and prejudice, upon the moral progress of mankind is, perhaps, nowhere more conspicuous than here; they have laid the pulpit under the most absurd restrictions and limitations; and hence its spirit has well nigh evaporated, and it has become almost a dead letter. The confined and technical character which belongs to the common administration of religion does more than anything else to disarm it of its power. The pulpit is the authorized expositor to men of their duties. Those duties, it will not be denied, press upon every action and instant of human life. But what now is the consideration which the pulpit generally gives to this wide and busy field of duty? Are not whole spheres of human action left out of the account? With the exception of some occasional and wholesale denunciations, are not business, politics and amusement passed by entirely? Are not men left to say, when engaged in those scenes,-"Religion has nothing to do with us here"? Do they not naturally enough feel that these engagements are, in a manner, set apart from all sense of duty? Is it strange that the public conscience is lax in these matters ? It is a hard measure that the pulpit deals out to these departments of life. It never recognizes them as spheres of duty; it does nothing for the correction or culture of men's minds in them; and yet, every now and then, it comes down upon their aberrations with cold, bitter and unsparing cen sure. No one will deny that the power of the pulpit is in itself very great, and might be made the instrument of incalculable good. Much of that power may remain unexercised, or be egregiously misdirected; but the character of its agency must ever continue a topic of deep interest to every friend of mankind: "The pulpit (in the sober use Of its legitimate peculiar powers) Must stand acknowledged, while the world shall stand, Support, and ornament of virtue's cause." Merely in virtue of his office and of the place which he occupies, the preacher is in possession of that respectful attention which anywhere else it costs long effort to obtain, even with the advantages of talents, information and character. The seriousness and sacredness of the clerical function tend to give weight and influence to the subject and sentiments of his discourse. And when it is considered that he possesses the incalculable advantage of incessant repetition, that he can add "line upon line, and precept upon precept,"—" here a little and there a little," until his object be fully accomplished, the influential character of his position becomes still more striking. Nor is this moral instrumentality circumscribed to a few; thousands possess and exercise it from week to week upon the most important portion of the community, -the most numerous, the most orderly and industrious, the most reflecting and moral classes. Sermons are to millions what reading is to thousands. The hearing of the former is to the uneducated their chief source of information on topics unconnected with their daily occupation; it is the most frequent and powerful impulse to thought which their minds. are in the way of receiving; it helps to fashion, more than anything else, their mental if not their moral characters. Hence the work of education is to a large extent in the hands of the preachers; and where it is not more directly so, still those to whom it is entrusted are subjected in a great degree to their influence. The greatest exertion is made, and generally with success, not only to instil into the minds of the young the belief of such doctrines as are deemed important, but permanently to influence their modes of thought and feeling. Now it cannot be gainsayed that this is a powerful machinery for good or for evil, and is worthy of most serious attention. Do the visible results of such an efficient universal agency correspond to what we might suppose to be its most judicicious working? If it be right to apply to the administrators of religion the test, "by their fruits ye shall know them," we must surely be compelled to acknowledge some great and mournful defect or error in their administration. In the words of an American traveller, when visiting Europe, we assert that "there is an amazing insensibility in the world "to the spiritual character of Christianity, which seems to 66 require some special reasons to account for it. And bad as "the case is in America, it seems to be considerably worse in "this country [England.] Whoever shall visit this, the most ww. 66 religious nation in Europe, will find an acknowledged "neglect of religion and laxity of morals among the higher "classes, an acknowledged ignorance of religion and inatten"tion to its rites among the lower classes; yes, and an acknowledged coldness and mercenary spirit among many of "the established clergy of this country, that will fill his mind "with painful emotions, if not with painful questions." Miss Martineau mentions the case of a clergyman from one of the southern states of the Union, who complained that during all the years of his ministry no token had reached him that he had impressed the minds of his flock, more or less. He did not know that any one discourse had affected them more than any other. Now, we will answer for it, this case describes the situation of some thousand preachers in this country. They preach on from year to year, without any sensible effect. The fault, we apprehend, lies here, that they proceed upon a wrong principle,-a principle, however, almost universally adopted,—that sermons, pulpits, priests, all the active agents that are labouring, or in any way concerned in the service of religion, are, by the nature of their objects and vocation, severed from the great mass of human actions and interests. The evil lies in a superstition, to use the words of an American preacher, " of believing that religion is something else than goodness." From this it arises that religious goodness is separated from active personal and social goodness. Pulpit-oratory has been too exclusively employed in speculations on the world to come, and on abstract principles of belief which are to carry us thither, losing sight meanwhile of our world of actual existence, when it is only by a proper discharge of the duties which the latter, in its manifold relations, throws in our way, that we can reasonably hope to enjoy the blessedness of the former. The question is, are we justified in believing à priori that men in general, by frequenting places of worship, become wiser and better? are they more informed as to the duties which they owe to one another, to society, and to themselves? and is the way to ascertain those duties cleared and facilitated for them by the ministrations of the pulpit? Are they instructed in what manner the performance of such and such moral obligations, and the avoidance of such and such errors, will tend to bring about a happier state of being, both as regards the community to which they belong, and themselves individually? As applicable to the general case, (there are no doubt many exceptions,) we have no hesitation in answering these questions in the negative. Let not clergymen, then, complain of the indifference of the people to their discourses; -the fault is in their own system. The pulpit is not-no, not in any country-answering the call which the human heart has a right to make upon it, and which the awakened mind of the world is now making with double earnestness. The efficiency of the priesthood, as it exists, is not commensurate with its power. In past times the prevalent modes and system of teaching Christianity had a certain adaptation to the ignorance, the barbarism, the low state of morals, and the perverted condition of society existing contemporaneously with them. They were some restraint upon vice. They taught man to think himself something more than a mere perishing animal. They had their mission and their day. But the time for those systems seems past or passing away. All great changes in the features or constitution of society brought on by the general progress of the human intellect, must be accompanied with a correspondent advance in religious knowledge, and the modes of its tuition and application. Changes are coming fast upon the world. In the violent struggle of opposite interests, the decaying links which have bound men together in the old forms of society, are snapping asunder one after another. Must we look forward to a hopeless succession of evils, in which exasperated parties will be alternately victors and victims, till all sink under some one power whose interest it is to preserve a quiet despotism? Who can hope for a better result, unless the great lesson be learnt, that there can be no essential improvement in the condition of society without the improvement of men as moral and religious beings; and how can this be effected but by the adaptation of religious truths to the wants of the age? It would seem from the practice being so universal, that the duty of a minister of religion is held to be indispensably bound up in giving his sentiments once or twice a week upon some passage of Scripture, often chosen at random from the Old or New Testament; a practice that elicited the ridicule of Voltaire, and not, perhaps, without some show of justification. The late Mrs. Barbauld, in her able remarks upon Gilbert Wakefield's pamphlet relative to social worship, notices this custom, and attributes to it in a great measure the vague and desultory manner in which the doctrines of religion are taught. She very justly observes, that a congregation may attend for years, even a good preacher, and never hear the evidences of either natural or revealed religion regularly explained to them: they may attend for years, and never hear a connected system of moral duties extending to the different situations and relations of life. This custom of prefixing to every pulpit discourse a sentence taken indiscriminately from any part of the Scriptures, under the name of a text, while it serves to supersede a more methodical course of instruction, tends to keep up in the minds of the generality of hearers, a very superstitious idea of the equal sacredness and importance of every part of so miscellaneous a collection. If these insulated discourses, of which each is complete in itself and therefore can have but little compass, were digested into a regular plan of lectures, supported by a course of reading, to which the audience might be directed, it would have the further advantage of rousing the inattentive, and restraining the rambling hearer, by the interest which would be created by such a connected series of information. She further suggests, that it might be desirable to join to religious information some instruction in the laws of our country, which are, or ought to be, founded upon morals, and which by a strange solecism are obligatory upon all, and yet scarcely promulgated, much less explained. The office of ministers of religion has hitherto been regarded as nearly confined, in their teaching capacity, to the expounding of the Bible. Now the Bible, it is true, contains a collection of the most important records in the history of man; and, in a general way, there cannot be a more suitable or authoritative rallying point around which we may gather to reap high religious impressions and a deep sense of duty. But it does not comprehend the whole history of man, nor does it contain all the abstract truths in reference to the human race which it is necessary to know. So that a thorough |