plicitly and positively teaches, doctrines which he distinctly and strenuously opposes: and the mode in which he endeavors to justify his imputations involves a perversion of thought and language scarcely less incredible. A parallel argument equally valid might be constructed to prove Cudworth an Atheist, Bishop Butler an Infidel, and Mr. Thomas Paine a Christian believer!”—p. xxi. This is strongly said, but it is true in the utmost strictness of the language used.

It is certainly quite possible that Cousin is inconsistent with himself, affirming at one time what he denies at another. For inconsistency is possible with all minds but the Infinite. But not every charge of inconsistency proves its reality. The charge is quite as likely to proceed from the incapacity of him who makes it, as from any ground in the subject matter concerning which it is made. The parts of any whole appear inconsistent to any one who does not comprehend the whole to which they belong, and them as parts of that whole. What more inconsistent than veins and arteries?—the one carrying the blood from the heart, the other all the while bringing it back, and yet the inconsistency is reconciled and disappears in the unity of the circulation as a whole. Hence the charge of inconsistency and contradiction is made most frequently only by the weakest, and least comprehending minds; they can see inconsistency and contradiction anywhere, and it is about all they can see. The cognition of the unity and the harmony implies a higher and more comprehensive grasp than they are accustomed to.

We are, then, quite willing to leave the charge of inconsistency and self-contradiction, which is the only plea that the Princeton Reviewer, and such as agree with him, can set up after the recognition of the fact that Cousin does in some places, at least, teach the most unexceptionable theism, to those who find any comfort or advantage in using it. We see no inconsistency in his system. We see absurd and innocent expressions, we see every where statements that will not bear to be taken and expanded by themselves, we see doctrines that we do not like, and which are not, that we can see, essential or fundamental to his system. Nor do we believe he has built up a system which, as such, will ever be universally received. But we do believe that he has contributed more than any man living towards the progress of metaphysical science to higher attainments, and to the inculcation of sounder and more wholesome views of man, his position, his duties, and his destiny. And we believe that there is no man living, and no man that has lived in the flesh, whose writings in the department of intellectual philosophy can be read by those who have both the taste and the talent for metaphysics, with so much profit as those of Victor Cousin.

ART. IV. PEWS AND FREE SEATS.

Ir is the ordinary effect of controversy to push men farther apart than they need to be, and, by widening the seeming difference between them, render their antagonism sharper and more direct than the interests of truth, whether it lie on the one side or the other, or, as is very apt to be the case, partly on both sides, require or warrant. Something of this effect we think we see in the Article in the last Review, headed "Free Seats?or Pews?" It seems even to have impressed itself on the wording of the title. And it is simply with a view to rebuke this extravagant assumption, and put the parties on what we believe to be a juster as well as more tolerant footing, that, with the change of the warlike disjunctive into the amicable copulative, the abatement of the fiercely defiant interrogation points, and the reversal of the order of the terms, we adopt the substance of the title and make it our own. We propose to write on Pews and Free Seats.

Whether our opponent will tolerate any such neighborly companionship, may, however, well be doubted. He is hardly cool enough yet. It may reasonably be supposed to require more than three months, dog-days included too, to cool off the fever of Quixotic rage into which he has worked himself up. But we think he will cool in time. And then, as he is the valorous knight, and we aspire to be no more than the humble squire, and as Sancho's sense, what he has, is common sense, a quality in which his more illustrious companion may perhaps be deficient, we hope to be of some use to him by keeping him awake to the real world around him, and persuading him not to break his sword upon the fans of a wind-mill, or put a pewter basin on his head for a helmet. Our adversary must excuse us, if we say that his warmth has considerably amused us. To the more thoughtful portion of the Church, we believe, he is his own best answer; and it would be unwise to add another, if there were not so many with whom vehemence goes for strength, assertion for evidence, and declamation for argument. His whole Article seems to us, indeed, little else but a string of false issues, a series of propositions which nobody, so far as we know, except as relates to facts, has ever dreamed of disputing, and which may all be as true as he asserts them to be, and leave the question in dispute just as it was. So that, on the whole, we may fairly enough claim him as

really our ally, on the principle that a feeble blow on the wrong side is almost as good as a strong one on the right. For, as he strikes always one side of the mark, his blows, however hearty and vigorous in themselves, are feeble in effect, because badly aimed. We insist on calling him back to the true point of discussion, which is not whether the Free Church system is not useful for certain purposes, nor whether it does not embody and represent true and important principles which have been too much overlooked, nor whether it is not in particular cases preferable to other systems and the true remedy of their evils, but whether it is entitled to take upon itself jure divino airs, or talk in a strain of special catholicity, and on one account or another claim exclusive possession of the Church as the ordinary and permanent rule of support. Such pretensions we believe to be groundless and ridiculous. We cannot help laughing at them. We may be charged with levity in not treating so grave a matter with more solemnity. But we must be permitted to indulge our vein. We think it is Horace who says, "Quid vetat ridentem dicere verum?" and so say we.

The writer in the Article under consideration, tells us that the Pew-System is not well adapted to the purposes of Church extension; and his argument in support of this position is quite conclusive. We entirely agree with him. His doctrine is true. But we cannot discover its relevancy. We are not discussing the Church's Missionary but her Parochial work. What it is wise or necessary for her to do in the effort to enlarge her borders, and bring men within her pale, is one thing. But how she shall conduct the affairs of her settled congregations and parishes,, so as to provide her members most steadily and effectually with the means of spiritual improvement and edification, and supply her Ministers with a regular and reliable support, that they may be without worldly care in their work, and" attend upon the Lord without distraction," is a totally different question; and, we suppose, just now, a somewhat important one. The two departments of operation are quite distinct. The one is the Church acting aggressively upon the world; the other is the Church engaged in the work of internal training and discipline, building up her own children in their most Holy Faith, and nourishing them unto eternal life. What may be a wise and useful system, or even a necessity, in the one, may be most inappropriate and hurtful in the other. It may be, indeed, that Free Churches are advantageous in the Church's parochial life, as well as in her missionary exertions. But it by no means follows that what the circumstances of the latter render advisable or unavoidable, is always

to be retained as a becoming and profitable feature of the former. What is suitable and beneficial in the incipiency or forming stages of a thing, is often a deformity of its maturity. Prattle and playthings are beautiful in children; disgusting in men. It will not do to argue that, because it is pretty in a child to lisp, therefore a man is to keep on lisping all his days. "When I became a man, I put away childish things." And so may the Church, in its mature and settled state, throw off, as awkward and inconvenient, a system, which it gladly used, as the best its circumstances would permit, in its earlier struggles. Nay, the Free Church System is inapplicable, in its full development, to the Church, even in its aggressive movements. For that glories in being a system of self-support. Whereas Missionary operations, and usually up to an advanced period of their progress, at least till they issue in a parochial organization, and oftentimes much longer, continue to be dependent on external aid, and give a free Gospel to some only at the expense of others.

Equally little to the purpose is it to say that Pewed Churches yield a fatal concession to the Free Church System by making some of their seats free; and that they are bound, in all consistency, to adopt entirely the plan from which they borrow so advantageously, on the principle that what is good up to a certain point must be still better without any limitation at all. We suppose the experience of mankind is the very reverse of this in a vast many cases, so much so, indeed, that human wisdom is largely employed in marking the bounds beyond which useful things grow pernicious; and, that for the beneficial, in moderation and in combination with other things, to be the destructive, in excess or unmixed, is one of the most familiar and comprehensive laws of human life. Why, if this be not so, then it ought to be true, that because the small fraction of a grain of prussic acid, either alone or mingled with other substances, is a valuable medicine, a man may drink any quantity of it he pleases with impunity, if not profit; or, because a sprinkling of black pepper in a plate of soup is an agreeable condiment, a black pepper broth must be still more palatable; and it is gross inconsistency to be afraid of the one, or dislike the other. If this be reasoning, we have our logic yet to learn. We ought not to be insolently told, then, that for Pewed Churches to have some of their seats free is an unlawful pilfering of another's property. There is in the Church no such thing as a monopoly of good. Rather is it the common possession of all, wherever it may be found. And none need the permission or the pardon of any other in order to appropriate

so much of any system of proceeding as seems to them valuable, and abandon it whenever it becomes false in principle or unsuitable to existing circumstances. We are sorry that our neighbor's equanimity is so much disturbed by the sight of Free Seats in Pewed Churches. We can only hope that he will become reconciled to it by habit. For, it seems not improbable, that upon some well regulated adjustment of the rival systems, which will preserve the most important advantages of both, and exclude as far as possible the evils of either, the judgment of the Church may finally settle as the happy result of the controversy that is now going on in her borders. Thon and Ziba divide the land.”

Thus far, then, we think, the Article before us has made little progress in the accomplishment of its object. The mind of the Church is not likely to be much impressed or influenced by argumentation so manifestly irrelevant and inconclusive. If this is all that can be said for Free Churches, we have no fear of the result. And as their advocate evidently lacks neither zeal nor ability, we must presume such to be the case till the contrary appears.

The remainder of the Article is an excursion into Dreamland, a new Dreamland to be sure, not at all the lovely region of that name we have been so pleasantly led into by another, but a country of dreadful goblins and "chimeras dire." Clearly enough, it is not any part of the actual, extant "Church militant here on earth." It is simply a land of ecclesiastical romance, which has no counterpart in these United States of America, or any other part of this terraqueous globe, of which the geographies give us an account. Now, for a writer to make his facts, and then argue from them, may be vastly amusing to himself, but will hardly be convincing to others. It is to be supposed that a writer means to be believed, and charitable to think that he at least believes himself; but it is difficult, sometimes, without also supposing him to be moon-struck. We have lived all our days in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and our days are not now very few, and we know of nothing that at all answers to his descriptions. Our whole experience is a contradiction of them, indeed. We meet this part of the Article by a flat denial of the whole representation, with an appeal to the common knowledge of Churchmen, using their eyes and enjoying their senses, in support of our appeal. To represent our Church as a broad Sahara of desolation and barrenness, dotted with a few verdant oases, where Free Church Chrysostoms, by "the Puritan Sacrament," are working wonders on men's hearts and pockets equal to any miracles of real or fictitious history,