processes; and is, in particular, the growth mostly of his earlier years: so that there was entire sincerity, no doubt, in the protest which Dr. Noyes always made in behalf of his own Christian beliefs, in the more precise and technical sense in which his own generation had been trained; at the same time that he seemed to accept, with full hospitality and clear understanding, in his own mind, the critical results which with others led by a short and easy course to rationalism; nay, that he asserted for the School in which he taught, and for the churches to which he sent forth his pupils, the duty of tolerating and harboring results to which he never gave his personal assent. None of us who were present at it last summer can forget the striking scene, when, frail with the infirmities of age, venerable of aspect, keen, clear, and resolute of speech, the honored Professor sat, as the throng of friends, listeners, associates, and former pupils pressed forward to the sight of his countenance and the hearing of his voice, while, for upwards of an hour, he vindicated his own position as a Christian teacher, and the good name of his School, from the anxious suspicions and fears that had been publicly expressed. Liberty of thinking and liberty of prophesying, -— balanced by sobriety of judgment and reverence for Christian truth, — these were to him the conditions of all right theological culture, the fixed terms by which the School must stand or fall.*

There was an harmonious, almost a poetic, completeness in the work which Professor Noyes had sketched out to himself in youth, and which he left just in the last stages of fulfilment in the moment of his death. That which had been the special claim and motive of his assuming the last post of service assigned him, was his eminence as translator and expounder of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was only the poverty of equipment in the Divinity School, compelling one man to do the

It may be proper to say, that the article on the Cambridge Divinity School, which appeared in the "Christian Examiner" for September, 1867, was sub. mitted to Professor Noyes before publication; that some portions were inserted by his suggestion; and that all of it (except some trifling error of figures) may be considered as having the sanction of his authority.

work of two or more, that put in his charge the critical exposition of the New Testament. With the same caution, patience, unwearied industry, and steadiness of purpose that had marked his earlier labors, he set himself to the task of being master of this new field. With characteristic modesty and reticence, he has refrained from offering to the public any fruit from it that should not be fully ripe. Except the editing of a volume of essays of moderate size, compiled from the labors of European scholars, together with two critical Introductory Essays, and the completed and revised edition of his Old-Testament translations, which we noticed in this Journal a year ago,* we do not remember any thing that he has published during the long term of his connection with the School. As is already announced, however, to the public, he has finished and carried through the press, excepting the final revision of the last few sheets, a translation of the whole New Testament, which will be published in a few weeks by the American Unitarian Association, to whom the copyright belongs. We have no means at present of estimating, by way of anticipation, the merits of this the work of his maturest judgment and learning. That it will be a fit and worthy close to this record of modest and honorable labors, we are well justified to presume. From time to time, during this last year of his increasing infirmity and frequent severe suffering, we have found him, with diligent and cheerful patience, busy with this labor of love, which he knew would only terminate with his life. And, at the impressive scene of his funeral, among the large company of those who had known him in earlier life, or had honored him in his later teachings, it seemed only wanting, that, after the touching German custom, the still unfinished sheets, the trophies of an arduous and well-wrought service, should have been laid, as a fit memorial, upon his pall.

* See Christian Examiner, for July and September, 1867.

ART. VII.

LIBERALISM IN CHURCH AND STATE.

Faith and Freedom in America. Sermon at the Consecration of the Church of the Messiah, April 2, 1868. By Rev. SAMUEL OsGOOD, D.D., Pastor. With Address to the People, Order of Services, &c. New York: James Miller.

THIS discourse is both attractive by its title and interesting in its substance. It sums up the cheering lesson taught a cultivated Christian scholar, by a nearly twenty years' residence in our chief centre of population and wealth. While narrating the progress of liberal Christianity in New York, it sets forth, with a sanguine confidence rare in these days, the signs of promise for a faith at once liberal, positive, and ecclesiastical, in our land. Where many observers find division and discouragement, every thing, to Dr. Osgood, carries signs of hope. His cheerful and complacent eclecticism welcomes every form of church extension, every instance of denominational progress, every symptom of an active religious zeal, sure that it will contribute its share to that "broadchurch movement" which to him is the grand fact and the noble promise of the time. The decay of faith at least of that faith consecrated by tradition and organized in sects and creeds has been so often insisted on as a mark of this hasty, materializing, sceptic, and godless age, that the statistics he registers come upon one with a certain surprise. The increase of the Methodists, for example, within the century, "from 15,000 communicants to about 2,000,000, the Baptists from 35,000 to about 1,700,000, the Presbyterians from 40,000 to 700,000, the Congregationalists from 75,000 to 275,000, the Episcopalians to about 170,000, and the Catholics to about 4,000,000," is a striking refutation of assertions which have too often passed unchallenged. It is well to be awake to the actual signs of religious activity and progress in the old channels, however we may be convinced that free thought is carving new courses of its own. It is indeed "remarkable,

that, while the population has increased sixfold, the Churchmembership has increased over fourteen-fold; and that, while in 1800 there was one communicant to about fifteen of the population, in 1860 there was one to six." It is in the midst of energetic, wide, and hopeful activities of this sort that the new energies of a liberal faith are to be employed. The directions in which Dr. Osgood finds the symptoms that are to him so encouraging may be somewhat special and ecclesiastical; the view he takes of American society and the influences at work upon it may be ideal and clannish. But the testimony he gives, from his own point of observation, is one well worth taking heed of, in judging of so large and difficult a matter as the actual condition of religious thought over so vast a field.

But there are other judgments of the same facts from other points of view; and, for the sake of comparison, we will set one or two of them by the side of his.

The last North-American Review," for April, contains an article deserving the consideration of all thoughtful persons, not only because of the high source whence it comes, but because it represents the convictions which have been growing up among many of the most serious, devout, and highly cultivated minds of our own community. It sets forth that the Church, as we find it at this day, with its order of worship and its institution of preaching, is quite outgrown by the advanced intelligence of the time; that it is useful, no doubt, as a means of instruction and a spiritual help, to classes on a lower plane of culture or of inferior mental opportunity, but no longer serves to represent the best thought and the most enlightened piety; that the work it assigns its ministers — the routine of service, the elaboration of pulpit themes, the appeal to a comparatively low level of religious emotion — must be supplanted by a more practical and living work of intelligent charity, if it is to continue to meet the real wants of humanity; that, meanwhile, the more cultivated classes are getting more widely estranged from it, and cannot, in fact, be expected to give it their respect, sympathy, or help; in short, that intellectual culture has created and is widening a gulf between the average and the higher mind of the day,

which the established institutions of Christianity are no longer competent to bridge.

In the "Atlantic Monthly," of the same date, is a paper equally suggestive, telling, in that style of brisk and captivating narrative of which its writer is a master, the growth, the energetic activity, the wise organization, the unlimited and confident ambition, of the Roman Church in our American cities. According to its representations, that Church was never so active, so prosperous, so strong. Within the century, it has increased from one-fiftieth of a population of four millions, to one-seventh of a population of thirty millions. The charm of its service, the perfection of its discipline, the peace, sympathy, and comfort found in its faith, are winning multitudes to it every year. Its schools have just that balance of authority and freedom, its teachers just that mingling of dignity and familiarity, which win the imagination of children and the confidence of their parents. Its spacious and costly church-edifices are thronged with successive congregations,-numbering, in all, many thousands of worshippers in the same place, in a single day,— of which the poorest share the glory and pride of belonging to the august institution that sustains them, while the most refined are attracted by the majesty of their ritual; and the heavy cost of them is so wisely adjusted as to bear easily on all, while appealing to the devotion, generosity, and self-sacrifice of all. In short, there is presented to us the picture of the growth of a spiritual power on this continent, as vigorous and fresh as that which asserted its sway in Europe a thousand years ago; its roots branching wide and deep in the subsoil of our population; fast coming to outgrow and overshadow every other; claiming that, within seventy-five years, its authority in our republic will be unchallenged and supreme.

Here, then, a view is suggested that contrasts sharply against the cheerful and confident prospect offered us at first. The disjointing and sundering, by horizontal cleavage, into strata of intelligence, - implied in the two documents last cited, is a very different thing from the bland dream of an