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THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JANUARY, 1856.

ART. I.-THE TRACT MOVEMENT.

1. The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society. London. Pp. 704.

2. Thirtieth Annual Report of the American Baptist Publication Society. Philadelphia, 1854.

3. Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the American Tract Society. New-York, 1854. 4. Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the General Protestant Episcopal SundaySchool Union, and Church Book Society. New-York, 1854.

5. Sixteenth Annual Report of the Board of Publication of the Presbyterian Church. Philadelphia. 1854.

6. Second Annual Report of the Tract Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. New-York, 1855.

7. First Annual Report of the Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church. New-York, 1855.

THE Tract enterprises of the Christian Church are worthy to be classed among the greatest undertakings of the age. The theme involves so much that to do it justice in one short article is impossible. This paper, therefore, is merely designed to draw an outline of the subject, and throw in a tint here and there, leaving the reader to complete the picture for himself.

We do not dispute the fact that the command to "preach the Gospel" means, primarily, that the messengers of Christ, who are called of God as was Aaron, are to proclaim their message with the voice. They are styled heralds, and there is propriety as well as beauty in the epithet. The student well remembers Homer's living epistles, who repeat the classic words of their various masters without the omission of a letter, or the slightest violation of rhythm. In proclaiming the good tidings of great joy, God's chief instrumentality is the voice of the living teacher, into whose mouth he puts words, commanding him to speak in his name. The speaker, standing up before his audience, face to face, eye to eye with them, will attract and retain their attention from the first to the last word of an FOURTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.-1

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address, which, if printed, would not be read through with the same interest and attention by one in twenty of those auditors. living teacher is, also in general, more impressive, as well as attractive. People love to feel emotions, and are prone to attribute truth, wisdom and all good qualities to those who are able to excite them in an agreeable manner. To most hearers, learned and unlearned, the speech which conveys the truth, and, while it keeps up the mental action aright, spices it with pathos or humour-a sermon which causes the heart to throb tumultuously, and the eye to suffuse—are far preferable to dry, passionless disquisitions, like a winter's night, clear and cold. But emotion is contagious. To weep with those who weep, and rejoice with them that rejoice, is graven upon our nature, as well as written in God's book. And the living teacher, whose heart glows with zeal for the cause of his Master, and whose eye, and voice, and attitude, and gesture all speak to his auditors, and impress, and thrill, and move them, holds the principal place in proclaiming the truth and saving the lost. No books, no tracts, no steam-press, striking off a volume at every swing of the pendulum, can supersede him. He must go. He must stand before those to whom he is sent, and there, while their lost condition rouses his Christian sympathies, and while his tenderness and zeal attract and impress them, he must preach-announce with a brother's voice the riches of Christ, and at the same time do what no volume or tract can ever do, show an example of a living, breathing Christian, redeemed from sin, and full of love for God and for souls.

No Church can prosper without the living teacher. The people called Quakers laid aside the ministry, as a class of men set apart to preach the Gospel and superintend the affairs of the Church, and yet the society has never prospered, never won upon other sects, nor made aggressions upon the world, except through the instrumentality of men who gave themselves to the work of the ministry, and who were earnest and abundant in labours. While their great leaders lived and constituted, in fact, what they denounced in name, a regular ministry, the society grew rapidly; but when these able preachers, who had roused the community from its apathy by their faithful "testimonies" and strong appeals, were gathered to their fathers, the triumphs of Quakerism were at an end. Two or three times the denomination has revived under the influence of preaching, but when these labours again ceased, the society ceased to grow, and in most cases, began to wane.

The founders of Christian communions have been generally, perhaps we may say invariably, great preachers. John Huss, Martin Luther, the Wesleys, and George Whitefield, were giants

in their day; while the Hicksites, the Campbellites, and the Puseyite movement, and various other subdivisions of the professed followers of Christ, may also be cited in proof of our position. Even the false religions of the carth owe their progress and power to the labours of the living advocate. The Mormons, for instance, show what can be done by indefatigable preaching, for even a very bad cause.

But the power of the modern press is also immense. It exerts an untold influence upon the welfare of the race, and is, at the same time, one of the best and one of the most dangerous elements of modern progress. Conceding to the preacher the place of the tongue, the Church wields in the steam-press the right hand of her power. As we propose to examine the subject at some length, let us begin with a glance at the literal machinery. Down under ground, in a hot and smoky atmosphere, a begrimmed personage in a soiled paper cap opens the ponderous doors of a furnace, and we gaze into a cavern of fire, raging within iron halls. Around and above are wheels and cylinders and arms of steel, all moving with resistless energy and heavy clangours. We ascend to another story, and there we behold a number of complicated machines, devouring monsters, gorging themselves with whole loads of paper aliment. The keeper of each lays before it, every instant, a huge, spotless sheet. Instantly a half a dozen pairs of iron thumbs and fingers shut upon the edge and draw it into the mysterious vortex of wheels. For a moment it is gone from sight, and then emerges again on the other side, where an iron hand receives it in its skeleton palm, and with a whirl claps it heavily upon a pile of its predecessors. Lo, the whole Gospel of grace is printed upon its surfaces! Thus the work goes on. The sweating toiler below fills up the red cavern under the boiler, and the hot spirit pent up within, like an infuriate criminal on the treadmill, chafes at his bonds and tears at the machinery with fiery energy. The tireless wheels revolve, and a score of iron hands swing to and fro, each every moment laying down, as an offering upon the altar of God, a volume which the slow pen of the scribe of other days would have required months to copy. The heathen ask for Bibles and the iron hand piles them up. munity requires tracts, religious newspapers books, and the iron fingers hold them forth. steam labours, the wheels revolve, and light earth.

A Christian comand Sabbath-school The fires burn, the streams through the

And in truth, the printed page has some advantages which the preacher lacks. The very force of appeal connected with personal advocacy sometimes renders it exasperating to irritable natures.

When man reproves his neighbour, no matter how cautiously and kindly, there is an assumed superiority implied which the combative heart of the transgressor is art to construe as Pharisaic pride, "Stand by, I am holier than thou." The printed page, on the other hand, is passive and passionless, and its admonitions are more like the deductions of one's own reason, or the calm dictates of conscience, against which the anger of the sinner is less likely to rise than against a reprover clad in flesh and blood, and saying, with lifted, upbraiding finger, "Thou art the man." Nor can the force of the page's appeal he broken by controversy, cunningly started up by way of diverting the conversation from personal matters. The types are never penned in a corner and silenced by sophistry; they tender no apology for what they say; but asserting without wavering or abatement, they compel the reader to meet the naked question. If the recipient of the tract burn it in his foolish wrath, not a letter deserts its post, but so long as the fabric holds together, it adheres to its original declarations, and the martyr, like those of old, perishes in the flames, firm and undaunted to the very last.

The tract or religious book, too, is always at hand, and thus can have a hearing in the mollia tempora fandi, the times when the whole man is soothed and softened, and the mind is reflective and the heart impressible. The page may be read again and again, while the eloquence of the living teacher is often lost with the breath which gave it utterance. The volume may remain in prison day and night among criminals, without pain to itself, or offence to others; it can maintain its position in the hands of vice, holding up its torch amid the thick darkness. It can go where the living teacher cannot follow, remain where he cannot stay, work when he is weary, and live long and toil hard when he is worn out and gone to his final rest.

The living teacher, then, is God's chosen messenger to guilty men, and yet the mute sermons of the religious press have some peculiar powers and advantages. The duty, therefore, of an enlightened Christian Church is to employ both agencies to the utmost limit of opportunity. Let the teacher go forth everywhere, and tell the story of the cross; let him lift up his voice in the lofty temples of the city, and in the humbler chapel of the hamlet, or beside the highways and the hedges, beneath the open sky. But while his words of invitation ring far and wide, let our friend in the paper cap open the doors of the iron cavern, and feed fat the hot spirit that pushes and tugs within; let books and tracts fly like the leaves of the forest when autumn winds are blowing; till, as in the quaint fancy of John Bunyan, both Eye-gate and Ear-gate have been

assaulted by the truth, and every citizen of Man-soul has bowed to the mild sway of the Prince of Peace.

The Christian Church is waking to her duty. Since the days of the apostles, the world never saw greater activity and energy in spreading the Gospel, more men employed, more money contributed, or greater success crowning effort; and of all the labours of the Church, none has sprung up more rapidly from small beginnings to a magnitude partaking of the sublime, than the religious publication enterprise. In fact, enlightened minds in all ages have felt that in value and efficacy books are next to the living teacher. The copy of the law, laid up in the ark, was regarded by the Israelites with a veneration approaching idolatry; and in after ages the Jews looked upon their sacred manuscripts as the choicest treasures of their synagogues. Solomon sought to find out and put on record acceptable words, even words of truth. Paul possessed manuscripts which he highly valued, and in reminding Timothy how he may be "a good minister of Jesus Christ," he urges him to "give attendance to reading." Wickliffe penned a hundred or more of manuscript volumes against the errors of Rome, and sent them forth on their mission of light; and one or two of these, borrowed of a Bohemian noble, who had been a student at Oxford, turned John Huss to the truth, and kindled another morning star of the Reformation. Luther arose soon after the invention of printing, and his strong practical mind was not slow to seize upon the press as a mighty helper in his vast work. So greatly were the adherents of Rome annoyed by these sharp arrows, that one of them cries out in anguish and dismay:-"The Gospellers of these days do fill the realm with so many of their noisome little books, that they be like to the swarms of locusts which did infest the land of Egypt."

Though here and there appear traces of combined effort for the publication of various books promotive of piety, nothing like a permanent organization is seen till 1701, when the "Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge," was founded in London. The means proposed by this society were the establishment of schools to teach all to read, and the distribution of Bibles, tracts and good books. Some other local associations, composed, like this, wholly of members of the Established Church, were formed, and doubtless accomplished good. In the year 1750, however, a society was formed in London, on a more catholic plan, for the "Promotion of Religious Knowledge among the Poor." In 1756 societies of the same character were established in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Toward the close of the century, Miss Hannah More began her labours in this new field, by writing, with the aid of her sisters, a series of "Cheap

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