ability. We have frequently been led to admire especially his severe analysis of mooted questions. It will not be expected that such a work will be altogether free from the special pleading of one who has been an actor in some of the most stirring scenes he records; but his pen will narrate facts of great importance to the future historian, and will give perhaps as fair a view of these facts as we can expect from a contemporary.

ART. VII.-LOOKING FOR THE CHURCH.

A Presbyterian Clergyman looking for the Church. By one of three hundred. New York: General Prot. Episcopal Sunday School Union. 1849. 12mo, pp. 177.

THE title of this book is suggestive. It awakens the thought of a Presbyterian clergyman looking for a parish. For certainly at any given time within the last few years, there have been at least three hundred" in that predicament. We have seen some such extending their search into New England, and as ready to turn Congregationalists, as Congregational clergymen out of New England are to turn Presbyterians. He who has been long looking for a church, very naturally begins to look for the church; and we remember more than one instance in which the result has been a going over to Episcopalianism.

Justice, however, to the author of the work before us requires us to testify that the thought suggested by his title page does not appear to be confirmed by an examination of the work itself. The author does not announce his name, but the veil under which he writes is transparent. The autobiographical nature of his performance-with all the information which he incidentally spreads before us touching his birth and parentage, his age, his education, his travels, and his troubles-makes it difficult for intelligent readers to be ignorant, or even to affect ignorance, of his identity. We do not hesitate then to say, judging from the book and from what else we know about the author, that he renounced Presbyterianism and became an Episcopalian-one of the highest and narrowest sort, not because he was looking for a parish, but because his tastes and sympathies carried him by an irresistible propensity in that direction.

Taking then for simple truth the biographical statements of the work before us, and supplying only such facts as are in their nature public property, we are enabled to give our readers some knowledge about the author of this little volume, and the influences, subjective as well as objective, which have brought him to his present position.

He was born in the Presbyterian church, somewhere at the South, not very far from the District of Columbia. His father, a faithful and venerable minister of the gospel according to the Presbyterian standards, was still among the living when this book was written, though if we mistake not he has recently entered into rest. His mother, whom, with filial devotion, he represents as a woman of saintly piety, died when he was a child, but not before her influence had begun to exert itself upon his spiritual being. "I was too young," he says, "to know the nature of my loss, when I lost my mother, but never shall that mother's prayer pass away from my memory; never shall her tear dry away from my sight, never shall her hand be lifted from my brow as she laid it there to bless me; never shall I forget the pleasing task she assigned me, as the little bearer of her basket and its burdens at her side in her almsgiving visits to the poor; never shall I lose from memory the little sanctuary whither she often resorted with her child; and where her soul soared upward and taught mine to follow; and until death shall restore me to her, I shall feel her influence, and, for aught I know, enjoy the defense and succor of her spirit hovering about me still." "My mother," he says, "who first brought me to Christ, and first taught me to pray, and who now 'sleeps in Jesus,' lived without blemish, and passed 'the swellings of Jordan' without fear" in that faith, which is preached by Calvinists, and in the enjoyment of that communion with Christ and his church which is administered without Episcopal ordination.

It is easy to discover that our author's childhood was full of promise to those who loved him best. A bright and amiable boy, he was educated with great care, and was early introduced to those studies which cultivate and refine the taste, as well as to those which unfold the intellectual powers. While he was yet a child, the evidences of the effect of Christian truth upon his character, and of the work of the Holy Spirit in his soul, were such that he was received by his father as a pastor to communion in the church at the Lord's table. It does not appear that he was ever subjected to the rough but invigorating discipline of an American college-that discipline of competition, collision, regulation and excitement, under which so many a nice, precocious boy, the father's pet, the sisters' pride, the mother's glory, is hardened into a sinewy man, fitted to grapple with the rude realities of the world as it is. He was only in his seventeenth year, when, in 1828, he became a student of theology in the well known Presbyterian Seminary at Princeton. There he resided "more than three years"-a somewhat longer time than is required to complete the regular course of lectures and studies in the Seminary. He distinguished himself by his intense application to study, his lamp at night being often the last to be extinguish

ed; he was among the foremost in all that proficiency which commends the punctual and diligent pupil to the faithful teacher; and what was doubtless not less to his credit there, he "swallowed every fact and dogma as most wholesome truth, 'asking no questions for conscience sake.' This last distinction he accounts for by saying that though he was "of an inquisitive turn," and "would have pursued a doubt on any important alledged fact to any extremity," he was "also in [his] mental bias, both happily and unhappily, confiding and disposed to faith," and had been "educated strictly a traditionist." Thus it happened that all the while he was at Princeton, he "never for a moment doubted the essential truth of the prevailing system" there. Once, however, and for a short time, he "deeply doubted the lawfulness of infant baptism." And though he soon became convinced on that point, there was still a mystery hanging over the question how to reconcile the prevalent idea of baptism in its application to the infants of a Christian household with "the popular idea of regeneration."

Our author made what he calls his "ministerial debut," between the years 1830 and 1840-that is, not far from the year 1832" in the First Presbyterian Church in Washington, in the presence of President, Senators, and rulers of the nation," when he was only about twenty years of age. We will not attempt to trace his history from the commencement of his ministry any more particularly than he has done it in the work before us. Omitting then all reference to the employment in which he was first occupied, we find him at length, not far from the year 1836, established in the city of New York in the pastoral charge of a congregation" of nominally more than five hundred communicants-the fruits, as the phrase was, of powerful revivals,"" and having under him "a corps of twenty deacons and elders." In such a position there were difficulties which he was not fully prepared to meet. Of the five hundred communicants whose names had been left upon the records by his predecessor, one hundred and forty could never be found, though their names were advertised in various ways, and though he and the elders and deacons pursued the inquiry diligently for almost a year. The elders who shared with him the responsibility of ruling the flock, seem not to have been entirely to his taste; it is difficult not to believe that he has them in his mind's eye when he says, "These elders, as my predecessor in a Presbyterian parish is said to have remarked, have been sometimes 'made wheu timber was scarce."" Some of them, it may be presumed, were not only much older, but thought themselves much wiser than their young pastor. Nothing is more likely than that he found the care and rule of a New York city congregation altogether a different thing in reality from what it had been in his youthful anticipations. He had to do, not with

the refined and intellectual exclusively or chiefly, but often with vulgar people who thought themselves refined, and with ignorant people who thought themselves intelligent. His own taste, exquisitely cultivated, could not but be offended with many an exhibition of what seemed to him like cant on the part of zealous elders and communicants. 'T'he forms and efforts in which religious zeal was manifested in such a congregation, the phrases in which it uttered itself, the ideas of progress and spiritual prosperity which were the established standard in a church whose five hundred members (including the hundred and fifty undiscoverables) had been gathered in as "the fruit of powerful revivals," -could not but be painfully incongruous with his habits of thought and devotion as determined by his early religious experience, by his pensive and poetic temperament, by his literary culture, beginning in earliest childhood, and by his theological training as a pet pupil in the most erudite and most conservative of Presbyterian seminaries. It was not strange then that he was put upon imagining some better ecclesiastical and religious system, and looking for a church which might approximate more nearly to the ideal demanded by his idiosyncrasies. Nor had he very far to go before finding, or seeming to find, that which he looked for. The low-roofed and oddly constructed building in which he ministered to an unstable congregation, was almost within the shadow of what was then perhaps the most imposing ecclesiastical edifice in the city-one of the three stately temples of the Trinity Church corporation-its beautiful proportions filling the mind of every passer by with a half unconscious sense of harmony; its massive walls and comparative retirement of position suggesting the idea of stability and peace; its tall spire rising far above the smoke and dust of the metropolis, catching the first beams of the morning, gilding itself with the latest radiance of the fading sunlight, ever pointing to the infinite expanse above, and seeming to hold communion only with the sky. There white robed priests, unvexed by officious or official laymen, and supported by indefiuite corporate wealth, ministered in enviable dignity and peace. There public worship was performed with decent pomp, with none of those outrages upon taste that so often deform the utterance of unprescribed devotion, and with none of the fervors of vulgar enthusiasm. There religion, pure and undefiled, could be promoted in all gentleness and quietness, without the painful eclat of a revival, without raising any question of "new measures," and without the endless jangling between "old school" and " new school" versions of doctrine. short, after some six years of an unhappy ministry in the Presbyterian church, and after many a painful conflict in his own soul, he became an Episcopalian, and in due time, more than six years. ago, he received such grace and gifts, and such a commission

In

from Christ, as could be imparted by the laying on of the saintly hands of Bishop Onderdonk.

The work which he has now given to the public, or rather has begun to give, for the last page tells us there is more to comeexhibits, in a desultory but somewhat imposing way, the intellectual views and arguments by which his mind was brought to embrace the system of the Episcopal Church. We can not follow him from chapter to chapter through the volume without writing a book instead of an article. All we can do is to select some of the chapters from which we may perhaps derive some useful suggestions for ourselves and for our readers.

The second of the eleven chapters into which the book is divided, is entitled "Tradition," and is well worthy of attention. The author finds that he was a Christian and not a Pagan or Mohammedan, nor an Atheist, nor a mere unbeliever and worldling,— because his parents were Christians; and in like manner, that he was a Presbyterian, and not a Wesleyan or a Congregationalist, -because his parents were Presbyterians. The religion of a child, he holds, must necessarily be a traditionary religion. But let him speak for himself.

“With_that_homage which parents such as mine seldom fail to command from their children, I could not for a moment doubt, so long as I yet 'thought as a child, and understood as a child,' that it was my duty to believe exactly as they had believed before me. And far be it from me to condemn this feeling, now that I have become a man.' If the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother' be imperative, He who scarcely takes things temporal into the account, can hardly be supposed to have forbidden us to honor them, by embracing and defending their religion."-p. 14.

He adds, "It is unquestionably the original design of Providence, that this instinctive and therefore divinely implanted, veneration for our parents' faith-a wise and holy instinct which Cain first violated-should have its application, not only to the church in her perfection" (as for example in an evangelical Congregational church) "where the case suggests no difficulty; but also to those forms of religion, which, although we call them defective, we rejoice to hope may be radically Christian." This is well said. Nor can we withhold our assent from what follows.

"Nor do we feel free to limit even here the application of the principle; but we believe it to be as truly, although less obviously, wise and salutary, even when employed in the transmission of the faith of the Mohammedan, or the Socinian, or the Pagan, or the Jew. For, if the children of such were not trained in the religion of their parents, they would grow up to manhood without those ideas of accountability and retribution, which lie at the foundation of moral improvement and restraint. As we say of 'the powers that be,' that any government whatever is better than none, because its very existence affords a basis for progress and improvement; so we say that any religion whatever, Turk, Jew, or Heathen, is unspeakably better than none, because it makes man a creature of hope, and preserves the idea of accountability and law. Few, indeed, would be willing to see the experiment, if it could possibly be