and machinery in the place of it, are subversive of the benevolent end of God in establishing the church. If it comes to be proclaimed and generally held that the church of Christ is a society of sacraments, by virtue of which alone there is salvation, and by partaking of which, salvation is secured to all the members of that society, and to none others, then the church of Christ becomes a spiritual despotism, but at the same time is paralysed of all vital and saving power. The Word of God, which proclaims regeneration by the Holy Spirit alone, and salvation only by personal union of the soul to Christ, is made of none effect by man's tradition; and that usurpation called the Church, is made Satan's grand instrument to lull men in the security of their sins under the seal of a state sacrament, and to dandle them, in the lap of sacred ceremonies, down to hell.

II. Intimately connected with the nature of the Church, and both growing out of it, and dependent upon it, stands, in the second place, the freedom of the Church. If the Puritans were selected of God to teach any one thing more especially than another, it was this. They themselves came to the knowledge of it gradually, but it was the inward working of it, from the very nature and necessity of a true Church placed like theirs, that impelled them.

The Church holds its privileges of freedom and independence by charter from God, as a society of the just, a body of believers. These privileges belong to none others, except by usurpation, by intrusion of earthly things upon divine. A society of unregenerate men may enter the Church and take the badge of churchmembership, and vote themselves by that to constitute the Church. All the members of a nation may do this, and may constitute +hemselves a national church; but they are not a truly a Church, but an usurping, anomalous society calling themselves the Church. In this usurpation they may vote to take away the privileges of independence and of freedom granted to the Church of Christ from heaven, and to make over to the state authorities the power of binding and loosing in the Church, and the jurisdiction over forms of worship and articles of faith. But it is not a church that does this, but a corporation of dead men usurping the name and power of living Christians and of Christ.

The Church is not so much an institution to be governed or regulated, as a spontaneous growing life to be cultivated, the life of Christ spreading in the world, with the regulation of which governments have no more authority to interfere, than they have to determine the colors in which the verdure of the field shall clothe the earth with beauty, or the forms in which a forest of oaks shall spread its branches. The whole difficulty in this direction has arisen from that gubernatorial rabies, which will suffer nothing to live and grow spontaneously, that can be ordered by external law. Everything must be governed, and must be THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. No. 1.

3

monopolized by the governors. Should the Church escape the play of this necessity? Strange indeed if the State should leave the Church unregulated, the Church that has had such unlimited control in the affairs of mortals. This mistaken habit of feeling and of reasoning has been doubtless in part the consequence of the universal caricature and misrepresentation of the Church under the guise of a polity of this world. The Church, as demonstrated or rather belied by Rome, has been an element that the State has learned to watch, and is a power that the State thinks not safe to be left out of its own management. We should have the same feeling in regard to the very atmosphere, if by some malignant influence the atmosphere had been drawn for centuries under the control of a vast despotic corporation, which had used it or withheld it for its own purposes, and accustomed mankind to imagine that it could not be breathed safely, except under such and such regulations. If in such circumstances some benevolent and far-sighted philosopher should propose that the air be set free to circulate at its pleasure all over the world, the world would be terrified at such a monstrous proposition, and would pronounce the philosopher a hopeless, dangerous heretic.

The secret, mainly, of the agitations of modern society, and the key of a great part of modern history, is to be found in this one phrase, my kingdom is not of this world. It is this truth, striving to realize itself, that produces such revolutions; or rather, it is this truth carried forward towards its realization, by Him, who will overturn, and overturn, and overturn, till that kingdom, which is not of this world, shall in all this world be established.

The consequences of the opposite principle, so long and so successfully made to reign in human society by the God of this world, and the conflict between the two, form the staple of the greater part of modern history. Not being able to exclude the Christian Church from the world, the great enemy, who first made his assault upon the Son of God himself, the founder of that Church and kingdom, and offered him all the kingdoms of this world, if he would fall down and worship, changed his plan of attack, and said to himself, when he began to comprehend the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, Very well; we can corrupt and conquer the Church, if we cannot tempt its founder. We will accept it as a kingdom, but we will change it into a kingdom of this world; and so it shall be my kingdom, though under the name of Christ.

Accordingly, the same temptation which had been put before Christ and rejected, was renewed to the Church, and accepted. All the kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them, were shown to the Church, and to its earthly hierarchy of authority and power, and to the Pope, its head, and in consideration thereof, it bowed down and worshipped. The temptation was fearfully,

sweepingly, infernally successful. And the compact was performed. All these things, and the glory of them, were given to the Church, and it was made a tremendous, universal, overwhelming, all-crushing unity of spiritual and temporal despotism. The similarity is so striking between the temptations of Christ in the wilderness, and the temptations which have assailed the Church of Christ in the world, that we might be induced to regard the first as a figure, prediction, or foreshadowing of the last. The primary step of the temptation in the wilderness, that of making the stones bread, may have its answering reality in the reign of traditions, legends, and false miracles, instead of the word of God, and in the almost universal belief of that lying, miraculous power, supposed to dwell in the bones and tombs of dead saints and martyrs, and in the efficacy attributed to penances, pilgrimages, and wax candles, trusted in for salvation, instead of the word of the living God. This was Satan telling the Church to command the stones to be made bread. The second great step, as we have seen, is shadowed and realized in the great Apostasy, the hierarchy as a worldly kingdom, becoming, under its perfection in the Pope, a supreme dominion, and an AntiChristian Church. The third great step, where Christ was tempted by the letter of the word to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple, may refer to the great temptation now prevailing, that of a presumptuous reliance upon bare reason interpreting the word, according to its own fancies and dry pride of learning, without a proper entire dependence on the Holy Spirit.

These, however, are ideas which we cannot pursue. But the change by Satan of the character of the Church of Christ as a kingdom not of this world into the nature of a kingdom of this world, with all this world's accursed ambition, pride, tyranny, and strife, we are compelled to consider. Whether it were foreshadowed in Christ's great temptation in the wilderness, or not, it has been the great temptation and successful corruption of the Christian Church. There has been always, it is true, in the midst of all this corruption, a chain of opposing witnesses, a voice as of Christ, proceeding from a part of his Church against the temptation; Get thee behind me, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. The witnessing Church of the Waldenses uttered such a voice, and most remarkably protested against the Pope and the hierarchy, as an anti-Christian kingdom, and against Church and State establishments, as making, contrary to Christ's words, a kingdom of this world. But the corruption has been almost universal.

And now the reaction against it, and the recovery and reassertion of the great declaration of Christ, My kingdom is not of this

world, and the unseen but universal working of that principle, form the great cause of the present shaking, tumult, and crisis, the world over. It is the recovery and assertion of religious liberty, after which the world is groaning and laboring. The gaining of this liberty, so long disallowed, a liberty to worship God according to conscience, and the practical understanding and acknowledgment of the limits and difference between the kingdom of Christ and earthly governments, are previous steps and conditions of progress, necessary to the rapid, unhindered spread of the gospel of Christ through the world. The State must learn and consent to let the Church alone, and simply keep her protected from injury and insult, in her proper operations, just as it protects every independent profession and pursuit of life among its citizens. its citizens. And the Church must learn and consent to exercise no coercive power, and to reject the assumption of secular authority for the support of her establishments or the enforcement of her rules. When this separation between the temporal and the spiritual is effected, when the difference between the two is understood and acknowledged, when each advances in its own way, occupies its own sphere, and is established on its own proper foundations, without molesting or intruding upon the independent dominion of the other, then, and only then, the world will have peace. In other words, in the words of Christ, When men render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's, the kingdom of Christ will everywhere be established, that kingdom which is not meat and drink, nor traditions, prayer-books, and ceremonies enforced, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Little did the eager Scribes and captious Pharisees, that gathered round the Savior, and thought to entrap him by their question concerning the tribute money, think that his answer, condensing the wisdom of his whole system of religion, would become the cause of commotions that should shake the earth to its centre, the cause of the fall and rising again of empires, and of the upturning of the world's kingdoms for more than eighteen hundred years.

Some minds are so constituted, or have been so moulded and warped by accustomed forms around them, as to be apparently incompetent to ascertain any idea of a Christian State, save only under a union of Church and State, or else the merging of the State in the Church. That only can truly be called a Christian State, whose affairs are regulated on Christian principles by Christian A national Church under State patronage cannot of itself make a kingdom a Christian State. The declaration of the Christian religion in the State forms cannot make a Christian State. A State is Christian no further than its statesmen are under the power of Christian principle, and its affairs are governed in accordance with the spirit of Christianity and the Word of God. A State

men.

sacrament cannot make a Christian State, neither can a National Church of which every citizen in the State is by his very citizenship a member. A State is truly Christian, only in proportion as its citizens and rulers are themselves individually and personally Christians. The idea of an organized Christian State as one with the Christian Church, can be realized only so far as all the members of the State are at the same time members of Christ's Body; and even then there would still be, in the nature of things, a difference and separation between the State and its powers as ordained of God, and the Church and its powers as a kingdom of

God not of this world.

Even in some great minds there has been a great confusion of ideas in regard to this subject. But there has never been any confusion of policy in the nations, whatever there may have been in their conception of Church and State; the policy has remained inveterately and infamously selfish. The existence of a national Church has never helped this matter at all. The policy of sacramented and sacramental States has been as warlike, as ambitious, as wicked, as lustful of power, as if the obligations of a Christian sacrament or a State Church had never been heard of. A National Church, constituted and kept by edict and headship of the State, can not only not regenerate a nation, but may sink it deeper in corruption by its own impurity. When nations cease to be selfish, and come under the dominion of Christian principle, then there will be such mutual love and good will, such righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, as will, of itself, make all things new. At present we are very far removed from such a point. Whatever Christianity has done, it has never yet reached and penetrated the policy of a single nation. Whatever number of churches or pious individuals there may have been in any community, the government has continued perfectly worldly; there has never been the least regard to the will and glory of God as the rule of political and legislative action, nor to the advancement of the Redeemer's kingdom, nor to the spiritual interests of the world. And the establishment of a National Church has been so far from making this state of things any better, that it has only added a vast complication of bitternesses, and the acid of an intense bigotry, to all other causes of strife and cruelty. If we are not mistaken, it will be found that the only years, in which the State policy of England, with her National Church and in spite of it, can be suspected of a Christian spirit or of Christian ends, were the years when, under Cromwell, her national Church no longer existed, but men not under the oaths and enforcements of a National Church, but under the personal influence and fire of the gospel, bore sway. It will be a wonderful spectacle, to behold a single kingdom or State penetrated in its public policy, in all its movements, its expenditures, its laws, with the