feelings which in this country we inevitably experience in regard to the speculations of many minds in our world concerning Christ's

Church.

The problem of the Church-what is the Church, what are its claims, what is its relative position to the State, what its connexion with the welfare of society? is a problem not difficult of solution in the light of the New Testament, but difficult by a priori reasoning and philosophic speculation. But without doubt, it shows the great advancement of Christianity in the world, that this problem should have become the one great question of our times, whatever ignorance of the very nature of the Church, or misrepresentation of the first and simplest principles of Christianity, may be involved in the manner of its discussion.

Sometimes, indeed, the philosophic analysis of principles can be pursued more deeply apart from their life and demonstration. Those who live principles most thoroughly are not always endowed with the same power of philosophically comprehending and expressing them, that they have of developing them. Hence we have seen a foreigner, De Tocqueville, taking perhaps in some respects a more profound and searching survey of the working of social and political principles in our country, than our own citizens are qualified to do. But in the matter of religious principle, and as to the working of religious freedom and voluntary Christian socialism, no mind seems capable of understanding it, but by both experiencing it personally, and dwelling where it has full scope and power. With us, the nature of the Church and its relations to society have first been experimentally demonstrated, and in consequence of this, a thousand questions, that might beforehand have proved impossible to settle, have not even been mooted. The religious philosophers of Europe are agitating the questions beforehand, with no satisfactory experiment, or pure, spontaneous, unconstrained development to guide them.

Two great fallacies have prevailed, and filled nearly all Ecclesiastical History. The first is the fallacy of epithets, apply ing the title of the History of the Church of Christ, and of the Christian Religion, to what is merely the history of human wickedness, of the "Synagogue of Satan," and of the corruptions of religion. The second is the fallacy of things, changed from what they once were, yet retaining the primitive name, and treated as the original essence, there being no line drawn, no point assumed, beyond which the legitimate application of the first name ceases. Between these fallacies the history of Christianity has been confounded with the history of Church establishments, and the sublime and pure reality of the Church of God has been confounded with the intruding and intriguing Church of man. The tares have sprung up in luxuriance and rankness,

till they have filled the whole space which the good seed originally occupied, and then the world has been poisoned with food concocted from those tares, and this has taken up in men's minds the place of Christianity, this has been regarded as the operation of the Church. The salt which had lost its savor, and was fit only for the dunghill, has continued, nevertheless, an article of traffic and of consumption, an article dignified with the highest place in history, and described and treated as sacred, instead of being condemned to the historical dunghill, as by our Lord it was to the moral and spiritual. The consequence was inevitable; the reputation of the Church of Christ has been blackened by infidels with the reproach of all the incarnate demonism of human nature at its most bestial and infernal ebb; for the wickedness of man has been greater, enacted under the name and mantle of the Church, than under any other conjunctures of time and circumstance. What is the Romish Corporation under the Borgias, but such an incarnation of depravity?

Archbishop Whately relates how the Royal Society were once imposed upon "by being asked to account for the fact that a vessel of water received no addition to its weight by a live fish put into it; while they were seeking for the cause, they forgot to ascertain the fact, and thus admitted, without suspicion, a mere fiction." Thus in history men have professed to trace, and have really thought that they were tracing, the path of the Church; when it was only the path of a succession of ungodly men imposing the despotism of their own iniquity upon the world under that fiction. It might well be asked how it is that the Church can be in the world, and displace no one of its ungodly elements? Ascertain the fact, before you seek the cause, and you will find the fiction; you will find that in such a case the elements put into the world under the name of the Church, are merely the world's own, native, unchanged elements of corruption in a more intense form. Not to detect this imposition is somewhat pardonable in a man who never attained to any other conception of the Church than as a mere human organization or element of man's creating, but it is unpardonable for one who has been taught the nature of the Christian Church, not to see it at once, and expose it. D'Aubigné remarks that most historians have presented only the barren history of the exterior Church, because they themselves were only the outward man, and had scarcely even imagined the life of the spiritual man. Even the mind of Guizot has fallen into great errors, in not distinguishing between the Church and its corruptions.

In the Old World, wherever the state-veil remains untaken away, great mistakes are mingled with great truths, even in minds that are advancing in many respects before their own age. The great truths which such minds discover, though old and common

to us, are announced there, in the midst of error, with prodigious power. Perhaps no man in Europe has uttered a nobler, more solemn protestation against a Church that sacrifices living truth to lifeless form, or puts the form in place of the spirit, than the Chevalier Bunsen in Prussia. Speaking of the English Episcopacy under that assumption of it which makes the essence and possession of religion to consist in successional sacraments, he remarks as follows:

"If the Church, as manifesting herself and existing through Episcopacy, is to take the place of Christ and the Spirit, who alone can give real church-membership, because new life; if covenanted salvation is to be made dependent upon this Episcopacy, then I think the death-blow is aimed at that Church's inmost life, the eternal decree of condemnation is passed upon her, unless she repent. For she is seeking salvation in man, and not in God, in the beggarly elements of this world, and not in the Divine Spirit, the source of all life, and the sole deliverer from death and corruption. She is attacking the glorious liberty of the children of God, of Christ's redeemed, the new-born, the native citizens of the Lord's kingdom; she is crucifying Christ, and practically denying the merits of his sacrifice. I should consider it as a parricidal act, if I did not vow to devote all the energies of my mind, insignificant as they are, and the last drop of blood, to protest against such an episcopate in the Church of that nation, to which it is my privilege to belong. If an angel from heaven should manifest to me that by introducing or advocating, or merely favoring the introduction of such an episcopacy into any part of Germany, I should not only make the German nation glorious and powerful above all the nations of the world, but should successfully combat the unbelief, pantheism, and atheism of the day -I would not do it: so help me God! Amen!-We may be doomed to perish, Church and State; but we must not be saved, and cannot be saved, by seeking life in externals."

This is a declaration that could come only from a soul, from the depths of a soul, baptized by the Spirit of God in the experience of that life in Christ,which constitutes, and which alone can constitute, the being of a church, or the essence of Chistianity. The grace of Christ only, vouchsafed personally to each believer's soul, the work of the Spirit only, producing such personal faith in, and experience of, that grace, in each individual, can make a church on earth, or constitute any creature of the race of man a member of that church. So far as the knowledge of this first principle of Christianity prevails in Europe, there is a foundation for the correction of all error, and the development of all truth.

It is obvious that opinions and speculations which make light of this truth, or distort it, or conceal it, or put human judgment

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 themselves 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.

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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,