government, that, because it relied upon the State or the world, would make less of a tax and demand upon them for great spirituality and piety. They rather said, We will have that form, in which we must live near to God, or die; we will have that form, in which, if the Spirit dies, the form drops and breaks in pieces. Rather so than a form that, like the thick bark of some trees, can remain standing while all within is rotten, persuading the world that it is sound, and imposing the form of godliness without its power. We throw ourselves upon Christ in a form, to which he only can give energy, but which, imbued with his Spirit, we believe to be better adapted than all others for the spread of his kingdom. That The result has demonstrated the truth of this belief. form of Church government is found to be the best, which, being rooted and grounded in God's Word, most fully recognises, relies upon, and displays, the efficacy of God's Word; which brings out the Divine rather than the human, and which brings the soul most immediately and directly, without distracting business and ceremony, to God. That form of Church government is the best, in which there is the least of government and the most of God. That form is the best adapted to save souls without deluding them, and to raise wheat without tares, which throws the soul most entirely, simply, uninterruptedly, on God's doctrines in his Word, and God's Spirit in the heart. It has been singularly enough objected against the admirable and successful mission and missionaries of the American Board to the Armenians in Turkey, that they have nothing but naked doctrines to preach; no liturgy, nor hierarchy, nor grand imposing forms, but only the simple bare truth of Christ and Him crucified; and, therefore, some imposing form of Church government must be sent to them to save them. This kind of appeal in behalf of Bishop Southgate's Mission of an Episcopacy seems better adapted to produce infidelity than faith. It throws the truth upon Church government for its efficacy, instead of the Church upon Christ and the truth. It is, perhaps, the greatest compliment that could have been paid to the Missionaries of the American Board, and the best testimony to the power of God's simple Word as by them presented. Without any gorgeous ceremonies, or ostentatious organization of orders, to catch the favor of the soul, they have brought to bear upon the Armenians the foolishness of preaching in the simple doctrines of the Cross, without a word concerning any other government than that of Christ, and unincumbered by those human additions which, in a corrupt Church, have suffocated the soul. The true Church is the pillar and ground of the Truth, and these faithful men have preached the simple truth, and not the Church, and in so doing they have fulfilled the Church's whole vocation, holding forth, not the orders of Church government, but the Word of Life in Christ and Him crucified. They have gathered a living Church, by preaching, not the Church, but the truth as it is in Jesus. It is to these principles in reference to the Church of Christ, taught by the Spirit, the Word, and the Providence of God to our Puritan Fathers, that we owe the great external results accomplished by God's Providence through their instrumentality. No doubt it is to those principles. Nothing but a pure Church of Christ, built upon those principles, could have produced such results. Our civil liberties have grown out of the freedom of the Church; our representative system itself, with the habits of self-discipline and government necessary to support it, have sprung from the congregational independence of our Churches. The elevation of the masses of the common people among us has been owing to the same ecclesiastical freedom, the same principles of independent thought and private judgment, made the habit of our Churches in reliance on the Word of God. Indeed, the Church of Christ in this country, with its primitive Scriptural principles, has made of the people of this country, but one common people. A religious education is another of the great blessings that has come to us from the principles of the Puritans. It was a common possession and habit of the Puritan churches. In a Puritan family and a Puritan church there could be none other than a religious education. The Bible entered into everything; the Bible was the rule of everything; the Bible must be studied. Their Church principles of form as well as of the spirit threw them upon the Bible, them and their children. They felt as if God had spoken to them as to the Hebrews. "Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates." Educated as the Puritans were in the Scriptures, and in the most jealous reverence and love for them, as the foundation both of their civil and ecclesiastical privileges and blessings, they have bequeathed the habit of a religious education, and of the same enshrinement of the Bible in the heart, to all their descendants a habit, which no attempt was made to undermine, in any part of the country, till the Roman Catholics began, in the State of New York, an outcry against the Bible and the element of religion in our public schools, as a sectarian thing. But God be praised, the old Puritan habit is too strong for this infusion of Papal jealousy against the Bible to do much with it. The decision and firmness of character, which marked our Puritan ancestry, are features of New England still; and New England schools and institutions have got their roots so entwined around the Scriptures, and imbedded in them, that under God's blessing all the miners and sappers of Romanism can do nothing to loosen them. And the habits that prevail in New England are, we would hope, increasing elsewhere; and the very attack and insidious effort of Romanism against a common religious education as sectarian, tends to awaken the sensitiveness and alarm of the Christian public on a point in regard to which the people had sunk into too sluggish a security. If we would keep our civil freedom, we must educate our children in the Scriptures. It came to us from the Bible; by the Bible only we can keep it. Like the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, it led our heroic ancestors through all the sufferings, discipline, and struggles, by which they established our liberties, and nothing else can preserve those liberties, or the spirit of them in their descendants. We must have a religious education; and if the cry of sectarianism frightens the State, then the Church must take it up, as she does the voluntary support of religion. In reliance on Christ alone she has advanced religion more than all State endowments in the world have ever done. In reliance on Christ alone, if compelled into it, she is able to do the same with education. She asks the appropriations of the government for a common school education; but if the condition of such help is to be an infidel exclusion of religious teachings, she abhors the treachery. It would be the death-warrant of freedom and religion to put her hand to such a covenant. There must be a religious education, or our life as a free people is ended. It is claims from other worlds, that have inspirited our star of liberty to rise, and other worlds alone can keep it above the horizon. No terrestrial expediency, nor infidel liberality, truckling to the cry of sectarianism, can save us. Our freedom is the product of celestial wisdom, and not a covenant with the powers of darkness, nor the child of a cunning policy; and celestial wisdom alone can keep it. What came from heaven to heaven by nature clings, Another of the great blessings bequeathed to us by the Puritans and their principles, and a mighty result accomplished by the Providence of God through them, is that of the Christian Sabbath, sacredly observed in its purity. No language can tell the greatness of this blessing. A habit of regard to the Sabbath fixed as a feature in the character of a nation is one of the surest guarantees for its permanent prosperity. This is one of those hereditary habits, which the Puritans have transmitted to us as their legacy; a habit, when once fixed, very difficult to be eradi cated. We can hardly form an idea of the greatness of that step in the Puritan Reformation, by which the Sabbath was rescued from its almost universal profanation, and brought back as the possession of the Church of Christ. The Puritans suffered much in England in defence of its sacredness. They fought the battle nobly, and by God's grace and providence gained it, in spite of the Protestant Book of Sports, the Romish desecrations, and the lax principles on the Continent. They had a great trial in England, but in this country they had a virgin soil to put their seeds in. They could plant their institutions and principles clean and uncorrupted, and not amidst tares. They were not working with a people steeped for generations in the immoral teachings and indulgences of the Papal Church. Hence this great possession of a Scriptural Sabbath is ours in greater purity perhaps than with any other nation in the world. As we have it, so must we keep it, guarding against its corruption, whether from native insidious decays and profanations, or the importation of injurious foreign examples and principles. Keep we the Christian Sabbath, and God will make it the bulwark of our Zion, and the best protection of our civil state. It is from a grand post of observation that we can now survey the course of great events, on the tide of which God carried the Puritans onward. In all probability there never has been a set of men since the time of the Apostles, honored of God with so mighty an instrumentality of good in our world, as those colonists of New England. They were the founders of a race, an empire, and an epoch. They formed a Church, the power of which is at this day felt throughout the whole world. Obviously, as to the means by which the great designs of God in the planting and settlement of this country by Christian colonies may be carried towards their completion, as God began this great work with the Church, it must be continued by the Church. As our fathers were thrown upon God, so are we. Our fathers conquered, by seeking not their own, but the things that are Jesus Christ's. The mission of the Church, which they began to fulfil, we must continue. The habits of self-denial and fixedness for Christ, which made them strong, we must return to. Their reliance on the Word of God, and their jealousy against every corruption of it, must be ours. Vain is it for us to have received an inheritance from our Pilgrim Fathers, if we think to keep it without the Spirit of the Pilgrims. We do not pur By their struggles, liberty is bequeathed to us. chase it, as they did, by suffering; it comes to us as our inheritance, which the Fathers laid up for the children. Mark, now, the course of great possessions. The energy, the self-denial, the patience, the endurance, the hardy virtues of a disciplined nature, that gained them, are rarely bequeathed with them. These are things that we cannot bequeathe. Men may give their children the title deeds of their houses, but they cannot of their virtues. And their children may have the ability to spend what they have laid up for them, without even so much virtue of nature and of discipline, as to gain one farthing of their own. The ability to spend is sometimes the only ability developed by those who inherit large possessions, without having been trained in the rigid qualities that are requisite to amass them. It may be so with us, in reference to the priceless blessings bought for us by the blood and toil, the prayers and self-denial of our ancestors. We seem now to be in the spending mood. There is a great spending ability developed in our rulers, and it is not, as yet, contradicted or restrained by the virtue, justice, and patriotism of the people. And our spendthriftiness begins to be developed in the most diabolical and fatal form ever invented by men's depraved passions. We have been plunged into a wicked, wanton, unnecessary war, the course of which makes us think of that sentence in the Memoirs of Francis Spira,-Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof? If we had been compelled to gather our patrimony of freedom and prosperity ourselves, by our own conflicts and sufferings, we should not now be spending our strength for the injury of others. There is nothing can save us from the destruction that overtakes the dissolute heirs of great fortunes, but a return to something of the uprightness and piety of our fathers. May God bring us back to that! It is as certain as that there is a God, that the blessings they have gained for us can be kept by us, only by the possession and exercise of something of their Spirit. May God thus turn the hearts of the children to the fathers, lest he come and smite our inheritance with a curse. The re-perusal of the letters of Cromwell, and the observance of the extreme difficulty which even minds like Carlyle's and D'Aubigné's experience in overcoming the incredulity in regard to his true character, will make every lover of truth anxious that the works, on which we have slightly commented, may be studied in this country attentively. The octavo edition of Carlyle's work, from Messrs. Wiley and Putnam, presents an engraving of the face of the hero; a noble face, the features of one of England's greatest, noblest men, that ever were or will be. The Committee of Fine Arts connected with the new houses of Parliament in London determined, we are told, that amongst all the rulers of England, Oliver Cromwell should have no statue. refusing the Protector a place of memorial in the Parliament, they seem to have done what, considering the difference in the times, is nearly equal to the farce of certain priests at the beginning of the fifteenth century in digging up the bones of Wickliffe, In |