the universe to a devotee of Vishnu, as the motion of the earth round the sun to the Inquisitors of Rome, who imprisoned Galileo. And so far as we can see, these simple principles of truth would not have been discovered and wrought out at all, except for the instrumentality of the Puritans. God's only laboratory for a long time, seemed to be his church in America. His divine agency he deemed fit to display especially there in the demonstration of these truths, these discoveries. There were glimpses of them at times elsewhere, but they came to nothing or stopped short of the idea of true Christian liberty, the idea, in fact, of Christ's Free Church. The Free Church has since been scourged and beaten into existence elsewhere; but probably even in Scotland not for ages later might this great work have been accomplished, but for the previous discoveries, demonstrations, and examples of the Puritans in this country.

For there is a vast difference between the announcement of such principles, or a glimpse of them by some individual emancipated understandings, and God's demonstration of them in actual successful experiment. Cromwell was a Puritan in Old England, who understood them as well, perhaps, as any man living in his day in New England. "What most distinguishes Cromwell above all great men," says D'Aubigné, "and especially above all statesmen, is the predominance in him, not only in his person, but also in his government, of the evangelical and Christian element. He thought that the political and national greatness of Britain could not be established in a firm manner, unless the pure gospel was communicated to the people, and unless a truly Christian life flowed through the veins of the nation." It was Cromwell's belief that England as a State was blessed and would be, only "by reason of that immortal seed, which hath been and is among them; those regenerated ones in the land, of several judgments, who are all the flock of Christ and lambs of Christ; his, though perhaps under many unruly passions and troubles of spirit, whereby they give disquiet to themselves and others. Yet they are not so to God, since to us he is a God of other patience, and he will own the least of truth in the hearts of his people. And the people being the blessing of God, they will not be so angry but they will prefer their safety to their passions, and their real security to forms. Had they not well been acquainted with this principle, they had never seen this day of gospel liberty."

"These men," continued Cromwell, "that live upon their mumpsimus and sumpsimus, their masses and service-books, their dead and carnal worship, no marvel if they be strangers to God, and to the works of God, and to spiritual dispensations. The worldly-minded man knows nothing of this, but is a stranger to it, and thence his atheisms and murmurings at instruments,

yea, repinings at God himself. Give me leave to tell you, those that are called to this work, it will not depend for them upon formalities, nor notions, nor speeches. I do not look the work should be done by these. No, but by men of honest hearts, engaged to God, strengthened by Providence, enlightened in his words, to know his word, to which he hath set his seal, sealed with the blood of his Son, with the blood of his servants. is such a spirit as will carry on this work."

That

That is such a spirit as must discover, draw forth and demonstrate, truth against power, truth overlaid by power, truth belied and perverted by power, truth driven out of the world by power. It was such men as these, who were required to reestablish truths that to us are plain as the daylight, but to the world then wore the guise almost of fiends. They were truths, put by their opposers, as the wise and godly Halyburton once said of certain caricatured doctrines of the gospel, under the guise of gross misrepresentations, mistaken notions, and strained consequences; and having thus put them in beasts' skins, as the primitive persecutors did the Christians, they set their dogs on them to worry them. The very strangeness of those truths made men hostile to them, as if they were enemies; and, indeed, for their defence no common decision or mere friendship would answer; it needed a mind to be grounded deep in them, to be persuaded of them as the truth of God, to have a conviction in them, which came from God's spirit, and was the fire of individual experience, and carried all things in the soul before it. Unless a man were of this adamantine resolution, and at the same time intense earnestness, he would be, in the pursuit of truth against which the whole array of State and Church launched their anathemas, like those hesitating doubtful men of whom Milton speaks, "who coming in the course of these affairs to have their share in great actions above the power of law or custom, at least to give their voice and approbation, begin to swerve and almost shiver at the majesty and grandeur of some noble deed, as if they were newly entered into a great sin."

The Puritans were impelled, as well as taught, of God's Spirit ; burned onward, as it were, by God's fire; forced, as well as guided, by God's Providence-shut up to measures of liberty, and driven on to the discovery of truths, from which, in mere human strength or impulse, they would have retreated. They carried by assault impregnable citadels, before which generations might have passed away in the action of an ordinary siege. The children of Israel, if time had been given them, would have crossed the Red Sea in ships of their own construction, nor ever would have stirred a step into the hazard of a miracle, in obedience to God's voice to go forward. But the celestial fire of spirit in our depraved nature, that which whirls a man on for God in face of

an opposing world, is a greater miracle itself than the cleaving of the whole ocean.

We speak of the great principles established by the Puritans, or rather wrought out and brought from concealment into clear day by the Divine Providence, Word, and Spirit through them, as all springing from, and returning to, the true idea of the Church. They were a body of men, a band of believers, in whom, by the Divine demonstrations through them, may be seen an illustration in this world of a passage of scripture concerning the Church, the action of which throws us mainly into the next world: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God. The true nature of the Church-the freedom of the Church-the unity of the Church-the rule of the Church-the mission of the Church-the life and dependence of the Church;—all these are questions, the solution and application of which are stirring up the world from its foundations. All these are questions developed and demonstrated by God's Providence and Grace in the history of our fathers, about as clearly and fully as we can expect truth to be demonstrated through the medium of humanity.

First, the true nature of the Church. The idea very widely prevalent, long after the commencement of the Reformation, in regard to the Church, was that of a national ecclesiastical society, of which men became members by baptism. The Puritans soon learned, partly by experience, and partly by the Word of God, that the Church is composed only of persons born of the Holy Spirit, and that a Church is any number of such believers whatever, who," as the Lord's free people, join themselves, by a covenant of the Lord into a Church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel." This idea, in distinction from that of a national Church, combined together of all in the land promiscuously," under government of the hierarchy, must necessarily be developed, if the Church of Christ would have purity and power. It was equally necessary for the freedom of the Church. lopment of this truth, and in the establishment both of the independence and the pure discipline belonging to the Church of Christ, the Puritans were carried further onward in the providence of God, and were made more perfect, than any other body of Christians since the days of the Apostles. The prevalence of deep and true piety in New England is greatly owing, under God, to the vigorous, uncorrupted scriptural sense of the nature of the Church of Christ, taught of God to our Puritan fathers, and transmitted by them to their descendants.

In the deve

The Church in their view was an existence solely of God's creation, not man's. It is made up only of those who are born again by the Holy Spirit; it is a company, the company, of new

creatures in Christ Jesus. The Church is the union of individuals abiding in Christ, having Christ's life in their souls, united to Christ first as individuals, and united together only by virtue of that personal union with Christ, and that life common in and to the Church only as derived by each and all first and independently from Christ. The Church is a union of believers, who come into a church estate by virtue of their faith in Christ, and their covenanted privileges as his disciples. They do not come to Christ through the Church, but they come to the Church and are made members of the Church through Christ. The distinction between these two ideas comprehends the whole difference between a Church which is of man only, and the true Church, which is of God only. It is the difference between a mere earthly machinery and a spiritual existence, between a ceremonial despotism and servitude, and a spiritual, immortal, indestructible independence and freedom. It is the difference between death and life. The Church, which is a church by sacraments, and not by Christ, is despotism and death. The clergy-church, the Church by a priesthood and not by Christ, is despotism and death. The Church, which is not a Church by individual regeneration of the Spirit of God, is no part of the Church of Christ, but is a corporation or synagogue of dead men in their natural state, who, if they arrogate to themselves the title of a church, do it by as great a usurpation as if a fraternity of masons or of chemists should take that title, and make the entrance to the Church consist in swallowing a phial of the tincture of Peruvian bark. All the successions, societies, and ceremonies, from Adam downward, sacred or profane, could not make a Church without individual personal union of the soul to Christ, nor introduce a soul into the Church but by such union. This was one of the vital truths of the Reformation, and sources of its power, so long as it went on. This was the truth which our fathers saw with the utmost distinctness, and by which they held, while the world was losing it, while in its place, usurping the keys of the kingdom of heaven, there came in a religion of sacraments, a Church of forms. This is the governing truth in the kingdom of Christ, the truth by which alone the Church can be a spiritual power and life to the world, and by which alone can be seen its independence of all earthly authority, its superiority to all earthly power, as a kingdom not of this world.

Till within a few years the statement of this truth has been in this country as complete a spiritual truism, as if one should say the sun shines with colorless light. We have been born into this scriptural idea of the Church as the element of spiritual existence, as we are into the atmosphere, as the element of our physical existence. It is a simple idea of Christianity, which nothing else could supply the place of, and which kept everything

else in its right place. There has been such a great gulf fixed. between us and the Papal Church, and, indeed, every Church of state sacraments, that we have been as a separate spiritual world, a world of different existences and experiences. But the truths

which have been and are

The fountain light of all our day,

The master light of all our seeing,

as much so as the idea of individual existence, are now occupying the world in theoretic disputation. In America we are singularly enough placed in regard to such agitation. We have been living upon these truths, acting by them, and acting them out, and now we see the old world intensely questioning and analysing them. The Church-what is the Church? and what is our relation to it? Questions that seem to us as needless as to ask concerning the air, what is the air? and what is our relation to the air? We are reminded of those remarkable cases of trance, in which grown men have lost the whole of their acquired knowledge, and have had to begin again spelling words of one syllable in the primers of their childhood. Part of the world seems to have gone into such a trance. The speculations of those who are just awakening, display, in some instances, as great a lack of practical knowledge and right conception, as if the people of another planet should undertake to inform the people of this in what proportions we must have our atmospheric gases mingled, and under what municipal regulations the atmosphere must be doled out. Or it is as if a society of theoretic chemists should tell our housekeepers that the only proportions and regulations in and under which our bread must be yeasted, kneaded, and baked, are according to the algebraic formula, a+b+c―d=b+r+e+a+d. We cannot help regretting, when we see the volumes, however able, devoted to the discussion of things that have long been demonstrated here in open day, that the noble minds engaged in such discussions could not have had the advantages of some twelve or twenty years' residence in a flourishing New England Congregational Church. But God seems to have appointed it as a law for our race, that all valuable knowledge in all important things, indeed in all things, shall be gained by personal discipline and experience. They who are working out these problems now in Europe do it almost as convulsively and painfully in intellectual discernment as our Pilgrim Fathers did in the endurance of real toil and suffering. Sometimes their theoretic speculations as to what ought to be, coincide wonderfully with what is. But we imagine that, in general, the sentiment with which our speculations concerning the degree of caloric requisite to sustain animal life in the planet Jupiter would be regarded by the inhabitants of that planet, might not be greatly different from the