflected light of inspiration and calamity, 
 the one explaining the other; by " the rod,'''' and the voice 
 of Him '■'•who hath appointed it,'" as He wields the one and 
 utters the other — God is instructing us to renounce our sins. 
 He who rules, and who is soon to judge the world, is reiter- 
 ating over our land his denunciations against sin, his warn- 
 ings against ruin, and his demands of repentance. Repent- 
 ance is alike his claim and our duty. Each calamity cries 
 aloud, and this is its message. And from the depths of our 
 own conscience, in our hours of solitude and serious reflec- 
 tion, the summons is re-echoed, " Repent ye." "Or those 
 eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew 
 them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that 
 dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you. Nay ; but, except ye 
 repent, ye shall all likewise perish." 
 
THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 
 
 (A Discourse preached at the Recognition of the Seminary Baptist Church in Hamilton, Madi 
 son Co., N. Y., Thursday Evening, Nov. 13, 1345.) 
 
 " Pastors and teachers ; for the perfecting of theisaints, for the 
 
 WORK OF THE MINISTRY, FOR THE EDIFYING OF THE BODY OF ChRIST. ♦ * * 
 
 " That wb henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and 
 
 CARRIED about WITH EVERY WIND OF DOCTRINE. ******* 
 
 * * " The head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly join- 
 ed TOGETHER, AND COMPACTED BY THAT WHICH EVERY JOINT SUPPLIETH, AC- 
 CORDING TO THE EFFECTUAL WORKING IN THE MEASURE OF EVERY PART, 
 MAKETH INCREASE OF THE BODY UNTO THE EDIFYING OF ITSELF IN LOVE." 
 
 Ephes. IV. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16. 
 
 The scene, and the occasion of our assembling at this time, 
 both deserve notice. The place whore we are gathered is 
 known widely in our own land, and in some remote and 
 heathen regions, as the site of a school of the prophets, where 
 the young men of our churches, called and endowed of God's 
 Spirit to "the Christian ministry, are trained for their largest 
 usefulness. The occasion that calls us together, within these 
 quiet scenes of study and prayer, is the pubHc recognition 
 of a church of Christ, not confined, indeed, to the inmates 
 of this Theological Seminary, but seeking nevertheless then- 
 especial benefit as one main object of its constitution. There 
 are those of us who might not be prepared to counsel the 
 formation of a church, limited to one class ol society in Us 
 membership. Believing that its Divine Foun.ler meant that 
 his church should embrace his disciples of every age, and ot 
 either sex, and that it should intermingle all clas.^es of soci- 
 ety for their mutual benefit, we sliould dread the estahlisti- 
 ment of a body, that would isolate instead of intermmghng 
 these various layers of human society, which togeth.r make 
 up the field of the world. If limited exclusively to tiieolo- 
 gical students, it would include the zeal of youth without the 
 ripe experience of age, and receiving the energy of one 
 sex would reject the gentleness of the other, ant gatherm, 
 the men of letters would have little room for the praeli.-al 
 sa^racity of the men of business ; and thus would the church, 
 
338 THE CHURCH, 
 
 which, from the genius of the gospel and the design of its 
 Author, was to be free as the air and wide as the world in 
 its invitations and consolations, be converted into the narrow, 
 self-conceited, and exclusive caste. It would again, seek- 
 ing its own edification and not the world's conversion, want 
 one main element of success, and evade one great errand of 
 the church. But it is not, as we suppose, the purpose of those 
 who have come together in the new church, thus to circum- 
 scribe their membership, and narrow the pale of their fel- 
 lowship and duties. But, whilst wishing to admit all else 
 who may desire to unite in its services, the well-being of the 
 youths who look forward to the Christian ministry will be a 
 prominent object. It has been thought, that, during the years 
 which our younger brethren spend within these walls, sev- 
 ered from the intimacies and removed from the oversight of 
 the churches, which received their baptismal vows and en- 
 couraged their ministerial aspirations, it was but fitting that 
 they should be surrounded, more closely than has heretofore 
 been possible, with the privileges and guards of a church 
 organization. Much as their esteemed instructors, who fill 
 the chairs of instruction in this seminary, may have accom- 
 plished, under God, by their public lectures and their private 
 influence, it was felt that more was needed. It was evident, 
 that the men who were to become the pastors of churches 
 should not in the best years of iheir youth be destitute of 
 the privileges and sympathies and disciplinary restraints of a 
 church ; or lack entirely all personal and experimental ac- 
 quaintance with the practical working of that church polity, 
 which as pastors they were hereafter to conduct. It was 
 seen, that no school of man's devising could supply the ben- 
 efits or supersede the necessity of that school of Christ's 
 devising, the Church of the Living God, the organization that 
 Infinite Goodness and Infallible Wisdom had framed, for the 
 best training of Christ's servants for their work on earth and 
 their place in heaven. 
 
 Education is the art of urging and guiding the growth of 
 the human mind. It is measured, not merely, or even 
 mainly, by the amount of knowledge it brings in, but rather 
 by the amount of power that it brings out. It educes the 
 hidden energies of the soul, strengthens them, and multiplies 
 and facilitates their application to the various tasks of life, 
 as the air, the light, the water, and the earth educe the flower 
 from the buried seed, and evolve from the acorn the sturdy 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 339 
 
 boughs and the massive foliage of the oak. It is one of the 
 characteristics of our time, tliat this duly of the aged to the 
 young, this good service due from the generation" thai rule 
 to the generation that shall soon replace them, is awakening 
 larger interest ; and its far-reaching results and widely varied 
 relations are arousing discussion, and even inllaniing'coniro- 
 versy. It is felt, that, in the truest sense of that term, educa- 
 tion is not confined to the town-school or the college ; that 
 it begins in the cradle with the infant's expanding lacuhies, 
 ere the school has snatched him from the nursery ; and tbat 
 it continues when seminaries and colleges have dismissed ihcir 
 pupil, and that it is protracted in the action of society and the 
 endeavors of the student, and the inlluence of these on his 
 character and powers, until he enters the grave. And reli- 
 gion, showing as it does that this life is but the outcourl of 
 eternity, and that the aims and duties of this world can be 
 ascertained only by remembering the destinies of another 
 world, thus shows that the education of an innnortal spirit is 
 a work never to pause ; and that the enlargement of his expe- 
 rience, and the expansion of his powers, and the development 
 of his moral nature, will be, through the long cycles of eter- 
 nity, the necessary and the inevitable emplovment of each 
 child of Adam. It is seen, therefore, that other influences 
 than those of the school, technically so called, are at work in 
 man's education. In Ireland and in France, the mingling of 
 the religious element with the tasks of the highest schools 
 or colleges of the nation, is at this very time the theme of 
 bitter controversy. In England, and in some parts of our 
 own Union, the intermingling of the same element with the 
 lowest or primary schools of the country, has awakened the 
 like eagerness of discussion. It is well that the relations of 
 Education and Religion should he discussed. 
 
 The Christian sees, in the church founded by his Redeem- 
 er, a school of higher endowments and loftier aims than the 
 best appointed universities of the nations. Even the Theo- 
 logical Seminary, religious as are its instructions, and sj)ir- 
 itual as is its influence, it is found, cannot sui)ply tiie place of 
 the Master's own simple, sublime organization, the Clwisiian 
 Church, with its ordinances and discipline, its intermingling 
 of sympathies and its mutual duties. The testimony given ou 
 this spot, and by these present services, to the unrivalled and 
 indispensable hlessings of the Christian church, leads us iial- 
 urallv to the selection of our theme. The topic ol those 
 
340 THE CHURCH, 
 
 remarks, to which we ask your patient and devout attention, is, 
 the Christian Church, a School for Heaven. And may 
 the Spirit of all truth, promised by our Saviour as the Com- 
 forter and Guide of His people, be invoked and received by 
 all here met. May His living Light and ineffable Might 
 unfold to us the lessons, and burn in upon our hearts the prin- 
 ciples of that gospel which He alone indited, which He alone 
 effectually interprets, and which it is or soon will be the 
 business of so many here to proclaim. Soon to be scattered, 
 perhaps, through many nations, but bearing every where one 
 message ; soon to be gathered to remote graves, but dying 
 every where we trust in one confession, and finding every 
 where one God, witnessing every where of one cross, and 
 summoning to one throne, let us meditate on the character 
 and blessings of that one spiritual church which we should 
 seek every where to plant and to defend, because it is the 
 one Church which the World's one Redeemer and Judge, 
 as we understand His word, devised for the men of all 
 climes and the men of all times. 
 
 It is one of the distinctions between the works of God and 
 the handiwork of man, that the Avorkmanship of human skill 
 is unable to bear close scrutiny or the stress of long use. It 
 is soon worn out, and on one side or other, by minute and 
 varied examination, is found imperfect, awkward, unfinished 
 or defective. But the fabrics of the Divine Hand are found 
 more perfect, the more varied the aspects in which they 
 are viewed, the more closely they are scanned, and the more 
 thoroughly they are tried. It is so with the Church. Human 
 societies, and governments, and philosophies, are found in- 
 efficient for the new emergencies and the enlarged experi- 
 ences of society. But the Church, as God framed it, perpet- 
 uates itself, containing the elements of its own repair and 
 permanence ; and, built upon Christ the Rock of Ages, and 
 endowed with the graces of that Divine Spirit, who is the 
 treasury of all wisdom and might, it goes down in the hands 
 of prayerful and faithful men, adequate to meet the conflicts 
 of every age, and the requirements of all forms and condi- 
 tions of society. Leave it but as Christ left it, and it bears 
 transplantation to the frozen North or the burning South, 
 thrives under the sides of the despot's throne, or in the soil 
 of a republic, and adapts itself to all grades of human culture, 
 from the races — forlorn, fetid, and loathsome — that seem on 
 the verge of bare brutalism, up to those, which, refined, ele- 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 341 
 
 vated and intoxicated by successive centuries of civilization, 
 are ready with Herod to deem themselves gods upon earth. 
 The Church is described in tlie Scriptures by various 
 imagery, that we may contemplate its adaptations and pur- 
 poses on various sides. It is called now the husbandry, now 
 the building, here the house and tliere the temple of God, 
 implying His continued activity upon it, and His presence 
 within it. Now, by metaphors derived from another walk of 
 society, it is called the tlock and fold of Christ, of which 
 he is the chief Shepherd, implying its dependent weakness 
 and His directing care. Now it is His bride, ransomed by 
 his death, adorned with the jewels of his glory, and sharing 
 his royalty. This is the metaphor not only of the New 
 Testament, but of the Old in some of the Psalms and in the 
 book of Canticles — Psalms quoted and indorsed, in that inter- - 
 pretation of them, by the Holy Ghost in the epistle to the 
 Hebrews. And as marriage in tlie eyes of the old common 
 law makes those it has united one person, and in the lan- 
 guage of Scripture they are one body, there is no violent 
 transition from this last metaphor to another, which makes 
 the Church the Body of Christ. This last is the reigning 
 imagery of the context, in that portion of the epistle to the 
 Ephesians, from which our text is taken. In PauFs first 
 epistle to the Corinthian disciples, the same illustration is 
 followed, at yet greater length. In our text the apostle 
 blends the similitude of a body of which Christ is the head, 
 with the imagery of a school having '■'■teachers,'''' some of 
 whose pupils remain but " children''^ or novices, when 
 they should have grown up to adult proficiency, or as he 
 elsewhere phrases it, " hahes inChrist,'' i\ecti'mg to be taught 
 again the lirst and elementary principles of the faith ; or as 
 he here continues the illustration, in danger of being " car- 
 ried axoay with every wind of doctrine,'^ the storms of every 
 new and popular teaching, however novel, unauthenticated 
 and contradictory such teachings may be — winds to which 
 the immature Christian gives too easy heed, however oppo- 
 site the points from which they blow, and however awful the 
 gulfs into which they would hurl him. To have brought fur- 
 ward the whole unbroken context, would involve a wider 
 range of discussion than may be admissible. We have 
 selected those portions of the context, which bear most 
 directly on the church in its aspect of a school, rcprescntmg 
 
342 THE CHURCH, 
 
 the members of the Christian Church as learners, who should 
 go on to maturity and perfection. 
 
 The Christian Church, as a school, is an image familiar to 
 the New Testament. Christ Himself had called His follow- 
 ers, disciples or scholars. The multitude who did not become 
 such learners, yet admired the Lord in His character of an 
 Instructor, who taught, to use their language, as one liaving 
 authority. He invited the weary to " learn of Him," and 
 urged men to test His " doctrine,'''' whether it were not of 
 the Father. And on quitting the earth, he left it in charge of 
 His churches to disciple all nations, or to call all mankind 
 into His school. In the times of the apostles, the ministry 
 are often described as " the teachers" of their brethren, 
 and Paul makes it a qualification for the office that a man 
 be apt to teach. The private member he elsewhere de- 
 scribes as " him that is taught," and enjoins it upon him to 
 communicate of his substance " unto him that teacheth." It 
 may be said that in his letter to the Galatians the same 
 apostle declares that we are " no more under a schoolmas- 
 ter," but an examination of the context shows him to be re- 
 buking the Jews for clinging to the law as yet their instruc- 
 tor, when that schoolmaster had already brought and trans- 
 ferred them to the higher form, and to the loftier guidance 
 of Christ, as John the Baptist sent his disciples to the Sa- 
 viour. In saying that the church had no more a schoolmas- 
 ter, Christ was certainly excepted, just as elsewhere when 
 the Saviour himself forbade his people to call any man Rabbi 
 or Master, he yet included not Himself in the prohibition, 
 declaring " that one was their Master," and that Himself 
 was such Master and Lord. The Church, then, is a school. 
 It trains in truth and in holiness. It trains for eternity, 
 for Heaven and God. Elsewhere, and quite as frequently, 
 the Church is designated as a family, all named from their 
 one Elder Brother ; and still more frequently, perhaps, as 
 a kingdom, all governed by one law, and one sovereign ; 
 and moving onward to an assured conquest and a com- 
 mon throne. So it is a host, and Christ is the Captain of its 
 salvation. The school, as we have said, is but one therefore 
 of the many sides, on which the Scriptures view that great 
 scheme of Divine Wisdom and Love, the Church of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. It is that side of this spiritual structure, to 
 the contemplation of wliich, the spot where we stand, and the 
 occasion that has assembled us, most naturally invite us. 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 343 
 
 As such, let US reverently and praycrfullv, since every school 
 has Its instructors, its manuals and pupils, inquire, " 
 
 I. Who are the Teachers in this, the School ofHeavcn ? 
 
 II. What the manuals, which they employ ? 
 
 III. And, lastly, who are the learners ? 
 
 The instructors, the text-books, and the pupils, form, then, 
 the three divisions under which our remarks will be grouped! 
 
 I. The Church, is a term used in the New Testament in 
 two varying senses, to describe an invisible and a visible 
 body. So its teachers are of two classes, the invisible arul 
 the visible. It has its Divine and its human instructors. We 
 said the word Church in the language of inspiration has two 
 meanings. It is applied to describe the general assembly 
 of all saints, those who were once, and those who are, anil 
 those who are yet to be on the earth, as all now foreseen, 
 or hereafter met and made perfect in heaven. This is the 
 general assembly and church of the First-born, and from the 
 very necessity of our condition, is therefore to the inhal)it- 
 ants of the earth an invisible church. This church excludes 
 what every earthly and visible church probably includes, 
 errorists, who hold not the Head, formalists and hypocrites. 
 It is composed of the elect, and the elect alone. The word 
 Church is used in another and more limited sense of the 
 visible assembly of saints, real or supposed, that holdiiiLf 
 the truth, meet for worship in one place. This is the visi- 
 ble church of the Bible, and is from its nature a single con- 
 gregation. The theologians have invented and made cur- 
 rent another and intermediate use of the word, a national 
 visible church, which they describe, as made up of several 
 hundred congregations, or even of the entire nation. For 
 this the Holy Ghost gives no warrant ; and yet on this 
 unwarranted assumption rest many of the claims of prelacy 
 and the papacy. The New Testament speaks not of the 
 church of Asia, or the church of Judea, as this theory would 
 have required it to do ; but of the seven churches of 
 Asia and the churches in Judea, showing that the visible 
 church of the New Testament is a single congregation. 
 Each such congregation, by the concurrent tesfimt)ny ol' tiic 
 New Testament and primitive antiquity, is independent of its 
 sister churches. Yet each such visible church, far as it dis- 
 penses essentially the same truth, and enjoys the same Sa- 
 viour's presence and the same Spirit's influences, is a section 
 of the great Catholic Invisible Church ; and is truly apostolic. 
 
344 THE CHURCH, 
 
 for it has unioa with the apostles now before the throne ; 
 and is truly Catholic, for it is one in spirit, testimony and 
 heritage with the godly of all dispensations and all ages. As 
 the church organization is then, in one aspect, a visible body, 
 and in another of its aspects and relations, part and parcel 
 of what is as yet to man an invisible body, seen and read 
 only of God ; we need not wonder to find that it has its two 
 classes of teachers, the seen and the unseen ; answering to the 
 two worlds which it unites, to that visible and material earth 
 where it is, in its sections, for the time planted, and to those 
 invisible heavens, Avhither it is finally to be transplanted, in 
 its entirety, and to find its better and eternal home, melting 
 there all its distinct congregations into the general assembly 
 and church of the First-born. 
 
 I. God is, then, the great and effectual Teacher, invisibly, 
 of this school of saints. He is the Unseen Instructor of the 
 Church. It was promised even under the old dispensation, 
 " All thy children shall be taught of God."* Each person 
 in the adorable Ti'inity co-operates in this work of spiritual 
 education. By a peculiarity which lifts this school above 
 all those of human origin and endowment, its true and effec- 
 tual learners are all changed in heart ; a lesson is set them, so 
 wondrous and energetic, that they are by it renewed as to the 
 spirit of their minds. The Bible describes this, the great 
 crisis in the science of salvation, as a new birth, the com- 
 mencement of a higher stage and a worthier mode of spiritual 
 existence. The share of the Father in this work we learn 
 from the lips of His Son. "No man cometh unto me, 
 except the Father which hath sent me draw hiai."t Why 
 some are thus drawn and others are not drawn, who may say ? 
 Exercising over our world a righteous sovereignty, of which 
 the history of the world and of the church alike attest the 
 reality, but of which the united wisdom of the world and 
 the church would alike fail to fathom all the mystery, the 
 Father makes some his, by adopting grace, and passes over 
 others. The general call, the imperative summons, and the 
 gracious invitations and expostulations of his gospel, are hon- 
 estly addressed to all ; but he makes them to become an 
 effectual calling, only in the case of His own elect. As to the 
 Son's share in this instruction, the work of Christ in this 
 teaching is spread over every page, almost, of the New Tes- 
 
 * Isaiah liv. 13. t John vl. 44. 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 315 
 
 taraeiit. In the context before us, he is made the Head from 
 which the entire body depends. Elsewhere lie is said to be 
 formed in the hearts of the regenerate, as the hope of glory. 
 They are the sheep that hear his voice. All who come ul 
 the Father come by Him, and none know that Father but 
 as that Son reveals Him. Present, to the end of the world, 
 in the humblest assemblies of His people, and aiding the 
 stammering lips of the feeblest of his true ministers, *this, 
 His pledged presence, is the secret of their iiidefcctibiliiy. 
 And, as in the days of Paul's youth he sat at Gamaliers fei't, 
 and as in the days of Christ's flesh Mary sat at that Saviour's 
 feet, so must, now and forever, every true learner in the 
 school of Heaven sit at the feet of Jesus the Great Teacher, 
 and learn of Him. But it is to the Hohj Ghost that esjjecial 
 prominence is given by the New Testament, as the great 
 Invisible Teacher and Comforter of the church. He opens 
 the sealed eyes and unstops the ears long closed. He takes 
 the stores of wisdom that are of the Father and of the Son, 
 and shows them unto us. By Him we pray acceptably, and 
 in His light see the light of the Scriptures. He not only 
 renews and sanctifies each private memi)er of the church, but 
 His alone it is to call, and endow, and prosper the pastors or 
 human and visible teachers of the Church. Christ gave this 
 Spirit, in all his varying and inexhaustible influences, as the 
 accompaniment and attestation of His own kingly ascension, 
 when he quitted the earth to regain his native skies, and 
 to resume the glory which He had for the time relinquished. 
 To sin wilfully against this great Invisible but indispensa- 
 ble Agent, is the unpardonable sin for which there is no remis- 
 sion. ' Grieve Him not,' ' Quencli not His kindled influ- 
 ences,' is the loud and solemn warning of Christ and Christ's 
 apostles to the churches. Forgetfulness of His rights and of 
 His incommunicable prerogatives is the secret of declension, 
 heresy, and wide-spread ruin, to the churches of earth in 
 every age. As the glorious reformation was traceable to a 
 restoration of Christ to his rightful place as the Mediator 
 and the Righteousness of the church ; so we suppose, that the 
 melancholy pause and reaction which was seen in the progress 
 of that reformation, was traceable to a neglect on the part of 
 the Churches, to give to the Holy Ghost his due place and 
 honors in the system of Christianity. IMen trusted in the 
 truth, apart from Him, the Spirit of Truth. They relied on 
 the graves of their reformed Fathers instead of the everlast- 
 
 45 
 
346 THE CHURCH, 
 
 ing God of those Fathers ; on controversies and in creeds, 
 dissevered from prayer for the influences of the Paraclete. 
 The eflect was that the chariot of salvation faltered in its 
 course, and its wheels drave heavily, and the banners of 
 Antichrist turned again from their earlier flight, and flouted 
 anew the standards of a purer faith ; and Christian Europe 
 saw itself like the victim on one of whose sides palsy has 
 laid its blight ; the half had sense and life, and half struggled 
 with the torpor of death. 
 
 The great mission of our own denomination, as distin- 
 guished from other sections of true Christians, is, not only to 
 proclaim, with them, the need of personal and individual re- 
 generation by this blessed Spirit, but also to discriminate 
 the eflectual Spirit from the emblematic rite, and to isolate 
 the individual, — apart from the nation, and apart from the 
 family, — shutting him up, singly and alone, to the need, for 
 himself, personally and apart from all hope in his fellows, 
 of this regenerating Spirit, for himself individually. When 
 Christians, (even wise, and good, and great men,) in the old 
 world, confound the Church and the State ; when, as we 
 suppose. Christians in the New World, of undisputed ex- 
 cellence and wisdom, are yet chargeable with the error of 
 confounding the Church and the household, thus bringing in 
 the carnal and unregenerate element into the constitution of 
 a church that should be exclusively spiritual and all regen- 
 erate, it is our duty to declare that the influences of this 
 great Invisible Teacher are not transmissible, as a material 
 hereditament, by mere right of descent. Our peculiar voca- 
 tion it is to call each to look to himself, and that he say not, 
 as did the Jews in the times of Christ's forerunner : We are 
 the seed of the spiritual, " We have Abraham to our father ;" 
 as if it followed thence, by an inevitable sequence, that they 
 had the spirit of adoption, and could legitimately cry to Je- 
 hovah : ' Abba, Father.' 
 
 And if ever, which may God forbid, the inscription of 
 Ichabod, the memorial of departed power and of vanished 
 glory, the mournful sentence that has been inscribed on many 
 a Theological Seminary in Europe and on some in America, — 
 Seminaries, that, reared in faith, have passed over into the 
 hands of formalism and heresy — if that dread and desolating 
 inscription be ever legible on these walls, reared by the sac- 
 rifices, and fragrant with the prayers of men who revered and 
 adored the Holy Ghost, it will be, probably, by a wrong done 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HKAVEN. 347 
 
 to this Divine Teacher, that the work of de.erratio,. will have 
 been begun :-the neglect of the Parachue will b,- the al,on.in! 
 ation that maketh desolate. If, against the examplen, an 1 the 
 entreat.es, and the instructions of your pious teachers, youn' 
 men ol this bennnary, the hope and joy of the Churches-le"t 
 a dying sinner say to his fellow-heirs of mortality and of 
 sin— il you substitute learning for spirituality, and a reli- 
 ance on intellect for trust in the Divine Teacher, and prefer 
 speculation to prayer it is against this, the pre-eminent and 
 Supreme Teacher of the Church, that you will be sinning 
 And the city of Mansoul, as Bunyan depicts it, beleaguerc^d 
 in all her gates, and with treason busy on her walls and in her 
 citadel, while this, the Lord Secretary, alienated by neglect 
 has withdrawn himself in disgust from an oblivious and un- 
 grateful people,— Mansoul, we say, besieged and disheart- 
 ened, famished and terrified, and deserted of her Lord will 
 become but the feeble image of the Churches to which vou 
 may minister, with the stores of an unsanctilied learnin<r and 
 of a godless and self-deifying intellect. "" 
 
 2. Subordinate to this Divine Teaching, and valueless 
 without it, there come, next, the human teachers, the ushers 
 under the great and paramount Teacher, God. They are 
 described in our text and the adjoining sentences. Some of 
 these human teachers were of an extraordinary and miracu- 
 lous character, given to apostolic times, but not continued 
 in later ages of the Church. Of this kind, are the three first 
 named by the apostle, among these visible and mortal teachers 
 of Christ's school : apostles, prophets, and evangelists. By 
 the last was probably intended a class of men like Timothy 
 and Titus, who might best be described by a name which 
 Rome has used for other purposes, as apostolical vicars, act- 
 ing in an apostle's stead, under his directions, and as we sup- 
 pose, only during his life-time. Thus Titus traversed Crete 
 and ordered its churches with a delegated share of Paul's 
 power. The name, evangelist, is now often given to breth- 
 ren in the ministry confined to no pastoral charge, and who 
 are devoted mainly to labors, for the revival of the churches 
 and for the conversion of sinners, over a wide district. We 
 would neither deny nor disparage the eminent usefulness 
 and graces of some men like Whitfield and the Wesleys 
 and the Tennents, who have been thus employed. We 
 believe that the churches need true revivals, and should 
 pray for them and seek them, and finding them from God, 
 
348 THE CHURCH, 
 
 may then well multiply and protract their religious services. 
 But, that this text recognizes and describes, here, preachers 
 devoted mainly to such eflbrts, as to their one vi'ork, as the 
 class it intends by the term evangelists, vi^e doubt. Far as 
 such laborers for God I'ebuke the apathy of Christian churches 
 and Christian ministers, and turn many to righteousness, we 
 would rejoice in their success and emulate their graces. 
 But far as such examples, on the other hand, are pleaded 
 as authority, and they have unhappily been so pleaded, for 
 measures more mechanical than spiritual, and for modes of 
 worship rather dramatic than devotional ; far as periodical 
 excitements have been made to discredit and replace God's 
 Sabbaths and the appointed and permanent preaching of 
 the word ; and far as, intentionally, there have been efforts 
 to break down the pastoral authority, to substitute for it, a 
 virtual control and supervision by a higher class of laborers, 
 who should themselves be bound to no spot, and responsible 
 to no church, we believe the pleas so made unwarranted, and 
 the results, as the churches have already proved, may be 
 abundantly disastrous. The church is, in one of its great 
 uses, as a nursery and school for the children of God. It is 
 dangerous to convert it, by our hot haste, into a Foundling 
 Hospital, crowded with those of dubious or spurious parent- 
 age. The inmates of such receptacles in Europe are known 
 to die, the larger mass of them, before reaching maturity. 
 And as the Foundling Hospitals of the old world have not 
 been proved to favor either the population or public morals 
 of a land ; so the rapid and indiscriminate admissions to 
 church membership advocated by some indiscreet laborers, — 
 the receiving as God's children those who give scanty evi- 
 dence of His adoption, — the letting in upon God's heritage 
 of an alien seed, — the giving, as Christ said, the children's 
 bread to dogs, — has not wrought happily on the purity or 
 prosperity of our churches. And how fatal must be its effect 
 on those thus baptized into an unregcnerate hope, and who, 
 if they but maintain an ordinary morality, burden our church- 
 es as formalists or errorists — or who, if casting off moral re- 
 straints, they incur exclusion, generally harden into infidels 
 and mockers. Let us not decry protracted meetings : let us 
 not unduly rely on their aid. Let us not crowd all our de- 
 votion into six weeks or seven of the fifty-two that make up 
 the year, more than the merchant would crowd all his hon- 
 esty into one month of the twelve. Let us give due honor 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 349 
 
 to brethren, to whom God may have given special endow- 
 ments for awakening the impenitent and backslidden. But 
 let us not claim the support of this text for these as if they 
 were the extraordinary evangelists of ajjostolic times, tra'- 
 versing the land with a divine commission, to set up, at their 
 pleasure, or to put down pastors. But let us cling tena- 
 ciously to God's mechanism for the world's conversfon and 
 for the sanctification of the Church, the ordinary ministry 
 and the pastorate ; and let us expect a harvest-time for 
 souls running through all the Sabbaths of the year. Let us 
 recollect that, in all communions, we are in danirer from 
 the error, which so beguiled and enlarged Rome." She. to 
 make religion popular, and conversions rapid and multitu- 
 dinous, hewed the strait gate wider, and made the narrow 
 way broad as the path to death. Tlius has she, under pre- 
 tence of evangelizing the nations, carnalized the gospel and 
 secularized the church. Instead of converting the nations, 
 this is but a conversion of the gospel to somethin<r other 
 and more and worse than what Christ left it. 
 
 Of the details of the pastor's duty we have not now time 
 to speak. God has all varieties of gifts in these his ministers. 
 There are some whose minds are formed for patient inquiry, 
 and others for impressive statement and irresistible appeal. 
 One man shows his strength in his prayers, and another in his 
 sermons, and yet another in his pastoral visits. There are 
 some whose doctrine distils like the gathering dew, softly 
 and almost imperceptibly bathing the mind of a hearer. Oth- 
 ers have a gentle profusion of sentiment and language, that 
 like the speech of old Nestor, as Ilomcr describes it, falls 
 as the snow, and covers all with its light, feathery flakes. 
 And there are still others, whose words, slow, ponderous, and 
 compact with compressed meaning, fall like the hail-storm 
 mentioned in the Apocalyptic vision, where each stone was of 
 a talent's weight, and crushed when it struck. A dull uni- 
 formity in the gifts of the pastorate, Avould not conduce to gen- 
 eral edification ; and the attempt, sometimes apparent, to 
 make any individual teacher the standard, to whose personal 
 endowments every other must be conformed, or sufler re- 
 jection, is an attempt to mend God's better methods of using 
 all and all varieties of gifts in his school. Peter could nei- 
 ther speak, write, nor act like John ; and John was incapable 
 of assuming the tone and port of Peter ; and neither could 
 dilate, with the broad magnificence, or dive into the deep 
 
350 THE CHURCH, 
 
 mysteries of truth, with the unfathomed profundity of Paul : 
 yet Paul, and Peter, and John were all servants of the same 
 Christ, organs and channels of the same Holy Spirit, and efB- 
 cient servants of the same Church of the Living God. Let 
 pastor and student, while shunning all needless eccentricity, 
 cultivate and develope fearlessly their own individuality, and 
 occupy the talents, few or many, given to their especial 
 keepmg. It is the duty of the pastor to look to himself and 
 his ministry ; to study, that he may teach ; to pray much, 
 that he may have much of the Spirit's influences ; and to vary 
 his appeals, warnings, and instructions to the varying charac- 
 acter, and needs, and state of the souls entrusted to his charge. 
 
 3. Again, the Church, collectively, is in a certain sense 
 to teach. All Christians bear, in their measure, part in the 
 human instructions, due from the Church. In this school 
 they are to be living epistles of Christ, seen and read of all 
 men. They are to hold forth the word of life. The Church 
 is to grow, as our context shows, by that which " every 
 joint supplieth." When there is a failure on the part of the 
 several members of this church to feel and meet this obliga- 
 tion, we see the apostle's command to the churches practi- 
 cally read, by a melancholy travesty, as if the body of Christ, 
 his Church, were to be, instead of compacted, " dislocated by 
 that which e\ evy ]omt witliholdeth, according to the inejicie/it 
 working, in the measure of every part, and maketh waste of 
 the body, unto the destruction of itself, in general uncharita- 
 bleness, and a reigning selfishness." Such churches pine un- 
 der an atrophy of Christian graces and a palsy of all spiritual 
 activity. In every station and of either sex, true Christians 
 may in their appropriate sphere witness for Christ. Thus 
 even in the sex to which Paul forbade public teaching in the 
 church, he commands that in the seclusion of the home and 
 in the associations of the domestic circle, the aged women 
 be " teachers of good things." 
 
 Thus have we observed how the divine and the human, the 
 visible and the invisible, combine as the appointed teachers 
 of the Church as it is God's school : the mortal usher seen, 
 but the Great Master by whom and for whom he works, un- 
 seen. 
 
 II. Let us now pass, in the second place, to the manuals, 
 which this school uses, the text-books out of which the lessons 
 are to be furnished. They are all volumes of God's inditing, 
 the first and the last marred by the share of man in their 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 35I 
 
 transcription ; the second is the only volume to which strictly 
 belongs the title of a revelation. ^ 
 
 1. The book of man's conscience, is, perhaps, the first to be 
 named. \\ hen describing the work of the areat Invisible 
 1 eacher of the Church, the blessed Spirit of God, the Saviour 
 represents Him, as unrolling this volume. He convinces or 
 makes to be read in the inner conscience the guilt of those he 
 teaches; convicting the world first of sin, brin<rin.T home 10 
 the human spirit the sense of its guilt, and haunliii.r it with 
 the memory ot its long-buried trespasses. S.) the apo-^tle 
 describing the heathen who enters the Christian assembly to 
 meet God there, represents him as having the secret of Ms 
 heart made manifest, and then falling down with the confes- 
 sion that God is indeed in the midst of the church. So Sol- 
 omon, in the ancient dispensation, calls the acceptable sup- 
 pliant of God's courts the man who knows the plairue of his 
 own heart. So Paul depicts the faithful preach'er of the 
 gospel, as commending himself to every man's conscience in 
 the sight of God. This is one of the books that will be oi)en- 
 ed in the day of judgment: and it is, even now, the business of 
 the human teacher of the church, instnnncnfally, and the 
 prerogative of the Divine Teacher of the church, effectually, 
 to turn the leaves of this dread text-book, and show to men 
 what they are and what they need, the guilt they have in- 
 curred and the mercy they require. So the Christian is to 
 try his heart and way, keeping with all diligence that heart 
 out of which are the issues of the life, and whence, in the 
 case of the renewed man, springs a well of water unto life 
 everlasting. 
 
 2. The second is the volume of God's Scriptures. Where 
 is this revelation of God to be found ? Is it within the lids 
 of the volume of the written word; or in the depths of the 
 human intellect, which in the first writers or isri noted that 
 word, and in each of its readers, is to try that word ; or is 
 it in the traditions of the Church, at whose hands we are to 
 take this word, and from whose, lips to have it interpreted 
 and amplified? For our churches, and the evangelical sects 
 of Protestantism, there is no hesitation, in choosing the pro- 
 per definition, and the true seat of Revelation. To us the 
 Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the ultimate 
 and complete revelation of God. Before the canon of the 
 New Testament was finished, and whilst apostles, having 
 plenary inspiration, yet guided the Church, their teachings 
 
352 THE CHURCH, 
 
 orally had, with the Christian disciples, the authority now 
 due to their written testimonies. The revelation of that age 
 was in their lips. Their writings gathered and fixed revela- 
 tion ; and gave it a local habitation in the Bible. Just, as 
 philosophers tell us, as the light existed before the creation of 
 the sun, floating in irregular masses ; so was it with revela- 
 tion in the first century. Until apostles, by their writings, 
 compiled, and by their death closed the canon of the New 
 Testament, this, the light of Heaven for the human soul, 
 was floating in the oral instructions of the teachers, and in 
 the memories of their converts. The formation of the New 
 Testament, and the departure of inspired apostles, gathered, 
 and fixed, and limited Divine Revelation, in an embodiment, 
 from which, now, nothing may be taken, and to which no- 
 thing may be added. 
 
 To this book, however, exception is taken, from opposite 
 quarters. The votaries of tradition represent the volume as 
 incornphte, needing theit traditions, as its appendix and its 
 exposition. The disciples of rationalism regard it as inexact, 
 and needing to be corrected and amended, by the better 
 judgment of each reader, and the rising lights of each new 
 and wiser generation. Widely, then, as these two opposing 
 errors diverge from each other, they yet converge together, 
 in the one principle, that Scripture is defective. Our church- 
 es deny all such alleged defect, and recognize, in the Book, 
 a type of the Wisdom of its Author, as a record omitting 
 nought that is needful for its purposes, and retaining 
 nought that is needless. We recognize the rights of human 
 reason, in its own legitimate sphere, and within the narrow 
 scope of its feeble powers, to examine, with patient thorough- 
 ness, all the evidences of the Divine origin of the document, 
 and carefully to settle the exact text of the document ; but, 
 these done, it is bound meekly to receive much that may be 
 mysterious, believing that what God has said, is and must 
 be true, and that the weakness of God is stronger than man, 
 and the foolishness of God wiser than man. 
 
 The God, who educes good out of evil, may, we believe, 
 bring to his Church profit and edification, even out of the 
 results of the most lawless rationalism, as exhibited in those 
 German scholars, who seem to graft a Sadducean temerity, 
 as to the doctrines of the Bible, upon a Pharisaic precise- 
 ness, as to the text of the Bible. The churches may be 
 called to bless God, for the siftings to which German Neol- 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 353 
 
 ogy has subjected the text of the New Testament, as they 
 do for the bigoted strictness of the ancient Pharisee, as to 
 the text of the Old Testament: and yet our ciiurches may 
 as little sympathize with the principles of the German exe- 
 gete as with those of the ancient Scribes. 
 
 As to the attempt to make tradition an indispensable sup- 
 plement to Scripture, and to prove that Revelation is to be 
 compiled, and a system of religious truth selected, out of 
 the Fathers, Councils and Decretals, it seems to us, on its 
 face, as absurd, as would be the proposal, that we should 
 set ourselves to compile and complete the Paradise Lost of 
 Milton, a book of the seventeenth century, out of the news- 
 papers and general literature of the nineteenth century. We 
 might better content ourselves with the copy as it stands, in 
 its original integrity. If we arc to go out of it, we may find 
 in the floating sheets of our time, all the words of Milton's 
 poem, covered by myriads of other words, and destitute of 
 all order and cohesion. But the task of disentangling, iden- 
 tifying and arranging these " scattered members " of the 
 poet, would involve a toil quite as diihcult for our incomix-- 
 teiicy as the writing of a new and rival Paradise Lost. And 
 so, in the traditions of the Church, and the teachings of the 
 Fathers, tortuous, and contradictory, and confused as they 
 are. Inspiration and Omniscience would be quite as much 
 needed to disentangle truth from error, as to write any gos- 
 pel or epistle in all the New Testament. The insj)ired se- 
 lection of the true tradition would need, too, as much mira- 
 culous evidence to warrant the claim, as was vouchsafed to 
 the inspired dictation of the canonical Scriptures. 
 
 But it is said, by the advocates of Patristic lore ; you do 
 not know the canonical Scriptures, except by the testimony 
 of the early fathers ; and if they, it is, who give yt)U the 
 Testament, you are bound to take with it their interpreta- 
 tion. We do not admit this. The early Christians are but 
 as the postman, who brings to us a letter from some friend, 
 the resident of a distant city. The epistle is autlienlicated, 
 in part indeed, by the postmark and the carrier. But, be- 
 sides and above the evidence thus supjdied, the letter itself, 
 and its contents, as tallying with the known character and 
 earlier correspondence of our distant friend, are evidences 
 also : and if these last be wanting, the others would be un- 
 availing. In his place the carrier does good service, and 
 bears availing testimony : but if, because he is the postman, 
 
 46 
 
354 THE CHURCH, 
 
 he claims to open for us, and to interpret to us, the epistle 
 he brings, he grossly exaggerates his own prerogatives. 
 Even so is it with the early churches. As the bearers, in 
 Divine Providence, to us of our Father's letters missive, they 
 may legitimately testify to certain facts within their know- 
 ledge, that certain compositions were written by apostles 
 and apostolic men whom the apostles explicitly authorized 
 thereto. This is a fact of history. They are the masters 
 of the post where the letter was mailed, and their mark 
 fixes its origin at such place and at such date. But there 
 are other historical witnesses besides them. The very oppo- 
 nents of the gospel, in earlier ages, give similar testimony. 
 Julian the apostate is himself, then, one of the postmen. 
 But, even traditionists would not contend that he is there- 
 fore an interpreter of the document, which he aids in authen- 
 ticating and forwarding. 
 
 But are we told, by the men of reason, on the other hand, 
 that, if we admit man's intellect to sit in judgment on the 
 historical and other evidences of the Divine origin of the 
 document, and on the just letter and text of the document, 
 then, we must, of necessity, hold that intellect competent to 
 judge the substance, as well as the text of the document, 
 and to alter and amend this, to the requirements of the cul- 
 tivated reason ? We answer : the claim, though urged by 
 those who call themselves rationalists, seems the embodi- 
 ment of all that is irrational, as well as irreverent. If rea- 
 son can thus make and remake a revelation, it certainly does 
 not need one : if, confessedly, it needs one, then it cannot 
 make one. The principle of such an exegesis is, that we 
 first reason out by our own native powers, a system of doc- 
 trine or morals, and that we then hew and crush God's 
 scripture into harmony with this our preconceived standard. 
 If this system leaves Scripture any place, it is that of being 
 the stuttering interpreter of Reason, by an enunciation, 
 awkward, quaint, and obscure, bringing out what Reason 
 herself states more clearly, more systematically, and more 
 forcibly. The Bible is, then, a Moses, of stammering lips : 
 whilst Reason is the Aaron, the eloquent speaker. On this 
 principle, Revelation is seen, stumbling on crutches ; whilst 
 Reason moves before it, like some parent bird before its un- 
 fledged ofi'spring, poised on airy wings. The Bible, and 
 Conscience, and man's own honest, and unintoxicated Rea- 
 son, coincide in reversing this imaginary relation ; and as- 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 355 
 
 cribe the real ownership of the crutches to Reason, ami of 
 the wings to Revelation. 
 
 Instead of being outgrown, as some intimate, by the grow- 
 ing civilization of the race, the Scriptures, with the infinite 
 wisdom they derive from their Divine vVuthor, are fouinl, 
 age after age, developing still new glories with each deeper 
 investigation. No past age has exhausted all the lodes and 
 veins of truth these mines contain. The gospel is as inex- 
 haustible, as man's wants, and life's changes, and Ciod's 
 grace. Until the breathing of these troops of students shall 
 have stript these hills of their keen and bracing air, — until 
 tlie lungs of the race shall have exhausted the atmosphere 
 of our globe, — until your thirst shall have drained the seas, 
 and your eyes have beggared sun and stars of all their light, 
 you need not fear, brethren in the Christian ministry, that 
 your studies and your sermons will have drawn dry the 
 fountain of God's oracles. The only concern we need to 
 feel is, that, as in Jonathan Edwards, and Andrew Fuller, 
 and Henry Martyn, study and pietv should keep pace ; and 
 that the results of our profoundest thinking should be used 
 to feed the flames of a seraphic dev(jtion ; and that, like the 
 warrior psalmist of Israel, vigor and valor in the outer batlle- 
 tield of the world, should never be regarded as a dk-^pensa- 
 tion from lowly and lonely adoration, within the curtains of 
 the tabernacle. 
 
 A portion of this book of Revelation is prophetic. It 
 limns, with more or less of distinctness, the shape of the 
 times that are to pass over the churches and the nations. 
 "If (said the apostle to Timothy) thou put the brethren in 
 remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister 
 of Jesus Christ " (1 Tim. iv. G). Look to the context of 
 that saying, and it is found that these things, thus commended 
 as the theme of pastoral admonition, are the dillicult, con- 
 troverted and mysterious lessons of prophecy ; but practical, 
 in all their mystery, for they forewarn of an imi)eniiing, 
 gradual and general apostasy, and this as growing, in part, 
 out of a practical mistake, false views of Christian lioliiiess. 
 Prophecy had bidden the churches discern the gatlierings ol 
 that cloud, which burst in a storm of delusion upon Chris- 
 tendom, and continued for successive centuries. We do not 
 say that prophecy is to be the one staple of the pulpit, that 
 it is to be the exclusive, or even the paramount subject ol 
 study to the churches. The milk which belits the babes in 
 
356 THE CHURCH, 
 
 Christian grace, and the simple bread for which the poor of 
 the Lord hunger, are not to be sought, mainly, in gauging 
 the apocalyptic vials. Sinai, and the Mount of Beatitudes, 
 and Calvary, have their right to be heeded, as well as those 
 dread blasts which issue from the trumpets of the apocalyptic 
 vision. But, on the other hand, what God thought it neces- 
 sary to write, the Church may not safely think it unnecessary 
 to read : and whilst it is our folly to be wise above what is 
 written, it is our privilege to be. wise up to what God has so 
 written. Do we shrink from controversy ? It is often in- 
 evitable, to pass safely the ordeal of some popular error. 
 Does prophecy, as a study, seem Avanting in practical uses ? 
 Certainly, in the text already indicated from Paul's letters 
 to his son in the faith, the essence of Christian practice, the 
 true nature of holiness, is represented in the prophecy, as 
 being widely mistaken witliin the nominal Ciiurch. Without 
 pondering this, and similar predictions, we are not sure that 
 we set out, with just principles, in our elementary views of 
 Christian graces, and of practical holiness. And, on the 
 other hand, the prophetic portions of the Bible were, in the 
 hands of the early reformers, most ])otent weapons, of daily 
 use, against Rome. It is a remarkable and significant fact 
 of our times, that whilst Rome, as in dread of their power, 
 has sought to turn from herself the evangelical descriptions 
 of Antichrist which the reformers quoted against her, there 
 should be, at two remote points, having little intercourse or 
 sympathy, the Oxford Tractarians of Britain, on the one 
 side, and some esteemed expositors of our own land, on the 
 other, a disposition to pass to the Romanist system of inter- 
 pretation, thus surrendering an outwork held, both long be- 
 fore and long after the Reformation, by those who have wit- 
 nessed against that apostate Church. A return to the views 
 of our fathers, is, in this matter, we believe, demanded by 
 the harmony of Scripture, and indispensable to the triumphs 
 of the Gospel. With them, we must hold Pontifical Rome 
 to be the mystical Babylon of the New Testament. As 
 Babylon of the Chaldees held Israel captive by the Euphra- 
 tes, so has this fallen Church, beside the streams of her 
 Tiber, wielded a more cruel tyranny, over a wider region, 
 and for a far longer term. Prophetic exposition, as one of 
 the weapons of the Reformation against her, has not yet 
 lost its temper, and may not be spared from the armory of 
 the soldiers of truth. 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 
 
 3r)7 
 
 Scripture, then, in its fulness and its sulljciency — in its 
 morals, and its mysteries, and its projjliecii's also, must be, 
 and remain, the chief text-book and manual, in the Sclioul, 
 where God trains the chihh-en of Adam fur llie em|)l()yment.s 
 and associations of Heaven. 
 
 3. But besides the inunuals of man's conscience and CJud's 
 Scriptures, there is another book to be studied in tiic church. 
 The third is the volume of God's providence. God is ruhng 
 the world. His dealings are full of instruction. " >Vhoso 
 is wise," said the Psalmist, " and will observe these thi/iics, 
 even they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord/'* 
 That portion of the volume of Scripture to which we have 
 last alluded, and which contains God's prophecies of the fu- 
 ture, is to be interpreted by cullatn)n with this other and cor- 
 responding volume of His providence. This forms the chief 
 value of Church History. It illustrates the reasonableness 
 and justice of the warnings of inspired men, the value of 
 their doctrines to holiness, and shows the ell'ect of all at- 
 tempts to improve their doctrines by a higher sanctitv, to be 
 eventually the fostering of unholiness. It shows inij)ressive- 
 ly the unity of the Divine Spirit, and of the Saviour's image, 
 in true Christians of all ages and all conununions. One 
 great excellence of the labors of the devout and eminent 
 Neander, is the mode in which he thus analyzes and recog- 
 nizes the elements of true piety, wherever found ; and de- 
 tects the unity of the true members of Christ's Church amid 
 all the varieties of discipline, and customs, and nations. The 
 church history may be accessible to few : but the book of 
 God's providence has other pages that are accessible to all. 
 And how impressive may a Christian find this volume, as it 
 contains, not the history of past centuries merely, but as it in- 
 cludes his own career and that of his fellow-disciples person- 
 ally known and dear to hiin. How much light is rellected 
 hack, from those pages of his personal experience and his 
 own observation of God's dealings, upon the volume of Scrip- 
 ture ; and how are the promises, the warnings, and the re- 
 bukes of Scripture, shown under a new aspect. And not 
 the history of the Church only, but the annals of the world 
 become intelligible and profitable, only when studied as the 
 book of God and of his Christ. Jesus, the Messiah, is the 
 being whose advent and work knit together the raveled and 
 
358 THE CHURCH, 
 
 tangled web of the world's history ; and give it symmetry atid 
 aim, a meaning and a plan. The first successful attempt to 
 write a Universal History, as even irreligious critics allow, 
 was that which was made on Christian principles, by Bos- 
 suet, and all subsequent attempts to substitute a secular for a 
 spiritual point of view, in a general history of the race, — to 
 look at God's government of the world from the footstool and 
 not from the throne, — from the plans of the creature, over- 
 ruled and frustrated, and not from the plan of the Creator, 
 overruling all and not to be frustrated by any ; — all attempts 
 to delineate the school of God's Providence, as seen from 
 the forms of the scholar and not as beheld from the seat of 
 the great Teacher — all such earth-born schemes of writing 
 a symmetrical history of man and of his earth, have failed and 
 will fail. It is God's book : and to overlook Him and His 
 purposes in it, is to tear out the title-page, and preface and 
 index, from the volume. 
 
 As geometry must be studied with diagrams, and as the 
 readers of our age delight in a literature rich with pictorial 
 illustrations, so has God enriched and illustrated, so to speak, 
 the volume of his Scriptures with the pictured scenes of the 
 volume of Providence. The problems and demonstrations 
 of the one book, are made more plain by consulting the dia- 
 grams of the other. 
 
 Thus out of His volumes, as inscribed on man's memory 
 and heart ; — as written upon the page of Scripture ; — and as 
 delineated upon the pictured page of Providence, has the 
 Great Teacher of this school for Heaven furnished manuals, 
 to be pondered and collated by the human teachers and pu- 
 pils of His church. These are our text-books in the school 
 of Christ. We study any or all to profit, only under the eye 
 of the great, Divine, and Invisible Teacher, the Holy Ghost. 
 
 HI. Lastly, let us dwell on the character of the learners 
 in this, the academy that trains for heaven the children of 
 earth. 
 
 1. The universal race, the unawakened world of mankind 
 are, then, to be invited to these studies. The books tell — 
 Scripture distinctly — conscience and Providence by implica- 
 tion—the destiny of the race. This Bible is the record of 
 their Judge and their Redeemer. The Church is, of right 
 and from Christ's organization, a missionary body, baptizing 
 her converts under a missionary charter, and enlisting their 
 services for a war of holy aggression, on a world lying prone 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 3o'J 
 
 and captive in the bonds of the wicked one, and in the prac- 
 tice of all wickedness. " Go ye into all nations" is the voice 
 yet ringing over all the forms of this school, from its pre- 
 sent Saviour ; and breathed oft by the whisperings of the 
 unseen Spirit into the ear of the missionary teacher. That 
 it is little heeded and so scantily obeyi'd, this it is that con- 
 stitutes the guilt and shame of the Christian church. The 
 feast was spread indeed for guests, many of whom, though 
 bidden, would not come. But how sad the thought of the 
 myriads never bidden by the Church. The school was 
 opened for many who have refused to become learners there, 
 yet what countless myriads have never heard even the Great 
 Teacher's name, or seen one leaf, or read one line of the 
 volume of His Scripture. 
 
 2. But besides the world, all invited to be learners, the 
 body oi private members of the Church are, again, evidently 
 learners in the school of Christ. They will j)rolit, onlv as 
 they reduce what they learn to practice, try the human teach- 
 er by the Scripture, and compare the scriptural page with the 
 books of Conscience and of Providence, and pray that upon 
 themselves and their earthly instructors may ever rest the m- 
 fluence of the Divine Teacher, the Paracli!te. Thus prayer- 
 ful and heedful, every visit to the sanctuary, every interview 
 with a fellow-disciple, every Sabbath and every sermon be- 
 come the means of editication, and minister to the daily 
 growth of the Christian. His mind is educed and evolved. 
 It unfolds like the flowct it towers like the oak. They shall 
 grow as the lily, and cast forth their roots as Lebanon. He 
 profits and is profited. The joy and crown of his pastor's 
 rejoicing, he is the counsellor and friend and })attern of his 
 fellow-members. The world is abashed before his transj)a- 
 rent sincerity and his unruffled meekness ; and, going from 
 strength to strength, he appears ai last before God, removed 
 from the lower forms of earth to the higher level and the 
 wider vision of the heavenly world. Seeing, here, through a 
 glass darkly, and knowing but in part, there he knows even 
 as he is known. 
 
 3. But these are not the only learners. Pastors as well as 
 their people learn. The earthly and visible teachers of the 
 church are not released from the duty of continuing pupils 
 in the school. Their profiting should appear to all men. 
 and even the feeblest of their fellow-disciples, and the niosi 
 inconsistent of their fellow-professors, may aid then- spnit- 
 
360 THE CHURCH, 
 
 ual education. As the birth of an infant into a household, 
 and the claims it brings on the sympathies and cares of the 
 elder children, train them to an affection and thoughlfulness 
 Oefore unknown ; so, the feeble and infirm of the flock may 
 augment the graces of their stronger brethren on whom 
 they lean. The eye, the hand, and the foot, exchange mu- 
 tual aid. If the eye now guides the hand, the hand at other 
 times tears down the barriers that obstruct the vision of the 
 eye. If the eye now directs the climbing foot, the foot it is 
 that gains the mountain top, and gives to the eye the range 
 of a wider horizon. At the bed-side of a dying child, or of 
 an ignorant but godly Christian, what pastor has not had his 
 religious attainments enlarged ? Even heresies may profit. 
 They must be, said the apostle, that those who are approved 
 may be made manifest. The fall of Peter in the high priest's 
 hall, and his rebuke, in after days by Paul, for the want of 
 Christian simplicity, served as a warning to each apostle who 
 heard them. So even from the infirmities, divisions, and 
 scandals of the churches, the spiritual man may extract les- 
 sons of good. 
 
 4. But beyond the world, and the private Christian, and 
 the ministers of Christ's gospel, there is still another rank 
 of learners, who gaze upon the lessons of this school. Faith 
 sees, towering over the seats of the sanctuary, another rank 
 of learners, all attent, and all believing. The Christian 
 Church is a study to angels, so Paul asserts. " To the in- 
 tent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly 
 places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom 
 of God."* They gain, by the Spirit's government of the 
 Church, new views of the evil of sin and the dangers of 
 error; and loftier conceptions of the extent of the Divine 
 Love and the range of the Divine Wisdom. Jesus, the great 
 Head of the Church, was " seen of angels." As of old 
 their golden resemblances, the cherubim of the mercy-seat, 
 bowed over the mystic contents of the ark, where the law of 
 inflexible justice was resting beneath the lids of the mercy- 
 seat on which was enthroned a God of forgiveness, so do 
 these angels, not emblematically but really, j'et desire to 
 " look into these things ;" and watch, with interest and sym- 
 pathy, the course of those human spirits, once the children 
 of wrath, whom grace has made the children of God, — once, 
 
 * Ephesians iii. 10. 
 
A SCHOOL FOR IIEAVEX, 30] 
 
 With Adam, learners, in the school of sin, of the fatal know- 
 edge of good and evil, and now, under the second Adam, 
 learners of the knowledge of good, good only and ever^ 
 more. They rejoiced before the throne over the sinner's 
 conversion. They minister to the onward course of the 
 struggling saint We forget this. Kneeling in feebleness 
 and gloom, and loneliness, in his secluded closet, the tempt- 
 ed disciple seeing for the time but the visible, and for.retiin.r 
 the invisible, deems himself the unnoticed and solitary wrcs° 
 tier, that is but " beating the air." He seems to ur-re an 
 unheard plea, and hardly to maintain an unavailing strife. 
 But, in truth, he is visible to those who are to him invisible! 
 That solitary wrestler of the secluded closet is, in fact, the 
 victorious athlete on whom is gathered the gaze of a vast,' and 
 thronged, and resplendent amphitheatre. He is watched 
 by a great cloud of witnesses. " We are made," said the 
 apostle, " a spectacle to angels and to men." And, above 
 all, there rests upon him, evermore, the eye of his Father 
 who seeth in secret and will reward liim openly. 
 
 Such are the instructors, lessons, and learners of the school 
 God's grace has opened in the church of the redeemed. 
 
 1. May not the recollections of the invisible and spiritual 
 church, furnish the most availing counterpoise to the claims 
 of Antichrist ? If, at first view, this imagery of a great Cath- 
 olic and visible church, having wide nations in its communion, 
 a visible head, and a long succession of such heads, enchant 
 and overpower the imagination ; how do these dwindle and 
 shrivel, beside the spiritual views the Scripture presents, of 
 a great catholic, invisible church, of the elect of all times, 
 now invisible but one day to be manifested, having an infalli- 
 ble and sinless High Priest, Christ Jesus, really present unto 
 all his worshippers, and a King who only hath immortality. 
 To traditions, contradictory and obscure, locked up in de- 
 cretals and acts of councils, and collections of papal bulls; 
 let us oppose the Eternal and Unerring Spirit, leading into 
 all truth, accessible every where to prayer, and dwelling in 
 the believer's heart — not to be sought at Rome by voyage 
 and pilgrimage, but near as his word, in our mouth and our 
 heart. The plea of private judgment, which some make the 
 exclusive, and most the prominent point of resistance to the 
 Roman argument, seems really liable to the objection Roman- 
 ists adduce against it, of leading into wild and impious ration- 
 alism. It is so liable, whenever severed from the recognition 
 47 
 
362 THE CHURCH, 
 
 of our continual dependence on the Divine Spirit, and sev- 
 ered from his infallible faithfulness to our appeals, when that 
 dependence is but acknowledged. Take these truths with 
 it, and place them before it; and the right of private judg- 
 ment is impregnable. But sever them ; and the claims of 
 antiquity, authority, and an infallible church, as the inter- 
 preter of Scripture, become to some minds irresistible. 
 
 2. Honor to the Divine Teacher is, then, the safeguard and 
 glory of the Church, of the Theological school, of our pul- 
 pits, and of our professorial chairs. Separate the visible and 
 the invisible, exaggerate the sufficiency and power of the 
 first, depreciate and forget the sovereignty of the last; let the 
 usher afi'ect independence of the Master, and let the minis- 
 try, the human teachers of this school, overlook the Divine 
 teachings of the Holy Ghost ; divorce the desk from the 
 closet ; attempt to read the written page of Scripture, and the 
 pictured page of Providence, and the blotted page of Con- 
 science, apart from the Divine Interpreter of them all : and 
 your pastorate becomes fruitless, your churches barren, and 
 your students heretical. Puny sciolism is earth's best schol- 
 arship, when it aflects independence of the Holy Ghost. Let 
 eloquence adorn, and science strengthen, the teachings thus 
 opposed to the Holy Ghost, the work and the workman are 
 something worse than worthless : they are accursed. The 
 frosts of the second death will seal those fluent lips. The 
 fires of the burning throne will smite the man thus faith- 
 less as a shepherd of Christ's flock, and thus dishonest as 
 the steward of the Divine mysteries, and who preaches re- 
 ligious falsehood in the chair of spiritual verity. 
 
 3. If the Church be indeed, in one of its multiform aspects, 
 a school for Heaven, a device of Infinite Wisdom to urge 
 and guide the powers of the soul in tlieir onward and upward 
 aspirations, it is manifestly the duty of the youthful student, 
 who looks, as pastor or missionary, to aid and extend the 
 Churches of Christ, to seek for himself, in the progress of his 
 scholastic education, the benefits of this spiritual education, 
 and to acquire a personal experience of the workings of 
 church order, and the advantages of church fellowship. Not, 
 as if it were to put himself under irksome restraints, but as 
 a matter of delight and advantage to- his own soul, and as a 
 token of his own deference to that Great Teacher whom 
 he is about to commend to others, he musi value the Church 
 which his Lord and Saviour organized ; and place himself 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 3G3 
 
 under the cherishing and stimnlatitig, the guard ian and the 
 impulsive influences of that school which Christ devised. 
 Not that students should necessarily, or generallv, even, he- 
 come full members. But if, the desire^o keep unbroken 
 the ties of union to the Church of their original member- 
 ship, seem to render their full dismission unriesirable ; and 
 the loss of all their licentiates for the ministry were, on 
 the other hand, no inconsiderable and no safe sacrifice, to be 
 made by the Churches abroad : this sundering of old ties and 
 surrender of youthful licentiates might perhaps be avoided, 
 and the end desired might yet be secured, if the churches 
 abroad, instead of giving to these students the ordinary 
 letter of recommendation, indefinite in extent of duration 
 and vague in its address, as being intended for all churches 
 alike, should give a special letter of recommendation, in the 
 case of their students at the Theological Seminary, This 
 peculiar letter of commendation might recommend them, for 
 certain years of their studies, to the peculiar church of that 
 Seminary, as subjects of its special care and recipients of all 
 its advantages. There would, thus, be given to the church 
 of the Seminary its special right to expect the communion 
 in its ordinances, and the aid in its services of the young stu- 
 dent, while leaving to the original church all rights of final 
 discipline and entire dismission. Thus the church, at the 
 scene of their studies, would serve as the trustee, with lim- 
 ited and defined powers, of the church of their proper mem- 
 bership ; and the youthful scholar would not, amid his 
 books and lectures, want this education, an education e(jually 
 valuable with books and lectures, and that the church affords 
 in its various services, and its mutual sympathies and cares. 
 4. If God, the Highest, comes down to the minds of the 
 feeble and the ignorant who sit in His school, the Church, 
 surely it should be the joy of the Christian scholar to briiiir 
 down his highest attainments to the aid of the least and of 
 the least esteemed in Christ's Church. The beam that drops 
 out of the side of the sun into the heart of the violet, paint- 
 ing it with its rich hues, has travelled myriads of miles with 
 the utmost speed, and, past stars and systems, it shot along its 
 undiverted way, to reach that lowly end, and to do this its ap- 
 pointed errand — So let the youthful servants of the cross, in 
 fetching like Elihu their knowledge from afar,* delight glad- 
 
 * Job xxxvi. 3. 
 
364 THE CHURCH, 
 
 ly to distil its results into the lowliest offices of the pastorate, 
 and instead of seeking after high things, condescend to men 
 of low estate, as the true ministers of a Teacher, who hum- 
 bled himself, coming not to be ministered unto but to min- 
 ister, and who had hshermen for his apostles. 
 
 We trust, there are none such among the youthful stu- 
 dents of this Institution ; but, to an evil, in some quarters 
 betraying itself, it is titting to allude in the modes its vota- 
 ries will best understand. If an affectation of gentility be the 
 highest aim of any misguided youth, who has condescended 
 to patronize the religion of that Carpenter's Son, who de- 
 meaned Himself so far even, as to die the malefactors' 
 death ; why should such an aspirant cling to the ministra- 
 tions of a faith, which must be, to his first principles of con- 
 duct, so uncongenial and repulsive ? Let him rather ' sacri- 
 fice to the Graces,' and restore that elegant Polytheism, 
 whose fall Gibbon deplored. Seeking, first and evermore, 
 the honor that cometh from man, he is likely to become 
 more versed in the gospel according to Chesterfield, than in 
 either of the four evangelists. Conscious, although he may 
 have little claim to talent, attainments, or piety, that he is 
 clothed with what to him seem far higher endowments than 
 are these, why should he sully his exquisite nature with 
 preaching a Gospel, which its Founder gave especially for 
 the poor? Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? How 
 can the elegant youth consent to put the mark of his distin- 
 guished approbation upon the Bible, on learning that it 
 actually contains the awkward and astounding fact, that an- 
 gels from heaven once were seen rendering lowly service 
 to a dead beggar? And this, too, when by continuing their 
 progress but a few paces farther, they might have been hon- 
 ored with the hospitalities of a member of ' good society,' who 
 was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously 
 every day. On learning, from some devouter friend, that 
 the New Testament actually contained the unaccountable 
 recital, and on ascertaining, from some more studious asso- 
 ciate, that German criticism has not pronounced the strange 
 narrative an interpolation, how could the refined and es- 
 senced candidate for the Christian ministry explain, with 
 courtly dignity, so much neglect of those within the pale of 
 refined society, and such undue familiarity toward one with- 
 out that dread enclosure? If he did not, with indignation, 
 repudiate the volume, the best apology his ingenuity could 
 
A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 365 
 
 construct for intelligences so regardless of all social distinc- 
 tions, must be, that all this occurred before the niaiuials of 
 politeness, now so valuable and so common, were published, 
 and that perhaps it was not the felicity of angels, even in 
 these later times, to be intimately acquainted with Chester- 
 field. The delicate youth must hope, that the society, which 
 in the high festivals of heaven recline near the bosom of 
 Abraham, have become of late years more select than when 
 they admitted Lazarus : else can they expect to be honored 
 by the accession to their number of a well-bred pastor and 
 his well-bred converts, who, while extending a proper ])atron- 
 age to the Bible, feel, with a more lively faith, the all-suili- 
 ciency of Fashion, that capricious and despotic deity? 
 
 Brethren, we are persuaded better things of you, though 
 we thus speak. We trust, that you would emulate the 
 spirit of that apostle, courteous indeed, and niagnanimou.s 
 if ever man was ; but who said : If I yet pleased men, I 
 should not be the servant of Christ.* Let others forge anew 
 the golden calf, and dance around it, even at the foot of the 
 quaking Sinai. Fix your eye on the smoking summit; and 
 let the thunder of its oracles drown, in your ears, the tink- 
 ling of their cymbals ; and count yourself more honored than 
 annoyed, by the scorn they may lavish on you, for the re- 
 fusal to share their adorations. The Christian preacher is 
 not the man of any caste : in lowliness, he is to deem him- 
 self beneath the meanest; but, in the dignity of his mission, 
 and in the authority of his Master, he is entitled to look 
 down on the loftiest' and mightiest of earth's transgressors. 
 
 5. Education, for the judgment day and for eternity, is the 
 first and last business of this life. Are we thus edncated 
 ourselves, and educating others? It is this, the invisible 
 and the endless, that must give due authority to our mes- 
 sage, and effect to our testimony. Soon, brethren in the 
 pastorate, the invisible realities of eternity will have become 
 visible. As the dreams of the sleeper vanish, when the 
 films of sleep melt from his eyes ; and the real world, unseen 
 during his slumbers, floats in upon his awaking :— so, breth- 
 ren in the ministry, will it soon be with us and with our 
 hearers. The day— that day— will try our work, of what 
 sort it is. The dreams and phantoms, that now occupy man- 
 kind, will disappear, when the night is once past ; and the 
 
 * Galat. i. 10. 
 
366 THE CHURCH, A SCHOOL FOR HEAVEN. 
 
 dread, or the glorious realities of eternity, of which we tes- 
 tify, will take their place. The Invisible God, of our sanc- 
 tuaries and our closets, will become the Visible God, of the 
 judgment-seat. Let us, like Moses, now, by faith, "discern 
 Him, the Invisible." Let us remember, that, when Daniel 
 stood before Belshazzar, the monarch and his appalled court- 
 iers quaked, not so much before the visible and human pro- 
 phet, as before that prophet's Invisible Master, whose hand 
 only was seen, tracing on the wall the dread characters of 
 doom. There might well have been, in that court, many a 
 more august visage, and a sterner voice, than were Daniel's ; 
 but behind the human messenger loomed the dread majesty of 
 that Almighty Avenger, for whom he spake. So must it be 
 with us. Let our churches, and congregations, be compelled 
 to recognize, behind the mortal pastor, who is but the human 
 and visible usher in Christ's school ; looming in Divine Ma- 
 jesty, the Invisible and Almighty Teacher of the Church, 
 and Sovereign of the world. Thus only, shall we benefit 
 both. The churches, honoring Him, will be compacted into 
 unity, and developed into symmetry. The body of Christ 
 will grow evermore, in his likeness. For the students in 
 the school of Christ never graduate. Throughout all eter- 
 nity, theirs is a growing expansion of intellect, and a widen- 
 ing range of intelligence ; and as death puts no end to their 
 spiritual being, so the universe interposes no barrier to their 
 endless advancement. Thus, too, shall we benefit the uncon- 
 verted as well ; and startle a doomed world, to a salutary 
 fear, and a saving faith, as they shall see the pulpit itself, but 
 in the foreground, and rising awfully, in the distance be- 
 hind, THE Great White Throne. "The things which 
 are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are 
 eternal." 
 
THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH AGAINST THOSE 
 DELIGHTING IN WAR. 
 
 (A Discourse delivered on the first Sabbatli of ilio year 1S47.) 
 
 " SCATTER THOU THE PEOPLE THAT BELIGHT IN WAR."— Psallll Ixviii. 30. 
 
 It was said by the Queen Regent of Scotland, wlien speak- 
 ing of the great Reformer of that country, wliose principles 
 she hated, whilst she was awed by his piety, that " she 
 dreaded the prayers of John Knox more than an army of ten 
 thousand men." And better and safer were it, my beloved 
 hearers, to face a cloud of hurtling spears, and to bear the iron 
 rain of arrow and javelin, and a wiser venture were it to walk 
 up to the park of artillery, pealing from iis mouth a fiery 
 sleet of death, than to encounter the prayers of (lod's saints 
 united with resistless urgenc)% and darting with invisible 
 potency against us and our cause. We have here the Zion 
 of the Most High, lifting up, as by the single but insj)ired 
 voice of David, their protest, their supplication, and their 
 adjuration against all who find pleasure in scenes of carnage 
 and reckless devastation. Now the prayers which our Heav- 
 enly Father has taught to Ilis people, reveal the princi|)les 
 upon which He administers His government of the nations. 
 The God-given supplications of the Church, by implication, 
 teach the statutes of the Head of the Church. The prayer 
 which inspiration has furnished. Providence will accomplish. 
 What He bids us ask Him to do, we may be assured. He 
 means Himself to do. The petitions He indites, and the 
 edicts He promulgates, are identical in their tenor. 
 
 Our country is at this time engaged in war against a neigh- 
 boring nation. It is impossible but that the ((uestion of the 
 lawfulness of this present contest, and indeed of all war, 
 should be agitated. It is, in no sense, our intention, nor is it 
 our province, to prostitute the influence of the pulpit to the 
 uses of political partisanship. But we hold that a religious 
 
368 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 teacher may state what he believes to be the teachings of the 
 Bible on the rights and the wrongs, the duties and the sins 
 of his times. He is not to shrink from rebuking sin in the 
 powerful, more than in the obscure and the poor ; in the 
 many more than in the few ; in the sovereign, more than in 
 the subject. Thus Nathan discharged his office, unawed by 
 the station, the power, or the feelings of David, the writer 
 of this Psalm ; thus Ahab, though a sovereign, found a re- 
 prover in his subject Elijah ; and thus Herod quailed before 
 the stern fidelity of John the Baptist ; and thus, too, Paul 
 the apostle, before a magistrate whose enmity it was, in his 
 condition as a prisoner, peculiarly dangerous to incur, and 
 whose character was neither marked by righteousness nor 
 temperance, nor fears of judgment in this world or the next, 
 chose to testify of the virtues in which his judge was deficient, 
 and dared to remind him of a tribunal where he, with his 
 meanest victim, must stand equally amenable. Sin, then, 
 wherever found, as it is God's enemy, is the fair quarry and 
 mark of the preacher to whom God has said, as to his pro- 
 phet of old, " Preach the preaching that I bid thee."* 
 
 With us the people hold the sovereignty. It is the prin- 
 ciple of the gospel that " he that ruleth " should do it " with 
 diligence "f — or know his responsibilities, and strenuously 
 aim to meet them. The people, like all other sovereigns, 
 owe allegiance to the " Blessed and only Potentate "J; above, 
 and may well study, therefore. His oriicles for their guidance, 
 imploi-e His favor in the ways of obedience, as the only con- 
 dition of perfect and permanent safety, and deprecate His 
 wrath, as involving sure and remediless ruin to the stormy 
 and multitudinous democracy, no less than to the solitary 
 despot. The pulpit may then censure national as well as 
 individual sins, and bring up the great principles which con- 
 trol or should control the movement of the masses, as well 
 as the precepts that require the obedience of individuals in 
 private life. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the minister of the gospel may 
 not be a mere politician. He may see in all political organi- 
 zations too much of inconsistency and corruption, to attach 
 himself blindly to the guidance of any. He sees sins in 
 the men of all forms of government, and in the members 
 of all political confederations ; and he sees also in men of 
 
 ♦ Jonah iii. 2. t Rom. xii. 8. I 1 Tim. vi. 15, 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN W AR. 309 
 
 every class, and tribe, and country, the abject, the hostild 
 and the criminal, souls iniinitely precious. His Master has 
 proclaimed that His ''kingdom is not of this wurld.'" The 
 Church of Christ may not then become the drudge and 
 tool of any ruler, or people, much less of any section of a 
 people. The conversion of a soul is to the true pastor, in 
 his better hours, of more moment than the political interests 
 of an empire. Never then may questions of government 
 become with him paramount to the great truths of the gos- 
 pel, sin and Hell, conversion and Heaven, an eternal salva- 
 tion and an everlasting perdition, the atoning Redeemer, 
 and the renewing, sanctifying Spirit. When, losing these 
 views, the pulpit becomes the mere channel of political con- 
 troversy, it damages the Church without benefiting the 
 State. Jesuitism gave to kings and courts its own confess- 
 ors, thus pouring through the ears of a monarch its own 
 principles into the counsels of his cabinet. Protestantism 
 would not be more wisely or honorably employed, were it to 
 send its ministers to crowd the antichambers or climb the 
 backstairs of rulers, or to edit for the sovereign nation their 
 political journals. A teacher of Christ's gospel has higher, 
 better work, than that of the mere politician, though the poli- 
 tician is notbevond the purview of the great principles which 
 the Christian minister is to expound and enforce. And, on 
 the other hand, as we have sought to show, the minister of 
 Christ may preach of national sins, where nations do sin, 
 and announce from the exhaustless and unerring oracles of 
 the Universal Sovereign, the great elementary laws of na- 
 tional duty. In doing this, he may for the time be claimed 
 by one party, or branded by another, as doing a work of 
 political partisanship. Imputations of a similar kind are in 
 his path, in the discharge of many other duties. He cannot 
 interfere in healing i)rivate grievances, or re-uniting brethren 
 that contend, or in administering the discipline of the Church, 
 but at the price of similar misconstructions. Misconception 
 and reproach are to some extent inevitable. His duty, it 
 would seem to us, is to lay down great principles — to avoid, 
 as far as possible, all interference with personal and political 
 details, and eyeing God's truth as his law, to commend his 
 work to God's judgment, indifferent to man's praise or blame, 
 so he have but testified for God, and before Him— /ur God, 
 the truth,— before God, that truth in sinceriti/.^ 
 
 These remarks may have seemed tedious. They appeared 
 48 
 
370 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 to US necessary, as vindicating and explaining what we sup- 
 pose are the rights of the Christian ministry in such mutters. 
 We entreat, now, your attention and patient consideration, 
 and the aid of your prayers, that the All-ruling and All-en- 
 lightening God may give us to know and say, see and obey 
 His own Truth, as we examine the lesson of the Psalmist's 
 prayer. 
 
 Our text presents a great principle in the Divine govern- 
 ment. He will, as his Church prays that he would, " scatter 
 the people that delight in war.'''' His Providence has re- 
 echoed and interpreted His Scripture in this respect. 
 
 In the secluded valleys of the Pyrenees in southern France, 
 have been found for centuries an outcast and scattered race, 
 generally maimed, covered with tatters and vermin, and the 
 victims of scrofula and leprosy, who are called the Cagots. 
 They have for centuries been a separate people from the 
 peasants around, the objects of contempt, hatred and per- 
 secution ; the. vilest offences have been imputed to them ; 
 and most trades and professions barred against them. They 
 were, in earlier centuries, required to wear on their clothes 
 some mark to distinguish them from others, were permit- 
 ted to enter the cliurch only by a separate door, long were 
 denied sepulture in the ordinary burial grounds, and the 
 priests refused to admit them to confession ; they wandered 
 about without fire in winter, with no settled habitation, re- 
 tiring at night to barns and hovels. In ancient times, the 
 testimony of seven of them was held equivalent to the evi- 
 dence of one freeman. The antiquaries of France have been 
 divided and perplexed as to the origin of these people, and 
 of that envenomed hostility and prejudice which bayed and 
 snarled at their feet, wherever they wandered, an abject and 
 outcast race. The most plausible opinion is tliat they are the 
 remains of a race once an invading and powerful one, since 
 subjugated and scattered, and that the remembrance of their 
 old cruelties is the origin of those long centuries of cruel op- 
 pression they have undergone. Some find in their very 
 name traces of their descent from those mighty and valiant 
 Goths who in earlier centuries rolled their successive bdlows 
 of desolation over so many kingdoms of Europe.* If this be 
 so, here have we, in the Providence of God, such reply to 
 and confirmation of the voice of Scripture as we have already 
 
 * See Appendix. 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 371 
 
 described. But whether the " scattered " and peeled, the 
 pale, timid and abject Cagot, be or be not the descendant of 
 the bold and warlike Goth, "delightincr in war," the princi- 
 ple o{ our text stands not on the right or wrong interpreta- 
 tion of that dark and difficult page in European history. The 
 whole volume of history establishes the truth, in instances 
 not dubious, not few, and not remote. War, loved for its 
 own sake, ultimately "scatters" the nation thus sanguinary 
 in their tastes. Those .taking the sword with bloodthirsty 
 carelessness, perish by it. 
 
 But is all war thus visited and thus condemned as displeas- 
 ing to God? We do not see the scriptural evidence that 
 it is. 
 
 I. We would then, first, examine the question. Is all war 
 sinful ? 
 
 II. Next we would consider the class undoubtedly sinful, 
 and here denounced, " who delight in war.''' 
 
 III. And in the last place, we would return to the punish- 
 ment .here invoked upon such from God : that they should 
 be dispersed and reduced : " scattered " by the whirlwind 
 they have loved to raise and to ride. 
 
 I. We cannot, then, with some Christians, believe that all 
 war is forbidden by the gospel. Private revenge is uniloubl- 
 edly forbidden, but so is not Divine vengeance. It is be- 
 yond all question, we think, prohibited to unite the Church 
 with the State, and so make Christ's kingdom of this world ; 
 but although the Christian faith is forbidden to seek the aid 
 and endowment of government, government itself is not made 
 an unlawful and unchristian thing. They who from the law 
 in the Sermon on the Mount, where private quarrels arc 
 discouraged by the command to turn, when smitten on the 
 one cheek, the other also, educe the sweeping inference, that 
 the magistrate and the soldier are usurpers, ought, in con- 
 sistency, to give the same broad interpretation to another 
 command in the same discourse, that we give to all asking, 
 and turn not from* the borrower ; and then if the first pre- 
 cept forbids forcible government and war, the second pro- 
 hibits all claim of private property. For what is war but for- 
 cible government— /»/j]/67Va/ might sustaining moral rl^j^hll 
 Now Paul expressly taught that the magistrate was not to bear 
 the sicord in vain. What is the sword? An instrument 
 forged for the single and express purpose of taking awav, not 
 brutal, but human life. Paul teaches, then (or rather Paul's 
 
372 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Master, Christ, and the inspiring and unerring Holy Ghost, 
 leach by him), that the magistrate may take man's life. Val- 
 uable as human life may be, right and order are yet dearer ; 
 and to maintain the last, the just and pious governor may take 
 away the first. In the case of a single wrong-doer, this is capi- 
 tal punishment. When several wrong-doers combine, when the 
 offenders are more than a mob, — a disorganized and revolted 
 province, — or a hostile and wrong-doing nation, this is war — 
 and such violent wrong may be resisted on Christian principles 
 by physical force. But it is urged, is not the spread of Chris- 
 tianity to abolish, in the last days, war, and to convert the 
 sword into the plowshare ? We allow this, but the Scripture 
 represents the gospel as abolishing war, just as it abolishes 
 law-suits, not by rendering the one or the other unlawful 
 or unchristian, but by abating and suppressing men's wrong 
 feelings, and thus exterminating those acts which make the 
 suit before a tribunal, or the appeal to arms, necessary for 
 the vindication of right. Judges are not unlawful, although 
 so much of litigation is unreasonable and wicked. War is not 
 unscriptural, although existing wars so often be most unjust. 
 But, is it urged that it is not consistent with the spiritual 
 character of Christ's new and olessed dispensation, to uphold 
 moral right with animal, physical force? We answer, God's 
 whole government proceeds on the principle of doing so. 
 He plagues the sinner with bodily disease. Outward trouble 
 visited the sin of Uzziah, and brought to Manasseh spiritual 
 healing. He vexes the guilty inhabitants of earth with fam- 
 ine and pestilence, and with physical destruction from the 
 earthquake and volcano ; and He calls them to recognize 
 His equity and His spirituality and His wisdom in these 
 physical inflictions, as well as in the moral influences of His 
 word and His Spirit. What is the voice of the fiery pit of 
 wo ? Is not its anguish in part a physical anguish, as de- 
 scribed by the Judge himself, our Lord Jesus, when he de- 
 ■ clares that both soul and body are cast into hell ? 
 
 And it should be observed, that after those times of spirit- 
 ual reformation, when peace shall long prevail over the whole 
 earth, and the Millennial rest be enjoyed, the Bible seems to 
 represent the return of a time when there shall be war again 
 between the saints of God's Church and the enemies of that 
 Church. God's people are not depicted as passive victims, 
 but as strenuous combatants in that conflict. The triumph 
 of the gospel, through Earth's long Sabbath, had not made 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR, 373 
 
 war unlawful, but only for one thousand years unnecessary. 
 If war, as some represent it, were in all cases but promiscu- 
 ous butchery and murder multiplied, would it ever have been 
 said, as it is in the imagery of the Apocalypse, that there was 
 "war in Heaven," and would it have been proclaimed, as it 
 is of the Lord Jesus himself, in that book, that in '■'■faithful- 
 ness he doth judge and make war ?'^ Is this tantamount 
 to the declaration (as some ultraists in the advocacy of 
 peace define war) in reference to the Saviour Jesus, that 
 in faithfulness he murders ? Forbid the blas})hemy ! No. 
 But it teaches the great truth already indicated, that the faith- 
 fulness of Jesus Christ as universal Governor, will be mani- 
 fested in "judging" those who acknowledge, and in "war- 
 ring " against those who defy his sway. He will dispense 
 his enactments and instructions as a judge, and if to some 
 these avail not, he will resort to force, physical force, as the 
 Just Governor of the Universe, making war upon and sub- 
 duing its criminals and revoltcrs. 
 
 And when Christ came himself into the world, neither he 
 nor his immediate forerunner, the Baptist, nor his followers 
 the Apostles, though under plenary inspiration, taught that 
 the profession of arms was unlawful and murderous. John 
 the Baptist instructed soldiers to be content with their wages. 
 If he had regarded these wages as but the price of blood, 
 would such have been the lessons of a Reformer, come in the 
 spirit and power of Elias, to denounce all sin, and to require 
 a general and prayerful repentance ? So the Acts of the Apos- 
 tles contain not the slightest intimation, that Cornelius the 
 Roman centurion, a chief of soldiers, was required by the 
 Holy Spirit which he received to abandon his ])ost ; nor that 
 Seririus Paulus, the Governor, was conunanded to relinquish 
 his connection with the central government at Rome, essen- 
 tially and in all its relations a military and war-maknig power. 
 The description given of the attendant of Cornelius, seems 
 unaccountable, if the views of some Christians against all 
 war were correct. " A devout soldier," on these i)rmciples, 
 is as great an anomaly as a religious assassin or a scrai)hic 
 
 poisoner. , , , i .• i 
 
 But it is said that the early Christians held war uulawlul. 
 
 This we deny on the authority of Neander, one of the liiijli- 
 
 est authorities in such a question.* There seem to have 
 
 * In his " Denkwiirdigkeiten," and his Church History. 
 
374 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 been those in the second and third centuries among them 
 doubting its pi-opriety ; but that it was not with the early 
 Christians a prevalent sentiment, appears sufficiently from 
 the boast of Tertullian, when he represents Christians as fill- 
 ing the Roman camps as well as forums. Their conversion 
 to Christ had not driven them from the standards of their 
 country. 
 
 God has authority, it will be allowed, to take away life. 
 He may grant it to human governments. It seems to us a 
 plain teaching of Scripture that he has done so. Force may 
 sustain Right. This, against a single wrong-doer, becomes 
 imprisonment, and may become capital punishment — against 
 a multitude of wrong-doers it becomes war. Dear as human 
 life may be, the sentiment of every heart is that there are 
 blessings that should be yet dearer. The martyr relinquishes 
 his life rather than forego the truth, because truth should be 
 dearer than life. The criminal forfeits his life to justice, 
 because justice is and should be dearer than life. And God, 
 in the case of the occupation of Canaan by Israel, explicitly 
 required war, and that a war of devastation. Its Hittites and 
 Perizzites were criminals of an aggravated turpitude and 
 audacious hardihood in crime. He was their magistrate. 
 The Jew was his commissioned executioner. 
 
 And whilst we allow that in war all forms of wickedness 
 are generally rife, and that war is always a calamity, and 
 generally an enormous crime on the one side or the other, 
 or perhaps occasionally on both, we cannot but think that 
 the voice of conscience and history, and the common senti- 
 ment of mankind testify, that in the terrible conflicts of war 
 have also been seen specimens of the high and heroic devel- 
 opment of our nature. Joshua, and David, and the noble 
 Jonathan, all warriors, were they not men of the highest 
 excellence ? Was not Abraham, the father of the faithful, 
 blessed by Melchisedec, the holy prince of Salem, as he 
 returned from a warlike foray and rescue ? Can the heart 
 think coldly of Leonidas, holding with his brave band the nar- 
 row strait against the dense masses of his country's invaders ; 
 or of Arnold de Winkelreid, the Swiss worthy, making a prac- 
 ticable breach for his compatriots in the spear-bearing and ser- 
 ried ranks of the enemy by gathering " a sheaf of their spears" 
 into his single breast? And Christian virtue, too, has been 
 found, and that of a high order, amid the din and carnage of 
 the camp. Baxter was an army chaplain when he wrote the 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 375 
 
 Saint's Everlasting Rest. Hampden, we believe, died the 
 death of a Chnstiun as well as a patriot, when mortallv 
 wounded in defence of his country's liberUes, unj„sllv a d 
 tyrannically assailed by the First Charles. Col. Hutchiuson 
 one of the converts to the views of the Baptists in the tinier 
 of he Commonwealth, was a soldier as well as a Christi m • 
 and so was the upright, ardent, and ind(,milable Harrison' 
 another Baptist of the Commonwealth, who in the Kestoral 
 tion suffered death as one of the judges of Charles. Col 
 Blackadder, a Scotch officer, was eminent for j.iety amona 
 the officers, as John Haimes, one of Wesley's exhorters, was 
 among the privates of the English armies in Flanders; and 
 by the labors of the last, the work of conversion went on 
 amid battles and sieges. Col. Gardiner, we doubt not, be- 
 lieved himself as really serving God when, fighting against 
 the return of the Stuarts, and with them of Romanism, to 
 the throne of England, he perished by Highland clavmores 
 on the field of Preston Pans, as when a few hours before he 
 had been bowing the knee in private devotion to his God. 
 
 It is, we suppose, a plain teaching of Scripture that war 
 is not in all cases unlawful. It is a principle with Got!, 
 that when Reason and Conscience will not restrain wrong, 
 then Might, physical Might, shall. He acts uj)on it Himserf. 
 He authorizes government to act upon it. Indeed, it is a 
 right necessary to the very existence of government, and 
 government we suppose necessary to the continued existence 
 of the race, as it certainly is to their well-being. The ruler 
 may not only advise and entreat, he may, and if it be neces- 
 sary, he must also coerce. 
 
 1 II. But it may be asked, if war be allowal)le, is not " dc- 
 jlight in war " also allowable 'I We answer, this by no means 
 J follows, Brutus believed that justice recpiired it of him to 
 condemn his own sons to dcatfi. But whilst this was patriot- 
 ism, it would have been brutality had he " delighted "in the 
 terrible sacrifice. Abraham honored God when, at his re- 
 quirement, he lifted the knife against the white, soft neck of 
 his only, his promised child Isaac ; but he would have dis- 
 honored himself and his God, had he gloated with "delight'' 
 over the prospect of seeing soon the severed veins, the spout- 
 ing blood, and the writhing limbs of his darling son. The 
 officer who for just cause inflicts the last sanction of the law 
 on some foul murderer, may but do his duty. But the spec- 
 tator, who has what some men have shown a j)erverted tasle, 
 
376 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 relishing executions, and who loves the sight of a dying wretch 
 in his last agonies, is not to be respected or excused. The 
 distinction between ^^ warring ^^ and delighting' in war,'''' 
 is a broad one. It is the same in principle as that which 
 separates the parent who chastises his child reluctantly, and 
 from a sense of duty, and the hardened and unnatural father, 
 who delights to worry and torture his offspring, and beats 
 from his delight in the infliction of pain. It is the difference 
 between the surgeon who amputates to lessen suffering, and 
 the Indian tormenting his captive in every mode that a tierce 
 ingenuity can devise to heighten pain into intolerable intensity. 
 
 We may do, and rightfully do, acts in which we have no 
 right to delight. A wise teacher will not delight in rebuke, 
 yet rebuke may be at times inevitable and profitable, A 
 Church of Christ may be compelled to exscind an offending 
 member, but they can never delight in it ; however, it may 
 be not only lawful, but even demanded of them, so that the 
 neglect of it would be unlawful and criminal. 
 
 When we remember the misery and devastation, the rapine 
 and conflagration, the violence and carnage, the privations 
 and bereavements, the orphanage and widowhood, the muti- 
 lations and butcheries that war involves, and the bitter feuds 
 between conterminous nations, which have been transmitted 
 to successive generations by its means, we must see that it 
 is, even when most mercifully managed, a tremendous evil, 
 a last and terrible resort. It is only as the inevitable and 
 just defence of Right that it is itself defensible or even tole- 
 rable. When pushed beyond the limits which the vindication 
 of a momentous right requires, or when itself founded on 
 W^rong, it is a crime of huge and indescribable enormity, an 
 offence alike against the Earth whose peace it disturbs, and 
 the Heaven whose justice it defies. But there are those 
 who, without respect to the justice or injustice, the right or 
 wrong of a war, seem to find pleasure in its excitement, 
 its perils, the honors it wins for the victor, or the plunder 
 with which it enriches or the power wherewith it invests him. 
 David seems to have warred generally from a regard to the 
 rights of his people. His kinsman and general, Joab, brave 
 but unprincipled and sanguinary, seems to have delighted in 
 the game of battle for its own sake. 
 
 1. Very many, then, it is to be feared, of those who fight 
 the battles of a country, come within the range of the impre- 
 cation here uttered. The private soldier is often one who 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 377 
 
 looks to scenes of lawless riot and easy plunder as the chief 
 inducemeuts to enlist under the standards of his country • as 
 the ofiicer who commands liim may often be careless of 'the 
 waste of life, if it but minister to his promotion and rrain 
 a ^. The classes who sjistain ivar are often involved in the 
 ^same condemnation. The army contractor, who accumulates 
 wealth easily and rapidly, at the expense of the lives of an 
 mvading host, and the butchery and plunder of an invaded 
 nation, does not he, with a cruel and bloody love of lucre 
 "delight in war?" The farmers of England, from the rise 
 in the price of agricultural products occasioned by the needs 
 of their large armies, became wealthy in their long wars 
 with France, and delighted in contests that thus enhanced 
 their gains ; though in later years, among the bones imported 
 from Continental battle-fields to'manure the lands of Eng- 
 land, some of these same men probably received the remains 
 of their own sons, killed in battle, and by the strange retribu- 
 tions of Providence, now returned to fatten the paternal 
 acres. Any portion of our own territory benefited by tlie 
 demand for provisions which war would create, but not ex- 
 posed by maritime position, or other causes, to the invasions 
 it provokes, would be likely to furnish a similar class, reck- 
 lessly rejoicing in what ruined others to enrich them. 
 
 3. The rulei's who wage war too often incur this condem- 
 nation. History has greatly and generally belied kings, if 
 they have not plunged their people into most causeless, cruel, 
 and protracted conllicts upon the most frivolous pretexts, or 
 ) with the most crying injustice. Territory, or glory, or j)lun- 
 der, has been the object. Lives they have estimated as the 
 vile price, cheaply paid for the coveted prize. When the 
 Supreme Governor " shall make inquisition for blood," who 
 will envy their fame, rank, or power? Nor are such un- 
 worthy motives unknown in other than monarchical govern- 
 ments. Ambition may render the demagogue as sanguinary 
 in his heartless recklessness as the despot. The froth and 
 foam of a speech enkindling every bad passion may cost the 
 blood of hapless hundreds. Reports drafted in the (juiet 
 peace of a cabinet, may to the presaging eye stem dripping 
 with more of gore than all that any one bayonet ever sjied. 
 The desire of personal distinction, or the eagerness for party 
 triumph, may induce men to carve, as it were, the whitened 
 bones of their fellow-citizens into dice for the gamblings 
 of political strife. A Syrian Pacha, under the Ottoman 
 
 49 
 
378 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Porte, in the last generation, gloried in the epithet of Djezzar 
 or butcher, that his remorseless murders had won him. The 
 political aspirants, and orators, and statesmen, that bring on, 
 tor selfish purposes, a needless or an unjust war— what are 
 they but the Djezzars of a republic ? The tears of the 
 widow and of the fatherless orphan may run unstaunched for 
 weary years, if they but drench and freshen the laurels of 
 these votaries of glory. The wealth of the merchant may 
 be confiscated, and the gains of the industrious artisan, to 
 swell the prize-money of the privateersman, thence to run 
 speedily into the exchequer of the dram-shop and the bro- 
 thel — scenes of riot and debauch, that are like the miry 
 places of the prophet's vision, the moral quagmires of the 
 state. 
 
 4. The literary classes of a nation may have their share 
 in the woes of our text. The true rulers of a people are 
 often, less the men recognized as magistrates and monarchs 
 by the ensigns of office, and rather the popular authors who 
 give coloring to the tastes and sentiments, and shape to the 
 principles of their times. Wearing no tiara, wielding no 
 sceptre, they are yet often really throned as rulers in the 
 mind of the nation and the age. When these, as such in 
 authority, feed a taste for war, reckless of right, and greedy 
 only of glory and plunder, they sin, and God holds them 
 answerable for the homes from which they lure the adven- 
 turous son or husband enlisting for a soldier's perils — and an- 
 swerable for the darker desolation of the abodes into which 
 war carries pollution and remorseless carnage. Poetry has 
 too iTiuch made the fray, and the banner, and nodding 
 plume, the resounding march, and the murderous volley, its 
 favorite themes, careless of the right or wrong of the quarrel. 
 And one of the many causes of contention that Virtue and 
 Piety have with the drama, especially in modern times, is its 
 love of slaughter, and the insane profusion with which it as- 
 sumes to expend human life like water, and gluts and fires 
 an admiring crowd with its spectacles of imaged suicide and 
 murder. Into these things a God of justice will search. They 
 have helped to make fallen man, like the tiger, raven for 
 blood. When our own Robert Hall urged the volunteers of 
 his country to contend against foreign invasion, he did not 
 unwisely or wrongly. But he who, irrespective of the justice 
 of the contest, delights in blood shedding, (if left to have 
 his own solitary and imdisputed influence,) would convert 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN War. 379 
 
 and easily won, how nmnj- a people in the l.i.Zv r ^^ 
 :^, originally simple, frL, J,, i^p'a t,:'S^ L e 
 become drunk with blood. For a time, God inadc^' e'n lis 
 ^rnble scourges, but the time of retribution alwa c , e 
 No nation delighting in war for its own sake, but h.sd" 
 m time the poisonous chalice pressed to its ow i loat i .<; 
 ips and the spoiler has been in his turn the spoile , a t f 
 ernble of one age has become the contemptible of he evt 
 In a government constituted like our own, the acts of the 
 
 entire nation If we have as a people been, as some con- 
 tend, driven by the misconduct of an enemy into our present 
 contest, well will it be for our rulers and ourselvesHn Ihe 
 day of unerring scrutiny and final decision. But if, as others 
 insist, we have transcended a known and rightful boundary, 
 t<^ provoke war, " removing the land-mark," which, a sin as 
 (^od has made it in the individual, is not less sin surely in a 
 nation; or if we have rushed into a war for which there 
 might be some provocation, without exhausting all possible 
 efforts to avoid this melancholy alternative, they who have 
 caused, and who continue, and who uphold the conflict 
 must answer it to One, whose rules of judgment were no[ 
 learned in earthly cabinets, and whose statutes may not be 
 set aside by protocols and proclamations. 
 , III. We have now reached the third and last division of 
 our subject— the prayer that God would scatter those who 
 thus love the bloody game of war. It is the prayer of the 
 groaning conscience, sick of (he horrors of a needless and 
 unrighteous contest— the prayer of the outraged aire.tions 
 stung into keenest sympathy in the view of mournin-r fami- 
 lies and weeping and fatherless children, and bleeding^'afresh 
 with each new incident of massacre and desolation bnui.rht 
 in the journals of the contest— the prayer of Industry, driven 
 from its wonted tasks, and taxed for aid it is loih to give— 
 and the prayer of Humanity, acknowledging in the foe, 
 plundered, and defeated, and dying, a man and brother. 
 But it is above all the ])rayer of Christianity, anxious that as 
 war was hushed at the Saviour's birth, to give to the new 
 message of peace with Heaven a free course over the quiet 
 
380 
 
 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 nations, so now the cause of Missions may be no longer 
 hindered by the outbreak of war, and the tumult of battle, 
 but universal peace make ready the way of the Lord ; and 
 that instead of a strife as to strength, and a rivalry in the 
 infliction and endurance of injury, the only contest may be 
 the emulation of brothers, in the manifestation of mutual 
 kindness, and in the service of a common father — a common 
 Brother and Redeemer. Mute Nature, speechless as she is 
 before man, is not so before her Maker in this quarrel. 
 The earth, from which cried the blood of the first-slain Abel, 
 has it ceased to cry, as fresh victims watered it with their 
 opened veins ? No ; Earth, " the creation made subject unto 
 vanity not willingly," cries, " Lord, how long ?" And the 
 Church cries, Scatter, O Lord, the nations and the hosts, 
 the parties and the cabinets that delight in war. 
 
 2. The prayer has been in times past fulfilled. We have 
 seen how, if the Cagots of Fi-ance be indeed, as some anti- 
 quarians believe them, the relics of the old and valiant and 
 terrible Goths, they illustrate the tremendous significance of 
 the text. Based as the prayer is on a recognized principle 
 of the Divine government, that existed ere the Psalm was 
 inspired, we see that principle ere the Psalmist's days, an- 
 nounced in God's treatment of some of the ancestors of that 
 Psalmist's nation, Simeon and Levi. They had recourse ta 
 treacherous butchery for the avenging of a domestic wrong, 
 and as their dying father, in denouncing their conduct, said, 
 " Cursed be their anger for it was fierce, and their wrath 
 for it was cruel :" and he added in the name of his God, " I 
 will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel."* 
 Read the fortunes of Egypt. In ancient days her Sesos- 
 tris led the pride and prowess of Mizraim in triumphant 
 invasion into distant lands. Now beside the lofty walls yet 
 brilliantly commemorating those conquests, and painting the 
 victor, and his car, and his triumphal train, cowers the mod- 
 ern Copt, a craven and timorous slave, building his hut of 
 mud beside the ruinous palace of his fathers, whilst the 
 country has sunk for centuries to the level which prophecy 
 assigned it, of " the basest of kingdoms.''' Contrast the pages 
 of ancient history and their picture of Babylon as she was in 
 her days of conquest, and the pages of modern travel and 
 their picture of Babylon as she is, " swept with the besom 
 
 * Gen. xlix. 7. 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 381 
 
 of desolation." Look at the Persian as he was, and the Per- 
 sian as he is ; the valorons and terrible Turk of other cen- 
 turies, and the effete and dependent 'I'urk of our times. See 
 the memorials of the far-travelled and victorious legions of 
 ancient Rome in the days of her republican miirht and her 
 imperial pride — then turn to trace, if you can, the features 
 of that terrible nation, who so excelled and so deliirhted in 
 war, in the effeminate, treacherous and vindictive Italian, 
 who has passion without power, and feeling without princi- 
 ple, his animal sensibilities, as nurtured amid tiie nudities 
 of exquisite statuary and matchless painting to a refined 
 delicacy of taste, educated until they have outgrown the 
 moral, and left behind no delicacy whatever of moral feel- 
 ings. Their Virgil boasted once, in the days of warlike 
 power, that other people might better carve and better paint, 
 but Romans were born to rule. The curse of Providence 
 on the mad love of military rapine has inverted the boast 
 of their poet. The modern Roman carves and paints, but 
 rule he cannot, himself or others. The bayonets of Austria 
 govern him, and the Swiss mercenaries are the guards of his 
 Pontiff. The assassin has replaced the warrior, the fiddler 
 the statesman, and for the severe virtue of her Cato and the 
 simple patriotism of her Cincinnatus, you see a nation with- 
 out conscience, without dignity, and without power, ffettin? 
 up melo-dramatic conspiracies and sanguinary outl)reaks. but 
 without the pith and manhood to recover their freedom.* 
 They who delighted in war, how are they scattered, al- 
 though the arches and the pillars yet stand that tell of their 
 old manhood, and enterprise, and renown ; and under the 
 shadow of Trajan's column and the arch of Titus clamors 
 the mendicant "and lurks the assassin. The old Sclavi, once 
 a formidable people, whose name in their own language sig- 
 nified ''glory,'' were at first terrible in their brave, fierce 
 invasions, but became in their time and turn van(]uished and 
 captives ; and now their national name is in our own and 
 several European languages the term to describe the bond- 
 man, the man not only who has lost peace, but who has lost 
 freedom also. Yes, our very word " slave" is a standing 
 memorial of the great retributive law of our text — " The 
 scatterer scattered," the prowler preyed upon, the troubler 
 
 * Written in 1847, and ere the strujrgles of 1849 had developed, in the char- 
 acter of some of the Italians, new and nobler elements. 
 
383 
 
 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 caught in the pitfall he has dug. So, turn to the European 
 ancestors of the race with whom is waged our present con- 
 test. So, see Spain, once the mightiest and bravest nation 
 of Europe, now at home poor, though her universal exche- 
 quer once was gorged with the wealth of both the Indies ; 
 and in her colonies, once the scene of the valor of a Pizarro 
 and a Cortez, see her race now how spent and abject. In 
 times nearer our own, how dreadfully were the invasions of 
 Revolutionary and Imperial France requited in her own cap- 
 ital twice entered by an enemy, and in the fate of her own 
 great Captain, coming at first, as it was predicted of Cyrus, 
 " upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth 
 clay," afterwards fretting himself to death within the circuit 
 of his narrow island prison — how did God seem reading a 
 fresh comment for a new and forgetful generation, on this 
 old and forgotten law of his Providence. 
 
 3. If it be asked. Why is this so ? we answer, Because 
 God wills it ; and because also, from the very nature of war 
 and of man's mind and heart, such must be the ultimate 
 results even of successful war, on those who delight in it, as 
 a gainful trade and a pleasant recreation. It inflates pride, 
 and Earth and Heaven delight in abasing pride. It fosters 
 a spirit of reckless violence and aggression, that must ulti- 
 mately provoke an opposition too strong and general to be 
 surmounted, and a revenge that will spare no humiliation of 
 its old oppressor. It undermines quiet industry and self- 
 reliance to substitute gains that, though large and easily 
 won, yet, like those of the robber, are soon wasted and little 
 satisfactory while possessed. It sets up in the nation a 
 false standard of honor, and the strong will that makes its 
 passions triumph over other men's wills, is counted great, 
 rather than the magnanimity that bows its own and other 
 men's passions to the simple, silent majesty of the laws. 
 Seldom, therefore, has liberty or law long stood before mili- 
 tary glory and power. The secret of military success is, 
 again, unreflecting, implicit submission to the leader's will. 
 The secret of permanent liberty is the trial of the leader's 
 will by the general conscience and reason of the people. 
 Jesuitism organized its terrible compactness, its lithe and 
 mighty unity, by the adoption of military principles of im- 
 plicit and entire submission. Its founder was a soldier, and 
 brought to his task military reminiscences. But as con- 
 science was crushed under the law of obedience by that 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAK. 383 
 
 system, so is it in its measure in all other systems of power 
 and grandeur, built upon the warlike basis. Our country 
 and its institutions, if preserved in their original cntireness 
 and purity, need the education and development, not the 
 suppression and extinction of the national conscience. And 
 war and its military training go to strain and break that 
 conscience, instead of training it. 
 
 4. God has set before us as a people a magnificent task. 
 To unite in the bonds of a common piety and freedom the 
 various people from whom our colonists are drawn ; to prove 
 to less free nations in the old world, how witli popular free- 
 dom may consist popular self-restraint, and how they who 
 rule themselves may be a law-abiding and God-fearing peo- 
 ple ; — this is the labor and the prize set before us. But if 
 we become a rapacious and unscrupulous nation, scornful 
 of laws, aggressive and unjust, we travesty our own most 
 solemn professions, we aid the cause of despotism in the 
 .Eastern world, and prepare the path and the necessity for 
 ithe rise of a military despotism among ourselves on these 
 Western shores. God is not mocked by republics more 
 safely than by churches, by statesmen than by religionists. 
 The unjust cannot long be free, the violent are never event- 
 ually safe. 
 
 Thus have we wished to bring out of our text the great 
 lessons it teaches. We have souglit to show that war is not 
 in all circumstances unlawful even under the gospel, but 
 that it is, yet, always a calamity, and generally an enormous 
 crime. We have sought to show how delighting in war was 
 sinful, and what the classes were thus guilty. We have seen 
 how, in ancient and modern history, God has governed the 
 world on the principle which the prayer of our text invokes. 
 
 We have sought to shun all needless and controversial 
 details. It is not long since the leaders of the two great and 
 rival parties of the nation united in declaring that the an- 
 nexation of Texas would involve our Union in a war. Tlie 
 friends of the measure of annexation denied this. The 
 province was annexed. The war has ensued. 
 
 Is it our duty to raise the cry in such circumstances, " Our 
 country, right or wrong?" In the days of the Commonwealth 
 and Protectorate, Blake, a religious man, the brave English 
 admiral who first began the long course of England's naval 
 triumphs, did not in all things fully sympathize with the 
 ruling powers at home. But he was accustomed to say that 
 
384 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 the seaman must leave the powers at home to settle the 
 affairs of the nation — it was his business to see that foreign- 
 ers did not wrong the country abroad. Now, if the wars 
 abroad were not unjust (and such they were not), we sup- 
 pose the principle that good and brave man announced as 
 his rule not an untenable one. But to a distinguished naval 
 warrior of our own country is assigned a sentiment more 
 sweeping, often quoted and highly lauded, " Our country, 
 right or wrong.'"' Now, there may be questions as to right 
 and wrong in the policy and course of a country, where 
 good men and able are nearly equally , divided. A man in 
 doubt, after his own best efforts to decide the question, 
 may, perhaps, safely leave such difficult and intricate ques- 
 tions to others, and do the work of his station. But a 
 man, who, after the first investigation, believes clearly his 
 country engaged in a wrong course, may and should, by all 
 proper means, protest against the wrong-doing, not only for 
 his own sake, and to clear his own soul, but for the benefit 
 of his country. God's right over man is older than that of 
 the country or the family even. If this principle on which 
 we comment were true in morals and patriotism — if our 
 country, irrespective of the justice of her claims, should be 
 sustained — then in those countries whose government is des- 
 potic, and where the king says virtually, like the royal Bour- 
 bon, "I am the State" — this maxim, " the country right 
 or wrong," is tantamount to saying. Let the will of the 
 prince, whether vicious or good, be my supreme law. And 
 if that will not only justifies but demands my obedience 
 as a patriot — if to be true to her and her government, I 
 must close my eyes and leave conscience in abeyance — then 
 the elders of Jezreel were blameless before God for obey- 
 ing the signet of Ahab and the letter of Jezebel, and shed- 
 ding the innocent blood of Naboth to obtain the confisca- 
 tion of his vineyard. Then John was a traitor for not leav- 
 ing uncensured the domestic relations of his sovereign He- 
 rod. Then the inhabitants of Madagascar are bound, by our 
 laws of patriotism, since such is their queen's will, to perse- 
 cute in our days Christians to the death. 
 
 If, as some wish, all discussion were treasonable, soon as a 
 war had been provoked, no matter how regularly and how 
 justly, or how irregularly and how unjustly ; and if thence- 
 forward to discuss its origin and character were unlawful, it 
 were virtually a proclamation of martial law over the land 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 385 
 
 —it were the enunciation by political power of a pontifical 
 interdict upon the nation's conscience, forbidding, as did the 
 rash edict of Darius the Mede, all prayer to God, as a Judge, 
 till the quarrel were ended. The patriotism of Daniel was 
 best shown, by refusing calmly to abide any such interdict, 
 usurping on the rights alike of conscience, and of the Lord 
 of conscience. No, our country — be her sovereign one or her 
 rulers many, be she a democracy or a despotism — our coun- 
 try and its government may never dispense us from our 
 primary allegiance to God's eternal and immutable law of 
 right. No, as we love God and fear his anger, let right stand 
 ever before either country or home. God and right an- to 
 the truly religious man, the patriot of scriptural principles, 
 dearer than his country. So Jeremiah loved his country, 
 and sacrificed popularity and perilled life, in counselling Zed- 
 ekiah and his nobles against a v.'ar that began by the break- 
 ing of a solemn treaty. Or rather, the enlightened believer 
 knows that his country can be safe but as brought riglit ; and 
 loves her true and permanent interests too well, to wish her 
 transient, and deceptive, and ruinous success, in a course of 
 wrong-doing. 
 
 Much is said of the destinies of the Anglo-Saxon race, and 
 of their irresistible development. May our God make that de- 
 velopment in science and art, in integrity and influence, more 
 than its loudest eulogist has dared to promise. But a slight 
 glance at the past history of the world suffices to discover, 
 that in races as in individuals, pride goeth before destruc- 
 tion, and is the first symptom of internal decay in the power 
 of which it vaunts. The core and pith of a nation's manhood 
 soon becomes rotten, when the outer rind and enamel of its 
 conscience and self-control and honesty scales off. And 
 when men claim, in the development of their talents and 
 might, to go beyond God's ordinary law of morals, God is 
 accustomed to transcend His ordinary laws of Providence 
 for their punishment. The antediluvian and gigantic races 
 of the old world arrogated to themselves to transcend vnlpir 
 laws of justice and religion; and God, to meet with comUgn 
 retribution their hardihood, gave to Nature to develope laws 
 and powers before unknown. The cisterns of heaven and the 
 fountains of the great deep were allowed to break their (dd 
 statutes, and spurn their original restraints, and the deluge 
 came to assert the supremacy of Right over Might. Mon- 
 strosities of crime provoke miracles of vengeance. These 
 
 50 
 
386 THE PRAYER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 may come from quarters remote and opposite to those whence 
 clanger alone was dreaded. But come when it may or whence 
 it may, it must come ultimately, and come the heavier from 
 the delay in its movements and the distance it has traversed — 
 an avalanche that has gathered in mass every moment it 
 lingered, and every fathom it travelled of the wide interval. 
 
 The man or the people would be far out of their course, 
 who should claim a development that had outgrown the 
 Decalogue as God's own voice proclaimed it on Sinai, and 
 who should boast of a patent to possess the earth by virtue 
 of a physical and mental superiority that reverses, in their 
 case, the eighth and tenth commandments, and converts the 
 prohibition into a chartei-, which says, in effect, to them, 
 " Thou shalt covet (because of his inferior numbers and cul- 
 ture, his lower grade of piety and powers) thy neighbor's 
 possessions ;" and " Thou shalt steal (because of his wretched 
 misgovernment) thy neighbor's land." Jehovah never re- 
 cognized the right, either of an infallible pontiifor of a sov- 
 ereign people, to proclaim a dispensation from the obligations 
 of his immutable statutes, by the development of their pow- 
 ers or because of their national greatness. 
 
 There is no successful warring against the Lord of Hosts. 
 His will is Fate, his might the quiet irresistibility of Omnip- 
 otence. Neither nations nor individuals can contend with 
 Him, And now, dismissing all questions of social interest, 
 let us individually inquire, whether we are serving or rebel- 
 ling against Him ? Look round the scarred and ruinous 
 earth : look up to heaven spoiled of Lucifer and the host 
 whom he trailed after him, partners of his revolt and fall. 
 Look to the hell where he writhes. See his conflicts with 
 Christ in the days of His incarnation. See the Church of 
 God often assailed, but the gates of hell not prevailing. 
 Look to sinners on their death-beds. Look into your own 
 consciences, in your more sober and wiser hours, and see, 
 my fellow-sinners, if it be safe to war and to delight in war- 
 ring against a Holy and Almighty God ? Then think of 
 the treachery and ingratitude of fighting a friend, a Deliver- 
 er, and see what reasons you can find for beginning another 
 year with a continued quarrel against the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 the Saviour, who bought you Avith His own blood? If you 
 war against the redeeming cross, will not, must not the Last 
 Judgment scatter your hopes for ever, and hurl your souls 
 into endless perdition ? 
 
AGAINST THOSE DELIGHTING IN WAR. 387 
 
 The universe is one great battle-field. The founder of 
 the Jesuit order wisely and truly represented all mankind as 
 making up but two great camps, the one under the banners 
 of Satan the Destroyer, the other grouped around the stand- 
 ard of Christ the Redeemer. There is no debatable ground 
 between the hosts. No neutrality is possible in this war. 
 He that gathereth not with Christ scattcreth abroad, and 
 shall himself be scattered in the sifting blasts of the Last 
 Judgment. He that is not with us is against us. With 
 whom, then, are you choosing your sides 1 Each new year, 
 each pause in the procession to eternity, each stile you cross, 
 and each milestone along the highway and in the pilgrimage 
 of life, invites you to review your march and inquire your 
 prospects. Are you still bent on rejecting Christ, and re- 
 sisting God and defying heaven ? How mad the war you wage ; 
 it is one of disinheriting for yourself, — of expatriation, endless 
 and hopeless, from the heavenly mansion and home. Against 
 you are angels, and saints, and God, and all holy beings, 
 the prayers of the Church, and the statutes of Omnijxitence. 
 With you are the wicked, and the lawless, and the abomina- 
 ble, earth's burden now, and soon to be the fuel of the pit. 
 O, why fight for death, and for damnation, and for endless 
 despair ? 
 
388 THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 THE CAGOTS OP PRANCE. 
 
 From the travels, which, under the assumed name of Derwent Conway, 
 and with the title of " Switzerland, the South of Prance, and the Pyrenees, 
 in MDcccxxx," were issued in Constable's Miscellany, as volumes Ixvi. and 
 Ixvii., of th:it work, by R. D. Inglis, Esq., a lineal descendant, we believe, of 
 the excellent Col. Gardiner, we take the following extract, relative to this 
 peculiar race. Inglis published, under his own name, several volumes of tra- 
 vels, marked with much acuteness of observation, strong sense, and felici- 
 tous description. 
 
 "In speaking of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees, I must not overlook that 
 extraordinary race, which has baffled the historian in his vain endeavors to 
 account for its origin, and which has furnished matter of interest both to the 
 novelist and the traveller. It is probable, that many readers of this volume 
 may never have heard of the Cagots, and that others may know only of the 
 existence of such a race; and although, in presenting some details respecting 
 this extraordinary people, I disclaim any pretension to novelty or original 
 elucidation, yet, having travelled among their valleys, and seen their huts 
 and themselves, I feel that it would be an unpardonable omission, were I to 
 omit availing myself of even the common sources of information, in order 
 that I may include, in this volume, a short account of the Cagots. 
 
 "The Cagots are found in several of the more secluded valleys of the 
 Pyrenees, particularly in the lateral valleys that branch from the valley of 
 Bareges, Luchon, and Aure. So sedulously do the Cagots keep apart from 
 the rest of their fellow-men, that one might travel through the Pyrenees 
 without seeing an individual of the race, unless inquiry were specially direct- 
 ed towards them. It was not until I expressed a desire to the guide who at- 
 tended me in my excursions from St. Sauveur, to see one of the race of Ca- 
 gots, that my curiosity was gratified. This was in one of the lateral valleys 
 that runs to the right, between Bareges and the Tourmalet, a valley traversed 
 by no road, and which only leads to the lac d'escaibous. The Cagot is known 
 by his sallow and unhealthy countenance — ^^his expression of stupidity — his 
 want of vigor, and relaxed appearance— his imperfect articulation— and, in 
 many cases, his disposition to goitres. If we were to credit the assertion of 
 the novelist, we should reject one of these characteristics, or at least say, that 
 the stupidity of the Cagot is only apparent. It is possible, that a knowledge of 
 his degraded condition, and the contempt, if not aversion, with which he is 
 regarded, as well as the total seclusion in which the familvof the Cagot lives, 
 may have their effect in impressing upon his countenance an expression of 
 humility, distrust, and timidity, that might be mistaken for intellectual defi- 
 ciency. But the observation of all those who have studied with the greatest 
 advantages the peculiarities of this race, concur in allotting to the Cagot an 
 inferior share of mental capacity. 
 
 "The days of Cngot persecution have passed away ; but tradition has pre- 
 served a recollection of the degradation and sufferings of the race, and has 
 
THE CAG0T3 OV FRANCE. 
 
 389 
 
 even, in some small degree, handed down, along with the history of these 
 persecutions, some vestiges ol the prejudices which gave rise to it. From 
 time immemorial, the Cagot families have inhabited the most retired valleys, 
 and the most miserable habitations. The race has always been regarded as 
 infamous, and the individuals of it outcasts from the family of mankind. 
 They were excluded from all rights of citizens; they were not permitted to 
 have arms, or to exercise any other trade than that of wood-cutters : and, in 
 more remote times, they were obliged to bear upon their breast a red mark, 
 the sio-n of their degradation. So far, indeed, was aversion towards this un- 
 fortuiTate people carried, that they entered the churches by a separate door, 
 and occupied seats allotted to the rejected caste. The persecutions have long 
 ceased; and time and its attendant improvements have diminished the pre- 
 judices, and weakened the feelings of aversion with which they were formerly 
 regarded. But they are still the race of Cagots— still a separate ('amil> — still 
 outcasts— still a people who are evidently no kindred of those who live around 
 them but the remnant of a different and more ancient family. 
 
 "It is impossible for the traveller, btill less the philosopher, to know of the 
 existence of this caste, without endeavoring to pierce the clouds that hang 
 over its oric^in, and the causes of its persecution. But it is at least doubtful, 
 whether any of these inquiries have thrown true light upon the subject. 
 History, indeed, records the peculiar persecutions of which they were the 
 subjects ; and proves, that these persecutions, pursuing a de^pisecl and hated 
 race were directed against the same people, whether found in Brittany, I.a 
 Vendee Auvergne, or the Pyrenees. We find the Parliament of Rennes in- 
 terfering in their favor, to obtain them the right of sepulture. In the elev- 
 enth century, we find the Cagots of Beam disposed of by testameni as slaves 
 The priests would not admit them to confession ; and, by an :i";-ient act ol 
 Bearn it was resolved that the testimony of seven of them should be e-iuiva- 
 lent to the evidence of one free citizen; and even so late as the fiflc'enth een- 
 turv they were forbidden to walk the streets barefooted, in case of inteetion 
 being communicated to the stones; and upon their clothes was >n}pressed 
 the tbot of a goose. Yet all these marks of .hatred arc unaccounted for. ^o 
 record has descended to us, bv which the cause of this persecution maybe 
 TxiSned and vve are left to -guess at the origin of that reprobation wh.ch 
 has Ibllowed this rejected pe'ople from the earliest times, and ,n whatever 
 
 ^"l^'-^rRan^Sdlin'his^^rulsition upon this subject, says, ' The Cagots of 
 ill Fmnce have a common orisin. The same event has conhned ill.' n all 
 in the t^ost remote and desert spots; and, .whatever this event may be ,t 
 i^iis besuch as will account for every thing-it must be great and general- 
 m s hive hiinressed at once upon the whole of France the same sentimenis 
 
 by the people who drove out the Romans ; but to t^i^ ''yP^';^ ;-, .^e 
 
 R^uond answers, tl^"t"nder the dominion of the Goths ^^^^ „^,,^ 
 
 Roman were never reduced to » "'a^ °*^^^7/J VanuuishedT would not ac- 
 
 the tyranny merely « . ;', ^^JV^^::;^/ ^t t ' ^^^ ^^^ ''^''^' '^'' ^"'='"-1 
 
 count for the origin ot the <^='K^\' ^!;,"' ^ ' '? '^n einpt, but of aversion, and 
 
390 THE CAGOTS OF FRANCE. 
 
 to be alike inefficient to explain the origin of this hatred and persecution. 
 He says, ' Such victory as may have terminated the conflict of two nations 
 equally ferocious and inflamed against each other by a long train of rivalry 
 — the invasion of one barbarian punished by another barbarian — the reaction 
 of the oppressed against the oppressor— at last completely disarmed — bloody 
 combats — disastrous defeats — such only could have been the sources of the 
 hatred and fury which could have given rise to miseries like those which we 
 behold.' Rut it appears to me, that such events as M. Ramond supposes, 
 would lead only to oppression, and perhaps slavery, but not to aversion or 
 horror ; and that even the deadliest feelings of hatred, engendered from such 
 causes, would not have outlived the generation which first imbibed them. 
 But even the explanation of M. Ramond, if satisfactory, would still leave the 
 origin of Cagots and Cagot persecution as dark as ever; for, among the nu- 
 merous hordes of barbarians who pushed one another from their conquests, 
 and among the endless and confused strife of battles which destroyed, min- 
 gled, and separated the different laces, how can we determine, whether 
 Alans, or Suevi, or Vandals, or Huns, or Goths, or Francs, or Moors, or 
 Saracens, were that peculiar race, whose remnant has descended to these 
 days with the mark of persecution and hatred stamped upon it ? 
 
 "It would prove to most readers an uninteresting detail, were I to go over 
 the arguments of M. de Gebelin, who contends that the Cagots are the re- 
 mains of the Alans; or of M. Ramond, who believes them to be a remnant 
 of the Goths. Nothing approaching to certainty, scarcely even bordering 
 upon probability, appears in the reasoning of either. The Cagots may have 
 been Alans, or they may have been Goths ; but there seems to be nearly the 
 same reason for believing them the remnant of the one as of the other people. 
 If this miserable and proscribed race should, indeed, be all that remains 
 of the Gothic conquerors of half the world, what a lesson for pride is there ! 
 
 " I cannot conclude this hasty sketch better than in the words of M. Ra- 
 mond, who, whatever his philosophical powers may be, is evidently a kind- 
 hearted and an observing man, and who jiosscssed the best of all opportuni- 
 ties forjudging of the people which were the object of his inquiry. 
 
 '"I have seen,' says he, 'some families of these unfortunate creatures. 
 They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has ban- 
 ished them. The side-doors by which they were formerly obliged to enter 
 the churches are useless (M. Ramond might have said shut up, for so they 
 are in general), and some degree of pity mingles, at length, with the contempt 
 and aversion which they formerly inspired ; yet I have been in some of 
 their retreats, where they still fear the insults of prejudice, and await the 
 visits of the compassionate. I have found among them the poorest be- 
 ings perhaps that exist upon the face of the earth. I have met with brothers, 
 who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want 
 of isolated men. I have seen among them women, whose atTection had a 
 somewhat in it of that submission and devotion which are inspired by feeble- 
 ness and misfortune. And never, in this half annihilation of those beings of 
 my species, could I recognize, without shuddering, the extent of the power 
 which we may exercise over the existence of our fellow — the narrow circle 
 of knowledge and of enjoyment within which we may confine him— the 
 smallness of the sphere to which we may reduce his usefulness.' " — Consta- 
 ble's Miscellany, vol. lxvii., pp. 128 — 134. 
 
 The Breton antiquariaris, who find in their own portion of France the 
 same race, have seemed mclined to trace them no farther back than to the 
 lepers of the mediaeval times, victims as they suppose of a disease brought 
 back into Europe by the Crusaders. But the allusions to this remarkable 
 people run back to a far earlier era than that of the first crusade. Michelet, 
 the historian, leaves undetermined the origin of these '■ Pariahs of the West," 
 as he calls them. The recent erudite and elaborate work of F\ Michel, (His- 
 toire des Races Maudites de la France etde i'Espagne. Paris, 1847, 2 tomes,) 
 
THE CAGOTS OK FRANCE. 391 
 
 who has devoted the first volume of his treatise to the Cao-ots accepts in 
 the mam, as true, the ancient tradition that they are chieflyrthou^h not cx- 
 chisively, descendants of the Goths, and sustains the derivation of"the name 
 supported by fecaliger, Canis Gothus, (or that, in tolvcn of the noi.ular hate 
 and scorn, they were styled Dogs of Goths,) (Michel, I. 355.) He assigns as 
 the era ot their settlement in southern France, the disastrous return of Char- 
 lemagne, from hi5 expedition into Spain, about tiic close of the eighth cen- 
 tury when the residents of Spain, Gothic and Arabian, who had adhered to 
 his banners, sought, on his retreat, safety from their Moorish masters, by re- 
 tiring into Charlemagne's dominions, though meeting there the hereditary and 
 invincible dislike of his earlier subjects already settled in the rct^ions where 
 he fixed these new colonists. The work of Michel furnishes the most cu- 
 rious details, as to the popular enmity, and social disadvantages, and en- 
 venomed contempt, of which the Cagots were for ten centuries The victims ; 
 their advent into France, according to his theory, going back to the times of 
 the battle of Roncesvalles, so celebrated in the fables of chivalry, when Ro- 
 land, the nephew of Charlemagne, and the Orlando of mediaeval romance, 
 perished, in fighting the Saracens. 
 
THE 
 
 BAPTIST SABBATH SCHOOL 
 
 A 
 
 New edition of this work, which was compiled by Rev. Josei'ii 
 ^^ A. Waune, has just been issued. It contains three hundred 
 and fifty hymns, in fair type, and is well printed. 
 
 Price per doz. in paper covers, - - - - $1 20 
 
 in half cloth, .... 1 SO 
 
 " in full cloth or sheep, - - - 2 40 
 
 EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE. 
 
 " The denomination for whose use this volume is pre[);ircd, is one of the most 
 numerous in the land ; and one which, therefore, may claim, as justly as any other, 
 to have a volume of liymns for use in its Sabbath-sihools, all of which shall be 
 such as may be employed without doing violence to its denoininatioiiul peculiar- 
 ities ; or covertly undermining its foundations: and if there is such a coUecliou in 
 existence, the compiler has not been so fortunate as to meet with it. 
 
 "Moreover, hymns for Sabbath-schools should be such as possess a genernt 
 adaptation to the moral condition of those for wliosc use they are designed ; and 
 they should express sentiments in which the children may properly and smcerely 
 unite; and these sentiments should be uttered in language rarely supcnor to the 
 level of their capacity. Tiiis rule would exclude n)any of the hymns found ni 
 books heretofore usedin our schools :— such, for example, as utter the la.iguage ot 
 lon<^, and varied, and deep Christian experience; and such as breathe iho lervours, 
 not merely of matured and ripened, but of almost seraphic love, and ol :• martyr a 
 zeal and self-sacrifice. These, or a portion of them, may, wuhout impropriety, 
 find a place among the hymns for the use of teachers ; but they are inappropriate 
 for general use in the school. 
 
 "Within the last few years, too, the infant Sabbath-school- an entirely new 
 branch of the Sabbath-school institution— has come into considerable prorameuce , 
 and more is required to meet its wants, than a single hymn or two in a considera- 
 ble volume. Accordingly, in this collection the number is considerably greater , 
 and the language is generally characterized by imusual simplicity ; that even babcH 
 might ' sing praises with understanding.' 
 
 " Sabbath-schools have, of lato years, (and long may it continue to be so,) been 
 favored with the special grace of the Spirit of God; and great numbers from the 
 classes have been led to profess publicly their attachment o the Redeemer. I 
 need no be saTd that a vo'lume o/ hymni comjuled on the principle of --g;"? ;>• 
 denominational peculiarities, could not aM mto its V^r^f \l''llX^'^j}\^ 
 of baptism. But need Baptist schools be thus restricted ? Purely not . oi i 
 So3 ouTbooks of hymns used in public worship contaui those adapted to thib 
 
 school, and who often constitute a majority ^ot the f "'[« ' ™ Jf ' ; ^^ ' ' .^ in this 
 contains several hymns on this subject, not found in book. »' ^";"^""" "f^ JJ" """ 
 v?cinity, in New England, or, it is believed, m the South or W e^t genciully. 
 Copies for examination furnished gratis to post-paid apphcation*. 
 
 EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 
 
 Publisher, 
 
 141 Nassau Street, Xcw Vork. | 
 
3XEAIIRXAG1: CERTIFICATES, 
 
 NEATLY ENVELOPED IN PACKAGES OF ONE DOZEN EACH. 
 
 No. 1— Printed in Silver, Price per dozen 50 cts. 
 
 No. 2— With a Silver Border, " « " 50 cts. 
 
 No. 3— Plain, with Border, " " " 25 cts. 
 
 No. 4— Plain, without Border, ti ci » jg ^tg. 
 
 No. 5 — Letter size. Silver Border, with Scripture Texts, 
 
 Poetry, Rules of Duty, iStc, " " " 50 cts. 
 
 Letters of Dismission of Church Members, . " per quire 50 cts. 
 
 Lettehs Notifying the Reception of Members, " " " 50 cts. 
 
 Letters for Calling a Council " " " 50 cts. 
 
 By using these Blanks, pastors and church clerks may save themselves much 
 time and labor, and promote good order among the Churches. 
 Samples furnished gratis to post-paid applications. 
 
 wm ^; 
 
 it ii®®isi 
 
 THE BAPTIST SABBATH SCHOOL HYMN BOOE. 
 
 Compiled by Rev. Joseph A. Waene, and containing 534 Hymns. 32mo. 
 
 Paper covers, $1 20 per dozen, 
 
 Half cloth, 180 " " 
 
 Pull cloth or sheep 2 40 " « 
 
 DOWLiNG'S CONFERENCE HYMNS. 
 
 A new Collection of Hymns, designed especially for use in Conterence and Prayer 
 j Meetings, and Family Worship. By John Dowling, D.D. 32mo. 
 
 Paper cover, $1 80 per dozen. 
 
 Half bound, 2 40 " " 
 
 Cloth or sheep, 3 00 " " 
 
 Embossed morocco, 3 60 " '' 
 
 THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 By Rev. W. W. Everts. With a fine Steel Engraving. Timo. 336 pages. 
 
 EDWARD H. FL< ETCHER, PiibSisher. 
 
 141 Nassau Street, N. Y. 
 
THE BAPTIST PULPIT 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNITED STATES; 
 
 CONSISTING OF ELOQUENT AND INSTRUCTIVE PASSAGES FROM 
 THE SERMONS OF 200 BAPTIST MINISTERS. 
 
 BY JOSEPH BELCHER, D.D. 
 
 EmbellisljetJ tofti) jFine 3i)ortraits. 
 
 In submitting this volume to the candid examination of the pub- 
 lic, its editor would respectfully offer two or three remarks. 
 
 To three classes of persons he thinks this work may prove ac- 
 ceptable and useful. 
 
 Our families need more and better reading for the Sabbath than 
 they generally have. It is more than time that tale-books, even 
 though they may be embellished with religion, were dismissed. Nor 
 is it of less importance that a class of works, not unfriendly indeed 
 to piety, but entirely without it, should give place to volumes filled 
 with holy truth. Here men eminent for talent, for learning, and, 
 above all, for Christian devotedness, may be introduced to give 
 their short but interesting addresses on topics of the highest mo- 
 ment. 
 
 Equally true is it that in many parts of our country, we have 
 congregations meeting from Sabbath to Sabbath without a living 
 teacher. Will not at least an occasional passage from this volume, 
 well and seriously read, often tend to guard against error, to lead to 
 the knowledge of truth, and to cherish a spirit of devotion and of 
 holy love ? Few of these passages can ever be inappropriate, while 
 some one or other will be suitable for almost all the various states 
 in which a church of Christ can be placed. 
 
 Nor can the volume prove unacceptable to the rising ministry. 
 Here two hundred of the servants of Jesus, of every part of our 
 country, and of more than one generation, in their varied phrase- 
 ology, lead us around the cross of Jesus, and derive from it motives 
 to the discharge of every Christian duty. 
 
 Many an important hint will be gleaned from the volume in ref- 
 erence alike to the subjects and the manner of the ministry, while 
 all will be increasingly impressed with the importance of the of- 
 fice. — From the Preface. 
 
 The selections cover the whole range of theology, and the volume 
 will be curious, agreeable and useful. — N. Y. B> coaler . 
 
 Its editor is a man of judgment and taste, and of con.>=idcrable 
 distinction as an author ; and as it regards the typography, nothing 
 better can be asked or expected. The parties have our best wisUc8 
 for their encouragement and success. The moral effect ot tbc pub- 
 lication cannot fail, of course, to be in favor of religion and virtue.— 
 
 Biblical Recorder. ^. . c* ■*! v 
 
 EDWARD H. FLETCHER. HI Nassau St., N.». 
 
DOWLL\G'S CONFEREiNCE HIiMS. 
 
 The Publisher begs leave to submit a few of the many unsolicited recom- 
 mendations of this little volume, which have been received. It is eminently- 
 adapted for use in the family, and for private devotion. The low price 
 brings it within the means of all, and its large type adapts it to the old as 
 well as the young. 
 
 A prominent pastor in Illinois, writes: " I received the copy of Dr. Dow- 
 ling's hymns, which you .sent me some time ago. I have examined them 
 thoroughly, and have shown them to many others. The universal expression 
 is, ' This is just the book we want in the West. Here are the old, soul- 
 cherished revival hymns, which every body knows, and with which every 
 body is delighted.' The mixed nature of our population here renders it diffi- 
 cult to obtain hymn books which all will like. But this little volume is 
 almost known to all by heart, whether from the east, west, north or south. 
 The hymns are those which almost every Christian has learned and loved; 
 not for their poetic elegance, but for their spirit and good religious seniimenl. 
 I have also taken pains to obtain copies of the Social Psalmist, the Christian 
 Melolist (by Br. Banvard) and the Baptist Harp. These are generally very 
 good, but every body says Dr. Dowling's hymns are the ones for the West to 
 use in conference, prayer, and inquiry meetings. Thousands of them can be 
 sold in this Slate, if they are introiuced." 
 
 A New England Pastor, writes: "Your opinion of a class of hymns that 
 should not be discarded, will no doubt stand the test of experience, and a 
 judgment based on their practical results. In a precious and powerful revi- 
 val in 1H25, I first learned to sing the songs of Zion. The singing constitu- 
 ted a prominent feature in the means employed; and the mention ot some of 
 the hymns you have inserted, and which had partially faded from my mem- 
 ory (as they are not Ibiind in our ordinary collections) seemed almost to 
 carry me back to the reality of those scenes of thrilling interest. I have 
 recently looked in vain for several of these hymns cherished by most pleasing 
 recollections, as I wanted to sing and hear them again under circumstances 
 similar to those where I first heard them so often and with so much pleasure 
 and profit." 
 
 A pastor in Mississippi, says: "Duncan's criticism in the South-Western 
 Baptist Chronicle will not injure it much. We want deep devotional senti- 
 ment, that is soul-.stirring and animating to the Christian, rather than rigid 
 poetical merit." 
 
 JF'rom Rev. John M. Peck, of Missouri. 
 
 "It is exactly such a book as thousands want and will buy in these great 
 central States." 
 
 From the Vermont Gazelle. 
 
 This work is designed especially to meet a want existing in the Baptist 
 denomination. The high literary character of the author is a sure guaran- 
 tee in this respect. But, after all, it is not so much finely finished .sentences 
 as soul-stirring truths, hymned by warm hearts, that impart to the social 
 interview its greatest zest. 
 
 From the Mlckigan Christian Herald. 
 From a hasty examination, we should think that Mr. Dowling had execu- 
 ted the work in a judicious manner. 
 
 From the Baptist Memorial. 
 The people generally will ^ay— give us the old-fashioned hymns, if the 
 poetry is not quite as good; while some critics will think otherwise. Most 
 of the hymns are, however, unobjectionable in respect to poetic merit. 
 Fro7n, the Western CkrisUan Journal. 
 Hymn books are multiplying, but we shall be mi^iaken if this does not 
 prove to be a popular collection. It contains 3tJ0 hymns, and many of them 
 the sweetest in the language. 
 
 From the Christian Sfcretnry. 
 We can cheerfully commend this little book to the churches, as being pre- 
 eminently adapted to the purposes for which it is designed. 
 
 EDWARD U. FLETCHER, Publisher, 
 
 141 Nassau street, N. Y. 
 
PUBLISHED BY 
 
 EDWARD H. FLETCHER, 
 
 141 NASSAU STREET (Opposite Brick Church). NEW YORK. 
 
 The Baptist Sabbath School Hymn Book. 
 
 Compiled by Rev. Joseph A. Warxe, and containing 534 Hymns. 32mo. 
 
 Dowlmg's Conference Hymns. 
 
 A new Collection of Hymns, dcsiened especially for use in Conference and 
 Prayer Meetings, and Family VVor.-^hip. By John Dowunq, D.D. 32nio. 
 
 Life and Thoughts of John Foster. 
 
 By Rev. VV. W. Everts. 12mo. 
 
 The Pearl of Days; 
 
 Or, the Advantages of the Sabbath to the Working Classes. By a Laborer's 
 
 Daughter. 18mo. Cloth. 
 
 Miscellanies, consisting of Discourses and Essays. 
 
 By William R. Williams, D.D. Rvo. 400 pp. 
 
 The Baptist Pulpit of the United States ; 
 
 Consisting of Eloquent and Instructive Passages from the Sermons of 200 
 Baptist Ministers. By Joseph Belcher, D.D. 12mo. 
 
 Tracts for Churches. Pamphlet. 
 The Soul and Instinct, 
 
 PHYSIOLOGICALLY DISTINGUISHED FROM MATERIALLSM 
 
 By Martyn Payne, A.M., M.D., Profes.^or of the Institutes of Medicine and 
 Materia Medica in the University of New York. r2iiio. 
 
 The Christian Church as a Local Association, 
 
 SCRIPTURALLY DELINEATED. Pamphlet. 12mo. 
 
 The Bible ; 
 
 ITS EXCELLENCE, AND THE DUTY OF DISTRIBUTING IT 
 
 in its Purity ; with the Claims of the American and Foreign Bible Society. 
 12mo. Pamphlet. 
 
 Baptism, in the Import of the Command. 
 
 By Rev. Edmund Tuhney. I2mo. Pamphlet. 
 
 The Scriptural Law of Baptism. 
 
 By Rev. Edmund Turney. I2mo. Cloth. 
 
 Christian Baptism. 
 
 By Rev. Baptist VV. Noel; with an Introduction by John Dowlino, D.D., 
 and a fine Portrait. 
 
 Heaven's Antidote to the Curse of Labor ; 
 
 Or, The Temporal Advantages of the Sabbath, considered in Relation to the 
 Working Classes. By John Allan Quinton. With Illustrations and a Prefa- 
 tory Notice, by Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, D.D. 
 
 The Baptist Scriptural Catechism, 
 
 For the Use of Sabbath Schools and Bible Classes, vol. I., cont_ainin^ great 
 truths in simple words; for the younger members of Sabbath Schools. By 
 Henry C. Fish, Pastor of the Baptist Church, Somerville, N. J. 
 DO. VOL. II on the Evidences and Doctrines of Christianity. 18mo. Board*. 
 
THE 
 
 BAPTIST 
 SCRIPTURAL CATECHISM. 
 
 FOR THE USE OF SABBATH SCHOOLS AND BIBLE CLASSES. 
 
 V O li U ME I. 
 
 CONTAINING GREAT TRUTHS IN SIMPLE WORDS; FOR THE 
 YOUNGER MEMBERS OP SABBATH SCHOOLS. 
 
 BY HENRY C. PISH, 
 
 Pastor of the Baptist Church, Somerville, N. J. 
 
 This little volume is designed for the younger members 
 in our Sabbath Schools, and will prepare the way for the 
 profitable use of that which succeeds it, or Volume II., on 
 the Evidences and Doctrines of Christianity. 
 
 Studious regard has been had to plainness and simplicity ; 
 as also to brevity in the answers which the pupil is to com- 
 mit to memory — a feature in which many question books for 
 children are sadly deficient 
 
 It has been the aim of the Author to present truth in an 
 attractive and pleasing form, in order that the child may ac- 
 quire a fondness for the study of the Scriptures, and be led to 
 store his mind with that knowledge which is able to make 
 him wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 •' Plainness, simplicity and brevity are the characteristics 
 of this Catechism, which, from a hasty examination, we think 
 is a very good one." — Christian Secretary. 
 
 EDWARD H. FLETCHER, Pnblisher, 
 
 141 Nassau Street, N. Y. 
 
THE 
 
 LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 BY REV. W. W. EVERTS. 
 WITH A FINE STEEIi ENGRAVING. 12mo. 330 P«gci. 
 
 Foster's life in cheap form, a desideratum. 
 
 This volume furnishes a life of lliis extraorriinary man in an available form for general circula- 
 tion ; combines the principal events an.i inrifienis of his exiemal history in one complete panura- 
 mic view ; and embraces an estimate of his intellectual, literary, and religious character, lllustrued 
 from his own writings. 
 
 " The sketch of his life prefixed is interesting. It presents about all that can be said on that sub- 
 ject."— Christian Chronicle. 
 
 the most remarkable passages op poster's writings, collected and classipiet fob 
 
 convenience of reference and USB. 
 
 In glancing over a page or volume of any writer, the eye rests with ravished atlenlion upon the 
 luminous points of thought, brilliant sentences or paragraphs, as a connoisseur of laste dwells upon 
 particular features of a land.stape, or lines of a painting. These more remarkable passages we have 
 carefully collected from the whole range of Foster's published writings (including those not yet is- 
 sued from the American press), as a sort of memornbilia of his wonderful genius, character, and sen- 
 timents. These thoughts, figures, and illustrations, are arranged under their appropriate topics, with 
 hoadinss to indicate their particular hearing or application, and numbered to facilitate rcferejjce. 
 
 Uilherto the religious character and powerof Foster's writings have been disguised by their secu- 
 la.'" vpeMs and associations. Yet there are few, if any writers, who have so faithfully observed all 
 t':e •.-.laimed applications of Cliristianity, and perhaps none wlio have furnished so clear and power- 
 iV ?:arfments and illustrations of the principal doctrines and duties of Rcvclalion. The most grand 
 rc-^gious ideas are interspersed through his more secular writings, like mines of gold through an 
 unsuspLCled territory. In the absence of religious garb and profe-ssion, lliey are like a store crowded 
 with t'lie most valuable wares, without the ostentation of an advertising sign. 
 
 "This work is emphatically a book for the people, and is just what the great mass of ordinary 
 readers needed. Theologians and men of leisure may find lime to read the voluminous works of 
 Foster, but the business and active portion of the public require something of a different character 
 to suit tlieir wants and their /jwr^es — a desideratum that is fully accomplisheil in the volume before 
 us. Robert Hall, in speaking of Foster's writings, .said, ' They are like a great lumber- wagon, load- 
 ed with gold.' The American editor has collected the 'gold,' and left the 'lumber- wagon' l)ehind." 
 
 ChrtJtian Secretary. 
 
 TO THOSE WHO HAVE FOSTER'S WORKS. 
 
 A large portion of Fo.«(er's works have never beeu published in ihis country, and those who have 
 tliem will also find its arrangement of topics and classification of passages, with headings indicating 
 tlieir scope or bearing, and copious index, greatly facilitating a reference to Foster's opinions and 
 the various use and application of his original and peerless thoughts, his splendid images, analugica, 
 and illustrations. 
 
 opinions respecting foster. 
 " A man of the most extraordinary genius— his conceptions are most extraordinary and original." 
 
 lio/iert llalL 
 
 " He Will retain the reputation of gifis that have rarely fallen to the lot of mortals. "-JoAn llarrU. 
 "Of the English minds that have departed from our world within a few years, none have excited 
 a deeper interest, or wielded for a season a loftier power, than John Foster and Robert Mall." 
 
 Geo. B. ChentT. 
 
 EDWARD H. FI.KTCIIER, Publisher. 
 
 141 Nassau Street, N. Y. 
 
BOWLING'S CONFERENCE HYMNS. 
 
 A NEW COLLECTION OF HYMNS, 
 
 DESIGNED ESPECIALLY FOR USE IN 
 
 (Jlonfcrciuc aub l^xamv illcctings, ai\\i iainib lllorsf/ip. 
 
 BY JOHN DOWLING, D.D. 
 
 The design of the present compilation is, in the first place, to add to the life and spirituality 
 of the Conference and the Prayer Meeting; and, secondly, to be an acceptable pocket companion 
 to the Christian, in. the family or in the closet. 
 
 From most of the Conference hymn books which the editor has examined, a large number of 
 devotional pieces, cherished in the memory and the hearts of the fathers and motliers in our Ameri- 
 can Zion, have been excluded ; probably because the poetry was not regarded as of a sufficiently 
 high order of excellence. The opinion of the present editor is, that sacred songs, embodying 
 scriptural sentiments and genuine religious experience — when not objectionable on the score of 
 vulgarity or grammatical inaccuracy— should not be discarded because they fail to stand the test 
 of a rigid poetical censorship. 
 
 To mention a few of the favorite pieces omitted in some recent collections, many Christians will 
 at once recognize the following, associated as some of them are with their sweetest seasons of 
 holy religious enjoyment : — " Sweet land of rest, /or thee I sigh" — " Whither goest thou, pilgrim 
 stranger" — " The Lord into his garden co7nes" — "Farewell, dear friends, I must be gone" — 
 '■^ A men, amen, my soul replies" — " Come, my brethren, let us try" — " Vain, delusive world, adieu" 
 — " O come, my loving neighbors, will you go to glory with me" — " Lei tny kingdom, blessed 
 Saviour" — " There is a land of pleasure" — " O tell me no more of this world's vain store" — 
 " Today, if you icill hear his voice" — " Beside the gospel pool" — " The Good Old Way," com- 
 mencing, " Lift upyour heads, Immanuel's friends" — " The Harvest Iltime," commencing, " This 
 is the field, the world below" — "The Bower of Prayer" — "The Saints' Sweet Home" — and New- 
 ton's pious and expressive pieces — "The Beggar's Prayer," commencing, '■^Encouraged by thy 
 word, of mercy to the poor" — The Dying Thief," commencing, " Sovereign grace liuth power 
 alone" — and, "The Lord will provide," commencing, '■'■Though troubles assail and dangers of- 
 fright.' 
 
 One great mot;ve in the present work was to restore, for the use of the Editor's own congre- 
 gation and of such otners as desire them, the above, and a number of similar devotional and famil- 
 iar "Sacred Sonsrs," omitted in some recent Conference hymn books. 
 
 Another principal object with the compiler was to promote Ih-dtfamiliarity and ease which he 
 thinks should ever pervade these meetings. If formality anti stateliness is out of place any where, 
 it is certainly so in the Conference room and in the Social circle. To aid in accomplishing this 
 desirable result, he has embodied in the present collection a considerable number of voluniary stan- 
 zas adapted to the Conference and revival meeting, and intended to be sung in the intervals of 
 prayer or exhortation, without the formality of announcement. 
 
 The first 108 hymns are arranged under the heading, " Hymns adapted to Revival Melodies." 
 They are the text-hymns to various familiar tunes, most of which may be found in various well- 
 known collections of revival tunes. The missionary and baptismal hymns have been added, to 
 avoid the necessity of using the larger hymn books at the Monthly Concert and on Baptismal occa- 
 sions. 
 
 A Conference hymn book, in the Editor's opinion, should be a book for the pocket, and the 
 publisher has endeavored to combine— with what success the reader must judge— a neat exte- 
 rior, and convenient pocket size, with a fair and readable type, that shall not be distre.ssing to the 
 eye. Such as it is, the book is devoutly commended to the blessing of that God who "loveth the 
 gates of Zinn," and who has commanded us to " teach and admonish one another in psalms, and 
 hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord." 
 
 D3- Copies for examination furnished gratis to postpaid a.ppl\cal\ons— unbound copies sent 
 
 """'"'■ Pnblished by EDWARD 11. FLETCHER, 
 
 141 Nassau Street, N. Y. 
 
Plinceton Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
 1 1012 01208 2816 
 
 
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