bell of the universe, to announce the great sermon that was to follow; and as the sermon continues after the bell has rung out, and becomes of its sound a memorial and testimony, so the marvellous words have outlived, and do testify of the marvellous works.

A second cause of our recent refined scepticism may be found in the narrow, bigoted, and unworthy notions of Christianity which prevail, in the obstinacy with which they are retained, in the fury with which they are defended, and in the contrast thus presented to the liberal and fluent motion of the present age. This is a large text, and opens up a field which we have not at present time to embrace. Religious authorship may be taken as a correct index of the general state of religious culture and progress. Now this has decidedly improved since John Foster wrote his first essays, where he so sternly characterizes a large proportion of its writings, where he speaks of "one writer who seems to value religion as an assassin his dagger, and for the same reason-of another, who in all his motions is clad with sheets of lead-of a third, from whose vulgar illuminations of religious themes you are excessively glad to escape into the solemn twilight of faith--and of a fourth, who represents the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose dominion is overshadowed by vengeance, whose music is the cries of victims, and whose glory requires to be illustrated by the ruin of his creation." For such, perhaps, we may now search our religious literature in vain; but we could point out some curious specimens still extant; here a writer who would sacrifice all the records of the creation to the arbitrary interpretation of a Hebrew particle; there another, who, in order to prove Christianity the most excellent of the sciences, raves like a maniac against all science, and cares less for the sun, moon, and stars, than for a farthing candle glimmering in the corner of a conventicle; a third propounding the horrible doctrine, that if you are not immersed in water you must be immersed in everlasting fire; a fourth turning the Bible into a padlock on the chains of the slave; a fifth seeking to excommunicate from fire and water here, and from water hereafter, one of the most gifted and amiable, albeit, misled men of the age, who came an invited and unassuming stranger to our shores; a sixth hanging around the majestic form of Christianity a dirty finery, picked up from the cast-off clothes of second-rate poets, and sinking the mother-tongue of heaven into the

sickly whine of a mendicant, as though Isaiah had become an old Jew clothesman; a seventh indulging, while defending religion, in the worst of human passions and language, as if rancor, and want of charity, and spleen, could be baptized and consecrated to Christ's service-as if the raven perched in Noah's ark were not a raven, a bird of foul feeding and bad omen still; an eighth, peppering bad poems with religion to make them sell; and a ninth, talking of the fearful secrets of future punishment as coolly as if he was not also in danger of the judgment, and who perhaps goes smacking his lips from the side of the great universe-darkening sacrifice to the Lord Mayor's feast! Add to this the deluges of commonplace, issuing in the form of religious pamphlets and periodicals of the day, and the thousand narrow and fierce controversial productions which each month spawns, and conceive of the three-piled disgust, which in so many of the refined and intellectual darkens into a deeper feeling, and provokes the cry, "If this be religion, better scepticism, pantheism, atheism itself."

This indeed, thank God, is not religion. But it must bear the reproach of having turned away many who otherwise would have come near and seen this great sight, and found how vast the difference between those crackling, whizzing, empty and transient fireworks, and the low light of the wilderness uneclipsed by the noonday ardors, clear, innocuous, but piercing as the eye of the Inspired, kindled from, and pointing abovethe bush ever burning and never consumed.

Thirdly. The divided and unhappy state of the church must bear its full share in accounting for the evil, and this the more especially when at present both letters and science are approaching closely the ideal of a commonwealth-when the associations of the scientific and literary are the order of the day-when rancorous personalities and jealousies are dying out--when an appeal made in behalf of the family of a deceased poet is responded to with such promptitude by men of all politics and creeds, as to show that an electric cord of communication is fast binding the literary world into one. And yet alas! alas! for the divisions of Reuben, and rents in the seamless garment of Christ. Where any real love between various parties? Where aught but ill-considered armistices? Where any broad, comprehensive plan of union? Where a genuine esprit du corps among Christian churches? Where any actual unions consummated, except in cases where the parties had come so near before, that

their union lost much of its romance-where it seemed more a shaking of hands in the market-place than a marriage, and where, as at the peace of Amiens, everybody on both sides was glad, but nobody proud? What philosophical examination of principles, conducted by wise and impartial men, such as should precede a great scheme of permanent union, has ever been talked of; and are even the meanest and basest of old arts of polemical depreciation and abuse altogether obsolete? It were long to trace the causes of this sad spectacle, which just amounts tothe church inferior to the world, in culture, in gentlemanly feeling, in Christian charity; but such is the fact, and prodigious the mischief which is springing from it. There are other causes which might have been illustrated, such as the contempt and prejudice entertained by many Christians for science and letters-the piece of well or ill adjusted mechanism to which the office of the ministry has been reduced-the superiority which the press has acquired over the pulpit--the political spirit which our churches of all kinds have been led to cherish--and the infection of German, and, in general, of Continental modes of thoughts and speech. But prominent above all stands the enemy within the camp-the ghastly fact that Christianity has not the vital hold over men which it formerly possessed-that we are now rather haunted by its ghost than warned by its presence that formality, mechanism, and a thousand other evil influences have crushed and choked it--and that its extension, however wide and rapid, will in all probability extend its evils at even a greater ratio than its advantages--propagate more tares than wheat. We unite our feeble voice with that of Chalmers, James, and Thomas Binney, in proclaiming this alarming state of matters. It cannot now be concealed that a great proportion of the mind of the country-of those who make our laws, who distribute our justice, whose eloquence fills our courts, whose talent informs our press, whose energy inspirits our business, whose genius animates our higher literature, whose benevolence supports our charities, and whose beauty, taste, and accomplishments, decorate and refine our society, have travelled away from churches, and resigned faith in creeds, and that this they have done principally because the charm and the power which were wont to detain them there have departed. Were a dance of the living suddenly turned into a dance of the dead, though there remained the same splendor in the decorations, and the

same lustre in the lamps, and even the same grace in the movements, would there remain the same delight in the spectators? Would they not rush forth in confusion and shrieking dismay at the sight of this ghastly mimicry of life, enacted where its pulse was beating highest and where its stream most richly and tumultuously ran? Thus feel many to our deserted churches-deserted not of the dead but of the living, not of the worshippers but of God. Pathetic the unseen Ichabod inscribed on the fallen cathedral-more pensive still the "Here God once dwelt," visible through the moonlight of meditation on the chambers of the soul in ruins; but, most sorrowful of all, the sight of a large assembly of professing Christians, where all the elegance, splendor, light, decency of deportment, eloquence of speaker-where sympathetic thrill, awful shadow, heaving breasts, and bursting tears themselves, will not disguise the fact that one is absent, and that this place is no more "dreadful" with his presence, nor glorious with his grace.

The statements thus made must be somewhat qualified. In the first place, we must not be understood to hold that all our modern sceptics are actuated by such motives or influenced by such causes. Many, we fear, like their brethren in times past, just "hate the light because their deeds are evil;" while others are stimulated to scepticism by vanity, pride, or ignorance. There is another class still, very intelligent but very inconsistent, of whom Miss Martineau may stand as a specimen, who, not merely doubting, but absolutely denying all the supernaturalism of Scripture, express their respect and reverence for the writers, although on their own showing those writers were either fools or rogues. But the class whom Sterling typified, while sorely perplexed about the supernatural part, and even the genuineness and authenticity of many of the documents, are smit to a passion with the grandeur and heavenliness of the system, even to its peculiarities of atonement, spiritual influences, &c.

Secondly. We must not be understood to homologate the train of thought which we have ventured to put into the mouth of the Sterling-sceptic, except so far as that relates to the insufficiency of external evidence, nor to insinuate that the causes we have mentioned excuse his scepticism. Prophecy, as well as miracles, we look on as powerfully corroborative of the divinity of religion; and the fate of nations, besides, not being the sole object of prediction, is very important when taken in connection with that system which they

Thirdly. We do not wish, from these giddy heights, to "waft a lesson of despair" to any one. We are sorry for the position of such men as Sterling, but it were to be weaker than old Eli, on their account to tremble for the ark of God. The lessons we do mean to draw are as follows: 1st, of charity; 2dly, of warning; 3dly, of shame; and 4thly, of courage.

1st. We have need of much charity at the present crisis. It will not do now to skulk from the field under a flight of nicknames. It will not do to call our opponents miserly ants and monsters. Here, at least, in Sterling, Arnold, Foster, we have to do with mist-seyered brethren upon one great common march, with sincere lovers of mankind, with practisers of the Christian virtues, with men who diligently discharged the duties of the Christian ministry, and whose latest deathbed murmur was of Christ. While we blame their doubts, let us pity the pain and sorrow, amounting almost to distraction and despair, which attended them, and let us inquire, if we have no difficulties, may it not be because we have never thought at all? and let us envy them the resolution of their doubts, to which they have now attained, we trust, in that land where the strength of light is not measured by the intensity of shadewhere amid all the constellations which may garnish that upper firmament, that of the "Balance" vibrates no more-where the inhabitants bask in spotless love, and see in perfect vision.

No such charity, however, can we or dare we extend to those half-fledged children of impudence and conceit, or else of pride and profligacy, in whom this age abounds, who at the finding of each new difficulty (one, perhaps resolved for centuries) raise a noisy Eureka, as they rush out with their filthy treasure--for those who cull from such writers as Shelley the blood-red stones of his blasphemy that they may wreathe them into a neck lace of ruin for themselves--nor even for those miniatures of Giant Despair, who seat

ners too.

2dly. We must take up anew a voice of warning-the voice of him who saw the Apocalypse. There is coming up the church a current of doubt, deeper far and darker than ever swelled against her before-a current strong in learning, crested with genius, strenuous yet calm in progress. It seems the last grand trial of the truth of our faith. Against the battlements of Zion a motley throng have gathered themselves together. Unitarians, atheists, pantheists, doubters, open foes, secret foes, and bewildered friends of Christianity are all in the field, although no trumpet has openly been blown, and no charge publicly sounded. There are the old desperadoes of infidelity-the last followers Paine and Voltaire; there is the soberer and stolider Owen and his now scanty and sleepy troop; there follow the Communists of France, a fierce but disorderly crew; the commentators of Germany come, too, with pickaxes in their hands, crying "Raze, raze it to its foundations!" Then you see the garde mobile— the vicious and the vain youth of Europe; and on the outskirts of the fight hangs, cloudy and uncertain, a small but select band, whose wavering surge is surmounted by the dark and lofty crests of Carlyle and Emerson. "Their swords are a thousand"-their purposes are various; in this, however, all agree, that historical Christianity ought to go down. before advancing civilization. Sterling and some of his co-mates the merciful cloud of death has removed from the field, while others stand in deep uncertainty, looking in agony and in prayer above.

3dly. Of shame. While thus the foeman is advancing, what is Zion about? Shame and alas! her towers are well nigh unguarded; her watchmen have deserted their stations, and are either squabbling in her streets with each other, or have fallen fast asleep. Many are singing psalms, few are standing to their arms. Some are railing at the enemy from the safest towers. The watchman who first perceived the danger and gave the alarm, almost instantly fell back in death.

4thly. Of confidence. Shall, then, these old and glorious battlements be trodden down? Between the activity of their foes and the supineness of their friends must they perish? No; vain is perhaps the help of