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mount of insufferable brightness on which God has built his throne, how are ye darkened by the corrupt and confused admixtures of human vanity and folly! How are ye prostituted to the base purpose of gilding the books in which man has recorded his own profane thinking! how are ye neglected! Forgive the treason, O thou Author of the sole light shining in this dark place, and bring thy wandering, erring, divided, and conflicting family to thine own thinking, as the only and all sufficient guide to truth and eternal life!

Thankful for the process, through which God has conducted us to the total extinguishment of partial desires concerning his earthly family, and by which he has made us willing that any and every specific form of christianity should lose its individuality, to make way for the condensation of the whole on the principles of revealed truth, we are not only prepared to embark in any measures that may give fair promise of such a result, but feel ourselves pledged to exhaust all the little strength with which God may endow us in our generation, to accelerate this magnificent consummation. If weeping were in heaven and sectarian devotees ever enter it, they would wash its streets with their tears, at the remembrance of their mutual heart burnings in this life and the extent to which they had wasted the energies, that ought to have been devoted to the savlation of the world, in circumventing each other's honest designs. Selfishness, sheer and malignant, they will then find, had much more to do with impelling them to act upon this narrow, contentious, and contemptible policy, than the love of truth of which they now make so much boast. Why can we not, therefore, throw away our various means of distorting the inspired text and come to the examimation of the word of God, with the docility and guilelessness of children, desiring the sincere milk of the word? Oh, could our variously constructed systems be compared with the inspired text as legitimate

ly interpreted, they would be thrown into as many contortions as the prince of sinning angels is described by the poet to have been, when he felt the stroke of Michael's trusty sword. Never, till these untenable theories are exploded and christians make the inspired sense the exact measure of their religious thinking, can the peace of the church be established on a permanent basis.

CHAPTER IV.

Party men, interests and measures.

There are true christians no doubt, who have by some means become enlisted in certain forms of christianity, which are as remote as can well be conceived from its primitive elements. The character

and life of some who may be found even in the worst of them, require that we should judge thus favorable. The human mind is curiously constructed. Its sentiments are susceptible of such modifications from the state of the heart, that the same abstract principle will be exhibited under entirely different aspects, in one person from what it will in another. There are, doubtless, Catholics with whom the acts of crossing themselves, counting their beads, and practicing genuflections before an image of the blessed Virgin, are connected with genuine repentance, humility and love to God; while in the majority of cases they are unquestionably associated with pride, self-righteousness, and presumptuous confidence in external forms. There is as much reason to believe that clerical celibacy, in such men as Fenelon and Bourdaloue, was adorned with the purity of subdued appetite, as there is that in many, perhaps most who are induced to adopt it, it is polluted with whatever is disgusting in debauchery, or abominable in invasions upon the sanctity of domestic life. The monastic state, adverse as it is to every principle of our nature, and blighting as the facts of its history have shown it to be, was made, by such men as Thomas a Kempis,

subservient to the most exalted attainments in piety. And there is scarcely an error so monstrous, but that, if intermixed with a fair proportion of truth, may boast of having been adorned by the most illustrious virtues.

Piety and virtue, however, are by no means indigenous to the cold and murky regions of error; they are exotics in those regions, which are made to bloom by some forced system of condensing the rays of the Sun of righteousness; and thus, they flourish, not as the consequence, but in despite of the corrupted forms of christianity of which they seem to constitute a part. We may apply remarks of this kind to every sect of Protestant Christendom. The virtue and piety of all flourish, not as they proudly boast, because they have a perfect system of faith, but in defiance of the most egregious perversions, either in doctrine or practice, of the inspired records of christianity. Like Prometheus, they have stolen sufficient fire from heaven, to impart life to the forms which their plastic hands have reared from the crude materials of their own thinking.

That some of these sects embody more revealed matter than others, we do not doubt; but that no one has yet reached, either in theory or practice, the purity, correctness and elevation, to which the word of God legitimately interpreted and carried out into real life, is adapted to raise the human character, we think equally unquestionable. Who, when he seriously reflects, is willing that his own system should constitute the exact limit of all future attainments in truth and holiness? Who is so blinded, as to regard his own form of christianity, as the exact model of what we are to expect in that future age of gold, which is depicted in prophetic vision? If the whole blaze of revealed light, is so perfectly reflected from any one of these systems, why may we not regard it as a complete exemplification of all that the Bible is capable of

doing for man? Oh, the folly and madness of sectarian assumption! Why have not philosophers assumed to have a system that perfectly reflected every possible fact of nature? And yet, they are as competent to bring out all these facts in a jingle of some two or three dozen abstractions, as the framers of our present forms of christianity, were to secure, in this manner, every possible revealed truth, together with every possible bearing which that truth is capable of exerting upon life and character. Are we to expect another revelation; or will the one we already have, be found to contain the germs of every future improvement? What one could be made to require more holiness and virtue, or to urge its claims by more powerful motives, than the one with which we are now blessed? But let us take the purest denomination on earth, whether with a written or unwritten creed, and the question is, whether every article of doctrine and practice which is a constituent part of its organization, would answer to be transferred into a perfect state of society?

We ought here perhaps to observe, lest our remarks be converted to an improper use by those who pretend to have no creed but the Bible, that whatever a body of men may seize upon by common consent and wield as their grand peculiarity, to the neglect of other and perhaps more weighty matters of christianity, has all the effect upon them of a rubric or creed, enforced by papal bulls and inquisitorial sanctions. Some of the worst forms of Protestant Christianity, whose peculiarity consists chiefly in elevating some external rite to the place of God in their unwritten creed, and wielding it on all occasions to the total neglect of the spiritual elements and subject-matter of our holy religion, are clamerous against creeds, and make great pretensions to the Bible as the sole basis of their organization. God forbid, that in our pleadings for the Bible, we should say a word to

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