Romanists do likewise; but those elements of secular knowledge which are requisite in the education of the national youth, to fit them to be enlightened citizens, and voters, and industrial contributors to the common weal, should be taught by the State. It is her indefeasible right to teach them, as she cannot live with a citizenship uninstructed in them. This is the position for all Protestants to take in the present contest; none other is tenable; this is impregnable.

Third: All Protestants should resolve to decline any further appropriations of public moneys to their respective bodies or institutions. We cannot, ourselves, accept such appropriations without sanctioning a policy which, we clearly see, endows Popery, and endangers the Common School System. We must summarily estop this whole policy. It has been a stratagem of demagogues, chiefly for securing what is called the "foreign vote." That vote has become the most disgraceful feature of American politics. It has corrupted nearly all our municipalities; it is sapping our political morality; it is degrading us before foreign nations; it is oppressing us intolerably by the waste of the public moneys. Out of the $528,000 given to religious denominations by the city of New York the last year, more than $412,000 were given, as we have seen, to Roman Catholics. The donations to the Protestants are but a disguise of the enormous bribes given for the Catholic, the "foreign, vote." Protestantism should no longer consent to be so used and degraded in this political trickery. And there is no selfvindication for it but in an absolute renunciation of the whole policy of sectarian appropriations. It can live and triumph without them; better without than with them. It should not hesitate, then, especially in an exigency like the present.

Lastly: There should be an organized movement in defense of the Common School System. Conventions should be held at convenient points of the Commonwealth; the public journals should be forced by public opinion into the contest; petitions should flow into the Legislature demanding the maintenance of the State education, and the absolute cessation of sectarian appropriations of public money. The clergy have the best opportunity of initiating this movement. They should not hesitate on account of its probable connection with politics. They should be the more prompt, that their influence may be felt before the

The

subject becomes more immersed in the mire of party politics. The American pulpit was emancipated in the late anti-slavery contest, and it should stand fast in the liberty wherewith Providence has thus made it free. In the Colonial times, and in the struggle for our national independence, it was a power in the land. It abetted, and to no small extent guided, the Revolution that gave us our national existence. It subsequently fell aside from most public, or at least national, questions; and when it began again to speak on them in the abolition agitation, it was denounced by politicians as dabbling in politics, and for a long time was nearly suffocated by public prejudice; it persisted, however, legitimately claiming that all questions, involving Christian ethics, pertained to its function. It vindicated itself, and triumphed. It saved the Republic in the late war. Protestant ministry put the national flag upon its spires; it emptied its Sunday-schools of their young men for the army; its appeals aroused the country, and inspired the popular patriotism with irresistible moral force, while the charities of its Churches supplied the unparalleled beneficence of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions. Let it never again forget its relation to the public intelligence and morals. It could now do no better public service than to turn its every altar into a battery for the defense of national education. We are no alarmists; we have not shared, heretofore, in agitations against Popery. Taking those generalized views of its condition and prospects which have been stated in the introduction of this paper, we have seen no great danger from its religious schemes. But now that, commanded by the Vatican, guided by the Syllabus, armed with the new Bull on Excommunication, it is attempting to overthrow a fundamental interest of American liberty and civilization we see looming up one of the most momentous conflicts that has ever menaced the Republic-a conflict between its Protestant civilization and a foreign medieval hierarchy which controls the consciences of nearly one eighth of our population; the long and wearisome struggle between the past and the present which has so much wasted the moral and intellectual life of the Old World, transferred to the New. We fear not the issue, if we only prepare rightly for it. We see in that issue, as we have intimated, more results than the settlement of this one question. But the issue itself depends upon the

popular opinion, and the best, the most effective popular opinion depends upon the free Protestant pulpit of the land.

The country has a right to look to Methodism for pre-eminent service in this struggle. Leaders of other Protestant denominations have not failed to recognize in American Methodism a providential offset to American Romanism. Methodism is present every-where in the land to confront it, and can oppose to it superior forces. The Methodist Episcopal Church embraces but little more than half the aggregate Methodism of the country, but it, alone, reports a clergy numbering (aside from its Local Preachers) more than 8,700, while Popery reports its clerical force (of all sorts) at about 3,500. The Methodist Episcopal Church has 12,000 churches; Popery reports 3,900, and the most liberal calculation for its unreported churches gives it an aggregate of but 4,650. The Methodist Episcopal Church has a membership of 1,114,000; and estimating the non-communicant members of its congregations at three for every communicant, it has a population of 4,456,000; the general population of Popery is comprised in its membership, and cannot much exceed this number.* Add all the other American Methodist bodies to these statistics of the parent Church, (nearly doubling the latter,) and it will be seen that the country has, in Methodism alone, a numerical and moral force sufficient to withstand and overwhelm any opposing force of Popery in a contest which must depend on public opinion and legislation. Let Methodism, then, "move to the front" in this struggle for the national education. Let her speak for it in all her Conferences, pulpits, and journals, and array her whole people for its defense. If she does so, the general Protestantism of the land will follow, and the Papal conspiracy against American education and liberty will be defeated, and, we trust, finally and forever defeated.

*These Papal statistics are made out from Sadlier's Catholic Directory. The denomination does not report (for reasons obvious in the preceding discussion) very fully its statistics, and gives no estimate of its communicants or population. The best American ecclesiastical statistician (Prof. Schem) expresses "the opinion, based upon Reiter's German Catholic Directory, that the Catholic population of the United States numbers less than four millions."

ART. IV.-ON THE POWER OF MIND OVER NATURE.

[ARTICLE SECOND.]

IV. The power of mind to control the mechanical, chemical, and electrical forces of nature, and make them subservient to intelligent purposes.

The "properties" of matter, density and impenetrability, and the "affections" of matter, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion, may be regarded as natural causes of physical phenomena. The former are passive, (inertia,) the latter are active, (energy.) "Two classes of causes occur in nature, which, so far as experience goes, never pass one into another. The first class consists of such causes as possess the properties of weight and impenetrability. These are kinds of matter. The other class is made up of causes which are wanting in the properties just mentioned, namely, forces, called also imponderables."*"Forces are transformable, indestructible, and (in contradistinction from matter) imponderable objects." The forces which "affect" matter are the agencies through which mind operates upon matter-a sort of "middle term " between matter and spirit, and as such, largely under the control of the human will. Man, by his intelligence and liberty, can so collocate and adjust these forces as to produce new combinations and new results in the field of nature. He can handle, and decompose, and recompose the substances in nature; and he can set the forces of nature at work on new lines, and under new conditions, so as to produce something which nature alone could never have produced. Man does not, we grant, add new properties to matter, or create new forces; but he places these properties in new conditions, and he disposes these forces in new relations so as to accomplish the ends which he designs.

Consider how man controls and adjusts mechanical powers. We may take a time-piece as an illustration. The elasticity of steel, the power of the lever, the equal vibrations of the pendulum, are properties of matter. These properties would never have originated uniform motion, marking the flow of

* Mayer, in "Correlation and Consecration of Forces," p. 252. + Ibid., p. 345.

time without particular collocation and special adjustment. When this is intelligently done uniform motion is the result. Man does not create these mechanical powers, but he lays hold upon them, he controls and directs them, and he sets them upon a course which he designs. "He did not give elasticity to the steel, but he relates it to the other parts of the mechanism so as to give an impulse to the whole. He did not ordain the equal vibrations of the pendulum, but he placed it in that position where it restrains the movements of the wheels, and gives the machine a regular and uniform movement so as to divide time;" and in doing so he produces something above nature.

In the conversion of water into steam a certain mechanical force is developed. The amount of this force depends, however, on the resistance which is presented to the vapor. The expansibility of water, the power of heat to generate steam, the power of cohesion and resistance in iron, are all properties of matter. But these alone are not sufficient to develop a force which shall propel a vessel against wind and tide, and drive the railroad train on an horizontal or a slightly inclined plane. It is by a collocation of these forces that the steamengine utilizes power. The force which is generated by the conversion of a liquid into vapor, and the power of resistance in the cylinder and piston, are so adjusted to each other as to secure motion, and this power is connected with the "point of application" by a succession of levers which secures a series of increased velocities. The mere properties or forces of matter would never have produced these orderly and beneficial results were it not for an interposing intelligence ordaining conditions and relations in which they may operate in an orderly and beneficial manner. Nature, as Dr. Bushnell justly remarks, never built a ship, or a steam-engine, or a railroad carriage, or a printing press; all of which having been done by man, is something above nature. These, and similar events, all spring out of human liberty acting in and upon the realm. of cause and effect, and producing effects which merely natural causation could not produce.

The power of man to control the chemical forces in nature is well exhibited in the manufacture and use of gunpowder, by which he tears rocks asunder and hurls projectiles through the