and to defend themselves with the sophistries which the time offers them ready made. The soul's cry for truth, that shall seize and hold reason and conscience, is audible enough. And there is nothing so touching to one deeply alive to eternal realities, as the cry to God and man of the erring and sinful soul. The wail of women for childhood cut off by pestilence, of sisters weeping for brothers who return not from war's bloody field, of men who go down in the sinking ship when no help is nigh, of the bewildered, flying inhabitants of the city buried in suffocation by the volcanic shower, touches not so deep a feeling as the silent cry of misguided spirits. Were a little child mysteriously missed from one of our homes, long enough to excite alarm, how would the cry pass from mouth to mouth, "A child lost!" how would the intelligence merge all minds, all thought and sense, in one distressing purpose! how would all business and pleasure be suspended in the anxious pursuit of the little wanderer! how would men search rivulet and creek and grove, pry under shelving cliff and fallen wall, stoop to look into every pit and shelter, undeterred by cold or storm, never pausing in the breathless hunt, except, as man met man, to ask, "Is he found?"— with no image before them but of the famishing infant and of the mother sitting in the apathy of spent agony upon her desolate hearth-stone! So sad to Jesus's heart was the wandering of the soul. And so ought we to merge all interests and purposes in the work of guiding God's benighted and erring children to the warmth and light of Divine truth, the spirit's paternal home. Brethren, I believe that, for this recovery of the wandering, man's rational and moral nature must be more respected than it has been. It is no resumption of dogmas that shock reason and the heart, no revival of antiquated notions of ecclesiastical authority, no religion of holidays and genuflexions, any more than of naturalism or of no church, that will meet the dangers of our country and time, but a religion which weds reason to faith, which makes men conscious of the presence of God with them in all existing relations, and listen for the voice of the teaching and atoning Christ in the duties and sacrifices to which the hour calls, a preaching which shall be a demonstration of the Divine spirit to the human, which - shall assert the Gospel's supremacy over the whole domain of life, which shall bring all man's thinking and doing at the grand inquest of reason and conscience before the tribunal of the Divine Word, which shall conduct men and nations into the school of Christian ethics, and lead governors and governed to bend in lowly obedience before the majestic law of the Most High. ART. VII. CHRISTIANITY AND SECULARISM.* We have copied below nearly the whole of the titlepage of a book which we have read with deep and painful interest, though we have closed it with a hope that it may be a means of good. The part of the title-page which we have omitted below, we have reserved that we may give it here with greater distinctness, as follows. The discussion was "On the Question, What Advantages would accrue to Mankind generally, and the Working Classes in particular, by the Removal of Christianity, and the Substitution of Secularism in its Place?'" This fundamental and comprehensive question will at once reveal the character of the contents of the volume. While some scientific men are bringing the records of revelation to their physical tests, and philosophers are trying its substance by their metaphysics, and critical and antiquarian students are proving its historical relations, workingmen, as becomes them, are asserting their distinctive rights and functions by subjecting Christianity to the ordeal of a practical issue. That there has been a great amount of scepticism and unbelief and irreligion among the working classes in Great Britain, and that that amount has largely increased within a few years, can be secrets to very few * Christianity and Secularism. Report of a Public Discussion between the REV. BREWIN GRANT, B. A., Editor of "The Bible and the People," and GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE, ESQ., Editor of " The Reasoner." Held in the Royal British Institution, Cowper Street, London, on six successive Thursday Evenings, commencing Jan. 20, and ending Feb. 24, 1853. Fifth Thousand. London: Ward & Co. 1853. 12mo. pp. 264. persons who have watched the current of thought and the visible phenomena of human life. These facts, too, present no cause of wonder. The explanation of them is as obvious as the light of day. How decisive is the condemnation written against the Established Church of Great Britain in the neglect which it has practised towards the working classes, and in the effects of that neglect! Where would have been the religion of the masses of the English people, had it not been for the Dissenters? There has been but one single book produced in the English Church which has had a popular circulation as a welcome heart-guest in the homes of all classes as a quickener and guide to true piety. We speak of Taylor's "Holy Living and Holy Dying." While, on the other hand, the Dissenters have furnished such religious works in rich abundance. Dr. Watts, Dr. Doddridge, Richard Baxter, and John Bunyan have fed the life of piety in the hearts of millions of the English race. It deserves mention too, in this connection, that the famous Dissenter, Oliver Cromwell, was the first Protestant Englishman who devised a missionary enterprise from the Reformed churches.* Those who have fixed their view rather upon the vital power than upon the hierarchical aspects of religion, have ever been the agents of its best influence in England. The Methodists, too, spent their strength most effectually upon those masses of humble operatives, miners and agriculturists, who had been to so great extent neglected by the Establishment. Notwithstanding the devotional works and the earnest labors of the Dissenters, and the good influence which they have exerted among the working classes, there was still an immense amount of latent scepticism in their ranks. While they have worked with their hands, their minds have not been idle. Sometimes the utter neglect as regards their religious interests with which they have been treated, sometimes the worldly and oppressive character of the Establishment, and sometimes the unintelligible, inconsistent, or repulsive views which have * Cromwell has not generally had the credit and fame which belong to him on this score alone, as but one of his many measures which gave honor to England in the eyes of all Christendom. Bishop Burnet, however, refers to his missionary project, and calls it "a noble one." been presented to them in the name of the Gospel, have led them to unbelief and irreligion. The recent diffusion of the means of knowledge, — crude, superficial, and imperfect indeed, but still not without effect on the mind,through penny magazines, cheap literature, and popular lectures, has set many strong and many weak intellects in lively action. Those sons of toil, the noble artisans who fashion our stupendous machines and our beautiful fabrics, the miners delving in the bowels of the earth, the operatives, farmers, and day-laborers, are all sharers of a lot which they feel to be a hard one. They see around them, they help to produce, the very luxuries which it is not theirs to share. They feel, often bitterly, the sense of social wrongs. They live and die amid the sterner aspects of life, with but little to soften and cheer, and nothing to refine them. Is it strange that the problems which religion presents to all minds should come in a peculiar shape to their minds, and hearts too, and that a form of unbelief should appear among them? It is with a real, practical unbelief among the working classes that the book before us deals, and that too most stirringly. Of the contents of this book we proceed to give our readers some account. If they regard it as we do, as a sign of the times and as a new witness to the necessity and value of a well-grounded religious faith to all men, they will share the interest with which we have followed every word of it. First, however, we must introduce the two disputants whose names appear on the title-page. We know nothing more of either of them than the book directly or incidentally announces. Mr. Holyoake is the editor of "The Reasoner"; a periodical work, of which there have been twelve volumes published, and in whose pages there is the most perfect freedom of utterance for every form of scepticism, unbelief, and atheism, and for the suggestion of every conceivable theory of reform, and every theoretical and practical objection to the existing usages and the established principles of Christendom. There seems to be no effort for self-consistency or system in its contents. On the contrary, the enormous amount of destruction which is felt to be needed, and the vast undertaking which the work of reconstruction involves, are regarded as a sufficient excuse for the chaotic 24 VOL. LV. —4TH. S. VOL. XX. NO. II. confusion of theory and opinion among reformers. Mr. Holyoake, courting the reputation of martyrdom for Atheism, made recently some offensive demonstration of that sort, for which he was imprisoned in the Gloucester jail. He announces that he made preparations for suicide, which he justifies under the plea that imprisonment for opinion's sake might drive a victim to insanity, from the first consciousness of the approach of which visitation one would have a right to seek relief in self-destruction. Mr. Grant very naively reminds him, in the discussion, that no real martyr for conscience has ever been known to have been visited with that malady, or to have made such preparations under the apprehension of it. Something more may be learned of the editor of "The Reasoner" from these words which he writes of himself in its pages: "Five years of my youth were wasted in the Sunday school of Carr's Lane Chapel. Every Sunday once, and generally twice, during that long period, it was my misfortune to sit under the Rev. Angell James, a believing recipient of such pernicious trash as that in 'The Anxious Inquirer.' If ever I and the Rev. Angell James meet at the bar of God, and justice is there af forded for those who have been wronged in life, I shall demand at the hands of the Rev. John Angell James the restitution of the buoyant years of my youth, which he so clouded with melancholy, and idly anxious' thoughts. Next to the evil which I thus suffered was the misery inflicted on many near and dear to me. Distinct before me, at this moment, are the agonizing expressions of those who believed or feared they had committed the redoubtable sin against the Holy Ghost. Without fear of contradiction, I venture the opinion, that, if the Holy Ghost has a particle of humanity in him, there is no sin against him like writing ANXIOUS INQUIRERS. Devoutly thankful am I to stand where I do, looking down on the dangers, the traps, the gins and pitfalls of evangelical piety which I have escaped." —Reasoner, Vol. III. p. 527. Mr. Holyoake had for some time invited and challenged discussion with Christian ministers, sometimes in courteous, and sometimes in taunting terms, and he would enter places of worship, offering his publications to the preacher, or taking down what was said for the purposes of criticism in his paper. He freely admits the inconsistencies and the crudeness of speculation often found in "The Reasoner," and as to its more gross and |