tology, nowhere admitted in the Scriptures, whose highest formula is THE CHURCH OF CHRIST, which, wherever it be, is universal or Catholic no further than this, that it comprehends all true believers and none others. Hence that expression in the creed, The Holy Catholic Church, seems a needless departure from the majesty and simplicity of the Scriptures, and a source of division rather than of Union. For when we believe in a Church of Christ, we believe of necessity in a holy Church, for none other is holy, and the Church of Christ is; and also, believing in the Church of Christ, we believe in a Catholic or Universal Church, that is, in the Church of Christ, which alone is universal, but universal in no other sense than as comprehending in itself all its living members. For a man, therefore, to say I believe in the Church of Christ, is a grander and more Catholic formula than to say I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. The terms Holy Catholic Church may be assumed and usurped by a particular schismatical Church, casting out others, and acting the Diotrephes. But the designation, CHURCH OF CHRIST, is universal, and needs no addition to its blessedness and majesty. It would be almost as tautological and needless, instead of the formula, I believe in Christ, to say, I believe in the Universal Christ, or in the Holy Catholic Christ. Is Christ divided? Neither is his Church divided. As Christ is one, so his Church is one. As the Head is one, so the body is one; and those members only are truly schismatical, who say to others, Because thou art not the hand or the eye, therefore thou art not of the body. But the universality of the Church of Christ is a thing invisible, and which ever in this world must remain invisible. Instead of seeking it in a visible organization, we are to seek it in a manifested imitation of the Life of Christ. Instead of seeking it in one branch of the Vine, we are to seek it in all. Instead of acknowledging it only in one, we must acknowledge it in all. We are no more to say, We are the Head, or because thou art not the hand or the eye, therefore thou art not of the body. We are to acknowledge the body in all, and all in the body. Instead of looking for a historical Christianity in one sect or denomination only, or at one era only, we are to look for it and to find it wherever there are communities of Christians holding the head.

If we refuse to do this, we become schismatical in our pretended zeal for what we call Catholicism. The way to promote unity is not to enforce it, but to go on taking it for granted. The way to promote unity is not to mark peculiarity, but to disregard it, and to view minor differences as things indifferent. Perhaps you are considering with horror the various denominations in the modern Church, and you pretend to compare with this the unity of what you call the Catholic Church, and you blame the liberty of denominations, as a liberty against Christian unity. Be

assured, it is not because you have so much Catholicism, or so deep yearnings after it, that you speak thus, but rather because you know not what it is, because you have mistaken the nature of Christ's Church, and do not and cannot enter into the greatness and freedom of his plan. The variety of denominations appears to you schismatical, because you yourself are infected with the spirit and the sophistry of schism; not because they have too much liberty, but you not enough charity; not because the body of Christ is divided, but because you are not willing to acknowledge the body of Christ, except under your own chosen form; not because denominational distinctions are wrong, but because you make too much of them.

By the coming of the Puritans to this country, and the blessing of God upon the various churches that have sprung from them, God has taught us more concerning the true unity of the Church, than had been learned since Luther broke from the Church of the Papacy. The age of the Puritans, and the country which the vine planted by them has filled with its branches, is now the age and country in which there is greater unity in the Church of Christ than there has been in the world for centuries. Some men are gravely lecturing the descendants of the Puritans on the alarming nature of the modern" leprosy of sectarianism," and the duty of returning from our wanderings into the bosom of our Mother Church! The unity which these men are striving after is the despotism of uniformity; a backward movement towards the Romish Apostate Church. But God is beginning to show, in the remarkable unity of the various Protestant Evangelical Denominations in this country, as the same Body of Christ, holding the same Head, what is the real, free, spiritual, and not false, enforced, formal, Romish unity of the Church. It is in this country, and among the descendants of the Puritans, that this glory is most developed. In Europe there is as yet too much despotism both in Church and State, and too much mingling of Church and State together, to permit it. In Europe it is not as yet even understood. In this country there are those who will not understand it, simply because of their extreme sectarianism and spirit of schism, in holding up their own denomination as the only Church, and casting out all others. This is genuine schism. This is the greatest of all violations of the unity of Christ. All genuine unity includes permitted differences. If not, there may be a despotism, and a system of spiritual pride, but no true unity. The Hand would cease to be a unity, if its five fingers were compressed into one. The hand is much more a unity with its five separate fingers, than if it were a simple indivisible mass. There is more true unity in the Protestant Church of Christ in this country, than there ever was in the Romish Church, and more of that unity which Christ requires, and which

makes one Body in Christ, and the Body of Christ, than there has been in the Church of Christ for ages. We look to the things in which we agree, and consent not to trouble each other concerning the things in which we differ, and thence results the true unity of the gospel.

The idea of the Church of Christ may be presented under the figure of a Cathedral, begun and reared under the superintendence of its immediate founders and architects. Before they died, or in their own writings and plans, the body of the building was finished, and all things at all essential to its perfection were in progress. There was here and there a tower not reared to its full height, but begun and plain, in all its intended proportions, so that all that after generations had to do was to build on in the same direction in which the apostles were building. This Cathedral is in the Word. All that traditionary or historical development can do, all that it is worth, is to finish and perfect certain corners, towers, or projections, and perhaps to add a great bell, with a clear, ringing sound, made up of metal cast in by the pure in faith for successive generations; together, if you please, with a chime of bells on various towers, all ringing in sweet melody and harmony, yet with a variety that a thousand fold increases the sweetness. Whoever holds the Head, whoever is united by faith to Christ Jesus, worships in it. The various denominations are all in it at once, all having one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. They may be called to worship by the great roar of the bell of all ages, or they may come at the sweet unison of the commingling chimes from all its towers at once, or they may gather at the musical note of a single steeple; but they are all one, and the chimes are all in harmony, because all ringing the truth, all ringing to the praise of Christ, all saying to one another, Come, brother, come! But if there be a schismatical bell foundry, that shall hang upon the steeple a bell sounding out the chime No Bishop, no Church; or, No Synod, no Church; or No Saybrook Platform, no Church; that is truly a discord, that is a schismatical bell, that was tuned by Diotrephes, not Christ; that calls to persecution, hostility, strife, bitter envying and devouring, and not to Christ.

This Church is large enough for all worshippers, and for all families of worshippers to gather around their own pulpit in their own mother tongue. The multitude come together, and hear, every man in his own language, in which he was born, Medes and Parthians, Elamites and Persians, Jews and Mesopotamians. There are chapels for Lutherans, Calvinists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, German, Dutch, French, English, and we care not how many others, if they do but hold the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, with one Lord, one faith, one baptism. There can be no strife

here, but perpetual harmony, unless one should say to the other, There shall be no place for you here except you worship in my chapel; or unless one should fence off half the Church with a railing of rubrics and traditions, or unless one should send about an apparitor or beadle with a bell, disturbing the worship of all the rest, and accusing of sectarianism and dissent, all who choose not to meet in his enclosure.

How great, how blessed, yet how difficult a thing is real unity! It is difficult in one view, because of the pride, prejudice, and passion in the hearts of men. It is easy in another view, because true love, in proportion as it exists, will produce it. Denominational distinctions and preferences there will be, perhaps, as long as the world stands; but they ought to be like the inequalities in the bottom of the ocean, kept there to sustain and regulate the motion of the tides, and not like the sharp rugged tops of glaciers, constituting dangerous and impassable barriers, or making enemies of nations. They ought not to be suffered to protrude in rough prominences, against which, as against a terrible reef of rocks, the peace and charity of men make shipwreck; but the tide of love ought to rise so high and to cover them so deep, that the ships of all nations in the Christian community may sail safe over them without touching. Unity is not the destruction of differences, or the levelling of inequalities and varieties in Church polity, but the covering of them all with what John Foster once called the great spring-tide of love.

"Yes," says D'Aubigné, speaking of the position which Evangelical Christian Theology occupies, and more especially of its formal principle, "there is one holy Catholic Church, but it is, as the Apostle says, the general assembly and Church of the first born, whose names are written in heaven. Unity as well as holiness appertains to the invisible Church. It behoves us without doubt to pray that the visible Church should advance daily in the possession of these heavenly attributes; but neither rigorous unity nor universal holiness is a perfection essential to its existence, or a sine qua non. To say that the visible church must absolutely be composed of saints only, is the error of the Donatists and fanatics of all ages. So also to say that the visible Church must of necessity be externally one, is the corresponding error of Rome, of Oxford, and of formalists of all times. Let us guard against preferring the external hierarchy, which consists in certain human forms, to that internal hierarchy, which is the kingdom of God itself. Let us not suffer the form, which passes away, to determine the essence of the Church; but let us on the contrary make the essence of the Church, to wit, the Christian life, which emanates from the Word and Spirit of God, change and renew the form. The form has killed the substance-here is the whole history of the Papacy and of false Catholicism. The

substance vivifies the form-here is the whole history of Evangelical Christianity, and of the true Catholic Church of Jesus Christ."

IV. We look next to the RULE OF THE CHURCH. In the year 1536 it was declared in Convocation to be King Henry's pleasure that the rites and ceremonies of the Church should be reformed by the rules of Scripture, and that nothing was to be maintained, which did not rest upon that authority. God made use of the selfishness of the monarch to disinter this grand principle from the grave, in which the sextons of Rome had buried it. But the royal intelligence which a selfish aim in the conflict with the Pope had rendered so keen, beheld not the whole reach of this principle, nor ever imagined that it would not only set the Church beyond the Pope's jurisdiction, but also above the king's. Yet so it was. The discovery which the king commenced, the Puritans perfected. They made the Rule of Scripture the only rule of the Church, and therein made a free Church. They made the Word of God the only Rule of Faith, binding every man to the study of that rule, to take it not upon the trust of the Church, but to examine himself and the Church by it. Every man was to do this, relying on the teaching of the Spirit of God. It was this that made the Puritan Theologians such men of depth and power. It was this that gave the principles of their reformation such hold upon them and such stability, that nothing could beat down their progress. They had the power and tenacity of conscience, the obstinacy of the clearest convictions of duty.

This independence, this right of private judgment, in reliance on the Spirit of God in his Word, carries with it the obligation of great and pemanent duties. It enforces those duties, keeps the soul in them, and makes the whole of our authority and life in Christ to consist in their spiritual performance. If you rely upon the Church, and take her faith, her teachings, her commandments, as yours, and infallible, and deem yourself safe in her communion, you will give up those duties, you will not feel yourself called upon to perform them. You will say, I believe as the Church believes, and can read and pray only as the Church reads and prays. I am in the Church, and so I am in Christ, and I partake of the life of Christ by partaking of the life of the Church and its ordinances, and nothing more is requisite. This is the ingenuity of the enemy of all righteousness, to keep men out of Christ by imbedding them in the Church, as lifeless fossils in a bed of stone. For if the members thus rely upon the Church, as the medium between them and Christ, the whole Church relies upon the Church, and is therefore no Church, cannot be a living Church, is not united to Christ, but is no better than a bed of limestone. For a Church can be a true Church THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. No. 1.

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