The great purpose of the Romish worship, which is to preclude all genuine feelings by substituting the enthusiasm of the imagination, is accomplished, it must be confessed, with consummate skill, and a just knowledge of the human mind. The end proposed will, manifestly, be best attained when the emotions which spring from the imagination are made to resemble as nearly as possible those that belong to the heart. The nicest imitation will be the most successful in this machinery of delusion. Hence it is, that while all those means of excitement are employed which quicken the physical sensibilities, the deeper sensibilities of the soul are also addressed, and yet always by the intervention of dramatic or poetic images. A plain and undisguised appeal to the heart is unknown to the system.

If it be for a moment forgotten, that in every bell, bowl, and vest of the Romish service there is hid a device against the liberty and welfare of mankind, and that its gold, and pearls, and fine linen are the deckings of eternal ruin; and if this apparatus of worship be compared with the impurities and the cruelties of the old polytheistic rites, great praise may seem due to its contrivers. Nothing in Christianity that might subserve the purposes of dramatic effect has been overlooked; and even the most difficult parts of the materials have been wrought into keeping. The humiliations and poverty which shroud the glory of the principal personage, and the horrors of his death; as well as the awful beauty and compassionate advocacy of the virgin mother, the queen of heaven; the stern dignity of the twelve; the marvels of miraculous power; the heroism of the martyrs; the mortifications of the saints; the punishment of the enemies of the church; the practices of devils; the intercession and tutelary cares of the blessed; the sorrows of the nether world, and the glories of the upper;—all these materials of poetic and scenic effect have been elaborated by the genius and taste of the Italian artists, until a spectacle has been got up which leaves the most splendid shows of the ancient idol-worship of Greece and Rome at a vast distance of inferiority.[2]

But of what avail is all this sumptuous apparatus in promoting either genuine piety or purity of manners? History and existing facts leave no obscurity on the question; for the atrocity of crime, and the foulness of licentiousness, have ever kept pace with the perfection of the Romish service. Those nations upon whose manners it has worked its proper influence with the fullest effect, have been the most irreligious and the most debauched. Splendid rites and odious vices have dwelt in peace under the same consecrated roofs; and the actors and spectators of these sacred pantomimes have been wont to rush together from the solemn pomps of worship, to the chambers of filthy sin.

The substitution of poetic enthusiasm for genuine piety may, however, take place apart from the decorations of the Romish service; but the means employed must be of a more intellectual cast: eloquence must take the labor on itself, and must subject the doctrines of Scripture to a process of refinement which shall deposit whatever is substantial and affecting, and retain only what is magnific, pathetic, or sublime. And yet the principles of protestantism, and, in some respects, the national temper, and certainly the style and spirit, of the devotional services of the English Church, all discourage the attempt to hold forth the subjects of evangelical teaching in the gorgeous colors of an artificial oratory. And if the evidence of facts were listened to, such attempts would never be made by those who honestly desire to discharge the momentous duties of the Christian ministry in the manner most conducive to the welfare of their hearers. A blaze of emotion, having the semblance of piety, may be kindled by descriptive and impassioned harangues, such as those that are heard, on festival days, from French and Italian pulpits; but it will be found that the Divine Spirit, without whose agency the heart is never permanently affected, refuses to become a party in any such theatric exercises; these emotions will therefore subside without leaving a vestige of salutary influence.

Yet is there perhaps a lawful, though limited range open, in the pulpit, to the powers of descriptive eloquence. The preacher may safely embellish all those subsidiary topics that are not included within the circle of the primary principles on which the religious affections are built; for in addressing the imagination on these accessory points, he does not incur the danger of founding piety altogether upon illusions. The great and beautiful in nature, and perhaps the natural attributes of the Deity, and the episodes of sacred history, and the diversities of human character, and the scenes of social life, and the secular interests of mankind, may, by their incidental connection with more important themes furnish the means of awakening attention, and of varying the sameness of theological discourse. Or even if no unquestionable plea of utility could be urged in recommendation of such divertisements, at the worst they are not chargeable with the desecration of fundamental doctrines; nor do they generate delusion where delusion must be fatal. But it is not so with the principal matters of the preacher's message to his fellow-men, which can hardly be touched by the pencil of poetic or dramatic eloquence without incurring a hazard of the highest kind, inasmuch as the excitement so engendered more often totally excludes than merely impairs genuine feelings.

If the taste of an audience be quickened and cultivated, nothing is more easy to the teacher, or more agreeable to the taught, than a transition from the sphere of spiritual feeling to the regions of poetic excitement. Intellect is put in movement by the change; conscience is lulled; the weight that may have rested on the heart is upborne, and a state of animal elasticity induced, which, so long as it continues, dispels the sadness of earthly cares. Let it be supposed that the subject of discourse is that one which, of all others, should be the most solemnly affecting to those who admit the truth of Christianity—the awful process of the last judgment. The speaker, we will believe, intends nothing but to inspire a salutary alarm; and with this view he essays his utmost command of language, while he describes the sudden waning of the morning sun, the blackening of the heavens, the decadence of the stars, the growing thunders of coming wrath, the clang of the trumpet, whose notes break the slumbers of the dead, the crash of the pillars of earth, the bursting forth of the treasures of fire, and the solving of all things in the fervent heat. Then the bright appearance of the Judge, encircled by the splendors of the court of heaven; the convoked assemblage of witnesses from all worlds, filling the concave of the skies. Then the dense masses of the family of man, crowding the area of the great tribunal; the separation of the multitude; the irreversible sentence, the departure of the doomed, the triumphant ascent of the ransomed.

Compared with themes like these, how poor were the subjects of ancient oratory! And such is their force, and such the freshness of their power, that, though a thousand times presented to the imagination, they may yet again, whenever skilfully managed, command breathless attention while the sands of the preacher's hour are running out. Nor ought it to be absolutely affirmed that excitements of this kind can never produce salutary impressions; or that such impressions never accompany the hearer beyond the threshhold of the church, or survive a day's contact with secular interests: peremptory assertions of this sort are unnecessary to our argument. The question to be answered is, whether this species of movement be not of the nature of mere enthusiasm, and whether it does not ordinarily rather exclude than promote religious feelings.

In reference to the illustration we have adduced, there might be room for the previous inquiry, whether, on sound principles of interpretation, the language of Scripture ought to be understood as giving any warrant whatever to those material images of terrible sublimity with which it is usual to invest the proceedings of the future day of retribution. But let it be granted that the customary representations of popular oratory are not erroneous; and that when the preacher thus accumulates the physical machinery of terror, he is truly picturing that last scene of the terrestrial history of man. Even then it were not difficult, by an effort of reasoning and of meditation, and by following out the emotions of our moral constitution, to realize the feelings which must fill the soul on that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be published; and these feelings may be imagined, on probable grounds of anticipation, to be such as must render all exterior perceptions dim and make even the most stupendous magnificence of the surrounding scene to fade from the sight. It is nothing but the present torpor of the moral sentiments that allows to material ideas so much power to occupy and overwhelm the mind; but when the soul shall be quickened from its lethargy, then good and evil will take that seat of influence which has been usurped by unsubstantial images of greatness, beauty, or terror. What are the thunderings of a thousand storms; what the clangor of the trumpet, or the crash of earth, or the universal blaze; what the dazzling front of the celestial array, or even the appalling apparatus of punishment, to the spirit that has become alive to the consciousness of its own moral condition, and is standing naked in the manifested presence of the High and Holy One. That time of judgment which is to dispel all disguises, and to drag sin from its coverts into the full light of heaven, will assuredly find no leisure for the discursive eye; one perception, one emotion, will doubtless rule exclusive in the soul.

No extravagance or groundless refinement is contained in the supposition that, in the great day of inquiry and award, the moral shall so overwhelm the physical, that when, by regular process of evidence, according to the forms of that perfect court, conviction has been obtained of even some minor offence against the eternal laws of purity or justice—an offence which, if confessed on earth, would hardly have brought a blush upon the cheek—the heart will be penetrated with an anguish of shame that shall preclude the perception of surrounding wonders:—on that day it will be sin, not a flaming world, that shall appall the soul.

If anticipations such as these approve themselves to reason, it follows that the humblest and the least adorned eloquence of a purely moral kind, of which the only topics are sin and holiness, guilt and pardon, takes incomparably a nearer and a safer road towards the attainment of the great object of Christian instruction than does the most overwhelming oratory that addresses itself chiefly to the imagination. Nay, it may be affirmed that such oratory, however artfully elaborated, and however well intended it may be, is nothing better than a curtain, finely wrought, indeed, with gorgeous colors, but serving to hide from men the substantial terrors of the day of retribution.

Nothing, then, can be more glaringly inequitable than the manner in which the imputation of enthusiasm is frequently advanced in relation to pulpit oratory. On the ground either of common sense or of philosophical analysis, the epithet should be assigned to him who, in neglect or contempt of the substance of his argument, draws an idle and profitless excitement from its adjuncts. And on the same ground we must exculpate from such a charge the speaker who, however intense may be his fervor, is himself moved, and labors to move others, by what is most solemn and momentous in his subject. Now to recur for a moment to the illustration already adduced. In the anticipations we may form of the day of judgment, there are combined two perfectly distinct classes of ideas; on the one side there are those images of physical grandeur and of dramatic effect which offer themselves to the imaginative orator as the proper materials of his art, and which, if skillfully managed, will not fail to produce the kind of excitement that is desired by both speaker and hearer. On the other side there are, in these anticipations, the forensic proceedings which form the very substance of the fearful scene; and these proceedings, though of infinite moment to every human being, tend rather to quell than to excite the imagination, and therefore afford the preacher no means of producing effect, or even of keeping alive attention, unless the conscience of the hearer be alarmed, and his heart opened to the salutary impressions of fear, shame, and hope. In looking then at these themes, so distinct in their qualities, we ask—Is he the enthusiast who concerns himself with the substance; or he who amuses himself and his hearers with the shadow? Yet is it common to hear an orator spoken of as a sound and sober divine, who, for maintaining his influence and popularity, depends exclusively, constantly, and avowedly, upon his power to affect the imagination and the passions by poetic or dramatic images, and who is perpetually laboring to invest the solemn doctrines of religion in a garb of attractive eloquence. Meanwhile a less accomplished speaker, who—perhaps with more of vehemence than of elegance—insists simply upon the momentous part of his message, is branded as an enthusiast, merely because his fervor rises some degrees above that of others. Ineffable folly! to designate as enthusiastical the intensity of genuine emotions, and to approve as rational mere deliriums of the fancy, which intercept the influence of momentous truths upon the heart. Yet such is the wisdom of the world!

It cannot be pretended that the distinction between genuine and enthusiastic piety turns upon a metaphysical nicety: nothing so important to all men must be imagined to await the determination of abstruse questions; and if the distinction which has been illustrated in the preceding pages is not perfectly intelligible, it may safely be rejected as of no practical value. But surely there can hardly be any one so little observant of his own consciousness as not to have learned that the feelings excited by what is beautiful or sublime, terrible or pathetic, differ essentially from those emotions that are kindled in the heart by the ideas of goodness and of purity, or of malignancy and pollution. And every one must know that virtue and piety have their range among feelings of the latter, not of the former class; and every one must perceive that if the former occupy the mind to the exclusion of the latter, the moral sentiments cannot fail to be impoverished or corrupted. It is, moreover, very evident that the great facts of Christianity possess, adjunctively, the means of exciting, in a powerful degree, the emotions that belong to the imagination, as well as those which affect the heart; it therefore follows that the former may, in whole or in part, supplant the latter; and thus a fictitious piety be engendered, which, while it produces much of the semblance of true religion, yields none of its substantial fruits. In this manner it may happen, not in rare instances, but in many, that if, in the history of an individual, a season of religious excitement has once taken place, though it had in it little or nothing of the elements of a change from evil to good, it may have been assumed as constituting a valid and inamissible initiation in the Christian life; and if subsequently the decencies of religion and of morality have been preserved, a strong supposition of sincerity is entertained to the last, even though all was illusory.

Yet these melancholy cases of self-deception are not to be remedied by mere explanations of the delusion; on the contrary, the practical use to be made of definitions and distinctions and descriptions in matters of religious feeling, is to exhibit the necessity and to enhance the value of more available tests of sincerity. Thus, for example, if it appear that, in times like the present, when religious profession undergoes no severe probation, the danger of substituting some species of enthusiasm for true piety is extreme, there will appear the greater need to have recourse to those means of proof which infallibly discriminate between truth and pretension. This means of proof is nothing else than the standard of morals and of temper exhibited in the Scriptures. No other method of determining the most momentous of all questions is given to us, and none other is needed. We can neither ascend into the heavens, there to inspect the book of life, nor satisfactorily descend into the depths of the heart to analyze the complex and occult varieties of its emotions. But we may instantly and certainly know whether we do the things which he whom we call Lord has commanded.

SECTION III.
ENTHUSIASTIC PERVERSIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE INFLUENCE.

A sentiment natural to the human mind, leads it to entertain and to dwell with pleasure upon the belief of the stability and permanence of the material world. Whether we view the multiform ranks of organized and animated beings which cover the earth, or examine the occult processes of nature, or look upwards, and contemplate distant worlds, the regularity with which the great machine of the visible creation effects its revolutions inspires a deep emotion of delight. This feeling brings with it involuntarily the supposition of extended duration; nor is it without extreme difficulty that we can separate the idea of so vast a combination of causes and effects, moving forward with unfailing precision, from the thought, if not of eternity, yet of unnumbered ages gone by, and yet to come. While these natural impressions occupy the mind, a strange revulsion of feeling takes place, if suddenly it be recollected that the massy pillars of creation, with its towering superstructure, and its high-wrought embellishments, and its innumerable tenants, are absolutely destitute of intrinsic permanency, and that the stupendous frame, with its nice and mighty movements, is incessantly issued anew from the fount of being. Apart from the divine volition, perpetually active, there can be no title to existence; and in the moment which should succeed to the cessation of the efficient will of the First Cause, all creatures must fall back to utter dissolution.

Reason as well as faith justifies this doctrine, and demands that we deny independency to whatever is created; devoutly confessing that God is "all in all." In him by whom they were formed, "all things consist:" in him all "live and move and have their being." He is the author and giver of life; and in the strictest sense it may be affirmed that every day is a day of creation, not less than that on which "the morning stars" uttered their earliest shout of joyous wonder: every moment during the lapse of ages, the word of power is pronounced from the height of the Eternal Throne—"Let there be light" and life. This belief constitutes the basement-principle of all religion, and is the sentiment from which piety must take its spring. The notion of independency and of eternity, suggested by the regular movements of nature, are thus thrown off from the surface of the visible world, and go to enhance our impressions of the glories of him who alone is eternal, unchangeable and independent.

But it is certain that the conditions of existence, not less than its matter and form, are from God. In truth, the notions of being, and of well-being, are not to be distinguished in reference to the divine causation; for each of his works is perfect, both in model and in movement. There can be therefore no particle of virtue or of happiness in the universe, any more than of bare existence, of which God is not the author. Neither Scripture nor philosophy permits exceptions or distinctions to be made; for if we attribute to the Creator the organ, we must also attribute to him its functions, and its health too, which is only the perfection of its functions. And thus also, if the soul, with its complex apparatus of reason, and moral sentiment, and appetite, be the handiwork of God, so is its healthful action. But the healthful action of the soul consists in love to God, and free subjection to his will. Virtue is nothing else in its substance, nothing else in its cause. As in him we live and move and have our being, so also it is he who "worketh in us to will and to do" whatever is pleasing to himself. Whether we take the safe and ready method of acquiescing in the obvious sense of a multitude of Scriptures, or pursue the laborious deductions of abstract reasoning, the same conclusion is attained, that, in the present world, and in every other where virtue and happiness are found, virtue and happiness are emanations of the divine blessedness and purity.

But if this efflux of the divine nature belongs to the original constitution of intelligent beings, and is the permanent and only source of all goodness and felicity, it must be intimately fitted to the movements of mind, and must harmonize perfectly with its mechanism; just as perfectly as the creative influence harmonizes with the mechanism and movements of animal life.

Whatever is vigorous and healthful in the one kind of existence, or holy and happy in the other, is of God, whose power and goodness are, throughout the universe, the natural, not the supernatural cause of whatever is not evil. It were then a strange supposition to imagine that this impartation of virtue and happiness may be perceptible to the subject of it, like the access of a foreign and extraordinary influence; or that while the creative agency is altogether undistinguishable amid the movements of animal and intellectual life, the spiritual agency which conveys the warmth and activity of virtue to the soul, is otherwise than inscrutable in its mode of operation. As the one kind of divine energy does not display its presence by convulsive or capricious irregularities, but by the unnoticed vigor and promptitude of the functions of life; so the other energy cannot, without irreverence, be thought of as making itself felt by præter-natural impulses, or sensible shocks upon the intellectual system; but must rather be imagined as an equable pulse of life, throbbing from within, and diffusing softness, sensibility and force through the soul.

It is indeed true that if death or torpor has long held the moral powers in a state of suspended action, the returning principle of life, while working its way in contrariety to such a derangement of the system, may make itself felt otherwise than where no similar obstruction has to be overcome; yet will it only be perceived by its collision with the evils that have usurped the heart; not by its own spontaneous movements. These are, in truth, the foreign and disturbing influences; it is these that make themselves known by their abrupt and capricious activity, by their convulsive or feverish force. Meanwhile the heavenly emanation which heals, cleanses, and blesses the spirit is still, and constant, and transparent, as "a well of water springing up unto eternal life."

Nevertheless, from the accidents of the position in which we are placed, the divine influence may appear under an aspect immensely unlike that in which we should view it if our prospect of the intelligent universe were more extended than it is. Thus the sad tenant of a dungeon, who has spent the days of many years alive in the darkness of the tomb, thinks far otherwise of the light of the sun, as he watches the pencil ray that traverses his prison wall, than those do who walk abroad amid the splendors of the summer's noon. Or we may imagine a world of once animated beings to be lying in the coldness and corruption of death, and we may suppose that the creative power returns and reanimates some among the dead, restoring them instantaneously to the warmth, and vigor, and enjoyments of life. The spectator of this partial resurrection, who had long contemplated nothing but the dismal stillness and corruption of the universal death, might, in his glad amazement, forget that the death of so many, not the life of the few, is anomalous, and strange, and contrary to the order of nature. The miracle, if so he will term it, is nothing more—nothing else, than what is every instant taking place throughout the wide realms of happy existence. The life-giving energy whose beams of expansive beneficence had been for a while, and in this world of death, intercepted or withdrawn, has returned with a kindling revulsion to its wonted channel; and now moves on in copious tranquillity. The dead may indeed still outnumber the living; nevertheless it is the condition of the former, not that of the latter, that is extraordinary; and the return to life, how amazing soever it may seem, could with no propriety be called supernatural.

The language of Scripture, when it asserts the momentous doctrine of the renovation of the soul by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, employs figurative terms which, while they give the utmost possible force to the truth so conveyed, indicate clearly the congruity of the change so effected with the original construction of human nature. The return to virtue and happiness is termed a resurrection to life; or it is a new birth; or it is the opening of the eyes of the blind, or the unstopping the ears of the deaf; or it is the springing up of a fountain of purity; or it is a gale of heaven, neither seen nor known but by its effects; or it is the growth and fructification of the grain; or it is the abode of a guest in the home of a friend, or the residence of the Deity in his temple. Each of these emblems, and all others used in the Scriptures in reference to the same subject, combines the double idea of a change—great, definite, and absolute—and of a change from disorder, corruption, derangement, to a natural and permanent condition: they are all manifestly chosen with the intention of excluding the idea of a miraculous or semi-miraculous intervention of power. On the one hand, it is evident that a change of moral dispositions, so entire as to be properly symbolized by calling it a new birth, or a resurrection to life, must be much more than a self-effected reformation; for if it were nothing more, these figures would be preposterous, unnecessary, and delusive. But on the other hand, this change must be perfectly in harmony with the physical and intellectual constitution of human nature, or the same figures would be devoid of propriety and significance.

But a doctrine of divine influence like this, though so full of promise and of comfort to the aspirant after true virtue, offers nothing to those who desire transitory excitements, and who look for visible displays of supernatural power; and therefore it does not satisfy the religious enthusiast. Not content to be the recipient of an invigorating and purifying emanation, which, unseen and unperceived, elevates the debased affections, and fixes them on the Supreme Excellence; nor satisfied to know that, under this healing influence, the inveteracy of evil dispositions is broken up, and a real advance made in virtue, he asks some sensible evidence of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and would fain so dissect his own consciousness as to bring the presence of the Divine agent under palpable examination. Or he seeks for some such extraordinary turbulence of emotion as may seem unquestionably to surpass the powers and course of nature. Fraught with these wishes, he continually gazes upon the variable surface of his own feelings, in unquiet expectation of a supernatural troubling of the waters. The silent rise of the wellspring of purity and peace he neither heeds nor values; for nothing less than the eddies and sallies of religious passion can assure him that he is, "born from above."

A delusive notion of this kind at once diverts attention from the cultivation and practice of the virtues, and becomes a fermenting principle of frothy agitations, that either work themselves off in the sourness of an uncharitable temper, or are followed by physical melancholies; or perhaps by such a relaxation of the moral sentiments as leaves the heart exposed to the seductions of vicious pleasure. Thus the religious life, instead of being a sunshine of augmenting peace and hope, is made up of an alternation of ecstasies and despondencies; or worse, of devotional fervors and of sensual indulgences. The same error naturally brings with it a habit of referring to other, and to much less satisfactory tests of Christian character than the influence of religion upon the temper and conduct. So it happens that practical morality, from being slighted as the only valid credential of profession, comes, too often, to be thought of as something which, though it may be well in its way, is a separable adjunct of true piety.

The rate of general feeling that exists at any time in a community measures the height to which the exorbitances of enthusiasm may attain; thus in times of peculiar excitement a perverted notion of Divine influence is seen to ripen into the most fearful excesses. In such seasons it is not enough that the presence of the Holy Spirit should be indicated by unusual commotions of the mind; but convulsions of the body also are demanded in proof of the heavenly agency. Extravagance becomes gluttonous of marvels; religion is transmuted into pantomime; delirium and hypocrisy, often found to be good friends, take their turns of triumph; while humility, meekness, and sincerity, are trodden down in the rout of impious confusion. Deplorable excesses of this kind happily are infrequent, and never of long continuance; but it has happened more than once in the history of Christianity that the habit of grimace in religion, having established itself in an hour of fanatical agitation, and become associated, perhaps, with momentous truths, as well as with the distinguishing tenets of a sect, has long survived the warmth of feeling in which it originated, and whence it might derive some apology, and has passed down from father to son, a hideous mask of formality, worshipped by the weak, and loathed, though not discarded, by the sincere. Meanwhile an hereditary or a studied agitation of the voice and muscles, ludicrous, if it were not distressing to be seen, is made to represent before the world the sacred and solemn truth, a truth essential to Christianity, that the Spirit of God dwells in the hearts of Christians! Whatever special interpretation may be given to our Lord's awful announcement concerning the sin against the Holy Ghost, an announcement which stands out as an anomaly in the midst of his declarations of mercy, every devout mind must regard it as shedding, if we might say so, a penumbra of warning around the doctrine of divine influence, and will admit an apprehension lest he should, by any perversion of that doctrine, approach the precincts of so tremendous a guilt, or become liable to the charge of giving occasion in others to unpardonable blasphemies.

If it be true that the agency of the Holy Spirit in renovating the heart is perfectly congruous with the natural movements of the mind, both in its animal and intellectual constitution, it is implied that whatever natural means of suasion, or of rational conviction, are proper to rectify the motives of mankind, will be employed as concomitant, or second causes of the change. These exterior and ordinary means of amendment are, in fact, only certain parts of the entire machinery of human nature; nor can it be believed that its Author holds in light esteem his own wisdom of contrivance; or is at any time obliged to break up or to contemn the mechanism which he has pronounced to be "very good." That there actually exists no such intention and no such necessity, is declared by the very mode and form of revealed religion; for this revelation consists of the common materials of moral influence—argument, history, poetry, eloquence. The same divine authentication of the natural modes of influence, is contained in the establishment of the Christian ministry, and in the warrant given to parental instruction. These institutions concur to proclaim the great law of the spiritual world, that the heavenly grace which reforms the soul operates constantly in conjunction with second causes and ordinary means. In an accommodated, yet legitimate sense of the words, it may be affirmed of every such cause, that the "powers that be are of God;" there is no power but of his ordaining; and "whosoever resisteth (or would supersede) the power, resisteth the ordinance of God."

No one can doubt the possibility, abstractedly, of the immediate agency of the Omnipotent Spirit of Grace, without the intervention of means; nor does any one doubt the power of God to support human life without aliment; for "man liveth not by bread alone." But in neither case does he adopt this mode of independent operation: on the contrary, the Divine conduct, wherever we can trace it, is seen to approve much more the settled arrangements of wisdom, than the bare exertions of power. The treasures of that wisdom are surely never exhausted, nor can a case arise in which an immediate effort of Omnipotence becomes necessary merely to supply the lack of instruments. Nor does the vindication of the honors of Sovereign Grace need any such interpositions; for the absolute necessity of an efficient power above that which resides in the natural means of suasion is abundantly proved, on the one hand, by the frequent inefficacy of these means, when employed under the most favorable circumstances; and on the other, by the efficacy, as frequent, of means apparently inadequate to the production of the happy changes which result from them. It is not only affirmed by Scripture, but established by experience, that "neither he that planteth, nor he that watereth, is anything;" and at the same time it is affirmed by the one, and established by the other, that, apart from the planting and the watering of the husbandman, God, ordinarily, giveth no increase.

No persuasion or instruction, we are assured, can of itself, in any one instance, avail to penetrate the deathlike indifference of the human mind towards spiritual objects; but when once this torpor is removed by inscrutable grace, then the very feeblest and most inadequate means are sufficient for effecting the renovation of the heart. A single phrase, speaking of judgment to come, lisped by a child, has proved itself of power to awaken the soul from the slumber of the sensual life, if, when the sound falls on the ear, the spirit has been quickened from above. In such a case it were an error to affirm that the change of character was effected independently of external means; for though they were disguised under a semblance of extreme feebleness, and were such as might be easily overlooked or forgotten, they had in themselves the substantial powers of the highest eloquence; and what might have been added to the momentous truth, so feebly announced, would have been little more than embellishment; like the embroideries and embossments of the warrior's garniture, which add nothing to the vigor of his arm.

Two causes seem to have operated in maintaining the notion that divine influence is often dissociated from concurrent means of suasion; the first of these is an ill-judged but excusable jealousy on the part of pious persons for the honor of Sovereign Grace; and is a mere reaction upon orthodoxy, from the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresies such persons have thought it necessary, for the safety of a most important doctrine, not merely to assert the supremacy of the ultimate agent; but to disparage, as much as possible, all intermediate instruments. The second of these causes is the imaginary difficulty felt by those who, having unadvisedly plunged into the depths of metaphysical theology, when they should have busied themselves only with the plain things of religion, fail in every attempt to adjust their notions of divine aid and human responsibility; and, therefore, if they would be zealous for the honor due to the first, think themselves obliged almost to nullify the second. If any such difficulty actually exists, it should be made to rest upon the operations of nature, where it meets us not less than in the precincts of theology; and the husbandman should desist from his toils until schoolmen have demonstrated to him the rationale of the combined operations of first and second causes. Or if such a demonstration must not be waited for, and if the husbandman is to commit the precious grain to the earth, and to use all his skill and industry in favoring the inscrutable process of nature, then let the theologian pursue a parallel course, content to know, that while the Scriptures affirm in the clearest manner whatever may enhance our ideas of the necessity and sovereignty of divine grace, they nowhere give intimation of a suspended or halved responsibility on the part of man; but, on the contrary, use, without scruple, language which implies that the spiritual welfare of those who are taught depends on the zeal and labors of the teacher, as truly as the temporal welfare of children depends on the industry of a father. The practical consequences of such speculative confusions are seen in the frightful apathy and culpable negligence of some instructors and parents, who, because a metaphysical problem, which ought never to have been heard of beyond the walls of colleges, obstructs their understandings, have acquired the habit of gazing with indifference upon the profaneness and immoralities of those whom their diligence might have retained in the path of piety and virtue.

Another capital perversion remains to complete the enthusiastic abuse of the doctrine of divine influence; and this is the supposition that those heavenly communications to the soul which form a permanent constituent of the Christian dispensation, are not always confined to the matter or to the rule of Scripture, and that the favored subject of this teaching, at least when he has made considerable advances in the divine life, is led on a higher path of instruction, where the written revelation of the will of God may be neglected or scorned. This bold delusion assumes two forms: the first is that of the tranquil contemplatist, the whole of whose religion is inarticulate and vague, and who neglects or rejects the Scripture, not so much because he is averse to its truths, as because the mistiness of his sentiments abhors whatever is distinct, and definite, and fixed. To read a plain narrative of intelligible facts, and to derive practical instruction therefrom, implies a state of mind essentially different from that which he finds it necessary to his factitious happiness to maintain: before he can thus read his Bible in childlike simplicity he must forsake the religion of dreams, and open his eyes to the world of realities; in a word he must cease to be an enthusiast.

The other form of this delusion should excite pity rather than provoke rebuke; and calls for the skill of the physician, more than for the instructions of the theologian. The limits of insanity have not yet been ascertained; perhaps it has none; and certainly there are facts that favor the belief that the interval between common weakness of judgment and outrageous madness is filled up by an insensible gradation of absurdity, nowhere admitting of a line of absolute separation. Where, for example, shall we pause, and separate the sane from the insane, among those who believe themselves to be favored perpetually with special, particular, and ultra-scriptural revelations from heaven? The most modest enthusiast of this class, and the most daring visionary, stand together on the same ground of outlawry from common sense and scriptural authority; and though their several offences against truth and sobriety may be of greater or less amount, they must both be dealt with on the same principle; for both have alike excluded themselves from the benefit of appeal to the only authorities known among the sane part of mankind, namely, reason and Scripture: those who reject both, surrender themselves over to pity—or compulsion.

It would manifestly be better that men should be left to the darkness and wanderings of unassisted reason, than that they should receive the immediate instructions of heaven, unless they possess at the same time a public and fixed rule to which all such supernatural instructions are to be conformed, and by which they are to be discriminated; for the errors of reason, how great soever they may be, carry with them no weight of divine authority; but if the doctrine of divine communications be admitted, and admitted without reference to a public and permanent standard of truth, then every extravagance of impiety may claim a heavenly origin; and who shall venture to rebuke even the most pestilent error; for how shall the reprover assure himself that he is not fighting against God?

It has already been affirmed that enthusiasm, far from being necessarily or invariably connected with fervor or feeling, is often seen to exist, in its wildest excesses, conjoined with the most frigid style of religious sentiment. Thus, for example, the three egregious perversions of the doctrine of divine influence, which have been described in the preceding pages, are maintained, and have been professed and defended during several generations, by a sect remarkable, if not for the chilliness, at least for the stillness of its piety, and its contempt of the natural expressions of devotional feeling; and even for a peculiar shrewdness of good sense in matters of worldly interest. But the incongruities of human nature are immense and incalculable; or it would not be seen that general intelligence, and amiable manners, and Christian benevolence, are often linked with errors which, if viewed abstractedly, might seem as if they could belong only to minds that were lost to wisdom and piety.

SECTION IV.
ENTHUSIASM THE SOURCE OF HERESY.

The creed of the Christian is the fruit of exposition; no part of it is elaborated by processes of abstract reasoning; no part is furnished by the inventive faculties. To ascertain the true meaning of the words and phrases used by those who "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," is the single aim of the studies of the theologian. Interpretation is his function. But the work of interpretation, considered as an intellectual employment, differs essentially from that of the student of physical or abstract science; for it neither needs nor admits of the ardor by which those pursuits are animated. Nor has nature furnished the faculties that are employed in the labor of expounding the terms of ancient documents with any very vivid susceptibility of pleasurable excitement. The toils of the lawyer, of the philologist, and of the theologian, must therefore be sustained by a reference to some substantial motive of utility; and though there may be a few minds so peculiarly constituted as to cultivate these studies with enthusiastic ardor, from the pure impulse of native taste, the ranks of a numerous body of men can never be filled up by spontaneous laborers of this sort.

Christianity, being as it is, a religion of documents and of interpretation, must utterly exclude from its precincts the adventurous spirit of innovation. Theology offers no field to men fond of intellectual enterprise: the Church has no work for them; or none until they have renounced the characteristic propensity of their mental conformation. True religion, unlike human science, was given to mankind in a finished form, and is to be learned, not improved; and though the most capacious human mind is nobly employed while concentrating all its vigor upon the acquirement of this documentary learning, it is very fruitlessly, and very perniciously occupied in attempting to give it a single touch of amendment.

The form under which Christianity now presents itself as an object of study does, in a much greater degree, discourage and prevent speculation and novelty, than it did in the early ages; and in fact, if all the varieties of opinion which have appeared during the eighteen centuries of church history are numbered, a large majority of them will be found to belong to the first three centuries, and to the eastern church. That is to say, to the period when doctors of theology, possessing the rule of faiths in their vernacular tongue, had no other intellectual employment than that either of inventing novelties of doctrine, or of refuting them. Other causes may, no doubt, fairly be alleged as having had influence in quickening that prodigious efflorescence of heretical doctrine which infected the whole atmosphere of Christianity, in the east, during the second and third centuries, and at a time when the western church maintained, in a good degree, the simplicity of Scriptural faith; but the cause above-mentioned ought not to be ranked among the least efficient.

But theology in modern times offers an unbounded field of toil to the student;—the toil of mere acquisition, and of critical research; for a familiar knowledge of three languages, at least, is indispensable to every man who would take respectable rank as a teacher of Christianity; especially to every one who aspires to distinction in his order; and some acquaintance with two or three other languages, is also an object of reasonable ambition to the theological student. And moreover, an accomplished expounder of Scripture must be well versed in profane and church history; nor may he be entirely ignorant of even the abstract and physical sciences. These multifarious pursuits, which are to be acquired compatibly with the discharge of the public duties of the pastoral office, assuredly furnish employment enough for the most active and the most industrious mind long beyond the period of college initiation. Nor are we to consider merely the natural influence produced upon the intellectual habits by these employments, in preventing that discursiveness of the inventive faculties which is a principal source of heresy; for its quality, not less than its quantity, is decidedly corrective of the propensity to generate novelties of opinion.

Every one who has made the experiment well knows that the toils of learned acquisition have a direct tendency to impair the freshness and force of the intellectual constitution, to chill and cloud the imagination, and to break the elasticity of the inventive faculty; if not to blunt the keenness of the powers of analysis. Thus they indispose the mind to the wantonness of speculation, and impart to it rather the timidity, the acquiescence, the patience, which are proper to the submissive exposition of an authoritative rule of faith. Biblical learning, therefore, not only serves directly to dispel errors of opinion by throwing open the true sense of Scripture; but it contains within itself what might be termed a physical preventive against heresy, which, if it be not always efficacious, is perceptibly operative. Nothing then can be more desirable than that public opinion should continue, as it now does, to demand erudition from the teachers of religion.

Nevertheless, when a large class of men is professionally devoted to the study of theology, there will not be wanting some whose mental conformation (not to mention motives which are foreign to our subject) impels them to abandon the modest path of exposition, and to seek, within the precincts of religion, for the gratifications that accompany abstruse speculation, discovery, invention, exaggeration, and paradox. All these pleasures of a morbid or misdirected intellectual activity may be obtained in the regions of theology, not less than in those of mathematical and physical science, if once the restraints of a religious and heartfelt reverence for the authority of the word of God are discarded. The principal heresies that have disturbed the church, may, no doubt, fairly be attributed to motives springing from the pride or perverse dispositions of the human heart; but often a mere intellectual enthusiasm has been the real source of false doctrine.

Errors generated in this manner possess, commonly, some aspect of beauty or of greatness, or of philosophical simplicity, to recommend them; for as they were framed amid a pleasurable excitement of the mind, so they will have power to convey a kindred delight to others. And such exorbitances of doctrine, when advanced by men of powerful or richly furnished minds, conceal their deformity and evil tendency beneath the attractions of intelligence. But the very same extravagances and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty, but of decency, and show themselves in the unpleasing bareness of error. The mischief of heresy becomes often far more active and conspicuous in second hands than it was in those of its authors; and the reason is that it is usually the child of intellectualists—an inoffensive order of men: but no sooner has it been brought forth and reared, than it joins itself, as by instinct, to minds of vulgar quality, and in that society soon learns the dialect of impiety and licentiousness. The heresiarch, though he may be more blameworthy, is often much less audacious, and less corrupted, than his followers; for he, perhaps, is only an enthusiast; they have become fanatics.

In like manner as the passion for travel impels a man to perambulate the earth, and then makes him sigh to think that he has not other continents to explore, so the constitutional enthusiasm of speculation urges its victims to traverse the entire circuit of opinions: and even then leaves him insatiate of novelty. It is not caprice, much less is it the excessive solicitude of an honest mind, always inquiring for truth; but rather the impetus of a too highly-wrought intellectual activity, which carries the heretic onward and onward, from system to system, blazing as he goes, until there remains no form of flagrant error with which he has not scared the sober world. Then, though reason may have forgotten all consistency, pride has a better memory; and as this passion forbids his return to the truths he has so often denounced, and denounced from all points of his various course, nothing remains for him, when the season of exhaustion arrives, but to go off into the dark void of infidelity.

The sad story has been often realized. In the conformation of the heretic by temperament, there is more of intellectual mobility than of strength: a ready perception of analogies gives him both facility and felicity in collecting proofs, or rather illustrations in support of whatever opinion he may adopt. So copious are the materials of conjectural argument which crowd upon him, and so nice is his tact of selection, and so quick his skill of arrangement, that ere dull sobriety has gathered up its weapons, he has reared a most imposing front of defence. Pleased, and even surprised, with his own work, he now confidently maintains a position which at first he scarcely thought to be seriously tenable. Having convinced himself of the certainty of the new truth, and implicated his vanity in its support, deeper motives stimulate the activity of the reasoning and inventive faculties; and he presently piles demonstration upon demonstration, to a most amazing height, until it becomes, in his honest opinion, sheer infatuation to doubt. In this state of mind, of what value are the opinions of teachers and of elders? Of what weight the belief of the catholic church in all ages? They are nothing to be accounted of; there seems even a glory and a heroism, as well as a duty, in spurning the fallible authority of man: modesty, caution, hesitation, are treasons against conscience and heaven!

The young heresiarch, we will suppose to have spent the earliest season of life, while yet the ingenuousness of youth remained unimpaired, in the pursuits of literature or science, and to have been ignorant of Christianity otherwise than as a system of forms and offices. But the moment of awakening arrives; some appalling accident or piercing sorrow sets the interests of time in abeyance, and opens upon the soul the vast objects of immortality. Or the eloquence of a preacher may have effected the change. In these first moments of a new life, the great and common doctrines of religion, perceived in the freshness of novelty, afford scope enough to the ardor of the spirit; and perhaps, also, a new sentiment of submission quells, in some measure, that ardor: the craving of the mind does not yet need heresy; truth has stimulus enough; and even after truth has become somewhat vapid, the restraints of connection and friendship have force to retain the convert three years, or five, in the bosom of humility. But the first accidental contact with doctrinal paradox kindles the constitutional passion, and rouses the slumbering faculties to the full activity of adult vigor; contention ensues; malign sentiments, although perhaps foreign to the temper, are engendered, and these impart gloom to mysticism, and add rancor to extravagance. And now, no dogma that is obnoxious, terrific, intolerant, schismatical, fails to be, in its turn, avowed by the delirious bigot, who burns with ambition to render himself the enemy—not so much of the world, as of the church.

But will even the last extravagance of false doctrine allay the diseased cravings of the brain? Not unless that physical inertness which, towards the middle period of life, sometimes effects a cure of folly, or perhaps some motive of secular interest, supervenes. Otherwise a progression must take place, or a retrogression; and when the heart is sick and faint from the exhaustion of over-activity, and when the whispers of conscience have long ceased to be heard, and when the emotions of genuine piety have become painfully strange to the soul, nothing is so probable as an almost sudden plunge from the pinnacle of high belief, into the bottomless gulf of universal scepticism. A lamentable catastrophe of this kind, and which is only the natural issue of an intellectual enthusiasm, would, no doubt, much oftener take place than it does, if slender reasons of worldly prudence were not usually found to be of firmer texture than all the logic of theology.

A chronic intellectual enthusiasm, when it becomes the source of heresy, most frequently betakes itself to those exaggerations of Christian doctrine which pass under the general designation of Antinomianism;—not the Antinomianism of workshops, which is a corruption of Christianity concocted by mercenary teachers expressly to give license to the sensualities of those by whom they are salaried; but the Antinomianism of the closet, which is a translation into Christian phraseology of the ancient stoicism. The alleged relationship consists, not so much in the similar abuse which is made in both systems of the doctrine of necessity, but in the leading intention of both; which is to inclose the human mind in a perfect envelop of abstractions, such as may effectively defend it from the importunate sense of responsibility, or obligation, and such as shall render him who wears it a passive spectator of his own destinies. The doctrine of fate was seized upon by ancient sophists, and is taken up by the Antinomian, because, better than any other principle, it serves the purposes of this peculiar species of illusory delectation. Yet the Christian theorist has some signal advantages over his ancestor. For example: the egregious absurdities of the ancient philosophist met him on every walk of life, and stood in the way of constant collision with the common sense of mankind: and thus the sage, in spite of his gravity and self-command, could hardly pass a day in public without being put to shame by some glaring proof of practical inconsistency; for as often as he spoke or acted like other men, as often as he made it evident that he did not really think himself a statue or a phantom, he gave the lie direct to the fooleries of his scholastic profession.

But the modern stoic, while, by a sinister inference from his doctrine, he takes large leave of indulgence to the flesh (an indulgence which he uses or not, as his temperament may determine) and so borrows the practical part of Epicureanism, transfers his egregious dogmas to the unseen world, where they come not at all in contact with common sense. In the vast unknown of an eternity on both sides of time, he finds range enough, and immunity, for even the most enormous paradoxes which ingenuity can devise, or sophistry defend. Besides, the argumentative resources of the modern are incomparably more copious and various and tangible than those of the ancient wrangler; for the latter could only fall back, ever and again, upon the same abstractions; but the former may take position on any part of a very wide frontier; for having so large and multifarious a volume as the Scriptures in his hand, and having multiplied the argumentative value of every sentence it contains almost indefinitely by adopting the rule of Origen and the Rabbis, that the whole of Scripture is mystical, and may bear every sense that can be found in it, he is at once secure from the possibility of being confuted, and revels in an unbounded opulence of proof and illustration in support of his positions. To the sober interpreter, the Bible is one book; but to the Antinomian it is as a hundred volumes.

With a field so wide, and means so inexhaustible, the Christian theorist lives in a paradise of speculation; and no revolution to which human nature is liable can be less probable than that which must take place before he abandons his world of factitious happiness. The dreamer must feel that sin is a substantial ill, in which himself is fatally implicated, and not a mere abstraction to be discoursed of; he must learn that the righteous God deals with mankind not fantastically, but on terms adapted to the intellectual and moral conformation of that human nature, of which he is the author; and he must know that salvation is a deliverance, in which man is an agent, not less than a recipient.

It belongs not at all to our subject to attempt a confutation of this, the most strange of the many corruptions which Christianity has undergone; our part is merely to exhibit against the system the charge of delusion or enthusiasm; and this charge needs no other proof than the plain statement that, whereas Christianity recognizes the actual mechanism of human nature, and appeals to the moral sentiments, and urges motives of every class, and labors to enhance the sense of responsibility, and authenticates the voice of conscience, Antinomianism, with indurated arrogance, spurns all such sentiments, and substitutes nothing in their room but bare speculations; and these speculations are all of a kind to cherish the selfish deliriums of luxurious contemplation. But to take a course like this, is, whatever may be the subject in question, the part of an enthusiast. Whoever, in any such manner, cuts himself off from the common sympathies of our nature, and makes idiot sport of the energies of moral action, and has recourse, either to a jargon of sophistries, or to trivial evasions, when other men act upon the intuitions of good sense, and rebuts every idea that does not minister gratification either to fancy or to appetite, such a man must be called an enthusiast, even though he were at the same time—if that were possible—a saint.

We have spoken of the enthusiasm of mysticism. But there is also an enthusiasm of simplification. The lowest intellectual temperature, not less than the highest, admits extravagance, and sometimes even admits it more; for warmth and movement are less unnatural in the world of matter or of mind, than congelation: what so grotesque as the coruscations of frost? If the reasoning faculty had not its imaginative impulse, the sciences would never have moved a step in advance of the mechanic arts; much less would the high theorems of pure mathematics, or the abstruse principles of metaphysics, have been known to mankind. But if this natural and useful impulse be irregular and excessive, it becomes the spring of errors. Yet the perfection of science, and its general diffusion in modern times, operate so effectually to keep in check that propensity to absurd speculation of which the elements are always in existence, that if we are in search of specimens of this species of intellectual disease, we must expect to meet with them only without the pale of education, and among the self-taught philosophers of workshops, who sometimes amuse the hour of stolen leisure in digesting systems of the universe, other than the one which is demonstrated in our universities.

Driven from the enclosures where the demonstrable sciences hold empire, the enthusiasts of speculation turn off upon ground where there is more scope, more obscurity, more license, and less of the stern and instant magistracy of right reason. Some give themselves to politics, some to political economy, and some to theology; and whatever they severally meet with that is in its nature, or that has become concrete, complex, or multifariously involved, they seize upon with a hungry avidity. The disease of the brain has settled upon the faculty of analysis; all things compound must therefore be severed, and not only be severed but left in disunion. It cannot but happen that, in these zealous labors of dissolution, some happy strokes must now and then fall upon errors which wiser men have either not observed, or have spared: mankind owes therefore a petty debt of gratitude to such speculatists for having removed a few excrescences from ancient systems. But these trivial successes, which are hailed with much applause by the vulgar, who delight in witnessing any kind of destruction, and by the splenetic, who believe themselves to gain whatever is torn from others, inspire the heroes of reform with unbounded hopes of effecting universal revolutions; and they actually become inflated to so high a degree of presumption, that, at a time when all the great questions which can occupy the human mind have been thoroughly discussed, and discussed with every advantage of liberty, of learning, and of ability, they are not ashamed to adopt a style of speaking as if they thought themselves morning stars on the verge of the dark ages, destined to usher in the tardy splendors of true philosophy upon a benighted world!

—Or of true religion: as if the Christian doctrine, in its most essential principles, had become extinct, even in the days of the apostles, and had not merely remained under the bushel of superstition during the ages of religious despotism, but long after the chains of that despotism were broken, and after the human mind, with all the vigor and intensity of renovated intelligence and renovated piety had given its utmost force, and its utmost diligence to the exposition of the canon of faith. Of what sort, it might be asked, were this canon, if its meaning on the most important points might, age after age, be utterly misunderstood by ninety-nine learned, honest, and unshackled men, and be perceived only by the one? Yet this is the supposition of simplificators, who from the impulse of a faulty cerebral conformation, must needs disbelieve, because theology would otherwise afford them no intellectual exercise.

It is a common notion, incessantly repeated, and seldom sifted, that diversity of opinion, on even the cardinal points of Christian faith, is an inevitable and a permanent evil, springing, and always to spring, from the diversity of men's dispositions and intellectual faculties. Certainly no other expectation could be entertained if Christian theology were what moral philosophy was among the sophists of ancient Athens—a system of abstractions, owning subjection to no authority. But this is not the fact; and though hitherto the ultimate authority has been much abused or spurned, the re-establishment of its power on fixed and well understood principles seems to be far from an improbable event. We say more, that an actual progression towards so happy a revolution is perceptible in our own times. We do not for a moment forget that a heartfelt acquiescence in the doctrines of Scripture must ever be the result of a divine influence, and is not to be effected by the same means which produce uniformity of opinion on matters of science. But while we anticipate, on grounds of strong hope, a time of refreshing from above, which shall subdue the depraved repugnances of the human mind, we may also anticipate, on grounds of common reasoning, a natural process of reform in theology—considered as a science, which shall place the intrinsic incoherence of heresy in the broad light of day, henceforward to be contemned and avoided.

The fields of error have been fully reaped and gleaned; nor shall aught that is new spring up on that field, the whole botany of which is already known and classified. It is only of late that a fair, competent, and elaborate discussion of all the principal questions of theology has taken place; and the result of this discussion waits now to be manifested by some new movement of the human mind. Great and happy revolutions usually stand ready and latent for a time until accident brings them forward. Such a change and renovation we believe to be at the door of the Christian Church. The ground of controversy has contracted itself daily during the last half century; the grotesque and many-colored forms of ancient heresy have disappeared, and the existing differences of opinion (some of which are indeed of vital consequence) all draw round a single controversy, the final decision of which it is hard to believe shall long be deferred; for the minds of men are pressing towards it with an unusual intentness. This great question relates to the authority of Holy Scripture; and the professedly Christian world is divided upon it into three parties, comprehending all smaller varieties of opinion.

The first of these parties, constituted of the Romish Church, and its disguised favorers, affirms the subordination of the authority of Scripture to that of tradition and the Church. This is a doctrine of slavery and of ignorance, which the mere progress of knowledge and of civil liberty must overthrow, if it be not first exploded by other means. The second party comprises the sceptical sects of the Protestant world, which agree in affirming the subordination of Scripture to the dogmas of natural theology; in other words to every man's notion of what religion ought to be. These sects, having no barrier between themselves and pure deism, are continually dwindling by desertions to infidelity; nor will they be able to hold their slippery footing on the edge of Christianity a day after a general revival of serious piety has taken place.

The third party, comprehending the great majority of the Protestant body, bows reverently, and implicitly, and with intelligent conviction, to the absolute authority of the word of God, and knows of nothing in theology that is not affirmed, or fairly implied, therein. The differences existing within this party, how much soever they may be exaggerated by bigots, will vanish as the mists of the morning under the brightness of the sun, whenever a refreshment of pious feeling descends upon the Church. They consist, in part, of mere misunderstandings of abstract phrases, unknown to the language of Scripture; in part they hinge upon political constitutions, of which so much as is substantially evil is by no means of desperate inveteracy: in part these differences are constituted of nothing better than the lumber of antiquity, the worthless relics of forgotten janglings handed down from father to son, but now, by so many transmissions, worn away to an extreme slenderness, and quite ready to crumble into the dust of everlasting forgetfulness. Surely men are not always so to remain children in understanding, that the less shall be preferred to the greater; nor shall it always be that the substantial evils of schism are perpetuated and vindicated on the ground of obscure historical questions, fit only to amuse the idle hours of the antiquary. This trifling with things sacred must come to its end, and the great law of love must triumph, and the Christian Church henceforward have "one Lord, one faith, one baptism."