But so did the fathers of our Church. Calmly perusing the Sacred Records, looking sheer over the dreary and awful waste of the dark ages, they inquired what the Saviour and His apostles taught, and rejecting every temptation to aggrandize themselves, they declared the ministry all equal in rank and degree. They declared every Christian man a king and a priest unto God, and placed the right to exercise the ministry in the election of the brotherhood, confirming the inward call of God; the apostolic succession they placed in the people, and the ministry as their officers, and, in a word, quietly abolishing Monarchy and Aristocracy, they established a Republican Church.

And now the question is, do we recognize and appreciate this grand fact? Do we find Presbyterians clinging to their altar, as Americans cling to their palladium? Do we value our Confession as we do the Constitution of the United States? Do we honor, admire, love, and hold to simplicity in Church, as we do in State? And if not, what does it argue for our Presbyterianism? What for our capacity to fill the place of our fathers, and carry forward the ark so long and so nobly upheld by them?

It becomes a question of the deepest, not to say alarming interest in these times, why the people should appear to be more loyal to American principles than the Church. It will not do to say, as those sometimes do who, on the one hand, despair of the republic, or, on the other, affect the sneering surface-philosophy, characteristic of the age just passing away, that there is no real republicanism in the country, that it is all vapor and smoke, the breath of the orator, and the froth of popular excitement. For why should a politician affect republicanism, even of the coarser type, except that it is popular? Why should the reputation of aristocracy be fatal to a rising statesman, except that the nation is at heart opposed to it? Why should no man dare to whisper a word in favor of Monarchy, except that the word "king," for this free land, would be a spell to wake from utmost Maine, to farthest California, twenty-three millions of souls, lashed into fury, as winds and waves are loosed and wild with the terror of tempest?

The question gathers around it interest for the statesman, as well as the careful observer of Church polity, when we remember the strong mutual influences of Church and State. The government in America is what the people are. If they become used to the forms, and submissive to the decretals of ecclesiastical Monarchies and Aristocracies, what will be the

ultimate effect? Will not the simplicity of our Republicanism seem bald? Will not the freedom of our Americanism seem licence? Will not the neck be willingly stretched out for the yoke, and as the Austrian yields himself up,a willing serf, so that he have music and social enjoyment, as the populace of Imperial Rome demanded only bread and the Amphitheatre; so our people used to have their thinking done for them in the Church, and amused and fond of its tinsel and its pomp, may clamor for luxury in living, and Aristocracy in the State, and at last having risen, or rather fallen, through bishop and archbishop to the papal head of the Church, demand his miserable type in the false splendors of a throne. Wise was the ancient proverb, which counsels us to resist the beginnings of evil!

But the question returns upon us, Why should the Church be behind the people? Why will it tolerate principles in its ecclesiastical relations, which it repudiates in its civil polity? Why shun with disdain the very tinsel in State, that it seeks in the Church?

We would not pretend to lay bare the whole of so extensive a subject, with all its historic relations, in so short a space as can be here allotted to it; but we would make one or two suggestions, with a view to awaken inquiry and thought.

For one thing, the number of those who are devoted, at least to a splendid Protestant ritual, is not large; but they fill a large space in the public eye, because, for the most part, they live in cities and towns, and frequently, from their wealth and manner of living and their pretensions to fashion, the world hears much of them. They are, therefore, not fair exponents of the masses of the American people.

Youth sometimes has genius, very often ardor, less often a chastened and cultivated taste; and so as a people, we are scarcely old enough to have a pure and true appreciation of refinement. The impressions made by the pretensions in question, are very much the result of the cry of a fashionable and gentlemanly religion; while men have not sufficient acquaintance with Scripture or Church History, to sift the assertions, which gain force by mere repetition.

one.

But people do not really reflect much upon Church government. The politics of the State come strongly home to every Americans watch their public servants; they study political principles; they even look at things in their tendencies. But in the Church, if their families are comfortable and satisfied, if the building is elegant, if the minister preaches well,

according to their standard of excellence, and if the Church be one that gives them standing in the community, they hardly inquire how it is governed, what are the tendencies of church judicatories, or what is the general influence upon themselves and their families; and thus they are often in the vortex of a system which has taken captive their entire sympathies, judgment and feelings, before they are aware of it. The Church Mighty Power. It is not wise to deny it, but it is wise rightly to use it, and if God has laid on us the dispensation, rightly to guide it.

We, as Presbyterians, court investigation. Here we are, and here is our history. If we are unscriptural in view, unholy in practice, despotic in Church government, or un-American in feeling, we should like to have it shown. If Freedom ever called in vain upon us, let the hour be pointed out. And what we wish is, that all our people should appreciate their priceless heritage. We have no quarrel with other denominations. But we ask that our own people err not through want of reflection, but with their eye on the history of the past, plan comprehensively for the future. Build your churches as richly as you will, furnish as costly as your means will allow. God loveth a cheerful giver, and does not wish to be served with that which costs nothing. But let your building be severe as our own Calvinism, simple as the faith of our fathers, clear as the robes of our martyrs. Build of marble, if you will, but let it be bright as unsunned Pentelicus; heave up costly walls if you wish, but let them be massive as the compacted doctrines of our glorious Confession; ornament your interiors, but let the adornment be like the Sermon on the Mount, or the seamless robe of its Author. Presbyterianism abhors any thing flaunting, meretricious, gaudy. The wild mountains of Scotland wreathed in mist, the cavern cool with moss and lichen, the grey cairn, the uplands gemmed with the heath-bell, charmed her renovated youth; and when she gathered up her robes to dwell in this wilderness-land, her favorite haunts were ever the fastnesses of the vast Alleghanies, the mountain stream, the deep valley, the broad clear river, the giant forest trees shading the fresh green herbage. Rough has Presbyterianism often been, but always true; rude at times, but always faithful to conscience and to God. It remains to deal with a false refinement, with an enervating luxury. The pure spouse of Christ is warned, oh how forcibly and terribly! against the flaunting harlot of Rome, and all that is Romanizing. What

we have to do, is to preserve our two grand elements, Freedom and Simplicity. Will Presbyterianism yield up freedom of thought, the right to follow the Providence of God wherever it leads? Will she be misled by a false cultivation, a wretched counterfeit of refinement, to pull down the very Parthenon of her magnificent simplicity, to put up the lath and plaster of some miserable Palladian temple? We fear for her transition state. If she can carry her own grand elements safely through this trial, the earth hath never looked upon such a structure as will be her Church of the future. Such as America looms in the far distance to the patriot, so does our Church seem to the eye of faith.

There is a subject which is ever becoming one of more practical urgency, which demands the most earnest thought, and the most efficient action on the part of our laymen. We can, at least, state the question clearly, if it requires further developments of Providence fully to solve it. If we labor only through ecclesiastical organizations, shall we not become sectarian, which our fathers were not; if we contribute the strength of our means to purposes of a general nature, will not our Church perish, because her own sons have deserted her? So stringent appeared this latter difficulty to our brethren, who separated from us in 1838, that they cut the Gordian knot. They directed the power of the Church into denominational Boards, leaving general Christian interests in the form of Voluntary Societies, to be refreshed only by the spray, which the great waves of benevolence might throw over them, in their mighty ecclesiastical on-goings.

The difficulty here, we admit, is very great. It arises from the necessity of adjusting the noble and magnanimous principles of Christianity, to the narrowness and littleness of sinful man. There is always a divine and a human element in the Church. What comes from God is infinite, transcendent, glorious. What comes from man is imperfect like himself. How shall we attain the best practicable working system of benevolence? On the one hand we cannot bear to shrink to the dimensions of a summer brook, through our own inward narrowness; on the other, if we waste our resources in a universal prodigality, our people lose their attachment to their own institutions, lose the very sense of home, and hearth, and altar, and country, amidst a universal benevolence, which like the circle in the water, at last widens to its own destruction.

First then, with our eye on history we will not be a mere sectarian Church. We know it is hard to be equal to the destiny of being a Presbyterian. The men who heaved the massive stones of our foundations, were building for all time, and we would say for Eternity also, did we not hope and believe that there is something even better than Presbyterianism, better than the best here, and brighter than the brightest, for there the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb alone are the Temple. God seems to strengthen men for some great work. The sagacity of the conscript fathers of our nation, seems hardly human. An American is great enough if he can only understand what they meant, and work in their spirit. The subtle essence of the souls of Moses and the great men of the Hebrew Confederacy, of Lycurgus, of Solon, of Demosthenes and the beautiful Greek freedom, of Alfred, and Hampden, and Sidney, and the Anglo-Saxon liberty-in-law, seems to have pervaded their minds and hearts. It will be enough for us, and for our children, not to degenerate from their greatness.

So is it with our American Presbyterianism. Our Bill of Rights is the Adopting Act of 1729. There it stands, and the ingenuity of all the subtlety that shall ever be built into the pyramid erected on the basis of 1837 and 1838, will not explain away one of its pregnant words, or obliterate one glorious line. With clear head, and graphic pen, our fathers have written their meaning. He that runs may read, and the carved work of that sanctuary can never be broken down by the axes and hammers of revolution. There is something that never can be exscinded.

We must see to it then, that we are in the line of the true life of American Presbyterianism. It will not do to give up our principles, because we have not strength to bend the bow of Ulysses. Only plant the right seed, and the right tree will spread its free limbs to the air in due time. This is our elective affinity, that the men who felt that there was a millennial spirit in Christianity, an anti-sectarian glory, a halo of unselfish benevolence, a magnanimity in the body like that of Christ the Master, who sought not his own, are with us. Just how this is to be made characteristic of the Church itself, in a depraved world, and amid opposing interests, may be a difficult problem. It is like the tremendous experiment of universal suffrage in the State. The statesman sometimes pauses aghast at what he has undertaken. What! the vessel of state confided to the ruthless hands of a tumultuating mob. How is the