get, divine and human, must decide for himself. A question which is not practical, which does not concern our conduct, our obligations, our responsibility, of such a question it can be of little moment whether any decision is made: but if the question is practical; if it does concern our conduct, our obligations, our responsibility; if, in other words, it is a question of what we shall say or not say, of what we shall do or not do; then it is a question which ought to be decided, and which each one must decide for himself. Each is bound to get all the light he can; but after all, the act is to be his, and he must decide what it shall be.

The chief reason for this can be stated in few words. God's law is addressed to men as individuals, to each one among them. It runs thus, Thou shalt, and thou shalt not. And God, who thus addresses men, individually, in his law, holds them responsible for obedience. It is written," so then every one must give account of himself to God." He bids them search the Scriptures to learn what his law to them is; and he forbids them to take for teaching the commandments of men, and directs them to try all human teaching by the infallible standard of his declared will. He permits no human ruler or judge, no human officer, counsellor, parliament, or congress, to stand between his command and them. And when they come, at last, to stand before his tribunal he will judge them for their own opinions and conduct. It will not avail them then to plead, as an apology for disobedience to his law, that a human government justified and commanded disobedience. The answer will be, the divine law was of paramount authority; and you knew it or ought to have known it. It will not avail them to say, that this or that human judge, or council, or senate, or ruler, told them that the human law did not conflict in that case with the divine, or, if it did, that nevertheless they ought to obey it. The answer will be direct. The law was addressed to you as an intelligent being capable of understanding it, and obeying it; and you were required to know it and to obey it.

Indeed this method of private judgment, each one determining, under his responsibility to God, what God's law requires of him, is the only practicable method. What else can one do? It can not be pretended that he should go to any other private individual. He may, indeed, for light and advice, but not for decision. For before God no one can assume his responsibility, or if one did, God would repudiate the assumption, and hold the other to account. To whom then shall he go? To some department of the government? That can not be pretended; for that would be to ask that government to decide a question between itself and God-a question which it had just decided wrong by enacting a law contrary to God's law. That would be, as though Peter and the apostles had left the decision of the question, whether they ought to obey God or the Sanhedrim, to the Sanhedrim itself!

And this leads us to ask how it was in the cases to which reference has been made, and which are divinely recorded for our instruction. How was it with Peter and John, how was it with Peter and the apostles, when the question was whether human and divine requirements conflicted, and if so, what they ought to do? How was it with Daniel? How was it with the three Israelitish princes? Did they allow the final decision of that question to be made by any tribunal but that of their own consciences? How would it have answered their personal obligations to God, if they had left the decision of that question to some Jewish council, or Babylonian judge?

No. We must hold to the supremacy of the individual conscience, as well as to the supremacy of the divine law. We must hold that each man's conscience is to be the final arbiter in questions of his duty. It would seem, indeed, that no Protestant could deny this. The opposite doctrine is Roman Catholic altogether. We will conclude this part of the subject by quoting the eminent authority of Bishop Butler.

"That our conscience approves of and attests to such a course of action, is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide, the guide assigned us by the author of our nature; it therefore belongs to our condition of being; it is our duty to walk in that path, and follow this guide, without looking about to see whether we may not possibly forsake them with impunity."

The truth of the doctrine which we advocate is attested, in some of its aspects or applications, by the universal assent of mankind. The martyrs in the cause of truth and of God-they who were loyal to their own convictions of what duty and the divine precepts enjoin, notwithstanding the laws of the land and the edicts of rulers in church or state; and who persisted in their course, though in that course were reproach and contempt, suffering and blood, prisons and tortures, the gibbet and the stakewhat is the verdict of the world respecting them? Are they not universally justified and honored? Are they not set forth for the admiration and imitation of all men, as examples of heroic integrity, philanthropy and piety? Yet they acted on precisely the doctrine we have defended. They attended to the voice of conscience. They obeyed God rather than man. They sacredly regarded what they thought to be the commandments of God, however forbidden by the commandments of men.

Let, then, Messrs. Webster, Clay and Cass sneer at the martyrs. Let them uncanonize the sainted ones, whose steadfast and suffering loyalty to God and truth, in opposition to the wicked. statutes and edicts of human power, has enshrined them in the

hearts of the church. Let them sneer at the unanimous decision of human reason, and at the common sense and general consent of mankind. Yea, let them sneer at Peter and John. Let them set down the apostles of Christ as fanatics. Let them cast their contempt on Daniel, and his three companions in heroic piety. Let them, in their extreme and fanatical loyalty to the slave-catching compacts of a human constitution, vent their sneers upon the Bible, and upon our divine Lord, who enjoined upon his disciples a fear of God above all other fear. They have virtually done, or attempted to do this, in sneering at the truly honorable Senator from New York, for propounding the idea that there is a higher rule of duty than any human laws or constitution. But be it known to those sneering Senators that the great body of truly conscientious and religious men condemn their sneers, and mourn over their defective and inadequate moral sense. And let Mr. Seward, on the other hand, be assured, that the enlightened moral sense of thoughtful and religious men, throughout the country, is with him. They exult to see a man stand up in the Senate of the United States, loyal to the supreme law of God, and reminding his fellow Senators that that law is above the constitution of the land. And they can assure him that this act of his will be held in honorable remembrance, when the sneers of those who assailed him will be forgotten, or remembered only as dark spots on their fame.

And let those who accuse of treason the men who maintain, in the legislative hall, by the press, or in the pulpit, the supremacy of the divine law and of the human conscience, beware themselves of a treason worse and more perilous than treason against human government, even treason against Jehovah―treason against him whose kingdom will endure when all earthly kingdoms, republics, constitutions and laws shall have perished, -treason against him to whom they must give their final account, and who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

L. Bacon.

ART. V.-JOHN COTTON.

The Life of John Cotton. By A. W. McCLURE. Written for the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, and revised by the Committee of Publication. Boston: Mass. Sabbath School Society. 1846. pp. 300.

THE managers of "the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society" have engaged in the laudable enterprise of getting up a series of biographical volumes, entitled "Lives of the Chief Fathers of New England." Six volumes have been published, of which the volume now before us is the first.

The merits and advantages of such a plan are obvious. It proposes to provide for all our Sabbath School libraries a body of historical and biographical literature, which shall commend to coming ages all that was sound in the principles, and all that was good in the examples, of the heroic fathers of New England. It proposes to direct the attention of competent writers to the preparation of works in this particular line, by giving them some comfortable assurance that the labor thus employed shall not be in vain. It proposes to circulate and sell the volumes thus prepared, by employing for that end the various influences and agencies which can be wielded by a popular religious publishing Society. We can not doubt that the enterprise, so far as doing good is concerned, will be highly successful. Books prepared under such auspices, and "revised by the Committee of Publication," will certainly be safe.

The disadvantages of the plan are perhaps equally obvious. Books written 'to order,' under the superintendence of a committee, are not quite so likely to glow with a natural inspiration, as those which are written under the excitement of an inward impulse on the mind of the author. The position, too, of the author writing to carry out the plan of such a series, got up by a religious publishing Society for the churches of one denomination exclusively, is not altogether desirable. Each biography in the series must needs be rather a panegyric than an impartial and critical history. No opinion discordant with the opinions of "the publishing committee"-no free, bold thought that might provoke some new discussion, can find admission. And if by any accident the committee shall have permitted themselves to affix their imprimatur to some rash utterance that gives offense, what can the author expect but that on the first indication of hostility, on the first complaint from any quarter from which the committee has any thing to hope or fear, his employers and publishers will withdraw his book from the market, and will virtually stigmatize it as being at the best, of dangerous tendency? Beside all this, the author can hardly fail to be embarrassed by the attempt to do two things at once. He is employed in writing a book for Sunday School libraries, a young people's book, which shall be at the same time a book for general circulation. To overcome this difficulty entirely-to write for the great public, and yet to be betrayed into no disquisition or digression inappropriate to the design of a Sabbath School, is an achievement to which few writers are equal. Mr. Jacob Abbott could do it; and Sir Walter Scott could have done it. But we doubt whether any such thing could have been done by John Foster or Thomas Chalmers. Jane Taylor could have done it; but the powers of her brother Isaac are hardly equal to such a task.

In the volume now under consideration, Mr. M'Clure has overcome the various difficulties of his task in a manner highly creditable to his ability as a writer and to the heartiness of his sympathy with the founders of these New England commonwealths and churches. In dealing with a book so well intended, and on the whole so well adapted to its purpose, we will not indulge in any ungracious criticism. We hope it may be found ere long in every Sunday School of the Orthodox Congregational communion from Maine to California. And we can not but regret that there is so little chance of its finding entrance into Sunday Schools of any other denomination. Not only must Unitarians and Episcopalians reject it with horror; but even our Presbyterian friends of whatever type, must be careful how they permit their young people to read it, for the author's zeal against the Presbyterian form of government burns with a clear and unrelenting flame.

The age of the settlement of New England was not like the passing age, in which hardly any body that has occupied any public station can escape the honors of biography. Yet the life of John Cotton was written and published, six years after his death, by his friend and successor, John Norton. Nearly half a century afterwards he was again commemorated by his grandson Cotton Mather in that great barathrum of Puritan pedantry, the Magnalia. John Davenport also wrote a life of Cotton, which was never published, but which Norton and Mather appear to have consulted, and which was preserved in manuscript as late as the days of Gov. Hutchinson, and may have been destroyed by the stamp-act mob in 1766, which destroyed so many treasures of that kind in burning Hutchinson's library. Another memoir by Samuel Whiting of Lynn, long remained unpublished, but when it was given to the public by Hutchinson in his volume of historical papers, it was seen to have been the basis not only of Mather's narrative but also of Norton's. The early history of Massachusetts abounds in notices of Cotton and of his influence in civil and still more in ecclesiastical affairs. In the controversial writings of that age on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially in those belonging to the controversy between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, Cotton is spoken of in a tone which shows that he was felt to be a man of power. Who was John Cotton? What service did he render in his generation?

Fifteen years before the close of that century which was signalized by the Reformation, there was living in the pleasant old town of Derby, where the Derwent gives its line of beauty to the picturesque scenery of Derbyshire, a grave and religious man, named Roland Cotton. He was of an honorable descent; but his parents having been "by some injustice," as the family