represent.* New Haven has scarcely ever been in entire sympathy with New England. Its theology has been wrought into her system slowly and with reluctation, and its present ecclesiasticism is of the same kind. The whole thing is ultra. Schemes, bold as the present, must be carried out with a kind of miraculous energy; they need the flight of the eagle and the strength of the lion. The New Englander and the Independent may imagine that they have both, but after this dream of universal empire has dazzled New England awhile, will she not settle down upon sober realities and repudiate her rash leaders? Nothing requires more high qualities than leading a great politico-ecclesiastical movement, and churches from their ordinary tranquillity, and their habit of following a simple and plain standard of right-doing, are especially liable to be goaded into mad action by some unscrupulous gad-fly. But woe to the wrong leader when the Church pauses. The elephant of India, while running furiously under the goad of the driver, is by some curious philosophy of its nature studying him all the time, and when he turns upon him, he tramples out of him the very semblance of humanity.

It is our special dispensation as American Presbyterians, in these days, to stand firm for moderate counsels. Against the violence of the Church of the Excision we have steadily protested, standing "in the old paths where is the good way;" and now it becomes our duty, be it availing or unavailing, to protest against the incipient ultraism of the Congregational Church. What special fiends the "prince of the power of the air," has drawn off from other worlds to people our atmosphere withal, and so to goad good and wise men to madness, we cannot tell. But we esteem it a privilege to escape so far as we yet have, this perilous visitation.

We wish it well understood, that the New Englander is responsible for its Article. It matters not to us who penned it. Qui facit per alium facit per se. In times like these, journals like the New Englander do not insert Articles carelessly. They are intended to affect the public mind, and if it should appear that the effect is unfavorable, they are not at liberty to say that some individual, of whom no one thought, is the author, and that the Quarterly is not responsible. We do not mean to intimate that the New Englander will do this, but we do say, that such a course is inadmissible. What the New Englander has written, it has written.

A venerable Lutheran divine, of our acquaintance, wrote in the year 1814, a work on the Apocalypse, in which he laid it down as deducible from prophecy that about these times the seventh angel would pour his vial into the air, and that the meaning of it was "conflict of opinion," the loosening of old foundations, a chaos something like that of Epicurus before the Kósμos emerged. It is perilous to commit one's self to almost any theory of the Apocalypse, but if our learned friend was right, and such a time is coming, one is inclined to think that we are in its penumbra, for it does not surprise us now to have any thing questioned, or any opinion broached, or any invention announced.

1. One of the grand principles which produced New England, and for which it professes to live, is Religious Liberty. To attain this, we are told, the pilgrim fathers embarked in the Mayflower; for this they signed their civil compact in its cabin; and for this they braved wintry snows and starvation on an inhospitable shore. This they have striven to impress upon America, and this they hope to carry everywhere, the wide world over, wherever the sons of the pilgrims plant their footsteps. If this is not the burden of every sermon, eulogy and poem, on "Forefathers' Day," then we shall have to unlearn all our notions of New England.

And what is Constitutional Presbyterianism? If ever there was in the history of the ages, a Church or people who lived and moved, and had their being as the embodiment of a principle, then is our Church the living body of which religious liberty is the soul. It is a constant, ever active, ever zealous protest against spiritual tyranny, separated especially by that one great thing from the church of the Excision, ever pouring forth its detestation of ecclesiastical violence, and existing as its great mission to maintain liberty-in-law. Wherever a Constitutional Presbyterian Church points its spire to heaven there is a bulwark against oppression; wherever a new brotherhood is formed, it breathes the doctrine that an enfranchised church member cannot be cast out without due form of law; and so radicated is this in the hearts of our children, and so reiterated by us in ten thousand forms, that no Church in America dare repeat the violence of 1837, and no Assembly in the clear

light of our statements and arguments, could be rallied to such wickedness.

2. The second great ecclesiastical peculiarity of New England, upon which we understand her to put forth special claims, is liberal Calvinism. New England theology, we are told, is Calvinism even with the spirit of the age, purified from the feculence of the dark ages, and freed from the excrescences of a false philosophy. Edwards, we are told, was a king of men, and Smalley and Bellamy, Emmons, Hopkins, and Dwight have, with amazing acuteness and singular discernment, brought theology to a point where it only needs the judicious development of this unparalleled age, to be the ne plus ultra of Revelation and Reason in happy combination.

Without pretending to say how much of this is to be taken literally, we ask, in all soberness, where does our church stand in this very matter? Is it so long since Mr. Barnes, Dr. Beecher and Dr. Duffield were tried for heresy, that it has passed from the memory of man? Who contend for the adoption of the ipsissima verba of a book containing four hundred and fifty pages, and who demand freedom within the Calvinistic system, to represent Divine truth in accordance with reason, emotion, and the purest philosophy of any time? Or are our sixteen hundred ministers and seventeen hundred churches so small as to be invisible, except when any one evinces a disposition to be proselyted, and do the leaders of New England behold the noble thinker then, with open vision?

3. New England has one more salient ecclesiastical principle, freedom in Church government. The churches are congratulated, as happily unshackled by Presbytery and unbound from the iron chain of a Church Session. Democracy exults in the popular vote, and it is even questioned whether our American government will be permanent, unless the country generally be leavened with Congregationalism.

But of the two forms of Presbyterianism now represented in this country, which is inclined to rigidity, and which to liberality? The one contends for Presbyterianism, if not as jure divino, at least indispensable to be maintained in every jot and tittle as laid down in the Form of Government (except, indeed, when a coup d'état becomes necessary for extremes produce

each other); the other is willing, as in the case of Calvinism, to allow minor differences, provided the great outlines of Presbyterianism are maintained, a sound discretion judging as to the limit of such departures.

There are two effects of the present course of the leaders of New England, which indicate that it is unwise. One is, the impression which will be made upon the whole country. The idea of Congregationalizing the old middle States, or the South or South-west, is utterly preposterous. A growing and powerful Congregational Church cannot be established in Philadelphia, or Richmond, or Louisville. Much more is it impossible to found one in the interior of Pennsylvania or Tennessee. Nor can it be easily done in the Southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois or Missouri. Something more can be done in the North-west, but less, we apprehend, than is imagined, where the two systems come (which they never yet have done) into fair and open conflict. And what has New England gained when it has planted a Congregational Church in Chicago, or St. Louis, instead of a Constitutional Presbyterian one? Not religious liberty, for that is the breath of life to us; not a liberal Calvinism, for that is our essence; not a free church government; for ours is a Republic as free as human nature will well bear. In fraternal times, when Presbyterianism and Congregationalism stood firmly together, New England sent her men by hundreds. They were cordially received into the Presbyterian Church, and allowed to leaven it with all that is valuable of Puritan principles, and just as New England men became judges and legislators in Illinois or Missouri, and merchants and mechanics in Detroit or Nashville, just so did they aid to make Presbyterianism exactly what a good man, of cultivated mind and enlarged heart, would wish it to be. What great glory is there in a name? If Scotland has poured its noble life through this western world, does it matter that the States she so largely influences and blesses, are called Pennsylvania or Carolina instead of Scotland? Is it true that New England is more acute than comprehensive? Is Massachusetts losing her eyesight? Is Connecticut becoming like the bull of the Spanish lists, to be goaded into fury by the red cloth of the tauridor? The "Synod of the Western Reserve!" Is it some

thing to be eschewed and abominated? Call it the "Association," and will it be thrice-blessed? "When I was a child, I

spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Has New England passed her manhood, and reached the stage of second childhood?

If this present tendency be fully carried out, and the alienation now begun, be perfected, it is quite obvious that New England can do nothing, in an ecclesiastical point of view, with America, except precisely so far as she can establish purely sectarian Congregational churches. Certainly nothing through the Church of the Excision. There is no real denominational cordiality between them, beyond serving some special purpose. Headed off there, they will find in American Presbyterianism, a firm, united body, with a sense of ill-treatment, and determined as their intensest conviction, never to be used for the purposes of others.

And thus the second effect, to which we have referred, will be produced. As we have recently heard it strongly put, and that, too, by one who loves New England dearly, she will become provincial. The great avenue of her influence over this broad land being closed, instead of impressing Puritan character everywhere, she will be thrown back into her own narrow territory, or be branded everywhere else as sectarian.

It is admitted to be one of the principles of Congregationalism, that each church has the right to govern itself. This, of course implies that of choosing its own government. If then churches of that order prefer a combination with liberal Presbyterianism, so as to gain, as they believe, the advantages of union, while retaining those of internal freedom, they surely have a right to do so, undisturbed. This sectarian crusade does not meet with sympathy everywhere probably, either at home or abroad. We know sons of New England, no longer residing there, who declare that the principles taught them before they left their homesteads, they still retain; principles which they deem the glory of their fatherland. They cannot unlearn them, and they cannot be taught to sympathize with a movement as narrow, they fear, in its origin as in its consequences.

It is well worth while for the East to consider the course and