beasts of the earth, and wild beasts and creeping things and fowls of heaven;" and when Peter felt as if he could not touch such uncleanness, the voice from heaven said to him, "What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common." Three times Peter heard that God had cleansed all that was before him, and then the sheet was taken back into heaven. These two facts, separated by about forty years, may well be called most suggestive representative facts. The earlier is the excellent miniature of the Talmudic system; the later is the finest miniature of Christianity. The earlier fact pointed out the road in which anti-Christian Judaism has ever since been traveling; the fact at Joppa pointed out the road in which true Christianity started out, never to turn back. We may identify in the earlier fact the capital principle of Rabbinic development; and in the later fact we may identify the central principle of Christian development and life. There is in the earlier fact the germ of all the Talmud, and there is in Peter's vision the true germ of Christendom. In that decree of Rabbinic sages, we see a greater darkness of impurity settling down on all lands of the Gentiles; but in that vision of Peter, we see all heathen lands cleansed by the holy blood of Calvary so as to have a right to claim the preaching of the gospel to every creature. In that decree we see the Jews trying to separate themselves more and more from the Gentiles, and practically saying, Let me be further from you; come not near me, for I am holier than thou; but in Peter's vision we see the wall of separation falling instantly, and Christian Jews going forth to embrace, in the arms of love, all the heathen world. In that decree we see the growing solicitude about the cleanness of the outside of the cup, and it appears to have been such a solicitude about vessels of glass as was something new in Israel; but in Peter's vision we identify the principle that it is more the words going out from the heart at the lips, that defile the man, than any cups coming to the lips; and that it is the heart, the inner man, which most needs to be cleansed. In that decree, which has its place eighty years before the temple's destruction, we see the glorious moon, which was shining high in heaven during a long night, now sinking to the earth, and touching the ground, and even falling below the ground, and the moment becomes unusually dark to all lands; but in that apostolic vision, forty years later, we see the new sun rising in the East, which the world never saw before, and sending its beams to every habitation of man.

1864.] DIVINE ORIGIN AND SUPREMACY OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 327

ART. VII.-The Divine Origin and Supremacy of Civil Government.

AMONG the premonitory symptoms of that decay that is now preying upon our country's vitals, and which will ultimately paralyze it in death, unless arrested, was, and is a constantly increasing disrespect for law, and legal forms, and a chafing under its restraints. Disrespect for law, whether it be physical, mental, moral, or civil, is the sure precursor of decline, in whatever phase it may appear. There is no true patriot, who has not been pained at the eruptions of this deep-seated disease in the body politic, in the form of mobs, that have been a burning stigma upon the land. The disease has not been located in any particular member or members of the body, but has permeated the entire system. In the rebellious States, negro Slavery has been the core around which the pus has gathered, which is now suppurating in the form of a terrible rebellion. The remark has often been made, and nowhere more frequently than at the South (for here its truth is most apparent), that the worst blight of Slavery falls upon the South herself. The wide chasm between the laborer and proprietor, destroys that happy adjustment of power, so essential to the preserving of society from despotism and monarchy on the one hand, and lawlessness, in the name of popular sovereignty, on the other. But when we turn to the other side, the loyal States, we find the disease there again gathering around that irritating core, Slavery, and suppurating, in many instances, in lawless attempts to get rid of it. And so Slavery has been as productive of disease in both parts, as a grain of sand in the eye of unceasing pain and irritation. It matters not whether it be lawless efforts to defend Slavery against those assailing it, or whether it be lawlessly attacking it; the demoralization is the same, for it is not right to use unjustifiable means for the attainment even of good.

We may as well open our eyes to the foreboding fact, that the whole body is diseased, that the whole heart is sick, and both are struggling to be relieved of their own corruptions. We discover its outworkings in the loyal States, in the resistance of constituted authority, as in the mob in New York, in dangerous secret combinations, dangerous symptoms of lawlessness, like smoking flax, only waiting a breeze to flame. And its tendency is as much

more dangerous than that in the South, as conspiracy is in crime above rebellion.

We will try to enumerate, briefly, what seems to us some of the causes leading to this state of affairs: and one of the most vicious is that infidel, superficial and degrading theory of the origin of civil government, that puts it on no higher ground than a mere convenient adjustment of communities for protection and profit. A theory essentially atheistic, and whose necessary consequence is anarchy, as is every arrangement that has no God in it.

We have imbibed the notion from our statesmen, that government is a sort of compact among men, instead of an eternal principle, and whatever its form may be it is a modification of the same principle, and it is the working of this principle that makes it even possible for them to be compacted together. Without it you could no more league men together, for any purpose, than you could confederate a heap of sand. The fable of the eleven oxen confederating themselves together to resist the attacks of a neighboring lion, is the history of the origin and end of civil government on this theory. Nay, we owe the beasts an apology for thus caricaturing them. Their instincts are not so superficial and senseless; even they obey a necessity of their nature, to be gregarious, which they never acquired by their own efforts, but is the impress of their Creator, even as matter, by a necessity of its nature, is attracted inversely as the square of its distances.

The sooner the world cracks the nut, and finds the kernel of civil government, the better it will be for mankind, civilization and religion. As it now is, infidelity gives them the husk, and bids them live, and be in health. What has the idea of civil government, being a compact, done for us? It has hatched in our own bosom the monstrous prodigy of secession and anarchy. Government is a compact, say they, and all the disaffected members have to do, is to withdraw from the body, until a limbless trunk will alone remain to die of sheer exhaustion, reproducing, on a splendid scale, the secession of the limbs from the stomach; and the nation, adopting the suggestion, would be left to write the moral in her own blood, that has oft been written of those systems that ignore God. Any system of government that can not point to a Divine progenitor is futile. The poet Coleridge, on hearing a friend descant on the probabilities of an infidel system of philanthropy regenerating the world, plucked a thistle down,

and flung it to the winds, saying: "The tendency of this down is to China, but I know, certainly, it will never get there; but after a few gyrations, it will fall near the place where it started. So government born outside of the Divine Mind, will perish upon the lap that gave it birth."

It must be a source of shame and wonder, that our Constitution, the embodiment of our system, has no mention of God in it. How in this its power is weakened, what bad morals it teaches the young offspring to be born and reared under its protecting ægis? And bitterly are we reaping the effects of its implied atheism, as well as presenting to the world the astounding fact of a Constitution ignoring the only source of its power, without which not a single wheel of its machinery would ever move upon its pinions.

A system ignoring God, and yet so dependent on him, that not a hand can touch this ark of our liberties without a solemn oath by him to insure fidelity in the exercise of its functions. If we would perpetuate civil government, we must educate the moral sense of its citizens; we must put the violations of its laws first in the domain of conscience, where this primary minister of justice will punish those infringements before they become overt, which, though they will ultimately lead to, as yet are not within its grasp. The resisting and upturning of it is not only a sin on account of its effects of derangement and ruin, but an absolute sin against God. When the Psalmist came to a review of his great sin in breaking the law, in violating its sanctity in the rights it secured to the citizen; when all this came up before him, we do not hear his confession hinging on the wrong he had inflicted on Uriah, his duplicity, his ingratitude to a faithful subject; but rising above these he bemoaned the fact that it, at last, was all against God: against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this great evil in Thy sight. And while it is always incumbent upon us to correct the abuses of the government by its functionaries in bad legislation, or in the wresting of good laws to bad ends; for mal legislation, or administration, is no more a part of the Divine ordinance of civil government than sin, and it is as much our duty to uproot the one as to conserve the other; yet while this is true, its very abuses must be corrected according to appointed order; so that it shall not be paralyzed under the shock. For government, like the human body, is arranged to repair its own injuries and correct its own humors; and, as in the body, all act on the principle in

effecting cure, to assist nature; so in civil derangements, all that is required is to start and uphold its dormant, or impeded functions, and it will cure itself. Not a jot further than this can we go without being conspirators against God himself; for he who arrays himself against the laws of God, whether mental, moral, civil, or physical, seeks to destroy almost the only way by which God manifests himself to the world; that is, by His government of it. One part of the mission of the Saviour into the world was to vindicate and give supremacy to law and government. Not only moral government, but civil too; which is, in some sense, an offspring of God's moral government. The germs of its existence are here; there could be no such thing as criminal law for the defense of property, reputation, or life, without it; for those moral distinctions in which criminal law is grounded, would be wanting. The laws against theft and arson, suppose the fact that these are understood already and blamed as being wrongs against moral obligation. And there is no way of defining these crimes and bringing them to judgment, except by reference to those distinctions that lie in the domain of moral government. Take, for example, murder; we can not punish it, or define it, until we enter the territories of moral government; we define it as killing with malice aforethought, done with a consciously criminal intent. Civil society is a chimera when divorced from moral government. Without it, we are not above the race of pismires. We have no moral and religious ideas, and can not legislate. Civil society and government is impossible, and all that is genial and benign in the State is lost. If your house is burned, you only conceive of it as a loss, and not a crime. If your children are killed, you are in the condition of the bees, when their hive is rifled; only mad with a sense of loss, but no sense of the crime or wrong.

Or to illustrate further, take our civil provisions to protect virtue; unless you travel over into the moral domain, what value are they? Without our moral allegiance, licentiousness is no more harm than hunger. But this is enough to show that even the humiliation and sacrifice of Christ was to maintain honor, and magnify all law, at whatever point it was broken, or infringed. And hence we find Him just as careful to uphold and support the civil government while on earth, as the moral; nay, it was impossible to divorce them; He pays tribute; He enjoins obedience to the civil ruler, and yields Himself an example of submission to an illegal