mal or pernicious in popular ideas of spiritual agency. That instinct of our nature which recognizes the supernatural, cannot at least be quelled by any amount of mere denials, infidel or rationalistic. It is to be treated, not with forcible repression, but with wise and judicious guidance. That important service we claim to be rendered in modern thought and modern life by our theology. The remedy for superstition, of whatever sort, as regards the supernatural, is an intelligent faith.

IX.

DENOMINATIONALISM.

THE denomination is a very commonplace and familiar fact to us of the present age. So much so that to many persons it does not seem to occur to make it a subject for special consideration. Occasionally we find it alluded to in a way of reproach or objection. The Roman polemic, perhaps, cites it as proof of the discreditable and damaging divisions of Protestantism. The skeptic takes occasion from it, possibly, to urge that if there were anything in Christianity those who hold to it would find some way to agree better amongst themselves. The current phraseology often makes denominationalism and sectarianism interchangeable terms, and condemns both in one. Even members of the different denominations themselves, and ministers sometimes, seem, from the tone of their allusions to this subject, to admit what the critics thus charge; although it does not appear that their censure, or their criticism, like charity, "begins at home." How far is this view of the matter just? How far might facts in the history of this feature of our modern Christianity, and some study of the thing itself, qualify, or even correct these views of the Christian denomination as we find it to-day?

Defined.

In defining the denomination, we must The Denomination distinguish it in a certain way from state establishments. The distinction cannot be carried out fully, because in some cases, as in the French Protestant societies, the two forms of Christian organism may be said to shade into each other. Yet in the main the dis

tinction is a just one. A voluntary principle is implied in the

denomination which can of necessity have no place in religions established by law. Then, we are to distinguish between what we mean by a denomination and what we mean by a church. However the fact may be in conventional usage, there is no New Testament use of the term "church" which can justify the making of it synonymous with "denomination." The denomination is not a church, but an association of churches, at least of bodies bearing the church name. In the third place, it is not simply the agreement of any number of persons in certain opinions, however clearly defined or earnestly held they may be. By a denomination, therefore, we mean a combination or voluntary association of Christian societies, characterized by certain common peculiarities as such, and united together in some kind of organic relation. This organic relation may of course be quite various, as in fact it is. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians follow very different methods in this regard, yet they are each the voluntary association of Christian societies, mutually resembling in doctrine and in organization, and held together by some sort of denominational organism.

ern Age.

We must notice, further, that the dePeculiar to the Mod- nomination in this sense is a peculiarity of the modern age. The sects of primitive Christianity could not properly be characterized as denominations; they lacked those organic features essential to this form of Christian association. So far as we are aware, they had respectively no common bond save their agreement in doctrinal or speculative belief, or in certain ritual practices and observances. Neither should we term the dissenting sects of the Middle Ages denominations. The mutual association here, also, must have been loose and uncertain. The denomination in that perfected form which has been such a marked feature of the modern Christian age, came into existence along with the growth of free thought, and with the assertion and maintenance of religious freedom in general. This fact at once affords us a suggestion as to its nature. Where some authority, whether it be hierarchy or magistracy,

imposes opinion, prescribes belief, and permits Christian organization only under certain fixed forms, you may have a papacy, you may have a State religion, but you cannot have such an association of Christian societies as we now speak of, framed after some model freely chosen and seeking common ends of growth and upbuilding by methods freely adopted. As might have been expected, when Christian men found themselves in a position to think, to speak, and to write freely, and at the same time earnestly, they found themselves differing. Differences crystallized in organizations; and thus we have the organic distinction in question.

Found Mostly among the English-Speaking Peoples.

It is a noteworthy fact, too, that this form of Christian association, in its proper sense, exists mostly amongst English-speaking nations. Lutheranism, wherever it exists in Europe, is a State religion, and is no more to be called a denomination than is Romanism itself. In France the National Reformed Church, as also the Lutheran Church, as existing in some parts of the republic-as it is now-are in such a way recognized and supervised by the State that they also may be said to be, although not in a very strict sense, State religions. Much the same thing we should say of the Calvinism of Holland. Wherever upon the continent of Europe, or anywhere else in the world, save in Great Britain or America, incipient denominations are found, they have been introduced there by English or American missionaries. The denomination, we may then say, in that perfected, efficient form of it which we find in this country and in Great Britain, is a product of that organizing faculty so notable in the races chiefly occupying those countries, acting upon differences of faith and practice which resulted from the exercise of religious freedom, won after a hard struggle, though not always by any means wisely used.

Its Origin.

We shall hope that it may not seem a far-fetched or an artificial view of the sub

ject, if we say, first,-in allusion to what has just now been stated, the fact that the denomination is so much limited to

English-speaking peoples,—that for the original source of this feature in what we may call, though not with entire accuracy, our Anglo-Saxon Christianity, we must go back of what is distinctively religious. The Christianity of the Englishspeaking races is characterized in much the same way as their national life. The representative principle is government in modern times originated with them, and among them alone has been consistently developed and applied; for we do not yet know what French republicanism is to end in. Even when our ancestors dwelt in the forests and fens of that bleak southern shore of the Baltic, their government was a representative one; and when they had conquered England, they reëstablished there a like method of representative rule, which even the feudal system introduced by the Normans could not wholly crush out. Mr. Green, the historian, very justly says of those remote ancestors of ours:1 "In their villages lay formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day "; and we may add, the America of to-day. He makes it very clear how the essential principles of the English constitution, after which in some degree our own is modeled, were carried over to England by the rugged men who won that coveted island from the Britons, and that these principles have their root in the very nature of the AngloSaxon man. Through all the vicissitudes of English history we find especially the principle of self-government asserting itself, so that even when the feudal yoke was heaviest, the Englishman, even down to the serf, rebelled against the idea that he could be any other than free-born, or that any man, noble or king, could have a right to put a collar on his neck and claim as a slave.2

This same feature constantly reappears in the religious history of Great Britain. The papacy never succeeded in establishing the same supremacy there as on the continent. The Latin races yielded to its claims a submission to which the

166 History of the English People," i. 8.

2 Gurth, in Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe," is in this respect a representative Saxon man.