the hill of Zion. On the bald and peeled scalp of the other, blight and barrenness are spread out, like the dreary drought and desolations of Gilboa, where the Lord departed even from his own Anointed, and left him whose love passed the love of women, to fall beneath the sword of the uncircumcised." What the man means we cannot imagine. Transpose the application of the images, and we shall arrive at a much closer approximation to the truth. We quote the passage as a specimen of rodomontade not easily matched.

It is not necessary to descend into particulars. Every man's experience furnishes him with instances more than sufficient for our purpose. The whole Diocese of Connecticut, which has grown, during the Episcopate of its present venerated Bishop, from thirty-three parishes to a hundred and twelve, and from seven that supported a Minister to between eighty and ninety, and has never had within its borders a self-supporting Free Church, rises up in just resentment of such calumny. There are, indeed, now, three Missionary stations in its two largest cities, conducted on the Free Church plan, all, we are happy to say, doing well, prosperous and successful. The Minister of the oldest and strongest of them has expressed to us his entire assent to the Article entitled "Free Churches Again," in the January Number of the last volume of this Review, and his conviction that the effort in which he is engaged will never attain permanent establishment, and strength to stand alone, without an abandonment of the Free Church System. And we prophesy of the others, that if they grow, as we trust they will, into stable and self-supporting parishes, they will modify their plan of operations, and become substantially like the parishes around them. If, however, they grow into all that their most ardent friends desire in their present form, we shall rejoice in the result. We have no fanatical ultraism to be gratified by Free Church failures, though we doubt, whether, under ordinary circumstances, Free Churches are on the whole salutary, even if they are practicable. But if success and growth are a criterion of value, and an evidence of the Divine favor, Churches supported in the ordinary way enjoy them largely. The venerable Dr. Croswell, in a discourse delivered a year or two ago, on the fortieth anniversary of his settlement in New Haven, exhibits results as the fruit of his labors, and those of his co-workers in the field, which cannot fail to awaken admiration and gratitude. Within the area occupied at the beginning of that period by a single congregation of moderate size, are now eight, several of them larger than that then was, and all vigorous and growing. No part of all this increase is due to Free Church influence; for the two congregations that are now conducted on the Free Church

System are yet recent and experimental, and must be regarded as the effect, and not the cause, of a redundant prosperity. It was our privilege, within a few weeks, to be present at a pleasant reunion of the Sunday Schools of several neighboring parishes in the open air, and to hear a Clergyman, who had formerly been the pastor of two of them, then united as a single cure, address the assembled company. Twenty years ago there were in these two parishes about seventy communicants; there are now about two hundred and fifty, and in one of them sixty have been added in the last two years. And they are village parishes, amidst a population not growing rapidly, and favored by no specially advantageous circumstances. We see in their growth nothing beyond the fruit of the divine blessing on faithful parochial labor. They are not Free Churches; but they present anything but "a bald and peeled scalp," covered with "blight and barrenness." We are continually conversant with a parish, which, a few years ago, called its present Rector to the charge of it, at a salary of six hundred and fifty dollars. This sum was then raised with some difficulty; and little was done for objects out of the parish. It has since built a Church at an expense of nearly sixty thousand dollars, of which it owes but sixteen hundred, and has purchased a lot and laid by the requisite means for the erection of a parsonage. It reported the present year nearly eighteen hundred dollars of contributions, besides its ordinary current expenses, having never been taught to account the salary of its Minister, sexton, &c., a part of its alms. Such cases are not exceptional and uncommon. It were easy to multiply instances to weariness. These have been taken simply because our knowledge of them is direct and familiar, and we can say of them, "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." The representations in the last Review on this subject are a mere romance, whether we refer to the glowing pictures on the one side, or gloomy sketches on the other, and only serve to show to what a marvelous extent an ardent mind can clothe objects with the hue of its own prejudices, and how, though

"Optics sharp it needs, I ween,

To see what is not to be seen,"

a fervid partisan can accomplish even that difficult feat. But we must not close without rendering to the Free Church movement its due. The Church, we believe, owes it a considerable debt. It has done good, and is doing good. We will not be uncandid and unfair to it, because some of its advocates are extravagant and partial. It has done good; but, as we believe, like the great temperance movement, to which it is in

many respects akin, more by its indirect influence than in its direct results. We shall be sorry, if, by becoming a fanaticism, it abridges its usefulness. We have no doubt the Church needed it, and that in its origin it was a symptom of life, the outspeaking of an irrepressible conviction. It stands among us the witness for great truths and solemn obligations, too long slumbered over and neglected. It testifies to the spiritual equality of men, and the rights of God's poor, too much forgotten, too little cared for. It has done much to awaken attention to them, and call forth efforts in their behalf. We trust it will do yet more; and if there is anything that makes us doubt of it, it is the arrogant, bitter and ungenial tone it seems to be assuming. Its best fruits, we believe, will be realized beyond its own boundaries, more in what it reminds and stimulates others to do, than in what it does in its own direct line of action. Its theories, we think, to a large extent impracticable, its purposes Utopian, its zeal sometimes Quixotic. But it has truth in it, and important truth, truth too little thought of, and earnest and able friends who will do with it all that can be done. There is some empiricism about it, but not a little reality. We have the vanity to think that we are better friends to it than some of its imprudent champions. It is fairly before the Church, and we have no doubt will, in the end, be fairly dealt with. If it gains a permanent foothold in the Church, and continues to occupy a certain sphere within her borders, we shall never quarrel with it, but hail it as a respected companion and coadjutor. If the mind of the Church should finally adopt it as the system, exclusive or principal, if we live to see the day, we will be as loyal to it as the warmest friends it now has. In a modified form it will probably continue and be useful. We hope it will. In the full latitude of its pretensions and expectations it will prove a bubble that will soon break and disappear. As such it will only be known in that immense repertory of impracticable projects which the Church lays up for the amusement of curious antiquarians-amidst ingenious whirligigs that cannot be made to go, and perpetual motions that have ceased to move, because they were planned and constructed with an innocent but fatal forgetfulness of the constitution of human nature, and the friction of human society-labelled-The Free Church Dream of the Nineteenth Century.

ART. V.-THE ENGLISH PURITANS.

1. William H. Seward's Oration at Plymouth Rock, Dec. 24, 1855.

2. Rev. Dr. Zachary Grey's Impartial Examination of Neal's History of the Puritans. Three Vols. London, 1736, 1737, 1739.

3. History of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration of Charles II. By M. GUIZOT. Translated by A. R. SCOBLE. Two Vols. London: Bentley, 1856.

WE certainly are disposed to honor the zeal with which the descendants of the old Puritans rally from all parts of the country, and in midwinter too, to celebrate the landing of their forefathers from the May Flower on Plymouth Rock. We wish our Virginia brethren were equally true to themselves and to their noble ancestors. Is this forgetfulness of Jamestown owing to the fact that the Church has shrunk into an insignificant body, numbering a communion in Virginia of only about six thousand, among the one hundred and twenty-seven thousand who now profess and call themselves Christians? We have no heart to cast reproaches upon our brethren in the Old Dominion; and yet we confess to feelings of mortification and sadness, and we cannot but raise certain inquiries, when we find the Bishop of Virginia, in his late historical papers, saying:

"The Episcopalian cannot but think with melancholy feelings of the gradual decline, as to numbers, of the church in Accomac, from the time of Mr. Black, in 1710, to the present day. Then, in one parish only, the upper, there were four or five hundred families, three overflowing churches, and two hundred communicants, with scarce a dissenter in it. Now, in both parishes, covering the whole county, there are only three churches and about fifty communicants. Other denominations, chiefly the Methodists, have drawn away the great body of the people from our communion."

Of course, life in any form or shape is better than no life at all. God forbid that in these days of worldliness, and selfindulgence, and self-seeking, we should fail heartily to sympathize with those manifestations of true spirituality which our Southern brethren are now exhibiting. And yet we cannot

hesitate to say, that Christ's visible and appointed Ordinances of Grace, so far from being hostile to Evangelical Doctrine and vital purity, are yet intimately connected therewith. So all history proves, as we shall by and by show. In the New Testament the Church is set forth, not as a mere system of Truth, but as a visible Institution, clothed with certain distinct duties, responsibilities, instrumentalities and honors; and we are never true to her, to her Great Head, or to ourselves, until, regardless of a scoffing world, we hold the Church in our affections as Christ did. Much less ought the faithful use of Christ's Ordinances to be exchanged for the "Revival System," so called, a system which the sects around us formerly adopted, which, for the time being, swept everything before it, and yet which is now almost as generally discarded, as both false in theory and evil in tendency. Even the Methodists, we see, are feeling their way back to something truer and safer. The history of the Church in Virginia, the blighting and mildew which characterized its ante-revolutionary period, is well calculated to generate distrust even of Divine Institutions. So one extreme begets its opposite. But the best blood of our country once flowed in the veins of the sons of Virginia, "the Mother of Presidents," and there is no better material in our whole country now of which to make devout and loyal Churchmen. Let us hope that the days of the Church's humiliation and shame are ended in a field once within her entire control. The Puritans, at least, do not mean to let the memory of the "May Flower" die. And if there are some strange contrasts in the two classes of persons; if, for one example only, the noise of revelry, of the harp, and the viol, and the dance, is now heard, instead of that "Psalm-singing" which alone the old Roundheads in their early days admitted, even on the most festive and joyous occasions, we will not quarrel now with the taste of either. But when, year after year, most persistently and systematically, we find certain virtues ascribed and principles attributed to those old Puritans, the very opposite of those which they really possessed, and when this false position, in which they are held up, necessarily, we will not say purposely, is made to reflect odium upon other actors beside the Puritans in those stormy times; in other words, when popular prejudice is thus brought to bear upon the Church of our affections, then we think it time to give to these Plymouth Rock celebrations a little of our attention. The bold and effectual manner with which the lamented Wainwright once publicly met and rebuked this Church hatred on a similar occasion, is of course fresh in the memory of our readers. It should never be forgotten with