Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029478520 Cornell University Library BX9843 .J96 Church in a series of discourses / by S olin 3 1924 029 478 520 THE CHUECH: A SERIES OF DISCOUESES, Eet. SYLVESTER JUDD, PASTOR OF CHRIST CHURCH, AUGUSTA, MAINE. "In promoting the infiuence of Christianity, the main duty of an enlightened Christiaa at the present day is to labor that it may be better understood ; and the views and results to which a few intelligent scholars may have arrived must be made the common property of the community." — Andrews Norton. BOSTON: CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY, lU Washington Stkeei. 1854. Ilntered aecordiug to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, by Ckosbt, Nichols, and Company, in tlie Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 31? 7, 53B X oaubbidge: metoalp and compant, peintbes to the dnitiebiiy. EDITOR'S PREFACE. The publication of this volume of Sermons is the result of several considerations. The one which I have felt to be most important, and. which is entirely- proper to be stated here, arises from the fact that the author himself intended to give some or all of them to the press, in connection with others on kindred topics, which he was expecting his clerical brethren in Maine would contribute to the object he had in view. This purpose appears in a letter which he ad- dressed, about a month before his decease, to his highly valued friend. Rev. Cazneau Palfrey, of Bel- fast. In it he writes as follows : — " It has seemed to me that we ought to publish to the world some of our Church principles, views, and plans. There is a spirit of inquiry awake, yet there is hardly a printed word that can be got hold of. Our own people, no less than others, need to see the thing in print. It is matter to be pondered. The IV PREFACE. 'Report' of our State Convention at Portland* does not explain itself to anybody. I am sorry no ' notes ' accompanied it. " I propose that there be published a book of this sort : ' The Church : in a Series of Discourses, by several Clergymen of the Unitarian Church of Maine.' I am willing to take all the risk of publication. What I want is, that any of us, whose minds have been exercised on the subject, should give the public a Discourse upon it, — you take up one point, I anoth- er, and so on. I want we should show a kind of organic, unitary front. For my own part, I have several Discourses which I might put into such a volume." I have no special clew to the particular sermons which Mr. Judd regarded as best expressing the views he desired to commend to general notice, and I am not sure that my selection is such a one as he would have made for himself. Still, I feel no hesi- tation in offering the following Sermons to the public, as I can hardly be mistaken in supposing they come fuU^ within the scope of the plan indicated in the letter from which I have quoted. They appear to me to stand symmetrically around the central point of interest, and I believe there will be found in them * See Appendix, Note A. PREFACE. a unity and logical connection with each other, and an exactness of statement and fulness of illustration, quite sufficient to enable the general reader to under- stand the author's true position on the topics which he has treated, and to take from every fair-minded person all excuse for any misapprehension or mis- representation of his general drift and real aim. While they are eminently didactic in their character, they are yet wholly unambitious in style, and were, in fact, prepared and delivered in the usual course of ministerial labor. But the earnestness and pro- found sincerity of their tone are calculated to fix the attention, when once enlisted, on the great theme which he discusses, and hold it until the whole series shall be perused. Such, at least, is the hope in which the volume is now committed to the pub- lic. JOSEPH H. WILLIAMS. Augusta, January 6, 1854. CONTENTS. SERMON I. PACE CHRISTIAN BAPTISM .... .... 1 SERMON n. GOSPEL CONVERSION 15 SERMON ni. CHRISTIAN OBLiaATIONS TTNIVERSAL 29 SERMON IV. WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 48 SERMON V. BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH 61 SERMON VI. THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY THE FAMILY AND THE STATE 83 SERMON VII. THE CHURCH HBREDITABLB 103 via COIfTENTS. SERMON VIII. WE SEND CHILDREN TO HEAVEN, BUT DAEE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE OHUECH . . .' 139 SEEMON IX. CHILDKEN TO BE COMMUNICANTS 149 SERMON X. EDUCATION, CONSIDERED AS THE GEEAT CHRISTIAN LAW . 178 SERMON XI. " WE THI^K IN WORDS " 199 SEEMON XII. THE SABBATH SCHOOL . 225 SERMON Xni. . THE COMMUNION 239 SERMON XIV. THE gospel: good NEWS TO ALL PEOPLE .... 255 APPENDIX 273 SEEMONS. SERMON I. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. I INDEED BAPTIZE TOU WITH WATER UNTO EEPENTANCE ; BUT HE THAT COMETH- AFTER ME IS MIGHTIER THAN I, WHOSE SHOES I AM NOT WORTHY TO 33EAR : HE SHALL BAPTIZE TOU WITH THE HOLT GHOST, AND WITH EIRE. — Matt iii. 11. My subject to-day is Baptism. I purpose to ex- plain the meaning of that which so often appears in the New Testament under this name. I venture to affirm that Christian baptism, that is, the baptism introduced and enjoined by Christ, imports a cer- tain spiritual effect, and not a watery appUcation ; that the essential idea of the term is spiritual ; that the use of water is non-essential. " Baptizing with fire " signifies the cleansing, puri- fying, enlightening, beautifying nature of Christ's baptism, its vivifying and ennobling power. It is represented by fire, says Adam Clark, " because it was to illuminate and invigorate the soul, penetrate every part, and assimilate the whole to the image of God." The Fathers abound in gross and fanciful conceptions on the subject. Origen and Lactantius supposed there was a river of fire, like the Phlege- 1 2 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM thon of the heathen, through which men were to pass. Chrysostom approaches a more reasonable view, when he says the word denotes the superabun- dant graces of the spirit. " He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." The definite article is wanting in the original of the text. The term " Holy Ghost " in many cases in the New Testament means holiness, or the conjoint product of man's spirit and God's spirit. He shall baptize you with holiness and with lire, is a form of expression which gives some idea of the purport of the passage. " It is impossible," says Dr. Furness, " to convey the full force of this word Ghost or Spirit in a translation. The original word is more comprehensive than the word " Spirit." It signifies also air, wind ; and the meaning of John is, " Water is the symbol of my office, but the power of him who is coming after me may be signi- fied by far subtler and more searching elements, wind and fire." The spirit of the passage, then, I take to be this : He shall baptize you with that which is holy and pure, with that which cleanses and refines, elevates and sanctifies. 1. Our text, then, affirms that Christ's baptism was spiritual, and not aqueous. I indeed baptize you with water, but he that cometh after me shall baptize you with something else, " with the Holy Ghost and with fire." John, the forerunner of Christ, practised water baptism. Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, went out to him, and were baptized of him in Jordan. Yet he says. One mightier than I approaches, one whose CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. shoes I am not worthy to bear, one so much superior to me that I am not fit to perform his most menial offices. I indeed baptize you with water, but he shall give you a loftier baptism, " with the Holy Ghost and with fire." He expressly distinguishes Christ's baptism from his own ; he characterizes it as something greater; nay, his language is pointedly significant of the fact that Christ's baptism is not of water, but of the spirit. Whether John be deemed capable of forming an infallible judgment in the case, is a point I shall not discuss. The mothers of John and of Jesus were cousins, and for some time abode together. Even if we suppose John to have been without the aid of supernatural grace, still he had the means of knowing much of Christ. Doubt- less they often visited each- other, and became ac- quainted with each other's character and purposes. John ingenuously owned the superiority of Christ, and fully testified to the greatness of his mission. He felt that Christ's baptism would as greatly excel . his own, as the endowments of the Son of Mary were diviner than his. Let me refer to the striking lan- guage which he uses. " After me cometh a man which is preferred before me, .... and I knew him not (i. e. as the Messiah) ; but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water. But he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me. Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." John, it will be observed, takes ex- treme pains to distinguish Christ from himself, espe- 4 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. cially in this matter of baptism. He speaks of him- self continually as a Water-Baptist, and, sets Christ in contrast as a Spirit-Baptist. He signalizes Christ as " he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." He does not call him by name, but speaks of him as " a man," and then distinguishes him by the unique and exalted title of Baptizer with the Holy Ghost. 2. In the second place, I point to the example of Christ. He never practised water baptism. " Jesus himself baptized not," is the unqualified declaration of the Evangelist. Christ did not baptize John, but John baptized Christ, that is, with water. John wished Christ to baptize him, but he would not. To none of his disciples, to no one even of the twelve, nor to Martha or Mary, did Christ ever apply the baptism of water, either in the way -of sprinkling, pouring, or immersion. He did, indeed, employ a kind of baptism, but what was it ? A baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire, a baptism of the spirit, an effusion of spiritual influences, an immersion in Light and Love. Again, in the interval between the resurrection and the ascension of our Lord, he addressed his disciples in this wise. Bidding them to wait for the promise of the Father, he adds, " For John truly baptized with water ; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence." Here is the same dis- tinction pointedly maintained between John's bap- tism and this other; between water-baptism and spirit-baptism. The occasion was Christ's last inter- view with his disciples ; he was soon to leave them in this world for ever. He does not say, " Now let CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. O me baptize you ; you need to be sprinkled or im- mejcsed ; I have never performed this rite on you ; you are yet unbaptized." No. But he says, John indeed baptized with water, but you, my own disci- ples, look for a higher baptism ; in a little while that higher baptism shall come. " Ye shall be baptized ' with the Holy Ghost not many days hence." Could language convey in stronger terms the great idea that Christian baptism is with the Holy Ghost and not with water ? 3. Again : I maintain the doctrine of this dis- course from the language of St. Peter and the con- duct of St. Paul. St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, says : " I thank God that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gains, and the house- hold of Stephanas ; besides, I know not whether I baptized any other. For Christ sent me not to bap- tize, but to preach the Gospel." Paul was the first teacher of Christianity in Corinth ; he founded a church in that city ; he made many believers ; yet it appears he baptized no more than four or five ; he asserts that baptizing was not a part of his commis- sion ; he avows not only an indifference to that rite, but^even congratulates himself before God that he had not practised it, declaring that he has higher ends in view. Can we do otherwise than conclude, from this, that water-baptism was in Paul's mind of small account ? Of St. Peter, we may say that he appears not to have entertained a perfect conception of Christ's spiritual baptism till after his remarkable vision mentioned in Acts x. In the accjount which Peter gives of this event he says. Moved by the 6 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. heavenly voice, I went to Cesarea, to the house of Cornelius the centurion, " and as I began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the begin- ning. Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water ; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost." It seems now for the first time to have dawned upon Peter, that the real baptism was of the spirit, a baptism of the soul rather than of the flesh. He begins to realize the full import of our Saviour's words. 4. In the fourth place, I would refer to a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer exhorts us to leave certain things and go on unto perfection. These certain things are denominated in our version " principles of the doctrines of Christ," or, literally, " the word of the beginniisg," by which is intended the rudiments, the a, b, c of religious attainment. Among the things we are to leave is " the doctrine of baptisms." Whether this signifies what we now understand by sprinkling or immersion, it seems im- possible perfectly to ascertain. Yet something of this sort I think is hinted at. If this be so, we are admonished to leave it (baptism) as an inferior good ; to drop the subject, and go on to perfection, to some- thing higher and better. 5. But, however this may be, manifestly the gen- eral drift of the Gospel is spiritual, and not mate- rial ; it opposes the supremacy of form, and favors the inward life. " In Christ Jesus neither -circum- cision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature." This is a cardinal maxim of Chris- CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. 7 tianity, and is as applicable to baptism as to any thing else. What circumcision was under the old dispensation, baptism was liable to become under the new. In fact, it did proceed to occupy the same place. As, among the Jews, one could not be saved unless he were circumcised, so it came to be a received doctrine of the Church that one could not be saved linless he were baptized. Water-baptism has been counted regenerative, a grace-conferring ordinance, a specific antidote to the malady of a corrupt nature inherited from Adam. Such is the doctrine of the Romish Church, the Church of England, and some others. But the spirit of the Gospel is quite opposed to all such conclusions. As Paul lightly esteemed the rite of circumcision, so he never suffered baptism to occupy in his mind an important place as part of the Christian economy. " I thank God," he says, " I baptized none of you, save " — as many as he could count on the fingers of his hand. 6. I derive support to the doctrine of this dis- course from the nature of things. It cannot be, I think, that the application of water to the body should have a saving efficacy on the soul. If the blood of the altar could not cleanse away sin, neither can water from the brook. Sin is of too fast a color to be washed out by such a process, and holiness is of too spiritual a nature to be generated by such ap- pliances. It is in the light of such considerations as I have now enumerated, that I interpret certain expressions of our Saviour. I refer to the commission he gave to his disciples, " Go, teach all nations, baptizing 8 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost " ; — and to that other passage where he says, " He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved."- Did our Saviour, by these expres- sions, positively instruct his disciples to practise water-baptism, and condition salvation thereupon ? Why, then, I ask, do we so soon find St. Paul thanking God. that he had baptized none? But more ; is such an idea consistent with other undoubt- ed points of character and of conduct in our Saviour ? Can it be supposed that he who broke through all forms would have made everlasting consequences to depend on a momentary and evanescent application of water ? If water-baptism were essential, why did he never practise it?, If he meant that his dis- ciples should immerse or sprinkle all nations, why did he never immerse or sprinkle any ? But what does Christ mean when he uses the word " baptism " ? In every instance, so far as the present subject is concerned, where, from the circumstances of the case, his language is determinable, he speaks not of water- baptism, but of something very different. " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I strait- ened till it be accomplished." " With the baptism that I am baptized with, ye shall be baptized." " Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost." Surely, Christ's use of the word Baptism is obvious enough. And when he says to his disciples, " Go ye, there- fore, and teach all nations, baptizing them (not in water, but) in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost " ; when he declares, " He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," — CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. 9 it is spiritual baptism that he means. " I delegate you to carry this baptism over the world. Immerse mankind in the divine flood. Pour on them the waters of the heavenly Jordan." Thus far we have been considering the meaning of Gospel baptism, or the baptism of which Christ speaks. We now approach the subject under another aspect, and we observe that while, in the great com- mission given by Christ to his disciples defining the nature of their future labors, the idea of spiritual baptism is mainly contemplated, still the Apostles and others, after the death of Christ, practised water- baptism. Of this there can be no question. While we are positively told that Christ did not practise it, and Paul but rarely, and while we feel assured that the great Gospel baptism is a baptism of the Holy Ghost, we have still something to say and somewhat to allow concerning water-baptism. Christ did not condemn it. He himself, in his own person, received it. Some of his immediate disciples resorted to it. It was very early adopted as a regulation of the Church. True, there is no positive command for water-baptism ; true, also, that with the rite many things have been associated that disgust a liberal, and shock a rational mind ; but, nevertheless, I think there is a solid and a reasonable basis for it, espe- cially as applicable to our children. I think I see a reason for the practice in its his- tory ; and yet, there are few customs or institutions the origin of which is so wrapped in obscurity as this. This much, however, appears, — that baptism, as a religious rite, has been observed in all times, and 10 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. among almosf all nations. It existed before Christ ; it was anterior to Moses. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans practised it, and it prevailed among the Mexicans and Peruvians. John the Bap- tist did not originate it, for it was in extensive use among the Jews prior to his day. Baptism, the sa- cred use of water, an external application to signify an inward purification, would seem to be one of the natural instincts of the human mind. It is in allu- sion to this universal custom, that John most perti- nently says, " I indeed baptize you with water," but Jesus comes, who will baptize, cleanse, and purify your souls ; he will scatter among the nations that divine truth which, as a flood of baptisn;al water, shall wash their sins away. It was in accordance "With this universal custom, that, without any explicit declaration on the subject by Christ, it was universally introduced into the early Church, and has continued as a part of the ecclesiastical ceremonial to this day. Baptism, or the ritual use of water, is the sign of purification. How then, it may be asked, does it apply to children, since it is not pretended among us that they are defiled, on the one hand, or cleansed by it on the other ? Admitting its suitableness for one of mature years, who has repented of his sins, or who seeks by resolution and effort for illumination and perfection, still, as children do not fulfil these con- ditions, what is its significance when applied to them ? I answer. Baptism is not, indeed, a sign of the purification of children, who have never sinned; it is a sign of that purity into which it is hoped chil- dren may grow. It is a sign of that perpetual purity CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. 11 which ought to reign over the heart and the conduct of childhood. We have a remote antiquity in favor of infant baptism, as well as its authority for much superstitious practice. As I have already said, water-baptism has been counted regenerative, — held to be a grace-conferring ordinance. Water ap- plied in baptism was thought to purge the stains of the Fall and to insure salvation. In Scotland, a few yqars since, unbaptized children were supposed to wander in woods and solitudes, lamenting their hard fate, like the souls of unburied Greeks on the banks of the Styx. In the North of England it was deemed unlucky to go over the graves of the unbaptized. But all these things we wholly discard. It is as an act wherein parents consecrate their chil- dren to God and the Church, as a pledge wherein they resolve to train them up in the way of Christian obedience, as an earnest and foreshadowing of that ultimate and greater baptism with the Holy Ghost and with fire, that infant baptism has its chief in- terest for us. Here, as I conceive, are the vital bear- ings of the subject. It is an ordinance whereby the important relations and duties of the Church are signified and recognized. It is the seal of the cove- nant which the Church makes with its children. It expresses the interest which the Church has for the little ones, and foretokens the protection it would ex- tend over them, and the blessings it would bestow upon them. The question is not, then, what good a sprinkling of water will do the children, or what harm will ensue if they be not baptized ; it is rather the greater, 12 CHKISTIAN BAPTISM. the morp momentous question, What will the Church do in behalf of these new heirs of immortality, these raw empirics in human experience ? It matters not how young a child may be, or how imbecile, or how unconscious ; we take it, helpless, idealess, sleeping it may be in its mother's arms, and baptize it into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Such, I say, is what the Church pro- poses to do. Such, at least, is my idea of what the Church ought4o do ; such is the standard of obliga- tion it should erect for itself. It, thus, would enter into covenant with the children ; it would cast its wise restraints about them; it would shield them with its most maternal love ; it would guide them to their eternal rest. The Church has many things to deal with, many concerns to look after, but the gravest of its cares is the welfare of its children. It is quite as well, nay, it is far better, that one should be young when he is baptized. Very young children do not understand the Sabbath, its nature or its uses, and yet we rejoice to have them feel its sanctity, and be subdued by its repose. So in re- spect of many things we do for them, or by which we would affect them, they are unconscious of the significance or the motive of our conduct. What- ever is done systematically and permanently for chil- dren usually takes its start below their consciousness, and gradually rises to it. As I would have a person young when he begins to acquire knowledge, or when he commences a course of virtue, so I would have him young when he is baptized ; that is, I would not have a child continue in ignorance, nor CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. 13 addict himself to vice, before in these respects coun- teracting influences should be gathered about him ; nor would I have him live in sin, no, not for an hour, before he should be surrounded by the salutary forces of religion and brought within the jurisdiction and wardenship of the Church. What in this matter have we cause to deplore ? This : that the mind and heart and strength of the Church have been engrossed with an outward, mate- rial ceremony, whereon Scripture delivers itself some- what ambiguously ; while there has been a sad for- getting and neglect of the inward, spiritual ceremony, whereon the letter of Scripture . is so precise and authoritative, " I indeed baptize you with water," — we read so far and stop. We crowd about John, as if he had uttered words on which hung the doom of the universe ; we ask who, what, where, when, how? " Shall little children be baptized ? " " No," cries one party, " it is ludicrous, it is absurd." " At what age, then ?" " With how much water ? " " By dripping or by dipping ? " The whole Christian world is con- vulsed. But what says John? I baptize with water, indeed ; let it pass for what it is worth ; but he, my superior, he into whose shadow I so soon shall fall, he, your Saviour and Redeemer, shall bap- tize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire. But in spite of this, we follow the waning disc of the de- creasing John, hunting for the pools of Enon, pry- ing along the reedy banks of Jordan, anxious, prayer- ful, seeking for depth of water wherein to lay our bodies. Christ, the increasing, the dilating one, who mounts upward, beckoning us on, who would bap- 14 CHRISTIAN BAPTISM. tize US in the sun, who would pour on us floods of empyrean light, him we forsake and despise ! But there is a spiritual baptism, to which we ought to aspire. " Baptized into Christ." " Baptized with the Holy Ghost." This is peculiar language. The formula, "baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," means not merely christening or taking upon one's self the Christian name ; it signifies this higher baptism. We are bap- tized into God, as we are into Christ. Not merely is the name of God a portion of the formula, the Spirit of God is the transfusing element. In true baptism, the font is not hewn out of marble or fabricated of silver. Our baptistery is the universe ; the baptismal flood is God, and Christ, and the Holy Spirit. We are plunged in the mighty influences of truth. It is a fiery baptism, — one that melts and refines us ; one that sheds warmth and vivacity through our souls ; one that disperses the darkness of the mind, and gives rest and peace to our natures. In that gor- geous lustre and radiance which burns on cloud- tops, and streams along the sky at sunset, I baptize my soul. In that diviner light, in the beams of the Sun of Righteousness, in the very brightness of the Father's glory, I baptize my soul. Daily as the sun baptizes the earth with light, yearly as it baptizes it with verdure, so ought we to be baptized with the beauty of the Son of God. Whatever we may think about water-baptism, let us not forget the bap- tism with the Holy Ghost and fire. Let us con- tinually strive for the baptism of Christ, even as Paul did for his resurrection. SERMON II. GOSPEL CONVERSION. CAST TE TIP, CAST TE UP, PREPAHE THE WAT, TAKE UP THE STUMBLING-BLOCK OUT OP THE WAT OP MT PEOPLE. — Isaiah Ivii. 14. There are many stumbling-blocks in the way of duty. As the true idea of the soul, of Christianity and the Church, begins to unfold, these stumbling- blocks are developed more and more. One hin- derance to doing what we ought to do for the sacred interests to which we all are nominally committed, lies in that frequent phrase, " I am not a professor." There is still another, which lurks in the feeling or notion that one has not been converted. There are multitudes who will not do any thing for God or the Church, on the ground that they have not been converted. Let us examine what this ground is, ' how good it is, how substantial. Those who occupy it are not bad men, vile, cor- rupt, impious. I take it, all who plead this excuse would repel such an imputation. The simple idea at the bottom is, " I have not been converted." What is this being converted ? What is the force 16 GOSPEL CONVERSION. of this idea ? How far does not being converted, in the sense attached to that word, furnish a reasonable disqualification for duties that lie before us ? Is not the logic of the phrase chargeable with incoherency ? If a man who has neglected duty hitherto, now per- forms it, is he not a converted man ? Is there any sense in saying you will do your duty after you are converted? Are you not converted in the very act of undertaking to do your duty, or in passing from a state of indifference to one of interest ? What is the meaning of the word " conversion " ? It is turning, or turning round. It is the Latin form of the Saxon expression to turn. It signifies to turn from one state or condition or mode to another. The corresponding Greek word means this, and no more. The original word in the New Testament is translated, indiscriminately, to turn, and to be con- verted. In the expression, "the dog is turned to his vomit again, " precisely the same word is used (eiricnpe^a, a-Tpe(j>co) as where it is said^ " When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren," or " Let your laughter be turned (be converted) to mourning." In this passage, " Jesus turned him about in the press, and said. Who touched my clothes ? " the same word is used as where we read, " He which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death." Our Lord turned, was converted, and looked upon Peter. Throughout them all, the word is the same. Paul asks, " How tu^n ye again to the weak and beggarly elements ? " how are ye converted ? And from this it appears we may, in Bible language, be converted or turned from good to evil, as well as GOSPEL CONVERSION. 17 from evil to good. Not only is the whole man spoken of, in the New Testament, as turning, or being con- verted, but parts of a man are thus spoken of. Paul speaks of some who turn away, convert, their ears from the truth. Some in their hearts turned back again, were converted, unto Egypt. Again, we read that Mary turned herself back and saw Jesus, convert- ed herself. Jesus turned himself about, was convert- ed. " If the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it. If it be not worthy, let it retu/rn to you again." Here we get a very precise idea of the word. So the unclean spirit is represented as saying, " 1 will return into my house whence I came out." " Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes." " And the shepherds returned, glorifying God." " Ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned [converted] unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls." Again, this verb is almost always active in the original, where it is passive in the translation. This people have closed their eyes, " lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and should be converted" (eTTto-T/aeilroxTt), literally, should turn, or return, " and I should heal them." " If thy brother trespass against thee seven times a day, and seven times a day turn again to thee [be converted to thee], thou shalt forgive him." " Repent ye, therefore, and be converted," return, turn, or convert yourselves. Indeed, I do not recall an instance where the verb in the original has the passive form. But the translation sometimes gives the word in the active sense of the original. Thus : " Many of the children of Israel shall he 2* 18 GOSPEL CONVERSION. [John] turn [convert] to the Lord their God, and he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias to turn [convert] the hearts of the fathers to the children," &c. " And all that dwelt in Lydda saw Eneas, whom Peter had healed, and turned unto the Lord." " And a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord." Paul says : " We are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn [be converted] from these vanities unto the living God." It is possible, according to the word of God, for one man to convert another. The commission to Paul was in these words : " I send thee to open the eyes of the people, and to turn [convert] them from darkness to light," " Brethren," says St. James, " if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him, let him know that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins." This is the way the matter stands in the Bible. And now, in the light of divine truth, I ask again, "What is the meaning of the pretence that a man cannot do his duty to God, to his own soul, and the Church, until he is converted ? Men are sometimes likened to sheep going astray. What language shall we use to them ? What shall they reply to us ? Suppose we say, " You ought to be in the fold, you ought to go back to your Shepherd," shall they reply, " We know it, but we cannot do so until we are convert- ed " ? What is going back but conversion ? Sup- pose we say, " Instead of continuing to go on in this way, you ought to turn back and go home." If they, GOSPEL CONVERSION. 19 owing to some deep, inveterate prejudice, fail to per- ceive the equivoque in the words, " We cannot turn back until we are converted," we should have to ex- plain to them that these two ideas are identical. As the Apostle says, " Ye wgre as sheep going astray, but are now returned [converted] unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls." The allusion, the import, and application of the language in the Bible are exceedingly simple. You are turned from an object, you turn towards it and are converted ; as Christ turned (literally, converted himself), and looked towards Peter. You are going a wrong way, you turn and go a right way ; you are converted ; as the sinner is converted who is turned from the error of his way. You have neglected your affairs, you now attend to them ; you are con- verted. You have been indifferent to truth, you be- come interested in it ; you are converted. Summarily, conversion, according to Bible lan- guage, is doing the very thing which you say you must be converted before you can do. Conversion does not lie anywhere between a man and his duty. Whoever faithfully fulfils his duty, having once neg- lected it, is a converted man. '' Conversion " does not express what a man is, or what happens to him, but -what he does. Invariably, I believe, it is re- ferred to by the sacred writers in an active sense. Suppose now, to begin at the very quick of relig- ion, you do not love God, your heart is estranged, you are carnally-minded, you are the servant of sin ; how does the Bible and common sense address you in such a case ? It urges you to love God ; it ad- 20 ' GOSPEL CONVERSION. monishes you of your serious duty. Do you say, you would love God, and be a disciple of Christ, if you were only converted? The very act of loving God, the very first recognition of Jesus as your Lord and Master, is conversion ; it is the essence and ful- filment of that very thing. If you do not love God, and presently begin to love him, that is conversion, it is turning your heart to him ; it is obedience to the exhortation, " Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die ?" If you have been sceptical, faithless, heartless, cold, in regard to Christ and the Church, and hence- forth become a believer, a lover, and a doer in these regards, that again is conversion, you become a con- vert. Multitudes think or feel that they cannot pray, or it is no duty of theirs to pray, or it is not expected of them to pray, till they have been converted. The fact is, if you- have hitherto neglected prayer, turned your back upon ^t, and now turn round, if you now begin to pray, you thereby become converted. There is no mystery in conversion, so far as the Gospel is concerned. It is a matter of common sense, of every-day life, of familiar experience. Christ and the Apostles employ the word in all manner of connections, and for all sorts of purposes, and with the utmost freedom. It is, as you see, a common word in the Bible, just as much so as turning, or going, or looking, or moving. There is no theo- logical, occult, polemic word Conversion in the Bible. It is used indiscriminately of one who turns from duty, and of one who turns to it. It has just as many uses as the word turn has, physical, moral, secular, religious. There is just this differ- GOSPEL CONVERSION. 21 ence ; the verb " to turn " is active-transitive and active-intransitive, as when we say, " a man turns to go home," or " a man turns a wheel" ; whereas the verb "convert" is used only in an active-transitive sense, as thus : " a man converts ice into water." We do not say, a drunkard converts to temperance, but are obliged to employ the passive form of the verb, and say, a drunkard is converted to temperance. But the Greek verb, eVto-T/je'^w, is employed, just like our verb to turn, in an active-transitive and in an ac- tive-intransitive sense. Yet in rendering this word "convert" instead of "turn," the translators resorted to a less flexible word, and one that without an ob- ject must always- be used in the passive voice. So they represent Peter as saying, " Repent and be con- verted," and Christ as saying, " Except ye be con- verted," while in reality the former says, " Repent and return," and Christ says, " Except ye return." Out of this grammatical peculiarity has the mis- take, in part, arisen, under which the subject labors ; and this contributes likewise to uphold the dogmatic error that man is passive in conversion. It is preached everywhere, in elaborate churches, in ves- try-rooms, in school-houses, in camp-meetings, that men must be converted. I affirm that that is not what the Bible teaches. The language and doctrine of the Bible are, that man must return, or turn about. On this difference of phraseology depend most sin- gular results. The two words have very different meanings, and theologically speaking this difference is of a rather formidable nature. What is sin? What is man ? What is religion ? What is to be 22 GOSPEL CONVERSION. looked for in the matter of salvation ? These and similar questions are involved in this discussion of a word. Is sin, as the English Church maintains, the corruption of our nature, naturally engendered from Adam ? Or is it, as the Bible says, a trans- gression of the Divine law ? If the former, then con- version is a passive state, a supernatural effect ; a man is converted, he does not return. If the latter, then conversion consists in obedience to the law, it is ceasing to do evil and learning to do well. Is sin an act, or is it a mode of our natures ? Is it volun- tary or involuntary ? Is man as a sinner responsible or irresponsible ? Does a man sin in Adam, or in himself? We do not hesitate on these questions, we have no doubts whatever on the subject. God has revealed the truth to his own Church. Most strik- ingly, most wonderfully, most providentially I might say, does the examination of Scripture serve to con- firm all the fundamental views of the Church. The deeper we pursue the inquiry, the more light from the great central luminary is derived to our foregone conclusions. The moment we leave the pathway of creeds and formulas of human device, and come where God himself speaks to the children of men, then do we discover what the essential truth is. No ; conversion is a returning, mark the word, a returning; a going back to something we have left, a recovery of an old position, a resumption of what we have neglected. Jesus says, " Except ye be convert- ed," — that is, except ye return, turn about, go back, — " and become as little children, ye cannot see the kingdom of God." The child's nature is not corrupt, GOSPEL CONVERSION. 23 it is not a vicious condition of being engendered of Adam ; it is pure ; it is free, I mean, from the stain of sin; and we must return to that simplicity and innocence, that our souls may be saved. This is what Christ teaches. This is what we believe. This is the doctrine of the Church. Conversiori, then, in its, highest sense, is the return- ing of the soul to its God, of the child to its Father in heaven, of the wanderer to his home. Repent and be converted ; repent and return. By repent- ance and humiliation, every sinner can and must re- turn to his God. All this, you say, is obvious and satisfactory. What is the difficulty ? This is it ; that, as regards many of us, the effect of our early education cleaves to us, the errors with which the very atmosphere round about is saturated influence us, the popular prejudices on the subject are imbibed by us, and when a man is spoken to about his duty to God, his own soul, and the Church, instantly a feeling arises which says, " Why, I have never been converted ! " or, " If I had been converted, you might expect such and such things of me." The effect is like poison taken into the system, and a long time will be neces- sary to purge it away. This prejudice, or sentiment, whatever it be called, is sometimes hallowed by the memory of parents who believed very differently from what we can believe ; it is associated, perhaps, with some of the tenderest and most solemn recollections of our life. Sometimes, when it has been hammered into us by some powerful sermon we may have heard, it has become like a goad fastened by the 24 GOSPEL CONVERSION. master of assemblies. Our nerves, or our strength, are not sufficient to rise to the simple Gospel point of elevation, where we can see that conversion is doing the will of God. There is another matter in this connection which occasions difficulty, — a dread of what the world will say. If one of you should undertake a religious duty, the question would be asked, " When was he con- verted ? " Or perhaps the whisper would go round, " I never heard he had met with a change ! " Or, " Do they allow unconverted people to engage in religious duties ? " The fear of man bringeth a snare, and the dread which I speak of fetters many a foot, and smothers many an utterance. Again, there are those who contrive to comfort themselves with the idea, that, as they never have been converted, nothing is expected of them, and who hope to live along without reproach from others or remorse in their own souls. While you really be- lieve one thing, you practise another. Your rational, sober belief is, that conversion is. doing your duty; your practice proceeds on the principle, that you can- not do your duty until you are converted. This idea of conversion that is so prevalent, that is even lodged in your own feelings, is not a Gospel idea, but a Calvinistic figment. And let me say, you never can be Calvinistically converted, for the reason that you do not believe in Calvinism. , You practise Calvin- ism every day ; I mean, you proceed on the idea that nothing in a religious way is to be expected of you until you have been converted. But that sort of conversion the men and women here to-day will GOSPEL CONVERSION. 25 never reach, go where you will, and hear whatever preaching you may, for the reason that in your own minds you do not, and never can be made to accept the dogma on which it rests. No, you will go on just as you are now going, through life, from this to your dying day, with the light of evangelical truth shining full upon you, but with your feet at the same time cumbered with the miry clay of error and prejudice, unless by some immediate, vigorous, and as it were, revolutionary decision, you break the spell that binds you. I remark, as regards multitudes of young men and women, and older men and women, in the sects about us, and all over the State, that they are waiting for this supernatural conversion ; they are waiting for it, they are doing nothing themselves, they have no en- joyment of God, they have no assurance of hope, they enter upon no religious duties, they accept no responsibilities as immortal beings. Religiously speaking, they are wasting, dissipating, losing the best portion of their lives, and all because the time of their fancied conversion has not yet arrived. Some of them live in sin, commit all sorts of vice, under the vain notion that this something called conversion, in a revival or at some other juncture, will supervene, and then they will not want to sin, then they will come into the Church, leave off bad habits, and enjoy a pure life. Such a conversion as they dream of may possibly happen to them ; but, as I have had occasion to re- mark, the instances are becoming fewer and fewer all through the country. And what, erelong, must the 3 26 GOSPEL CONVERSION. issue be ? That there will be no religion at all ? Assuredly Calvinism is losing its force upon the public mind ; certainly Calvinistic conversions are diminishing. When there shall be no such conver- sions, what then ? What, I ask, will become of our young mea and women, and our older men and women ? My reply is, that the platform of the simple Gos- pel is broad enough to receive thern all, and strong enough to hold them all. They will yet find, as I hope and pray, that being converted, in the Gospel sense, is radically and simply a turning unto God. The Church, the true Church, the Church that has the seven golden candlesticks blazing with light, must develop itself, extend itself, lengthen its cords, and strengthen its stakes, that it may receive into its bosoni and enfold the multitudes of the bewrayed, the estray, the forlorn and lost, who may flee from error, cant, and formality, and desire a shelter. The two notions of the innate corruption of hu- man nature and of miraculous conversion are actu- ally consuming the religion of New England; I mean, they are filling our cities and towns, our churches and families, with those who believe they have nothing to do with religion or the Church except in that mysterious ccmtingency to which I have ad- verted. God gives it to us, ray friends, — reverently and without presumption, yet positively, I say it, — God gives it to us to rescue and preserve the religion of our country. The Church, God's own Church, that which is the pillar and stay of the truth, that which invokes reason and common sense, (without GOSPEL CONVERSION. 27 which religion cannot stand up long anywhere,) which allies itself to humanity and cleaves to the simple word of God, — in a word, the true Church) is our refuge and our hope. My friends, let us listen to the message God ad- dresses to us. " Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumbling-block out of the way of my people." The stumbling-blocks in the way of truth are obviously such as error puts there ; the stumbling-blocks in the way of our individual prog- ress in truth are such as a false education has placed in our way. One of these obstacles is that which I have now commented upon, that one cannot do his duty until he is converted. Let us, my friends, re- move it out of the way. " Not being converted " really exempts you from no duty, discharges you from no obligation, gives you quittance from no com- mandment ; no, not for an hour. If you are a sinner before God, your duty is to leave off your sins and turn to. or be converted unto God. If you do not pray, your duty is to pray. No plea of non-conver- sion can excuse you for an instant. If your child runs into the street, and you send for him to come back, does it content you that he replies, " When I am converted, I will go back " ? You send him to school, and he plays truant, and wanders down to the river. When one speaks to him, and urges him to return to school, shall he take refuge in the same preposterous reply ? And yet that reply is no whit less absurd in respect of religious duties than it is in the cases just supposed. Nor do we misconceive conversion, we understand 28 GOSPEL CONVERSION. it ; nor do we pervert its meaning, we elucidate it ,' or rather, by applying ourselves to the simple word of God, we discover and learn what it is. This ex- plains what I have elsewhere said about Unitarian- ism being the true interpreter of the Bible. It gets just as near to the mind of Christ as it is possible to do. It goes to the original media of expression ; it compares passage with passage ; it follows a given word from book to book. Having heard Christ use a phrase once, it stays near him and waits until he uses it again, and then it betakes itself to Paul, to be sure of the sense ; and thus, simply, humbly loving the truth, it is impossible that it should not know the truth. My friends, to use no harsher epithet, it is a shame that rational, immortal beings, men and women with religious natures, a religious sense, religious needs,, should be embarrassed in the discharge of their du- ties, hindered from the accomplishment of their des- tiny, spoiled of their highest happiness, by these pitiful pretexts. Let us feel, let each man, woman, and child feel, that we have something to do for God, our own souls, and the Church. Let us be ready to do that something to-day, or any day, as opportunity offers, or call upon us shall be made. Let us remem- ber that conversion consists in doing our duty ; that we are being converted just as far and as fast as we^^ do our duty ; that there is no conversion, and never can be a genuine conversion, while a man neglects to do his duty. SEEMON III. CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVEESAX. EOK THE KINGDOM OP HEAVEN IS AS A MAN TRAVELLING INTO A FAR COUNTRY, WHO CALLED HIS OWN SERVANTS, AND DELIV- ERED TJNTO THEM HIS GOODS. AND UNTO ONE HE GAVE FIVE TALENTS, TO ANOTHER TWO, AND TO ANOTHER ONE ; TO EVERT MAN ACCORDING TO HIS SEVERAL ABILITY ; AND STRAIGHT- WAT TOOK HIS JOURNEY. — Matt. XXV. 14, 15. I MIGHT refer for my text to the entire passage which I read to you this morning. In it are con- tained the thoughts on which I propose to dwell, and the doctrine I would inculcate. In the parable it is stated that thef servants were held responsible, each according to his ability. The word " talent," which in the original means a sum of money, may be considered, in its spiritual applica- tion, to denote in general terms our duties ; and it is a principle at once of Christ and of common sense, that duty devolves to every man according to his ability. It is sometimes common to regard talents in the light of powers, gifts, endowments ; that is, means of performing our duty. But this seems to confound them a little with the ability or capacity according to which they are distributed. Perhaps both ideas are to some extent involved ; and the 30 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. term may stand for faculties to be improved, as well as duties to be fulfilled. The'language of the text is, " The Lord called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods ; and he gave to every man ac- cording to his several ability." The ability was the basis, the measure of the trust. The ability in each case determined the ratio of his bounty ; the bounty was not arbitrarily bestowed, and then regarded as a criterion of ability. No man is accountable for what he cannot do. No man is accountable beyond the strict limit of his ability. The doctrine of the pas- sage is, to be a little more specific, that every man is responsible to God and to his own soul ; that relig- ious, moral, and other duties devolve to every man, according to his several ability. The passage reads, " The kingdom of heaven is as a man," &c. These words in italics are not in the original, but are supplied. Better, perhaps, say, The Son of Man is as a man travelling into a far coun- try, &c. This would be more appropriate, I think. Christ, so to say, has gone on a journey. He leaves his goods, his effects, his interests, his schemes and purposes, in the hands of his servants. He delivers to us duties, work, commands, according to our sev- eral ability ; to one ten talents, to another five, to another one ; to all, something. If we are right in supposing that the parable refers to men generally, our statement broadens into this, that Christian du- ties devolve to every man, according to his ability. Let us look at this determining test, the hinge on which our duty is made to turn, this ability. Ability may be considered as made up of three CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 31 parts, or resolvable into three elements, intelligence, capacity, and opportunity. Perhaps more things may enter into its composition, but these three are certain and enough. There must be intelligence, or the knowledge of what duty is; capacity, or the power of performing it ; and opportunity, or the oc- casion and . call for it. If one have these three in combination, he would seem to be sufEciently fur- nished unto all good works, unto all that God or man can demand of him. Our formula, then, may be thus expressed : man is responsible according to his intelligence, capacity, and opportunity. Consid- ered as moral and religious beings, our moral and religious duties are as our intelligence, capacity, and opportunity ; as under the Christian dispensation, our Christian obligations are in the same ratio. Reflect on what is here involved. Our responsi- bility and duties before God are not proportioned according to any arbitrary judgment of our fellow- men, or any conventional standards of society. They do not devolve to wealth alone ; the poor man has high obligations as well as the rich. They are not laid upon mental force alone ; the man of mediocre mind is equally accountable with the manof gigantic intellect. Only some have ten talents to deal with, and others but one. Again, our duties are not deter- mined merely by the intelligence we possess, but also by our capacity. Nor are these alone to be consid- ered; thereto must be added opportunity. A man may clearly see that certain things ought to be done, and yet have no power to do them. Or, the under- standing and the power may entirely fail of results, by reason of a want of occasion or call. 32 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. Especially I would observe, that our moral and religious accountableness is not graduated by pro- fession. The Lord, in the parable, divided what may be called his capital among his servants, not ac- cording to the professions any of them made, but unto every man according to his several ability. So are we all accountable before God. So are moral and religious duties, so are Christian obligations apportioned amongst us, to every man, woman, and child, according to our several ability. Such I un- derstand to be, such I insist is, the rule of Christian- ity and of common sense. Let us apply it, — apply it to ourselves and to the community about us. A difficulty appears at once. The general senti- ment and practice have transferred and confined the obligation of religious duties to a limited portion of the population. In other words, the world about us is divided into two classes, one of which assumes, while the other deems itself exempt from, the high- est duties of human existence. The former is a small company, the latter comprises the great body of our citizens. Herein is a singular condition of things. Let us examine it for a moment. That which characterizes these two classes is, for the most part, what is popularly known as profession of re- ligion and non-profession. Or, the first are techni- cally church-members, and the last are noh-church- members. The sentiment or notion to which I refer is, that the highest human obligations before God, religious duties, Christian accountability, devolve solely to the comparatively small fraction of the community called professors of religion. I observe, CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 33 moreover, that this is an ecclesiastical novelty, a notion somewhat peculiar to New England. The origin of it is to be found in the dogma that all men, by nature, are totally depraved, but that in a few men this depravity is in some supernatural way cured. Hence the people of any given locality be- come separated into two classes, the naturally irre- ligious and the supernaturally regenerate. Those whose innate depravity has been cured make a pro- fession of the fact, or of their hope of the fact; thence the distinction of professors and non-profes- sors. Thus sprung up this sweeping characteriza- tion of the human race. In its peculiar features, and such as we ourselves have been familiar with, the system is about a century old. It is sometimes said to be of no consequence what a man's speculative notions are. But this purely metaphysical abstrac- tion of total depravity lies at the very bottom of the sentiment and usage to which I have adverted. You all know how the case stands. Go back in memory to the village where you were brought up. There were the professors and the non-professors; in other words, " the Church," so called, and the world. The professors were supposed to be in the sight of God the good people, and the others the bad. The professors had hopes, the others had none. Call to mind the universal, deep-seated, positive popular expectation and feeling that these profes- sors alone should partake of the Lord's Supper, that' they alone should have their children baptized, that they only should pray in their families and in private, that they should attend and generally speak and pray 34 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. in religious meetings, that if any one would study for the ministry, or go forth as a missionary, or become a deacon, or undertake any religious office, he must be a professor ; and, negatively, that these men must not use profane language or dance. Nay, more- Was it not in your younger days, is it not now everywhere hereabout, the expectation, feeling, senti- ment, deep and irresistible, that those others, the non-professors, would not partake of the Sacrament, or have their children baptized, or pray in their families or in an evening meeting ; that no one of them would for a moment think of filling the office of a deacon, or of studying for the ministry, or of embarking on missionary labors ? I do not mean that a non-professor was positively enjoined not to pray, but would it not have been thought passing strange if the mass of the people, the non-professors in your native town, had adopted regular habits of family prayer? But as for certain kinds of recrea- tion, you know these were, for the most part, abso- lutely interdicted to professors, or at least were re- garded as matters of reproach and discipline when indulged in by professors, while for a non-professor to practise them was thought nothing of. Will it be said that this distinction of professor and non-professor implied a real difference in char- acter, in heart and life ; that the first was truly a saint and the last a notable sinner, the first really a good man and the last really a bad man? Is that the fact? Are New England professors of religion the really good men of New England, and are non- professors the really bad men? I am aware that CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 35 here I come close upon a disputed dogmatical ques- tion, and I grant that a fancied real distinction has something to do with this outward nominal distinc- tion. But go into any community where this eccle- siastical classification prevails, and will you hear any one saying, " Why! Mr. is a good man, and therefore I wonder he does not attend the prayer- meeting ! " Is not the wonder and the reproach more often this, — " He is a professor, and therefore he ought to attend the prayer-meeting " ? This distinc- tion, the basis of this expectancy, is not that some men are really good, and therefore should do thus and so, and the rest are really bad, and therefore it is of no consequence what they do ; it is simply pro- fession and non-profession. The mere fact that a man is a professor, not that he is really a good man, determines at once the popular expectation in regard to him. So, I say, speculative theology, here in New England and elsewhere, divides the human race. Consider now the operation of such a division on the exterior and interior religion of New England. These professors, or converted men, as they were reputed to be, were supposed to have joys and hopes that others had not. They were addressed from the pulpit differently from others. They were deemed to be God's elect, and called God's people. When they died, it was presumed they went to heaven. All outward religious duties and privileges devolved to them, such as prayer, communion, bap- tism, &c. They constituted the Church. Presently they began to assert some special rights. They claimed the exclusive right to choose and settle the 36 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. minister. But the others, the non-professors, had to help pay the minister's salary. Hence a dispute arose between them. The professors, commonly called the Church, yielded so far as to say, " We will nomi- nate the minister, and you may have a voice in his election." In the case of Brattle Street Church, Boston, now Unitarian, the non-professors went to the point of insisting that, as they were equally in- terested in the minister with the rest, they would not only vote in his election, but they would have an equal voice also in his nomination. And it has since come to pass in all the Liberal churches of New England, that professors and non-professors unite in the choice and settlement, as well as the maintenance, of the minister. This ecclesiastical distinction was one of the causes of the rise and development of denominational Liberal churches in New England. After Whitefield's time, professors began to tighten the reins, and to insist more strenuously than ever on their prerogatives. It was asked by them, — and on the common Calvinistic ground there was much pertinence in the question, — "Why should sinners, unconverted, depraved, and vicious men, be allowed to choose a minister? How could they undertake to determine who should dispense God's message? And gradually the non-professors began more and more to be excluded from all voice and influence in church affairs. In some instances in Massachusetts, as members of the parish they actually outvoted the professors and bore them down; but in other cases the professors got the upperhand and drove CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 37 off the non-professors. The upshot of the matter was the fixed establishment of distinctively Liberal churches. Several of the older Massachusetts Uni- tarian churches sprung directly out of this oppug- nance between professors and non-professors. In some cases the non-professors withdrew and formed congregations, settled pastors, and sustained Chris- tian-ordinances of their own. I am aware that what is called the ecclesiastical history of New England does not state the case just as I have stated it, but such, nevertheless, is the actual truth. I pass to the more impressive fact already inti- mated, that the entire catalogue of vital and practi- cal religious duties was lifted wholly from one class, and left resting wholly upon the other; the thing was as palpably, as clearly done, as if I were to take this Bible from one side, of the desk, and lay it over on the other. Nobody was expected to pray, to be in the habit of prayer, except professors, or the so-called Church. I dp not say that all others were forbidden to pray, but nobody else was expected to pray. I am certain of this, that not only was no one expected, but no one was allowed, to partake of the communion, except professors. It was so in respect to manifold other duties. The great majority of people virtually relapsed from all sense of their Christian and religious obligations. Now, what is presented in all this but a direct impugnment, rejection, and overthrow of that cardi- nal principle of Christ, and of common sense, that Christian and religious duties are imposed and rest upon all men, according to their'several ability ? I 38 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. know of nothing in any country or age, under any form of reKgion, Heathen, Jewish, Mohammedan, or Christian, like this, which, in its most striking de- velopment, we behold round about us, — that the per- sonal, private, peculiar obligations of religion are thought to pertain to only an insignificant fraction of a given community. The public ministrations of religion, possibly, may be in some cases more select, and ecclesiastical functions more sparingly bestowed, but not the personal and familiar duties of religion. According to this order of things we have all been educated ; in it we have received our nurture and ad- monition ; it is a part of. our personal history ; it is cradled among our instincts and sentiments ; the great majority of even this congregation are at this moment under the E^lmost despotic control of this marvellous hallucination. Yet nature struggles against it, — our riper reason is against it, — all laws of human association and the general law of human happiness are against this anomalous, monstrous di- vorce between professors and non-professors. Un- derstand me, my friends ; I say nothing against the propriety or advantages, or even duty, of making a formal avowal of religious faith. That may be well. I am only undertaking now to exhibit the lamentable fact, that, while all the highest obliga- tions before God, all religious and Christian duties, devolve to every man, professor or non-professor, according to his ability, yet here in this community all such duties are distributed according to pro- fession. It may be one of our duties to make such CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 39 a profession, but even that duty is to be discharged according to every man's ability. It was not enough that mankind had been voted depraved and natu- rally averse from religion, but the clergy, the divines, the learned theologians, have deliberately taken from them a sense of the obligations of a religious life. But many things, I say, are against this divorce, and tend to promote a reunion. A hundred years ago, professors tried to keep aloof from non-profes- sors in the matter of choosing their ministers ; but in many churches they came together, and I believe there is not now a church in this State that would venture upon calling or settling a minister without free and full consultation with what it pleases to call the world. So in forming a parish, erecting a meet- ing-house, providing for support of ministers, there is at this day no recognized distinction between the two classes. Converted and unconverted men are seen wending their way to the house of God in com- pany. When it is desirable to sell pews, I believe the money of an impenitent sinner is as readily ac- cepted, if not as highly esteemed, as that of a regen- erate man. In the matter of Sunday schools, al- though it is generally desirable, yet it is not always the case, that the Superintendent is a professor. In respect to the teachers, I believe they will be usually found to consist of both classes, and as for the schol- ars there are rarely any professors among them. In missionary movements, so far as its pecuniary basis and general home management are concerned, no discrimination is made. Non-professors attend the monthly concerts of prayer, the names of non-profes- 40 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. sors may be found in the lists of members and sub- scribers. In rural gatherings, Sunday-school celebra- tions, parish meetings, the Church and the world meet on equal footing. It is no uncommon event for a professor to marry one who is not, and clergymen are nothing loth to sanction this vital, indissoluble compact between parties, one of whom they, theoret- ically, believe to be wholly corrupt, a child of the Devil, and the other they presume to have met with a change, and to be a child of God. I may observe that the family to a very considerable extent serves to confound and annihilate this ecclesiastical dis- tinction, inasmuch as under the same roof, around the same table, and in all that belongs to home, and its sacredness, depth, and beauty, professors and non- professors are everywhere mingled in together. In raising funds for the endowment of theological schools, no such distinction is kept up. In all that pertains to the personal comfort or necessities of the minister and his household, men of both classes pro- miscuously are seen to engage. What I have mentioned are some of the religious relations in which the Church and the world of any given parish are found to unite.^ I need not say how in benevolent and philanthropic enterprises they are mutual helpers and co-workers ; in efforts for reliev- ing the poor, in the temperance reform, in behalf of peace and universal emancipation, they all move together. But it is of what belongs peculiarly to religion that I would chiefly speak. And I observe there is an increasing tendency to a reunion between professors and non-professors. Is there any harm in CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 41 this ? Does the Church lose any thing thereby ? Is sound piety endangered ? Is the Church coming down to the world, or the world rising up to the Church ? In the opening of this discourse I stated what Christ had laid down for us, as the great law of hu- man obligation, in respect of what is highest and holiest; that in every man duty is proportioned to ability. I have taken an historical review of a portion of Christendom, and shown how this law has been set at naught, and how it has been attempted to segregate a class of men on whom peculiarly and solely these obligations should rest. I have said how, in process of time and in the providence of God, even these inveterate distinctions begin to give way, and that all classes are found coalescing more and more in certain religious relations. I am now prepared to make a seasonable, and I trust an ef- fective, application of the doctrine of the text. I see, my friends, how you are situated. I know how most of you have been educated. I can allow for all the subtle influences that are biasing at once your nature and your reason. I have spoken of cer- tain things, perhaps some will deem them among the lesser and unessential things, in which the world actu- ally does unite with the Church. Shall we stop there ? Shall we carry the healing process no further ? It may be God will carry it further in spite of us. A few years since, when professors, as I have said, would not permit non-professors to have a voice in the choice of a minister, those very non-professors drew off and built a meeting-house and settled a 4* 42 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. minister for themselves. It may yet happen that non-professors will withdraw and set up a commun- ion-table likewise. But that is not exactly the point I am concerned about, as I fear it is a result of which there is little hope. The danger is rather in an opposite du'ection. While indeed many things indicate that non-professors are awakening to some sense of their duty and privileges, I fear they will stop far short of their whole duty. But ought there not to be distinction between professors and those who are not, between church- members, so called, and the world, so called? I am not now discussing that question, nor am I obliged to notice it, except to observe that this is not a happy way of propounding the true question. Our modern notions of the Church and church-membership are wholly foreign to the New Testament. But as to the practical effect of the distinction, it was well tested some years ago in the matter of settling min- isters ; let those renew the experiment who will. Refuse to give a man a voice in the choice of his pastor, and then go to him with the subscription- paper. Nay, to be consistent, having refused his vote, refuse also his subscription, and finish up, con- summate the desired distinction, by shutting him out of the meeting-house altogether. Let not the un- converted appear in the assembly at all! Thus the separation of the Church and the world would be complete ; then it would be seen at a glance, who were Christians and who were not. But see how this distinction has actually disappeared in the Sun- day school. There you will find unconverted per- CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 43 sons, non-professors, the world, teaching the Bible to the children, some of whom-, it may be, are them- selves church-members. There is the duty of prayer. Respecting this there may be a diversity of gifts. All persons cannot lead in miscellaneous social devotion. In this, as in many other cases, some have ten talents, some five, others only one ; but to each man is the talent or duty al- lotted, according to his ability. Take, now, a case like this. A non-professor gives money to the mission- ary cause ; at the monthly concert, prayer is put up in its behalf ; it is customary to pray for success to the end and for a blessing on the means. Now is it not absurd to imagine that a man may give money for a religious object, and yet have no power to pray for a blessing on what he does ; absurd to suppose that God will accept a man's pecuniary offering and not his prayers ? I lay it down as a rule, which I think no reasonable man will wish, and no bigot dare, to dispute, that whenever and for whatsoever a non- professor, a technically unconverted man, may bestow pecuniary aid, then, and for just that, he not only may pray, but he is bound to pray. And as to speaking in social religious meetings, the same law applies. It is not the peculiar duty of professors of religion to do this ; it is every man's duty, in proportion to his intelligence, capacity, and opportunity. Then as to miscellaneous Christian duties : to let our light shine, to overcome evil with good, to love God and oflr neighbor, to be renewed in the spirit of our mind, to put away lying, to be humble and sub- missive, to edify one another, to repent of sin,— 44 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. these, and more that I might name, all belong to every man of us, according to our ability. They belong to no set of men, but are equally imperative on every man in Christendom, who has intelligence, capacity, and opportunity therefor. The text, to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, ordinarily preached to professors, is as applicable to one man in a Christian land as to another. "We are all called of God and to God. We are called to virtue, to holiness, to Christ ; and we are every one of us bound to honor our vocation according to our several ability. There is the duty of the baptism of children ; where in the Bible is it said the children of profes- sors shall be baptized ? If it is one parent's duty to have his children baptized, it is th& duty of every other. It is the duty of every man according to his ability. If you can understand l^his rite, if you be- lieve in it, if you have a proper sense of it, you cer- tainly have the capacity and the opportunity, and it becomes your duty, to conform to it. There is the sacrament of the Lord's Supper ; we know about this ; we know how it is viewed ; but can you show me the least warrant for the prevailing scruples? can you show me one line of Scripture that limits this ordinance to a scant and select por- tion of a Christian community ? Christ says, Do this in remembrance of me. Can you tell me why it is ray duty to thus remember him, and not yours ? " O, but you are a professor ! " It is not one whit more my duty than yours. Have you intelligence, capacity, and opportunity therefor? Answer me CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 45 that. Therein is contained the key to your duty in this matter. You see, my friends, where the application of this subject brings us. I have no ' design in what I say to inveigh against any body or any thing ; my sin- gle aim is to rectify the conditions of religious ob- ligation. I wish to snatch a burden that has been unnaturally and unwarrantably laid upon a few, and distribute it amongst all. Granting that certain people have taken upon themselves these duties, they have no right to any exclusive distinction thereby. The mass of our people, like serfs in despotic coun- tries, like slaves in our own, under the present sys- tem have grown supine, dull, indifferent to their duties, privileges, and obligations. I would arouse them to a sense of what they are losing. I would kindle them, so to say, to some purposes of rebellion against this usurpation. I would incite them to the resumption of their God-given prerogatives. A pro- fessor of religion has no more right, and is under no more obligation, to pray, to have family prayer, or make public prayer, than you. Each one of you has the same right, and is under the same obligation, to do so. I care not what the clergy may say, — I care not what the popular sentiment has sanctioned, — I care not what the prevailing custom is; it is all wrong, — wrong before God, wrong in the light of the Bible, a wrong to our deepest convictions. In the eleven years that I have been pastor of this church, I have never yet preached a discourse solely and pointedly to technical professors, as such ; and for the reason, that every obligation that rests upon 46 CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. them, rests with due weight upon every man in the parish according to his ability. Every man of us is bound to live well, not according to his profession, but according to his intelligence, capacity, and op- portunity. Here is a poor person to be relieved, a sick man to be prayed with and comforted^ a vicious man to be reformed ; it is not the professor's duty to do it solely and exclusively, it is every man's duty according to his ability. The great mass feel that they have nothing to do but sin ; they are not expected to pray, they may not commune, they may not participate in the public exercises of religion, and so they are left to abide in their sins. Yet out of the goodness of their hearts they come with their money, and ask to be permitted to pay a little to- wards the church expenses and the church needs, and their money is always well received. Bad, most bad, most unchristian state of things ! Let us do what we can to change it. Will you, each one of you, my hearers, ponder upon the great truth of this discourse, the weightier truth of Jesus ? Need I say, that nature does not discrimi- nate among us, whether we are professors or not ; the season smiles, and the harvest ripens, for us all alike. Neither does the discipline of life discriminate ; — temptation, sadness, and woe overtake us all. Neither does sickness discriminate, nor the grave. Neither will the Judgment discriminate. The simple question of that day will be, Have we the talents committed to us, ten, five, one ; and have we been good and faithful servants oyer them ? God is going to reap among these non-professors, just as surely as he will among CHRISTIAN OBLIGATIONS UNIVERSAL. 47 the professors. And he has sown here, too; for eleven years at least, may I not say, his truth has been sown in all your hearts. God is going to gather among these n on -professors, just as much as among the pro- fessors ; and he is not a hard man, reaping where he has not sown, and gathering where he has not strewed. He has been sowing and strewing here now these many years. O, will any one of us be the wicked and slothful servant ? Will we imitate his conduct and invite his doom ? SEKMON IV. WHAT IS THE CHUECH1 THAT THOtr MATEST KNOW HOW THOU OUGHTEST TO BEHAVE THYSELF IN THE HOUSE OF GOD, WHICH IS THE CHUKCH O! THE LIVING GOD, THE PILLAR AND GROUND OF THE TRUTH. — 1 Tim. iii. 15. The Church, the Church of God, the Evangelical Church, the Holy and Apostolic Church, — what is it ? where is it ? who is it ? There is the Greek Church, prevalent in Greece, Turkey, Russia, numbering seventy million souls ; is that the Church? There is the Roman Church with one hundred and twenty million adherents, the English Church and its branch in this country, the Church of Scotland, the Nestorian Church, the Lutheran Church, the Abyssinian Church ; are any of these, or all of them, the Chutch ? The Church is the pillar and ground of the truth. Are these the pillar and ground of the truth ? The Church is that by which the manifold wisdom of God is made known, according to_^the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. In this sense, are these the Church ? Are they the body' of Christ, or that of which Christ is the head, which is the Church ? WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 49 For the sake of convenience, and according to the natural laws of language, we apply the term church to a variety of things, as to a building, to a sect organically considered, to a body of professors. But the New Testament does not state the thing in this way. According to that, the Church is a body, com- prising men, women, and children, of which Christ is the head. " Christ is the head of the body, the Church." The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church ; and he is the saviour of the body. ,There is no such language in the Bible as mem- ber of a church. According to the evangelical idea, we are members of Christ. " Ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular." " For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church : for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones." " Know ye that your bodies are members of Christ ? " Again, we are members, not of a church, but of one another. The allusion in the Bible is not to a body politic, or to a body corporate, but to the body vital. The reference is strictly an anatomical one. Here is a structure, an animal organization, like to our own bodies, of which Christ is supposed to be the head, the brain, the heart; and we are members, as hands, feet. This is the Gospel idea of the Church. Let us suppose a living organism to pervade crea- tion, so far as intelligent beings are concerned ; veins and arteries of spiritual life flow back and forth through the whole ; as respects man and the 5 50 WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? earth, Christ is the head of that body, and we are members, and God is the head of Christ ; he is head over all, he is the immense, universal life. We in this become members of Christ's body; yea, even of his bones and of his flesh. This vital, living allusion is also preserved in that other language, I am the vine, ye are the branches, and my Father is the husbandman. The heart of God, so to say,, pulsating through the universe, beats in Jesus Christ and in all his followers. There is not only one body, but one faith, one baptism. The connecting element, the arterial tide, is the Holy Spirit, which runs like blood through all pure souls, or blows like the wind across the continent of rational being. Most intimate and very strong phraseology is kept up on this subject all through the New Tes- tament. He that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him. Christ desires that his people may be one in him and God, even as he is one with God. This unfolds the radical and primary Gospel idea of the Church. Again, there is a secondary idea, that of a num- ber of men in a given place, who are members of Christ and of one another; arterially, vitally, joined to Christ and God, by the Holy Spirit. Thus we read of the Church in Nymphas's house, the Church at Antioch ; that is, a number of people who in those places were members of Christ, a part of the Divine organization in the universe. We read of persons being added to the Church ; being added to the num- ber of "such members, or added 1;o that Divine organ- ization in the universe, which consists of God, Christ, and man united by the Holy Spirit. WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 51 Wherever, in any part of the world, appeared peo- ple breaking away from Paganism, or Judaism, and accepting the truth as it is in Jesus, they were called the Church. As this number increased, they chose elders, presbyters, bishops (overseers), pastors, ministers to be over them. There is no such thing in the New Testament as what we call joining the Church ; that is, outwardly joining a company or society ; as we say, joining the Odd Fellows. The moment a man truly accepted Christ, he was a member of the Church ; that is, he was a member of Christ, a member of the Divine organization, a partaker of the New Covenant. Will you observe this language ? " The Lord daily added to the Church of such as should be saved." Daily. People were not " converted," and then kept waiting two or three months before they could join the Church. The moment the Jewish eunuch be- lieved that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the mqment the heathen jailer believed, he was a mem- ber of the Church. The primary meaning of the word church is as- sembly, congregation, any collection of people. Its particular meaning is an assembly or congregation of people united to Christ. It is par excellence the as- sembly, the congregation, as the Bible is The Book. Churches are assemblies or congregations, or num- bers of Christian people. This institution called the Church is of great account in the Bibje. Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for it ; he cherisheth and nourisheth it ; he designed it for a glorious Church. But there is something extant in our day, calling itself the Church, — as the Greek, or Latin, or Eng- 52 WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? lish, or Baptist, or Methodist Church, — about which even good men are suspicious. We find some most excellent men outside of it. They leave the Church, they disown it, they will have nothing to do with it. We find other excellent people whom you could no more persuade to join the Church, than Daniel could have been induced to join in the worship of Nebu- chadnezzar. Is this what Christ and the Bible mean by the Church ? In the text, Timothy, who had just entered the pastoral office, is directed how to behave or conduct himself in the house of God, — not meeting-house, but household, family, or assembly of God, — which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground (the stay) of the truth. The first idea, then, of the Church, considered in respect of its action and duty, is, that it is the pillar and ground or stay of the truth. Of course, it follows that that which is the pillar and stay of error is not the Church of God. This is a plain test. The doctrine that Christ is very and eternal God, of one substance with the Father, is an error, a grave error, one of the most salient and pernicious heresies ever promulgated. Whatever is the pillar and stay of such an error is not the Church. It may be a church, it may have something in common with the true Church, but it is not the Church, The doctrine of the Trinity destroys the whole idea of the Charch, as it is set forth in the Bible, which is, that believers are members of Christ, even of his flesh and of his bones. If Christ be God, they cannot be members of him, except through Pan- WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 53 theism. A part of the doctrine of the Church is that God is over all, — that Christ, man, all things, are inferior to God. The notion that Christ is very and eternal God, of one substance with the Father, overthrows the Divine organization, and confounds the economy of God in respect of the Church. It follows that the Greek, Roman, and English Churches are not the Church, for they all teach and hold iippermost in their teachings that Christ is very and eternal God. They may be a church ; their in- dividual votaries may belong to the true. Church ; but, considered as a whole, considered as a body, they are not the Church. No man who joins them joins the Church, for they are not the Church. Another test is this, that Christ, under God, is the head of the Church. That which owns any other head than Christ is not the Church. The Pope is accounted the head of the Roman Church. At least, we know that every man, holding any sort of post in that Church, is obliged, on penalty of ex- communication, to profess and swear obedience to the Roman Pontiff. The king of England, by the fun- damental law of the realm, is supreme head of the Church. I am aware these things are explained as not meaning much ; but when every man in the Romish Church, who holds ofBce in that Church, is obliged to take oath to obey, not Jesus Christ, but the Roman Pontiff; when every man who holds ofRce in England is bound to acknowledge, under oath, that the king or queen is supreme head of the Church, it shows how wide is the departure from the evangelical idea of the Church. 54 WHAT IS THE CHURCH? A third test of the Church is, that it is that by which the manifold wisdom of God in Jesus Christ might be made known. In the third chapter of Ephesians 'Paul is speaking of the unsearchable riches of Christ, of God's promise in Christ, of the mystery that had been hidden in God from the beginning of the world, and how he had been appointed to preach thereof, to the intent that unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus, Imme- diate reference is here had to the fact that the Gen- tiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of the promise of God by Jesus Christ. The general reference, however, is to what he else- where styles the great mystery of the Gospel, — Christ in us the hope of glory. Here he speaks par- ticularly of an object he has in view, that Christ may dwell in his readers' hearts ; that, being rooted and grounded in love, they may know the love of Christ, and be filled with all the fulness of God. In a word, the wisdom of God purposed of old in Jesus Christ, here referred to, is what we now-a- days call the scheme of redemption. By the Church, then, the true scheme of redemption is made known. There have been many schemes of redemption. Some churches say we must accept Christ as an atoning sacrifice in order to be saved. Some teach that water-baptism is regenerative. The Roman Church says a man is damned who rejects the de- crees of the Council of Trent, The English Church says a man is damhed who rejects the Trinity fabri- WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? £5 cated at Nice. But that only is the Church, which teaches the scheme of redemption, or mystery of God in Christ, as laid down in the Gospel. Here, then, are three very plain and simple tests of the Church. First, that it is the pillar and stay of the truth ; second, that Christ is its head ; and third, that it teaches the purpose of salvation by Christ. These three things are found in this Church. First, it is the pillar and stay of the truth. The truth in regard to God and man, revelation and nature, humanity, duty, life, death, and eternity, is here en- forced and maintained. The aim of Unitarianism has ever been the simple truth of Scripture. I need not refer to the writings of Locke, Lardner, Norton, Channing, Dewey. The truths of Unitarianism, I mean the truths which God in his providence out of the Bible, in conjunction with human reason, has revealed to the Unitarian mind, are at this moment affecting, modifying, agitating, reforming, the whole system of theology. There is hardly an intelligent mind in the land, of whatever persuasion, but finds his views influenced by these Unitarian truths. The dogmas of .the Trinity, Total Depravity, Vicarious Atonement, Baptismal Regeneration, everywhere are giving way, either in substance or form, to the light thus mahifested. This Church, then, is the pillar and ground or stay of the truth. Secondly, it acknowledges Christ as its head, and rejects all other heads. Creeds do not bind it. Councils are not its authority, it has no king or pope to whom it owes allegiance. It has no arti- 56 WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? cles, aside from the Gospel, to be subscribed as a condition of fellowship. You acquire admission to it, not by the way of its clergy, but by way of Christ. Its criteria of heresy are reason and revela- tion. Unitarian churches, each and all, profess Christ to be their head. I know no exception to this. I do not know a single ch~urch amongst us that puts any thing but the Gospel between a man and his duty. I do not know of a single church amongst us that requires of its ministers, its dea- cons, or any of its officers or agents, any thing more than a belief that Jesus is the Soii of God, or a be- lief in the words and teachings of Jesus and the Apostles. By this test, then, this is the Church, that body of which Christ is the head. A third test of the Church is, that it teaches the method of salvation, originating in the wisdom of God and developed through Jesus of Nazareth. This indeed may be variously stated. " Christ in you the hope of glory," is the summary language of St. Paul. It is making Christ our Way and Truth and Life ; it is possessing the spirit of Christ ; it is bearing the fruit of the spirit ; it is receiving the life of God into the soul through Christ ; it is having Christ manifested in our mortal bodies ; it is dwell- ing in love; this is the wisdom of God according to the purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. And this we hold and teach. By this test too we are the Church. There is a definition of the Church in these words : " The visible Church of Christ is a congre- gation of faithful men, in which the pure word of WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 57 God is preached and the sacraments duly adminis- tered according to Christ's ordinances, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same." And by this test the Unitarian body are the Church. Heresy, in a generic view of the term, is a de- parture from the word of God. I'he doctrines that Christ is very and eternal God, that the Holy Spirit is the third person in the Godhead, that human nature deserves God's wrath, that man can will or do no good thing, that relics are to be worshipped, of the resurrection of the body, of water-regenera- tion, &c., are all heresies, all departures from the word of God ; and most of the so-called churches are, herein, heretical. This Church rejects these things because they are departures from the tvord of God. This Church is not heretical. Orthodoxy means sound doctrine. That is sound doctrine which is according to reason and Scrip- ture ; or which is according to the word of God. The Unitarian Church is the orthodox Church. Catholic means general, universal. That is the Catholic Church which sees all men one in Christ, which expands its sympathies wide as humanity, which recognizes the universal brotherhood of the race. The Unitarian Church is in the best sense the Catholic Church. The Apostolic Church is that which has the same foundation as the Apostles ; that is, Christ. This is the Apostolic Church. Evcmgelical is simply Greek for Gospel, which is Saxon for good news. The message of the angels was good news, glad tidings, or Gospel ; the whole 58 WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? scope and spirit of Christianity is good news, glad tidings, Gospel, Evangelical. We adhere to the whole scope and spirit of Christianity; hence are we the Evangelical Church. This, my friends, is Unitavianism. Some have been suspicious of it because they did not know what it would lead to. It seemed to be a departure from the old standard, and where it might end was not known. This is what it leads to, the recovery of the Church. It departs from dogmas that it may find the truth as it is in Jesus. It. abjures Roman- ism, Anglicanism, -Calvinism, that it may give its allegiance to the Gospel. As the Israelites left Egypt, and slavery, and onions, and garlic, and went on till they found the promised land, so have we left the churches of prelates and dogmas, of slavery, and of plenty to eat, that we might find the true Church. Our fathers left the despotism of the Old World to build up a glorious commonwealth in the New. So Unitarianism, if it has seemed to wander many months, like the Mayflower, on an unknown and tempestuous sea, is freighted with earnest, truth- loving, and God-fearing souls, and it makes land at last on the new continent of thought where it may build up a glorious church. There are in this matter of the Church what may be denominated things indifferent. An instance is the erection of places of worship, meeting-houses, or, as they are wont to be called, churches. There is nothing in Scripture commanding or forbidding these. It is a matter which Christ left to the good sense and discretion of his followers. WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? 59 There are questions of names for particular churches. The name of this is Christ Church, a name deliberately adopted by the congregation wor- shipping here. By this name it is known in law. By this it is distinguished from other churches in town ; as the Nazarene church, St. Mark's church. There is the use of language. We speak of church order, church music, church organ, church architecture, church bells, church going ; we speak too of Church and State, we have histories of the Church. All this, I suppose, is a proper use of lan- guage. We frequently speak of going to meeting, of attending meeting. You go to the church ; your place of worship is Christ Church, or simply the Church. Some people say they attend the Unita- rian meeting ; rather they attend Christ Church, or the Church. In England people are divided into what are called Churchmen and Dissenters ; members of the Estab- lished Church being Churchmen, and all others Dis- senters. I am no Dissenter, and I repudiate the name. I never did use it, and never will, to describe myself or my brethren. I, we, all of us, are Churchmen, and for the simple fact that we adhere to, and have never left, the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and stay of the truth. The real dissenters in the world are those who have departed from the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ. There is a question of the baptism of children. It is not specifically answered in Scripture. Christ and his Apostles dealt chiefly with Pagans and 60 WHAT IS THE CHURCH ? Jews. The question for us is, When Christianity becomes the religion of a country, and children are born to Christian parents, how ought the Church to regard them ? It ought to baptize them and cherish them in its bosom and nurture. Who are members of the Church ? All who are members of that body of which Christ under God is the head, are per se members of the Church. All who accept Christ as the Son of God, all believers in Christ, are members of the Church. We are all members of the Church jtist so far as we love God and goodness. All who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before their God, are members. The peacemakers, the poor in spirit, are members. When the wicked man turneth from the wickedness he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he becomes a member. All of us, my friends, just so far as we have an interest in Christ, and are de- sirous to know his truth, to do his will, to be pos- sessed of his spirit, to imitate his example, are so far forth members of his body, and are his Church. Just so far as we seek to build upon the foundation of the Prophets and Apostles, Jesus Christ himself b^ing the chief corner-stone, as individuals or a community, we are his Church. You see, my friends, what, as part of the Unita- rian and Liberal body, our position is, and what God is calling us to, and how we are bound to vin- dicate and maintain the dispensation committed unto us. SERMON V. BIRTH-EELATION TO THE CHURCH. rOE AS WE HAVE MANT MEMBERS IN ONE EODT, AND ALL MEM- BERS HATE NOT THE SAME OFFICE; SO WE, BEING MANT, ARE ONE BODT IN CHP.IST, AND ETEKY ONE MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER. — Romans xii. 4, 5. I HAVE shown that we are The Church ; also, that all religious and Christian obligations devolve to every man according to his several ability. I purpose now to inquire into the obligation which every man sustains to the Church. I have already, under the general argument, intimated that every man owes obligation to prayer, to the communion, and other pious offices, according to his intelligence, capacity, and opportunity, in respect of such things. I purpose at the present time to consider the Church by itself, as one of the radical forms of human soci- ety, and including all these duties under the sum- mary head of duties which the Church represents, or which are its peculiar care. I purpose, I say, to in- quire into the ground of this universal obligation to the Church, and to examine more particularly the na- ture of our relation to it. Why does every man of us owe obligation to the 6 62 BIRTH-EBLATION TO THE CHURCH. Church of Christ, or that which the Church repre- sents, or which it prescribes ? How is it that I, as minister of the Church, can urge you, all of you, without discrimination, to the performance of these duties ? There must be involved here some simple principle of reason and nature. Can we discover it ? Why does a man owe obligation to other things, in respect of which such obligation is supposed to ac- crue ? Why do we all owe obligation to the state, to the government of this empire? "Why to the family, why to the city, why to society in general ? Is it because the state, the family, society in gen- eral, protects us and does us good ? For the same reason do you all owe obligation to the Church, inas- much as it protects and blesses you all. It invites you all within its walls, it pours its light over you all, it visits you all in sickness, it brings your children, without distinction, into its Sunday schools, and is ever ready to shield your virtues, further your happi- ness, and crown you with immortal life. For this cause, then, if there were no other, you are all obli- gated to the Church, each one according to his sev- eral ability. But this is not all ; there, is something deeper than this, something underlying these reasons. I observe that, as regards a great variety of human relations, birth is the primary ground of obligation. As to most of what may be called the great natural relations of man, this is the primary ground of obligation. Why does a man owe obligations to, or how can he claim protection from, these United States ? Fundamen- tally, from the fact that he is born here. Why is an BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 63 Englishman similarly situated in respect of England, or a Chinese in respect of China ? Mainly from the same fact, that he is born there. Or if it is because we are citizens of this republic, how came we to be citizens ? As regards the great mass of us, because we were born here. Birth makes every man a citi- zen of the state, and he is to be so considered, until, by some overt act, he forfeits the rights of citizen- ship. On the other hand, why do these United States owe protection to us ? Fundamentally for the reason I have stated, that we are born here ; or if because we are citizens, still we are citizens be- cause we are born here. This protection is owed indiscriminately to m^n, woman, and child. It would not seem to be earned ; it would not seem to be in recompense of good deeds on our part. This government owes protection to the infant of a day, as well as to the greatest man in the land, and for the reason that it is born here. So the family owes support to its members, fundamen- tally from this accident of birth. So, in general, society owes something to all that are born into it. So, reciprocally, all persons owe something to so- ciety into which they are born. Let me illustrate the point. Let me take a cage so far removed from common life as to be free of the objections which, from a thousand causes, in treat- ing subjects of this kind, are wont to embarrass our view. I will imagine a case like this ; that a num- ber of unenlightened and heathen people are thrown upon an uninhabited island, which they make their permanent abode. In a few years, as we may sup- 64 BIRTH-RELATION TO THE .CHURCH. pose, they become in a measure educated. They wish to form a government, and found a nation. By some wonder, they discover a political constitu- tion like that of one of our States. They adopt it. In all solemnity and with much parade it is pro- claimed the fundamental law of the land. By and by another generation springs up ; children are born to these first settlers. Have they any thing to do with this constitution, or it with them ? Have they any right to it ? Are they in the state, or out of it ? Do they belong to it, or are they in a condition of outlawry ? They are part of the state, you say. But for what reason ? This, simply and circularly, that they are children of their fathers. In other words, birth is the foundation of this political rela- tion. The children are born into the republic. If you please, it is the right of nature, it is a God-given right, it is an inalienable right ; yet, the literal, prime foundation of the right-is birth. So much in regard of the State, or politics. Let us now turn to the matter of the Church, or religion. We will suppose this people in some way to find a Bible, and to become believers in Christ, and to ac- cept the Gospel as their rule of faith and guide of life. With all solemnity and prayer in the great congregation they do this. In other words, they form a church. They choose a pastor, they meet on the Sabbath, they have the sacraments. They be- come a church, a body Christian. All things go on well. By and by a new generation springs up. Where, as respects the church, do these belong ? Are they in it, or out of it ? Do they owe it any BIETH-EELATION TO THE CHURCH. 65 thing, or it them ? Are they parts of it, or in a con- dition of outlawry, disfranchisement, excommunica- tion ? Is not the church over and around these children, as much as the state ? Is not that pastor pastor of all the people, as much as that governor is governor of all the people ? Need I make formal answer to these questions ? This new generation has relations to the church in virtue of birth. These children are children of the state in virtue of being children of their parents, and for the same reason are they children of the church. I can perceive no flaw in this course of argument. I know of no possible escape from these conclusions. That church is as much beholden to the children of , those parents as that state is ; it is as much bound to look after them, to provide for their weal in spiritual things, as the state is in temporal things. The church is as much an entity as the state is. It is as much a permanent interest, as much a fun- damental organism, as the state is. It is as much needed as the state. A good religion is as proper to man as a good government. And what connects the successive generations with the institutions of the past is, primarily, birth. Let us suppose this were not the case. Let us suppose the children of the country to which I have referred, — or rather, to bring the matter nearer home, let us suppose the children of those who adopted the Constitution of this country in 1784, — that these children, I say, in virtue of birth, as being children, held no sort of relation of duty, service, or interest, to that Constitution. Why, that Constitution and the 66 BIETH-EELATION TO THE CHURCH. union of these States would end, would be annihi- lated, with the death of those who first adopted it, and the next generation would be left all afloat, with- out a government, without laws, without a country, without unity. If the rule of descent does not hold, the link is broken that connects one age with another, and the institutions of the past with the future. The extant generation of the people of this country must either live without a government, or go on to form a new one, or split into a thousand govern- ments, each of which shall last during the lifetime of its founders only, unless this hereditary principle be a good one. But to turn back to that imaginary land. The fathers die, the state does not die ; it is perpetuated in their children. Neither does the church die ; that, likewise, is perpetuated in the children. The children are bound to take up the church when their fathers leave it, just as much as they are to maintain the state, and carry it on. This is clear, my friends, is it not ? All the peo- ple owe obligation to that state, do they not? And do not all the people owe obligation to that church ? And does not this obligation both to church and state continue through all generations, that is, so long as the state and th§ church continue ? Have I not, my friends, pointed out the fundamen- tal ground of obligation to the church ? Have I not elicited the correct principle of the thing ? Is there one in this assembly who thinks I have not stated it right ? Is there one who sees any considerable weakness in the case I have undertaken to make BIETH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 67 out ? Of course, I speak in an abstract and general manner, and without reference to local or temporary exceptions. As regards that country, you may say persons coming to reside in it from abroad, from other na- tions, are not admitted to the state, or to the privi- lege of citizenship, without probation. True; but the probation ends with them. The children of these naturalized parents fall into the general flow of things, and become, like all the rest, members by birth. Thus, in these United States, an Englishman must wait five years, I think, before he can become to all intents an American, or a citizen of the repub- lic. But the Church, the true Church, is more uni- versal than any existing state is. There is no re- public of nations, there is no community of repub- lics. If there were, this law of naturalization would be greatly modified. As it is, England being a mon- archy, there would seem to be a propriety in allowing its people who come here time to become republi- cans. But the true Church is one in all parts of the world. Of course, the Church of England, the vari- ous Trinitarian churches in this country, however much truth they may embody, are not to us the true Church. But taking the Unitarian Church to be the true Church, I say it is one in all parts of the world. Let me ask a moment's attention to this word naturalization. It is a singular word, perhaps a strong word, a term of political economy. It means that a foreigner becomes a natural citizen ; he is in- natured, so to say, to the country he joins ; he be- comes the same as a natural-born citizen, and his 68 BIETH-KELATION TO THE CHURCH. children hy birth become citizens. Herein is involved the central idea of this discourse, that a man is a cit- izen by nature, that he is a member of the state by nature, in other words, as we have used the phrasej by birth. That is, this naturalization is simply taking a man out of foreignness, out of an exotic condition, and making him indigenous to the new soil, making this his natural place, restoring him to a condition of nature here. To his children, even as to seeds that drop from a transplanted tree, this becomes their native soil ; they grow up on the same earth where their parents last lived, they bloom beneath the same sky, they are obedient to the same laws. This is naturalization. And here I am reminded, frequently and sadly reminded, qf what our Saviour said ; that the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. As to certain of these things in the state to which I have referred, men have gone straight forward, and acted in a rational and common-sense way ; but in mat- ters of the Church they have bungled shockingly. It is nowhere distinctly decreed, indeed, in the Consti- tution of the United States, that the rule of succes- sion to the rights, duties, and privileges of citizen- ship shall be just as I have stated, by birth. Yet this is the great principle that underlies our country, our history, our laws, our entire being as a nation. I appeal to legal gentlemen before me if it is not so. And if these legal gentlemen are so wise in their own affairs, why will they not help us in ours? Why will they not throw some light on the darkness of us ministers, who are supposed to represent the BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 69 children of light ? For of a truth this whole church matter is in Egyptian darkness. As regards the state, birth constitutes the prime law of relation to it. Even naturalization is no exception to this rule, since it only indicates an attempt to bring all such residents as happen not to be born here, into this birth condition. My conclusion is, that really, in any true idea of the Church, in the actual condition of any true Church, birth constitutes a ground of re- lation to it. Does history or experience throw any light on this subject ? This principle is not only implied, it is distinctly asserted, in the Jewish economy. The orig- inal covenant with Abraham was to him and his seed for ever. And this is the key to all the subse- quent history of the Jews. So Moses uses this strik- ing and most appropriate language : " Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it : that thou mightest fear the Lord thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command thee ; thou, and thy son, and thy son's son, all the days of thy life," — i. e. all the years of thine existence as a nation. The rule of circumcision is ex- plicit: " He that is eight days old shall be circumcised amongst you, every man-child in your generations, he that is born in the house." When the law was publicly proclaimed, they were directed to " gather the people together, men and women and children, that they might hear and learn, and that their children which had not known any thing might hear and 70 BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. learn to fear the Lord." So of particular rites and ordinances, as the Feast of the Passover, and the Tabernacles ; tljese were to be kept by the Israel- ites and their children through all generations. In other words, Judaism, in all its extent and import, established and perpetuated itself on the basis of propagation. Will it be said that, among that ancient people. Church and State were one ? What difference does that make ? Even if these become separate, as with us, how does the principle of continuity by birth fail, or hold in one case more than the other? This rule does apply to the State of these times, why should it not to the Church ? I turn to the primitive Christian era, — when a Church was formed, so to say, without any State ; when in the midst of corrupt and wicked nations a new element of spiritual life developed itself, and a community arose containing within its bosom the germs of both Church and State, but of a much purer type ; and in those times, I shall contend, the principle to which I have adverted prevailed. I shall stand on this, until evidence to the contrary, of the exist- ence'of which I am ignorant, shall be produced. In- deed, I shall insist that this idea of natural perpetua- tion, or perpetuation by birth, was transferred, bodily, from Judaism to Christianity. It underlies the whole Gospel system. Christ could have had no other ex- pectation than that his kingdom was to descend from father to son through all generations. So Christ called the little children to him and blessed them, as if, at the very earliest possible point, to win and ini- BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 71 tiate them to the coming dispensation. So Peter says, " The promise is unto you, and to your chil- dren." So Paul calls us the spiritual seed of Abra- ham. Young Christian women are to love their husbands and their children. Children are to obey their parents in the Lord. John rejoices that the little children are walking in the truth. Paul ex- pressly argues that Christianity is thus continuous, in order that the promise may be sure to all the seed. There is the remarkable passage (1 Cor. vii. 14) where Paul, alluding to the question whether a Christian might marry a heathen, says, if two persons are so married, let them not separate, — "for the unbeliev- ing husband is sanctified by the wife, and the un- believing wife is sanctified by the husband ; else were your children unclean ; but now are they holy." " Already," says Dr. Neander, commenting on this passage, " the children of Christians were distin- guished from the children of heathen, and might be considered as belonging to the Church." " We have here," he adds, " an indication of the preeminence belonging to children born in a Christian commu- nity." Am I mistaken in saying that the original Chris- tian Church could have contemplated nothing else than that the Church of the fathers would be- come the Church of the children, to the end of all things? Or are we in this taking some things for granted which do not exist? Are we begging the question ? I mean, is the Church, like the State, like the family, to be considered one of the permanent and comprehensive institutions of the race ? I have 72 BIETH-KELATION TO THE CHURCH. supposed it was so. I have argued on that suppo- sition. Is there any mistake here ? Was the Church designed for one age ? Was it ever designed for a limited class of human beings ? Is the Church to be considered like a committee of arrangements got up for an occasion, and expiring when the occasion ends ? Is the Church like a copartnership, that ends with the death of its members, or may be terminated at any moment by dissolution ? I will further illustrate my point by putting it in this light ; that as things are, even in our most erro- neous parishes, the Church has, as it were by nature, as it were on this simple basis of birth-relation, a good deal to do with you, with each one of the peo- ple, with men, women, and children indiscriminately ; and out of this I shall argue that you all indiscrim- inately have a certain vital, natural birth-relation to the Church. For instance, the Church through its pastors visits all your families, saints and sinners ; it marries you ; it buries you ; it invites you all to its sanctuary ; it preaches to you, prays for you, pro- nounces its benedictions on you all ; it has its direc- tions, its consolations, its admonitions, its helps for you all, \\(ithout respect of persons. You have the Bible, the Church constitution and laws, in all your houses. Your children attend the Church Sunday schools. The Church, so to say, gives the Sabbath to you all alike, and you all suspend your secular busi- ness on that day. More ; as I showed a while since, the Church asks your aid, for its meeting-houses, for the pay of its ministers, and for its various benevo- lent objects. Now what is it that brings this church, BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 73 or me, its pastor, into this near personal connection with you all ? It is this of which I speak, nature, birth. I mean, that as this church has had connec- tion with the parents, so it has connection with the children, because they are your children. Whatever tie binds you to the Church or its minister becomes a tie of nature in your children, and will continue a birth-tie in your children's children. I am called to bury a child. Why ? Why not somebody else, why anybody ? For the simple reason that you have a certain connection with the Church, and the child is your child, and I am pastor of it, because it is your child. In many places a minister, that is, an officer of the Church, formerly would not, in many places now such a man will not, bury an unbaptized child ; be- cause it did not belong to the Church, and the Church could take no cognizance of it, and it could not be admitted into consecrated, that is, Church burying- ground ; and unshriven, unblest, it was sent to moulder in the desert. But Protestant ingenuity has contrived a way to avoid this shamelessness ; our ministers will go to work in a common-sense way, and bury such children, while at the same time they waive all allusion to the Church which in reali- ty employs them. So, too, they would not marry unbaptized persons ; and would not now, save that our secular rulers, wiser in their generation than the heads of the Church,, have so managed matters as to take this affair of marriage wholly out of ecclesias- tical control, and hence by a sort of necessity the 7 74 BIKTH-EELATION TO THE CHURCH. clergy I refer to are driven to compromise their ground somewhat. Well, if I, if this church, of which I am pastor, holds this important and responsible relation to you, you all hold an important and responsible relation to me and the Church. As the President of the United States holds an important relation to all the people of the land, so do I, your pastor, to all the people of this parish. And as all the people of the Union hold a certain important and natural relation to the Pres- ident, and to the government he represents, so also do all the people of the parish hold an important and natural relation to me, the pastor, and to the Church which I represent. As the people of the United States, in their successive generations, are born into these important relations to the State, so are these parishioners, in their successive generations, born into important relations to the Church. There is involved here a plain principle of recipro- city. If I hold a religious relation to you, you hold a religious relation to me ; if I am your Christian preacher, you are my Christian hearers ; if I am un- der church obligations to you, you are under church obligations to me. Will any reply, that neither they nor their fathers were technical members of the Church, and therefore the principle we have been un- folding does not apply to them or their children ? But you are church-goers, church-worshippers, church- supporters ; you have come yourselves, and brought your families here, for months and years ; you con- sider me, the pastor of this^ church, beholden to you BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 75 and your families, and on the principle of reciprocity you are in like manner beholden to me and the Church. But more than this. On the principle of naturali- zation, which the world happily furnishes us, you are brought into intimate relations to the Church. Granting that your parents were not church-mem- bers ; granting that you, before you came hither, attended no church ; your very coming here, and being here, and staying here, naturalizes you to this church. I grant we have prescribed no term or method of probation ; only I say this, that any man or family that, truly worships here, belongs here; any one that awakens in behalf of himself or his family a pastoral and church interest, is so far obli- gated to the pastor and the Church. As regards a great multitude who consider themselves in a sense aliens and foreigners to the Church, they connect themselves with it by naturalization ; and this covers the whole ground, — covers it not only for them- selves, but their posterity after them. Some have a notion they are only connected with the Society. A man the other day told me, he had indeed paid something to the Society, but that he did not belong to the Church ; and clearly intimated that he was under no sort of obligation either to the Church or the pastor. I am not, in any high and proper sense of the term, pastor of a society. The Society is a thing of the law ; the law makes and unmakes societies ; the law of the Society has changed many times in this country. I am pastor of a church; was ordained over a church. The Society, as a legal entity, I have had nothing to 76 BIETH-KELATION TO THE CHURCH. do with ; I never attended one of their meetings ; I know not that I ever looked into its book of records. So that, really, I have little or nothing to do with the Society. Here, indeed, may be some interesting questions, not as yet settled, which I shall not now enter upon. Now, when men who have been here year after year, with their families, and have involved me in intimate relations with themselves and fami- lies, turn round and say that they have only had a certain connection with the Society, and clearly imply that they are under no sort of obligations to this Church of Christ, or to me, its pastor, what do such things mean? We are all at loose ends on this subject. It is in the hope of being able to do something toward setting us right, that I say what I have, and perhaps weary you with topics of this sort. I hold this for self-evident, that, in a Christian com- munity, the people hold important relations to Chris- tianity ; \hat in a community of churches, in other words, in a Church community, a Christian Church community, they hold important relations to the Church. For instance, that here in New England, here on New England soil, the people here, all of them, old and young, hold as vital connection with our Christian Church here, as they do with the politi- cal State here ; and if the Church here is utader any sort of obligation to labor for, pray for, bless a single man, that man is under equal obligation to love and cherish the Church. If a man has merely a financial connection with the Society and has no obligations to the Church or its pastor, — no moral, religious, BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 77 high obligations, — then the Church has no obliga- tions to him. On common principles of justice, he cannot expect the pastor to do any thing for him, or his family ; if he is sick, he cannot expect the pas- tor to visit him ; if he should die, he cannot expect the pastor to bury him. Indeed, he has no pastor, no church. "Will you say that, by pressing the analogy between the State and the Church, I must needs imply a na- tional religion, as we have a national government ? "We have in an important sense a national relig- ion, we are called a Christian nation, we are part of Christendom. I wish we had more national re- ligion, I do not want to see a national creed. How- ever, it is granted that, as a people, we are divided on theological subjects. There are Jews amongst us, and Mormons, and all kinds of notions. But suppose the worst. Suppose there were but one true Church in the land, and that this assembly, gathered in these walls, were it; the case would not be altered, the argument would be the same. We who are assembled here would all be beholden to that Church, we and our children after us for ever. Inasmuch as, in virtue of being born, or living here, you belong to the State, so in the case supposed would you in a sense belong to the Church, even if there were no other church in the land. But you say, even if all persons in a sense belong to the State, they are not allowed the highest privi- leges of citizenship till they are twenty-one years of age, and they cannot fill certain offices till they are older than that. True, but they enjoy a multitude 7" 78 BIRTH-BELATION TO THE CHURCH. of state privileges before that period. Every one, at birth, shares and enjoys the protection of the laws and care of government. Every child has the privi- lege of schools, of the highwray, of support, — of a thousand things. A babe that shall be afloat on the wide sea, a thousand leagues away, is still under protection of the flag that symbolizes the nation. In many of the old churches, custom, if not canon, prescribed an age when persons should begin to commune, that is, be admitted to the highest privi- leges of church-membership. In England this age is sixteen years. In that country a particular age is prescribed also as necessary to the holding of various ofiices of the Church. There is no more difiiculty in respect of the Church than of the State. Even here in New England, while our platforms are silent on the subject, universal custom, as well as common sense, without fixing upon the precise age a man must reach, always requires a certain maturity of mind and heart in those who would exercise ecclesi- astical functions. In this analogy between the State and the Church, we come to another interesting and important point. You say that all are not citizens, that some have forfeited their state rights, that for crimes and mis- demeanors they are shut in prisons. Will you ob- serve this, — that every man is presumed to be a worthy citizen until by competent tribunals he is proved to be a wicked man ; that the normal, natu- ral, birth condition of every man is citizenship ; and that any change in that relation is an after affair, a superinduced and artificial event ? But the point is BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 79 this. As the State has the power of punishment, so the Church has the power of discipline ; a power given by Christ, often exercised, too often abused ; — but she has the power. As the State can outlaw or attaint, so the Church can excommunicate. You see what the State does in assuming' that every man belongs to it, except on the condition above stated. Has not the Church as good a right, is not the Church of consequence enough, holds it not suffi- cient breadth of place in the permanent interests of this world, is it not imperatively bound, to consider all men in a certain sense connected with it, until by an overt act of wrong-doing they become liable to its censures, or provoke its penalties? Popular usage, as you well know, reverses every thing; it presumes nobody to belong to the Church, or to have any thing to do with it, until by some special act in after life they render themselves proper candidates for its favor ; — thus, in a Christian community, in all our Christian congregations, virtually unchurching the great majority, excommunicating our wives and little ones, actually damning the infant at its sainted mother's breast. There are in all communities recusants both to Church and State, commonly known as Come- outers ; we have them in this country. All I have to say about them is, the Church can get along with them as well as the State. The best way, perhaps, is to let them alone, . Let the Church reach and bless them if it can. Yet in many instances that which calls itself the Church has so conducted, I do not much wonder men leave it. Their duty 80 BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. in the case, however, would seem to be to revive and perpetuate a true church form and feeling among themselves. Of course I need not say, if the Church or the State does wrong, sins against God, and vio- lates human conscience, no man is bound to obey or to regard it. Will you remark some singular results? In a town not a thousand miles from here, where is what is called a society,; a meeting-house, a Sun- day school, Sabbath services, for the most of the time a preacher, an organ, a choir, I was told by one of the parties interested, they were not a church. A religious society without a church ! I have heard of a state without a king, a church without a bishop ; but it was reserved for the present time, so fertile in improvement and invention, to produce a religious society without a church. Again, it has happened during the religious controversies that have agitated New England, that the entire body of so called church-members, with their minister, have with- drawn from a given parish, while the majority of the people from conscience' sake remained. The ques- tion I would ask is, Did no church of Christ re- main? Sometimes the non-communicants have, themselves gone off and built up, I was going to say, a church of their own. Did they not become a church of Christ, — that in which, as we believe, was all truth, all evangelical doctrine ? My friends, we are in a position happily, provi- dentially adapted to rectify the errors of the past ; at least for ourselves, and our children after us. We reject the dogma of total depravity, we reject BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. 81 the fable of regenerative baptism, which was in- vented to heal what the other destroyed. We admit baptism, and do not at the same time cast off the baptized ones. We believe at least in the inno- cence of the babe ; we believe at least that the child has a susceptibility of goodness, and of the Chris- tian life ; and we see in baptism a seal of the cove- nant which God would make with us and ours for ever. We recognize, too, the higher privilege of the Holy Communion. And is thfere any thing to hin- der us and all Liberal Christians from taking that stand which God would have his Church adopt? Will not these adults feel, will they not go on to feel, that, as it were by a species of naturalization, they sustain vital, interesting, solemn relations to the Church ? Will you not educate, train your children to feel that they, by birth, because they are your children, likewise hold these most affecting relations to sacred things, and are growing up members of Christ and of one another ? Will any man of you ever again teU me he has no obligations to the Church ? Like the genius of a departed faith, I stand here in the midst of the desolations which for ages have been sweeping over the world, the desolations of error and superstition, bigotry and craft, that have swept over the Zion of New England ; I stand in the midst of men who have grown cold, selfish, and indifferent to every thing relating to the Church ; in the midst of dark and forbidding influences, sur- ^ rounded by the monuments of deserted truth, I stand here to appeal to you, to lift my voice in the 82 BIRTH-RELATION TO THE CHURCH. midst of the desolations, and beg and plead with you,' that the Church of God may have a place in your hearts. I ask that an attachment to it may be revived, or created, in your souls. SEEMON VI. THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY THE rAMH-Y AND THE STATE. I SPEAK CONCERNING THE CHURCH. — Ephesians V. 32. There are three great enduring and divine or- ganizations of men, or, if you please, social relations of human beings, the Family, the State, the Church. I call them enduring, because as long as man lasts on the earth they will last ; I call them divine, be- cause they have their foundation in the will of God. I might with equal truth say they have their founda- tion in nature, but this would be a tautological ex- pression, since nature is of God's ordaining and the creature of his power. I am aware of discussions that proceed on the hypothesis of man as a pure in- dividual or solitary being. Sometimes we hear the expression, man in a state of nature. But,~ for all practical purposes, man never is a purely individual or solitary being. He always is in society, and, if you please, out of a state of nature ; not a felicitous phrase, I allow; since nothing is more unnatural than the solitary state. At least the great mass of those of whom this discourse speaks, and to whom it refers, 84 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY are to be considered in this light. An infant is in society, most helplessly, most pitiably so. It is in the family. Birth implies society. All human be- ings around me exist in some form of society. Man is social in his nature, and ever tends to some mode of assembly, aggregation, or whatever we may call it. Man is not complete, not developed, not perfected, except in mutual relation with his fellows. An ex- ample of purest individuality or extreme solitariness of a voluntary sort, may be found in the species of monks called anchorites and hermits. An instance of an involuntary sort is seen in persons condemned to the solitude of a prison. We conceive both of these cases to be departures from the great law of humanity. "Well, since men must come together, what are the leading modes of that union ? We have said these are three, the Family, the State, the Church. At the basis of these lie three leading ideas or senti- ments : religion, which expresses our relation to God ; morality, which expresses our relation 1o our fellow-beings in general ; conjugal affection, which unites the human race in pairs. These organiza- tions and these ideas are prime, fundamental, and universal. In all parts of the world, in every age, among all races, you will find men uniting on these forms. Man eternally tends to the infinite, which is religion ; he eternally tends to an intercourse deter- mined by geographic, or lingual, or other affinities, which is politics; man and woman eternally tend together, which is love. That is, there is no people without a Family, a State, and a Church ; albeit in many instances the forms of these things are very THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 85 rude and the point of junction very dimly defined. At least, in proportion as man advances in civiliza- tion, the more entirely and distinctly are these affin- ities made manifest. Yet I can hardly recall even a savage tribe that does not, either by priesthood or rit- ual, by altar or worship, express its relation to God. I am avv^are that I use the term Church in rather a wide sense. I do not mean by it the Christian Church alone. We often hear the expression, the Jewish Church. There is also the Mohammedan Church. So everywhere is that, which, organically, expresses a people's relation to its God. A termi again, that expresses the idea of State is Politics, or we say men unite for political purposes. A syno- nyme for State, very nearly, is Government, Country, Empire. -Different forms of states or governments are monarchies, republics, and all the intermediate shades of civil polity. The object of government, as ex- pressed in the Constitution of Maine, is to establish justice, insure tranquillity, provide for our mutual de- fence, promote the common welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. People unite in the Church for religious purposes, to cultivate their higher natures, and sanctify them- selves before the Lord their God. There is hardly a good synonyme for Church; we sometimes borrow the Jewish phrase Zion ; in our vernacular we have a rude way of expressing it, by the words meeting, meeting-house. There is the Christian Church, wherein people unite for Christian and religious purposes ; or for religious purposes as modified by Christ. It is of this that I now speak, and when 86 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY I use the word, religious, it will be in the sense of Christian-religious. We denote the Family sometimes by the words house, household, domestic relations, coiijugal tie, and the like. There is a word that expresses the deep thing which the Family is to us, that is, home. The Family continues the race on the earth, in it are nurtured some of our deepest affections, to it evermore gravitate the hearts and the loves of all well-regulated rninds. The Family is holy, the State is holy, the Church is holy. That is, in their true actuality, they are all forms in which men devote themselves to what is agreeable to God. In other words, they are all of Divine appointment. In some countries, chiefly in such as are monarch- ical, there is what is called a union of Church and State. The king or monarch is head of both. This is particularly the case in Russia and England. The constitution of the Church in those countries, like ■ that of the State, is purely monarchical. The peo- ple have no more rights in the one than in the other. In this country there is a separation of Church and State ; and what is noticeable, while the Constitution of our State is republican, that of some of our churches is purely monarchical ; as the Roman Cath- olic, the Episcopalian, and the Methodist. The reason is, that these churches all retain essentially the same constitution they had before the Revolu- tion. The people have no rights in either ; the peo- ple cannot determine their own creed, nor settle their own minister, nor consecrate their own church THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. ■ 87 edifices, nor form their own churches. All these depend, not on the king indeed, but on a power above them, called a prelacy. Most of the New England Churches, however, as the Unitarian, Universalist, Baptist, Swedenborgian, and some others of the Trinitarian • communion, have what is called a congregational constitution, which in church matters means the same as democratic in state matters. The congregation, the people, rule or determine their own affairs. The law of the Family is determined partly by the State, and partly by the Church. Its great prin- ciple is mutual love. The State says what shall con- stitute marriage, and the Bible says how married peo- ple^shall behave. In Roman Catholic countries, I be- lieve, the Church controls marriages altogether. Yet in general it may be observed, the Family in its essen- tial constitution is wholly independent of the State. The State in some regions is very large, as Rus- sia, China ; in others small, as Denmark, and some of our particular States, as Delaware. The Family consists essentially of two, husband and wife, and directly and collaterally it enlarges, but, as com- pared with other organizations, is always small. The State is geographically limited, the Family is confined to the house ; the Church, in its true idea, is universal. Of particular churches, some are large, some small. Man tends evermore to society, we say; and in addition to these three dominant organizations are others, smaller and secondary. The most interest- ing of these is the school. This is not essential, 88 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY like the Family, the Church, and the State; since it is conceivable that the Family or the Church should educate the children. The school is a convenience ; families combine and hire some one to educate their children in common. In this country the State says families shall so combine. The Church blesses the school. In some countries the Church interferes and directs the school. There are other organiza- tions, some of business, which we call companies or incorporations ; others of conviviality, called clubs ; others of pleasure, that go by various names, — assem- blies, parties. But none of these secondary organ- izations are everlasting. We spend only a few days at school, we dissolve our companies, we are at a party only of an evening. We are always in the Family, in the State, in the Church ; this is a cardinal distinction. We are born in the Family, and in some form continue in it till we die. We are born in the State, and are always its subjects, and always claim its protection. So we are born into the Church, and are always members of it. This, I mean, is the true idea. Our relation to the Family, in some sense, terminates at death, and so does that to the State ; our Church connection continues beyond the grave. Or however it may be with these others, the Church at least, beginning on earth, survives in heaven. Next as to the use of words. The definition of State, Government, Country, is political society, but its- proper name is State, Government, Country, &c. Hhe definition of Family is married society, the prop- er name is Family. So of the Church, the definition THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. ' 89 is religious society, but this is not its name. The only name for the Church is the Church. All organ- izations, collections, meeti ngs of men, are societies ; but each of the societies, of the principal and univer- sal ones at least, has a distinct, or proper, or generic name, as well as a definition. So in other things ; rose is a kind of flower, brook is a form of water, but the proper organic name is rose, brook. Now in regard to every thing else but the Church we use language properly. We never say, the political so- ciety of Maine is large and prosperous. "We say, the State of Maine is large and prosperous. Yet when we come to speak of the Church, we always use the definition, and not the name, and say, the religious society, or perhaps more curtly still, the society, is large and prosperous. A man never says his married society is small, but his family is small. So we say, the State, or, synonymously, the government, empire, of Great Britain is powerful ; we do not say, the political society of Great Britain is powerful. Country, again, expresses the deep sentiment of the state, the nation ; and a man with feeling exclaims, O my country ! So home expresses the deep senti- ment of the Family, and one cries out. Shall I never see my home again ? As regards this other thing, there is nothing left but to say, O my religious so- ciety ! Society is a terribly cold word ; there is not a particle of warmth in it ; it is a mere term of the intellect, of philosophy, or of law. I say these three great everlasting, forms of human society all have a name, a proper name ; but here in this community, and elsewhere, we always call two 90 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY of them by their proper names, and the other rarely or never ; we call it by its definition, a thing almost unexampled in the whole use of language. There are what we call, and rightly enough, societies ; as Tem- perance, Tract, Colonization Societies. These are not the eternal forms of human society ; they are tem- porary and special organizations, for which there ex- ists no proper name. Now, as to the use of the word church for the place of worship or building in which a church meets, it is natural, and agreeable to all analogy. The word house expresses not only a building in which a family resides, but the family itself. There are many instances of this in Scripture. Cornelius "feared God, with all his house." So city means a local place ; as one says, I am going to the city. It means, also, the people of the city ; as, the city was in an uproar, or the city voted so and so. So bench means a seat ; it is also used to signify those who sit on it ; as, in legal phrase, the full bench decided so and so. So, among. the Jews, Synagogue meant a collection of people, and the place in which the people collected. So Church expresses not only a people religiously associated, but, agreeably to all philological analogy, it expresses also the place where they meet. Then, again, the building is very prop- erly called church, because the building, if properly constructed, if rightly cared for, becomes a symbol in wood and stone of our faith and love, our zeal and devotion. Curiously, with many, the building, the wooden walls, is called the Church, while the people, the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 91 living souls, are called the Society. This week, in a religious newspaper, I saw the term Church used a dozen times, more or less, as applied to the building, and Society invariably used as applied to the people that worshipped in it. There are the words meetings and meeting-house. Meeting is a mere synonyme of society, and expresses just as much. It is no proper name ; it is a term of definition. All assemblings together of human be- ings are meetings or societies ; the term expresses the simple fact of passing out of the individual into the social state. The legislature is a meeting, a pic- nic is a meeting, the state is a meeting, the family is a meeting, a party is a meeting. Yet, in speaking of the legislature, one never says he is going to meeting. Speaking of going to a party, you never say, I am going to meeting. This peculiar use of the word meeting is, in the main, an Americanism, and a vulgarity. Nobody uses it in dignified dis- course. According to the true theory of our subject, every- body' is in the Family, in the State, in the Church. Yet the power of expulsion is claimed for each of these great organizations. Expulsion from the State is called banishment, or outlawry, a thing more prac- tised in ancient than modern times ; expulsion from the Church is called excommunication; from the Family, disowning. This expulsion is one of the greatest calamities that can befall a human being. To be an outlaw, or an excommunicate, or a dis- owned, — to have no country, no home, no church, — is among the greatest of evils. 92 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY THE Well, every man is presumed to be in the State, the Family, the Church, until, by due process of law, by overt offence proved against him, he is formally ejected. The point is not for a man to show cause wjiy he should be in the Church, but for the Church to show cause why he should not be there. In these times, the State does not directly outlaw people, but in cases of high crimes and misdemeanors virtually does this by sending them to prison. Such offenders cease to be members of the State. Their political or state rights are taken away. But every man born on our soil can claim all political or state rights till such offence is proved. He is a state member in virtue of birth. Here and there you find persons who, in the providence of God, are out of the Fam- ily. Their parents are dead ; their brothers and sis- ters, their husbands or wives, their children, all are dead and gone ; they have no family, no home, no place for the family affections to be garnered and family joys to be indulged. They are, in a word, homeless ; and I ask if there is ar word in the lan- guage that contains a more vivid picture of sadness and sorrow than that? Well, churchless is just as sad a word ; and if we had any sort of right con- ception of the subject, we should feel just as wretch- ed to belong to no church as to belong to no family. See how it is in the State ; look at Kossuth ; what is the trouble in his mind ? what affects him ? Why, he has lost his country ; to him there is no true Hun- garian state. Hungary exists, and the people, and her waters, and her skies ; but Kossuth's ideal of a state has ceased to exist. How would any one of THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 93 US to-day feel, if, in some strange catastrophe, we all at once shoald find we had no country, no state, no government ; that Russia had overturned the whole framework of our political society ? There are but three great leading, divine, and eter- nal organizations of mankind, — the Family, the State, and the Church ; and all men are presumed to be in each of them. The Family organizes the affections'; the State, political relations ; and the Church is the organization of the religious element. The Church expresses eternally our relation to God ; the State, citizenship ; the Family, the ties of husband and wife, parent and child. You are all interested in the State ; you rejoice to belong to it, and to feel that you are a part of it. Indeed, politics, or the manage- ment of state affairs, is a ruling passion with some of you. You are all interested in the Family, either in that to which you now belong, or in the forming of a new one. What interest have you in the Church ? People are proud of state offices, and like to be called by the title of their offices, as President, Gov- ernor, Mayor, Esquire, Judge ; proud, too, of military offices, as General, Colonel. People are everywhere getting ashamed of a church ofl&ce ; indeed, that good congregational title of Deacon is fast disap- pearing from current speech. There is no dignity or honor attached to it. To have an office in the State is honorable, andat is a breach of decorum on state occasions, nay, it is a great offence, to omit the title. To have an office in the Church is deemed a sort of drudgery. This shows to what a pass we have come. 94 THE CHUECH, ILLDSTRATED BY The great mass of the people are all out of the Church. What calls itself the Church is merely a select clique within what is called the Society, — a clique growing smaller with every year ; and the whole idea of the Church is fast fading from the popular mind. There are fathers who are unwilling to consecrate their sons to the service of the Church, not willing to educate them for the ministry. They yield them to the State without a scruple. The am- bition of our young men is not to be ministers or bishops of the Church, but to be lawyers, to go to Congress, to attain judgeships. The path of honor and dignity leads that way. There is little honor or dignity yi an office in that highest of organizations, that empire of supremest ideas, the Church. My friends, I ask you if things shall go on so ? I ask you, as reasonable and Christian men, to help me lift up the Church to its true place. I am going to labor for this, and I want your aid. I ask you to accept the great idea of the Church, and adjust yourselves thereto. Some say people will be good and-religious without the Church ; so, I say, people maybe good and love one another without the Fam- ily ; people may be good and honest without the State. Break up your State apd your Family, and see where you will be. You say we may have bad members. So you may have bad children, bad citi- zens ; what are you going to do about it? You say the State and the Family will get on without the Church. Nay, they will not. Things have gone on in a slipshod sort of way tol- erably well, so far, because of an overlying and over- THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 95 awing church sentirf-ient, derived from our fathers. Moreover, the religious element, like all other deep, eternal elements, evermore seeks organization ; and if we liberal, congregational, independent Christians furnish the popular want with no Church, if others about us do not, then there is something back of and behind us, back of and behind the ages and all ecclesi- astical history, that will furnish one. Romanism is moving straight onwards to one result, almost noise- lessly, quite meekly in this country, to be the Church of Christendom. For this she is building her splen- did Gothic piles, at due intervals, in all the land. Romanism, if nothing else will, will give the people a Church. Nothing, in the long run, can meet the Romish Church but the Unitarian Church ; nothing can meet the false Church but the true Church ; nothing can fneet that which calls itself the Church but that which really is the Church ; and I say, in face of all, let others call themselves as they may, we, the Unitarian body, are The Church. j^ Now understand me, my friends ; I speak of noth- ing awful, arbitrary, dangerous to liberty, when I speak of the Church attitude thtrt we would take. We are liberal, we are independent, we are congre- gational, we believe in humanity, we are resolved on progress, we labor in the highest ideas for the highest ideas. These are fundamental, unalterable, eternal principles ; our Church shall be the organization of these great principles. Our fathers broke away from the English monarchical state ; did they abandon the plan of a state ? No. They had great principles of democratic freedom. They said. Let us organ- 96 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTKATED BY ize these principles into a state. We, too, will have a state ; we, too, will be a state. So they organized ' or constituted those great principles into a state. In other words, they formed a constitution embodying those principles, both for themselves and their pos- terity for ever. And as to themselves, and all that they had to do with, they were the State. In this section of the country they said, " We do hereby agree to form ourselves into a free and independent state, by the style and title of the State of Maine." What I ask is, what the time has come for is, what God demands is, that free and independent Chris- tians as we are, — we, and all in all parts who agree with us, form ourselves into a free and indepen- dent church, by the style and title of the Church of God and Christ, the Liberal Church, the Unitarian Church of Maine. What should be the idea of The Church? All that which, in the State, liberty expresses. In a republican, democratic state, the Church should be republican and democratic. It should have no creed but the Bible, no ultimate head but Christ. Its bond should be the Holy Spirit, its sentiment frater- nization, its purpose perfection of our being, its du- ration everlasting. Already we have the materials of such a Church, — ideas matured, many a sacred tradition to be incorporated into it, thinking and earnest men and women, consecrated edifices, pas- tors duly ordained. My friends, I call upon you all to awaken to some thoughts upon and some endeavors after that grand- est of human organizations, the Church. Disabuse THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 97 your minds of prejudices and errors ; and while em- bracing the conception, devote yourselves to the actu- alization of the Church. We want that deep feel- ing in the heart which says, I love thy Church, O Lord ! You do say, all of you say, the children say, I love my home, I love my country. I want a sen- timent which says, I love my Church. I want some of our young men who are thinking of college and an education to say, I will devote myself to the Church, I will become a minister of Jesus Christ, I cast my lot, I fulfil my destiny, in that great divine organization of which Christ is the Head, and where apostles and martyrs are my predecessors. Again, I want so much Church feeling that men of wealth will so love the Church as to bestow more of their means upon it. I need not soften matters ; the simple fact is, the Church, as an organization, in all its ramifications and modes, needs money, just as much as the State or the Family needs it. It is just as right and proper that a man of his abundance should give abundantly to the Church, as that he should to the Family or the State. We give volun- tarily to the. Family and to the Church, and by tax- ation, by a species of compulsion, if you will, to the State ; but the principle is the same. Every man of us ought to consider his church tax or church sub- scription just as binding, just as promptly to be attended to, and as much a part of his indispensable yearly outlay, as any other necessary expense. Then, again, I want our men of leisure to devote themselves more to the Church, to the thought of the Church, to the consideration of what the Church is 9 98 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY and should be, to laboring for the Church, to extend- ing its iijfluence, to deepening its purity and power, to looking after its minor wants, its buildings, its furni- ture. See, here is a man out of business. He has leisure and means ; he hardly knows what to do with himself; he reads newspapers, frequents political meetings, and affects many things. Let that man de- vote himself to the Church, feel that the Church is a thing to be interested in, feel how vast is its scope, how infinite its bearings. How the old B-omanists, men, women, and children, loved their Church, and what a Church they made of it! how their painters painted for it, and their musicians composed for it, and their architects planned for it ! what beautiful, what gorgeous needlework their women wrought for it! Look once a month between this city and Hallowell or Gardiner, of a Sunday, and see the Romanists, youths and children, old men and maidens, — in winter snows, or mire of March, or heat of midsum- mer, — trudging afoot to their church in this city! Wha,t is the reason ? There are many, but the un- derlying reason is, they have a Church, they all belong to it, its history is theirs, its hopes are theirs ; in all its majesty, in all its promise, the Church of Rome fills each little boy's, each little girl's heart, as a part of their own being. Hence it is so difficult ever to proselyte them away from their Church. They are all baptized into it in infancy ; it becomes their very essence ; they grow into its image. Hence none of our Protestant revivals, no Protestant prop- agandism, can ever touch a Roman Catholic. If Romanism, with all its errors and wrongs, can build THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 99 up such a Church, what cannot Unitarianism, or pure Christianity, do, if we will but set about it in the right way ? You say, we have not the authority that Church pretends to exercise. ^True ; neither has democracy the power of monarchy. But can we not on a democratic basis rear as glorious and goodly a state in this country as they have in Great Britain or Austria ? So on a Unitarian or Liberal basis we can rear as glorious and goodly a Church as any the world has seen. The true Church, the Unitarian Church if you will, wants painters, musicians, architects, — in a word, it desires that genius and art should devote themselves to the Church, as well as to the State or the Family. See how comprehensive is that word, " The Church." It stands for the glorious body in all worlds of which Christ, under God, is the head ; this primarily. But next, it stands for a collection of Christian people ; it stands for people organized into a pastorate or parish ; it stands for worship, ■ or people met for worship ; it stands for the ordi- nances, and for the building or house in which such people meet ; finally, it is a collective idea, and rep- resents in one word the whole of these things. I have said that there is an instinct of the Church, as much as an instinct of the State or the Fam- ily, a sort of appetency for the highest organiza- tion of the highest truths ; a desire of fellow^ship and communion in the highest society ; and the Church in all ages and everywhere represents this organiza- tion, and men are not satisfied out of it, and mean some time to be in it. Yet, in this country, the 100 THE CHURCH, ILLUSTRATED BY instinct of the State is fast superseding that of the Church; in other words, religion yields to politics. This was the case with those of whom I spoke"; it is the case everywhere. I ask you again, these mid- dle and mature aged men, if you are willing to give your freshness and energy, the meridian of your days, the flood of your being, to the State, and only reserve a few last ebbing pulsations of penitence and submission for the Church ? Will the Church be content with only that? I say, the true Church will not. Of course, it will receive a man at the elev- enth hour. But it wants your vigor, it would em- brace the full circle of your days, while,'at the same time, it would cooperate and sympathize with you in all rightful ends. Are Roman Catholics the Church ? are the Rus- sians the Church ? are Episcopalians or Methodists the Church ? Are little companies, gathered exclu- sively within the various religious societies, the Church ? To me, to us, they are not. They may call themselves so, they may think so, if they will ; that is their concern, not mine. To me, to us, there can be no church, except that which has Christ for its head and the Gospel for its creed ; none but that in which humanity and nature and reason are .recognized ; none but a liberal and progressive one. Therefore, to ourselves, we are the Church ; for us there is, there can be, no higher. Are you prepared for this sentiment ? Can you respond to it, " We are the Church." For one, here I stand; and if there be but three others in the wide world to stand by me, here I stand and say. We are the THE FAMILY AND THE STATE. 101 Church. If this be not so, if there be aught higher than we, if there be aught that is the Church more than we, then this parish is as nothing, these walls and worship are nothing, then the whole thing of Liberal Christianity is nothing. No, but to us the whole thing of Liberal Chris- tianity, of a pure and unadulterated Christianity, is every thing. Where the organization of that is must be to us The Church ; there can be no other. We do not want, we will not have, nor be, a partial, or sectarian, or a narrow, or a bigoted church. We will have a church where the profoundest philoso- phy and science can worship and commune, where the largest humanity can worship and commune, where the highest intelligence and reason can wor- ship and commune. There is a religious element in science, in humanity, in reason, but these are all out of the sympathy of the Church ; that is, the so-called churches do not recognize their afRnity, and men of science, as such, worship in no church. Yet they seek the fellowship of God and truth, and we will give it to them. I have already said that our states- men are out of the Church. The Church has no dignity in their eyes, compared with the State. Its creeds, to a multitude of minds, are a set of old wives' fables, its sanctity a species of tallow-faced imbecility, its mysteries a contrivance to beguile weak minds. We can have a true Church ; God is calling us to restore the beauty of Zion. We can resolve our- selves into the Church ; we can covenant with God and Christ, with reason and nature, to be theirs for 102 THE CHURCH, FAMILY, AND STATE. ever. We can have a Church into the fellowship of ■which all great and pure minds, as well as all weak and tender ones, shall love to enter, — a Church to which knowledge, hope, progress, and all possibilities of humanity shall flock as clouds, and doves to their windows; a Church honored and respected by the world ; a Church, my friends, where we may be happy together, where we may commune together, ^here our highest and best desires may be satisfied together ; a Church that shall be as an open door to us into the skies, where, when we go hence, we shall meet those who have gone before us; a Church where the Holy Spirit will for ever dwell, in which Christ is, and under and around and over which is God our Heavenly Father. SERMON VII. THE CHUItCH HERBDITABLE. THE PEOMISB IS UNTO TOIT, AND TO TOUR CHILDREN. - Acts ii. 39. In a discourse a few months since, I undertook to show that children sustain, primarily and fundamen- tally, a birth-relation to the Church. I now say, in continuation of the subject, that the children are included in the covenant of the Church ; that no church-covenant is complete that does not include the children ; that it is not only not complete, but radically and fatally defective ; that this was the origi- nal economy of God in the arrangement of human relations, the foundation laid by God in nature for the perpetuity of the principal institutions of the race ; that this was the principle that entered into the construction of the primitive Church. I affirm, moreover, that there is no other practicable theory of the Church ; no other tenable or rational or Scriptural ground on which to place it. The Church is not a Masonic Fraternity or an Odd Fellows' Lodge, into which one adult man is 104 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. elected, and from which another adult man is reject- ed ; the benefits of which only accrue to the member during his lifetime, and do not pass over to his chil- dren. It is, in the strong language of the Bible, a heritage ; its dignity and honor, its law and constitu- tion, its rights and ceremonies, its duties ^nd its responsibilities, descend from parent to child even so long as there shall remain a seed on the earth. It is not a business partnership, nor an association for moral improvement, nor a meeting of an evening ; it expresses the eternal form of human beings in that eternal relation to the worship of God, communion with Christ, and everlasting progress of the soul. By hereditable, I mean this : that as our political con- stitution descends from the fathers to the sons, so does that of 'the Church; as the peculiar prin- ciples that govern us as a nation descend from father to son, so do those of the Church ; as the whole thing that we call the State is transmitted, so is the whole of that called the Church. Just, too, as this church edifice is an inheritance from our fa- thers, and we shall transmit it to our sons, so is all that which this edifice symbolizes, — Christian truth, worship, liberty, progress, unity, immortality. I affirm, that the analogy of all history of all times and places and subjects, favors the view herein expressed. For instance, in ancient Greece, where the Church and State were one, or where the administration of public religious and political af- fairs was under one general direction, both Church and State were hereditable ; in other words, the children were born into one as much as into the THE CHURCH HEREDITABLB. 105 other ; the covenant of the fathers included the chil- dren ; each generation took up the prevailing insti- tutions where the preceding one left them, and possi- bly carried them to greater perfection. The form of recognition at Athens was a simple registry of names, and this was done three times ; first, in the year of birth ; second, at the age of eighteen ; the third, at twenty ; all the rights of citizenship and church-mem- bership simultaneously and in due order of time ac- cruing. No Athenian could be deprived of any relig- ious privilege unless he had been convicted of some great offence. The same is true of Rome, and indeed of every country the history of which has reached us. The form among the Romans was a change of dress. Young people wore a gown bordered with purple, called the tog'a prcetexta ; at the age of sixteen they put on the toga virilis, or manly gown, which was also called toga pura, because it was purely white. These seasons of registry among the Greeks, and of change of apparel among the Romans, were solemnized by religious observance. In these, as in other instances to which we might refer, there was a period of infancy and minority, and of majority or manhood. But the essential point was birth and age. In the Church, as in the State, there is perhaps what may be termed a minor membership and a major membership. But I wish now to inquire more particularly what the Bible teaches on this subject, and what is God's revealed will. And first I shall ask attention to the Abrahamic coVenant, which gave a character to the whole Jewish history, and from which also Chris- 106 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. tianity derives a certain complexion. "We read in the book of Genesis, that God said unto Abraham, " Behold, I make my covenant with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations, and I will estab- lish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and thy seed after thee." This was the token of the covenant, that every man-child at eight days old should be circum- cised. Here is the foundation or beginning of what for the sake of convenience may be called the Abrahamic Church, or Abrahamic State, or Abra- hamic dispensation. This was before Christ, about the year 2000. Here was a solemn covenant, com- munion, fellowship, between ^Abraham and God. And all the children, as fast as they were born, were born into it ; and at eight days old they were circurrv- cised as the seal of their membership. These few words express the theory and the fact of the whole Jewish economy. To Abraham Isaac was born, and he was included in the covenant or Church ; to Isaac succeeded Jacob, and so on. There is no halting, no intermission, no questioning. After about four hundred years Moses led the Israelites, the Abrahamic Church, out of Egypt, and, with some additions to their laws, rites, and customs, they were established in the land of Canaan. But the rule of succession and the rite of recognition underwent no change. The Abrahamic Church was hereditable. These Israelites are called a holy peo- ple, a kingdom of priests, and also saints. They are said to be sanctified, and this in anticipation, this of THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. 107 children yet to be born, of generations that only in the way of nature would be connected with what had gone before them. All this is true and plain. I do not know that anybody doubts it, I do not know that anybody misunderstands it. You may ask how those as yet unborn, who had done neither good nor evil, could be called holy. The fact is, they were so called. God himself did not hesitate to predicate holi- ness of all the children of those included in his cove- nant with Abraham. " Ye shall be to me," he says, " a holy nation." " All the congregation is holy, every one of them." " Ye are the children of the Lord your God." The presumption was, that every child was holy ; holy according to the standard of Judaism, until the contrary was proved; just as un- der our state- economy every citizen is presumed to be honest and innocent until the contrary is proved. In the Abrahamic or Jewish Church, provision was made against transgression, as is done in our politi- cal state. If a man violated the law of God, he was to be dealt with. So if a man violates the law of the land, he is dealt with. The result was, that all the Jewish men, women, and children were in the Jewish Church ; the majority, the masses, the people, were there ; the exception being here and there one who had been cut off. Now, whether this was well, or wise, or jjidicious, it was just what God, so far as he had any connec- tion with Judaism, wished should be. It was what he expressly ordered, and so to say, stipulated for. We are shut up to this conclusion, that God, in ar- ranging the economy of the Church, so arranged it 108 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLB. that it should be hereditable ; placed it on this basis and no other ; excluded every other basis, that he might put it on this. True, the Jews were not al- ways faithful to their God, their covenant, and their Church. And they suffered severely for their sins and follies. But what was it that brought them back to fidelity ? It was the remembrance of the responsibility they were under to their God, their covenant, and their Church. These responsibilities never left them in all their declensions and backslid- ings ; and their covenant relation to God was ever urged upon them as a motive to virtue and perfec- tion. So far our way is clear. Two thousand years elapse, and Christ appears. Now I desire to ask, if the economy, purpose, or plan of God respecting his Church changed ; changed, I mean, in the particular of which I am speaking ? Doubtless there were changes. Moses is changed for Christ, Judaism -for Christianity, universal wor- ship succeeds worship at Jerusalem, universal love national love ; God enters into a new covenant, or relation, with his children. We leave the Jewish Church and enter the Christian Church. But has the law of succession changed ? Is not the Church still hereditable ? If there be a change, I know no evidence of it, I can find not one particle of evidence of it. Can any man direct me where I shall find • even the first hint of such alteration ? Indeed, there is nosuch evidence ; indeed, the testimony, as I shall presently show, is all the other way. The covenant blessings of God seem to have been confined hitherto to the Jewish nation. Christ comes and scatters THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. 109 these blessings over the world. A stream of Divine favor seems to have been flowing through Judea, and when it reached the borders of that land to have stopped, and, as it were, risen very high. Christ comes and breaks down the gates, and lets the waters of life flow over all people. His ministration includes, not merely the lineal descendants of Abra- ham, who had often proved themselves unworthy of everlasting life, but Greek and Roman, Barbarian and Scythian. Christ would establish a universal Church; God, he says, will enter into covenant with all races, and I am the mediator of the New Cove- nant. Believe in me, he says, and accept the prom- ise God makes through me. The seal of the old cov- enant was in the flesh, the new one is in the heart ; the old law was written on tables of stone, the new one in the mind. Believe this to be true that I tell you. It is glad tidings, it is the Gospel, and you, John and Peter, go and proclaim the glad tidings. The old law, or " the law," as it is concisely called, the law of Moses, was defective ; it said. An eye for an eye ; the new law says. Nay, resist not evil ; the old law said. Kill your enemies ; the new, Love them ; the old said. Salvation is of the Jews ; the new. Salvation is for all; the old law made the body holy ; the new makes the spirit holy. There were great interior differences between Christ and Moses, between the Christian Church and the Jewish Church, but were there administra- tive differences ? Was not the rule of succession the same ? Did not the children of the Christian Church inherit the Christian Church ? The covenant with 10 110 THE CHURCH HEEBDITABLE. Abraham was hereditary in its operations. And I ask you particularly to observe, that this covenant was for all nations. Yet for two thousand years it was confined to one nation, the Israelites. Now when Christ came with his liberal, human, cosmo- politan purposes, when he came to open the door of the true Church to all men, the JeWs, or their teach- ers and chiefs, took umbrage, and for this cause per- haps more than any other they compassed his death. Even the Jewish Christians could not for a long while get over their feeling of exclusiveness. Salva- tion is of the Jews, was a sentiment ever ringing in their ears, and blazing before their imaginations. Hence a dispute, and in settling this dispute you get a key to all of Paul's Epistles. In the light of the question now agitated, these Epistles of Paul become luminous and beautiful. Paul says, God made a covenant with Abraham, for all nations; and the promise, the old, original promise, was, that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. But hitherto only the Jew- ish nation has been blessed. But Christ has come, argues the Apostle, who is the seed of Abraham, and in him now all nations are to be blessed. Every- body, anywhere, Jew or Greek, who believes Christ, and accepts the great principles he inculcates, enters into the covenant of the promise, and is a child of God. So far all is clear. But I ask attention to this : Paul claimed that the old covenant made with Abraham two thousand .years before was fulfilled, completed, or rather, fully carried into execution, by Christ. Biit the Jews, or the Judaistic Christians, THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. Ill said, See here : we have a law ; it was given by Mo- ses four hundred years after the time of Abraham ; it prescribes circumcision, sundry washings, new moons, sabbath-days, various rites and ordinances, — in other word?, quite a variety of outward works ; and we insist that that law remains, and is binding ; and, even if one does become a disciple of the Nazarene, he must still keep the law. Very well, Paul says, then you are going to make all men Jews ; you will have them all circumcised, and he that is debtor to any part of the law is debtor to the whole; and there is no possible escape for any man. But the original covenant with Abraham included all nations, and your law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul the covenant before con- firmed of God in Christ, to be ultimately accom- plished in Christ. In plain wor5s, Paul says salva- tion has come to the Gentiles. Christ has redeemed us from the' curse of the law, your law, — from the curse denounced on such as violate it; we have nothing more to do with it ; and all, that the bless- ings covenanted to Abraham might come upon the Gentiles. In a word, according to Paul, the Abra- hamic covenant is not only fulfilled, but, as it were, revived, and truly developed in Christianity. This too, I believe, is generally admitted. But the great point back of all this is wholly lost to view, that the original Abrahamic covenant and Abrahamic Church included the children, was hereditable. This fundamental principle, I argue, underwent no change. The Christian covenant and the Chris- tian Church, however in other things it may differ 112 THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. from the other, must in this agree with it, that it also includes the children. There is a difference, a change in an important particular ; circumcision was the seal or token of the Abrahamic covenant ; while, with most pedobaptists, baptism takes the place of circumcis- ion. But circumcision was the sign that the child was in the bosom and fellowship of the Abrahamic Church, as a minor, indeed, at first, l?ut afterwards as a major ; and why should not baptism be a seal or token that a child is in the Christian Church ? I know that infant baptism nowhere among the sects that we are most familiar with is so regarded. I insist that as God did with Abraham, so also he did with Christ, establish a covenant with him and his seed after him, in their generations, for an ever- lasting covenant. And the seed of Christ are those who believe in him. Peter, in the text, emphatically declares, " The promise is unto you, and to your children." This, then, is my first direct argument from Scripture for maintaining that the Church is hereditable, or includes the children, — the connection that St. Paul declares to subsist between the Abra- hamic and the Christian covenant. 2. Another reason for the same view is this: Christ is made the heir of all things. The inherit- ance which had been in the hand of Abraham or Moses, now passes into that of Christ. But we are joint heirs with Christ, or we are heirs of God in Christ, not Abraham, and our children inherit with us of very necessity. An inheritance is of course hereditable. This new dispensation, this new cove- nant, this that we call the Christian Church, the in- THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. 113 heritance that the Apostle speaks of, is hereditable. " We have an inheritance in the kingdom of God " ; " in Christ we have obtained an inheritance." (Eph. i. 11.) " We are heirs according to the promise." Judaism had been the inheritance, the Jews were heirs, and they thought themselves sole heirs. No, Paul says ; and here was the point which was a mys- tery to the Jewish mind, and which — not the Incar- nation, not the Trinity — is the mystery of the Gos- pel, that " the Gentiles too should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of God's prom- ise in Christ ; which in other ages (in the times of Isaac, and Moses, and David) was not made known unto the sons of men, but is now revealed unto the holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit." (Eph. iii. 5, 6.) Of course, then, I say, as the Jews and their descendants had been heirs of the original cove- nant, and all its rights and privileges, so are we and ours, in all senses of the word, heirs under the new dispensation. " And if we are Christ's, we are Abra- ham's seed, [as really as the Jews,] and heirs accord- ing to the promise." (Gal. iii. 29.) Paul's idea seems to have been something of this sort, that God really entered into covenant with Abraham, not for the Jews only, but for all the world, and all time ; but that the Jews had somehow monopolized the covenant till Christ came, who re- stored its true meaning, and applied it to its true use, that of distribution equally among all the races of men. Hence he says what I have just quoted. If we are Christ's, we are verily Abraham's seed, and 10* 114 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. heirs according to the promise originally made to the patriarch. 3. My third argument for a hereditable Church, or that the children of the Church belong to the Church, is found in the express declaration of Scripture. Our text would seem to be decisive, — " The promise is unto you, and to your children." This is said im- mediately after the ascension, when the disciples began to adjust themselves to their great work, and is spoken to the Jews for the purpose of winning them to the new covenant. But its intent cannot be mistaken. It is the Christian promise ; or, if you please, it is the old Abrahamic promise now revived in Christ. But the point before us is, it is for " the children." It is the same language God had em- ployed in all ages, and its import could not have been misunderstood, that God would covenant with them for their children, or for their children in them. There is this remarkable passage : " The unbeliev- ing husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbe- lieving wife is sanctified by the husband ; else were your children unclean; but now are they holy." (1 Cor. vi. 14.) The Jews were called holy because they were a covenant people of God ; their children were deemed holy because they were included in the same covenant. The conclusion is irresistible, that, inasmuch as the children of believing parents are declared by the Apostle to be holy, they must of necessity be included in the Christian covenant. The case is this. The Bible, in the Old Testa- ment, presumes all Jews to be holy, and their chil- dren with them : " Ye shall be to me a holy nation " ; THE CHURCH HEREDITABLK. 115 " Every male child shall be called holy to the Lord." In the New Testament, it presumes all Christians to be holy, as Paul calls them holy brethren, holy women, elect of God and holy, and their children with them. If holy here means consecrated to God, it means that the children, as well as the parents, are consecrated. Not but that Jews and Christians, par- ents and children, may sin, as we know they did sin. I say the fact may be that they sin, but the presumption in the Bible is that the children of good parents will be good. Just as, in the United States, the presumption is that the people are republicans and lovers of liberty, although there may be people here who are monarchical in principle. This presumption covers the children. In a Mohammedan country, the presumption is that all the people are temperate, and that the children will grow up into temperance, and be consecrated to total abstinence. Yet the fact may possibly be that some drink wine and strong liquors. We are obliged to presume one thing or the other, and address ourselves accordingly. The passage last quoted presumes the children of believ- ers to be believers, minor believers, and deals with them as such. There are presumptive heirs to the throne of an empire, and they are always addressed and treated as such, even though they may die, or rebel, or abjure their country long before the expected place is vacant. 4. My fourth argument is drawn from the lan- guage of Christ touching children, and his manner of treating them. Christ came to renew the cove- nant of God with man ; he came to gather into one 116 THE CHURCH HEHEDITABLE. those that were near and those that were afar off; he came, if you please so to say, to form a Church, a true Church. Had he any regard to the children ? If so, what ? Did his scheme include them ? Did his own heart embrace them ? He commanded par- ents to bring them to him, he took them into his arms, he blessed them ; and thus, as it would ap- pear, signalized his entering into everlasting cove- nant with them. He declared. Of such is the king- dom of heaven. The phrase kingdom of heaven, or of God, so often used by Christ, does not refer directly to the life beyond the grave, but rather to this ; or I may say it refers to that through this. The immediate kingdom of God which Christ had in mind was to be developed here on the earth. It means, however we view it, at least as much as the word Church. I think it stood to Christ's mind as synonymous with the goodly Church he would plant and foster in all the world. If, then, children belong to the Christian kingdom of God, they certainly be- long to the Christian Church. When Paul says, " The children of a believer are holy," he says no more than Christ affirmed, that " they are of his kingdom." It does not admit of a doubt that the purposes, scheme, economy, and whole heart of Christ, comprehended the children. How he yearned and agonized for such a result ! " O Jerusalem ! Jeru- salem ! how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings!" This may mean the whole people of the city, but it certainly must signify the little children also. " Forbid them not to come unto me." We THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. 117 are not to throw the least obstacle in the way of the smallest child borne in its mother's arms entering into the covenant of God in Christ : it must be con- secrated, dedicated, to God, to Christ ; and if so con- secrated or dedicated, it of course belongs to his Church. The idea of a child coming to Christ, and being declared to be of his kingdom, and being blessed by him, — and not being in his Church, still remaining outside of his Church, and being, as we say, in the world, a stranger from the covenants of promise, — is a simple absurdity, a monstrosity. 5. My fifth argument comes from the way in which the Apostles, after Christ, or, as we sometimes say, the Apostolic Church, treated children. There are the declarations already cited ; first, that of Peter, made upon the very introduction of himself to man- kind as a Christian minister, — " The promise is unto you, and to your children " ; second, that of Paul, who takes it for granted, a thing which nobody doubted or ever thought of bringing into dispute, that the children of believers were holy. And, in reviewing the action of the Apostolic Church, we must not disregard the final injunction of Christ to his disciples, " Go, teach all nations, baptizing them," &c. It is well argued that nations must include the children of a nation. I am not now speaking of bap- tism, as an external rite. I have little doubt, the real, deep, efficacious baptism that Christ meant was a spiritual baptism. I am not now inquiring whether infants ought to receive water-baptism. The point is, whether, with or without baptism, the children of the Church belong to the Church. Whether, indeed, 118 THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. baptism here means spiritual influences or water ap- plications, and whether, as most suppose, it is a token of the Christian covenant and a seal of church-membership, or not, whichever way we look at it, it would seem to include the children. Lydia was baptized, and her household, or family. Paul baptized the household or family of Stephanas. I am not going to affirm there were children in these households. The presumption is, there were ; at any rate, the whole family, more or less, great and small, became of the Christian Church. Paul uses this language : Salute the church that is in such or such a house, or family. The house or family, parents and children, were accounted as constituting the church. The jailer at Philippi believed and was baptized, with all his house. The Baptists say, there could have been no infants in that family, for infants cannot believe. I will not commit the folly of say- ing the jailer believed for his children, if he had any. I do say, this father, as every father ought to do, ac- cepted Christ as the Saviour, Shepherd, Divine Head of himself and his children, — accepted Christianity as the religion of himself and family, and took all his little ones with him, and all that should be born unto him, into the new covenant ; and if there was a babe of but a day old, he said to Paul, take that too, seal it with the great seal, it shall grow up into the faith of Jesus. Again, we read that a nobleman of Ca- pernaum believed, with all his house, and that Cor- nelius feared God, with all his house. We have a dozen or more instances in which the house, the en- tire family, is most sacredly connected with the great THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. 119 movement Christ and the Apostles were starting in the world. Now those have undertaken a very hard work, who shall convince me, or anybody, that there were no little children in those families. The pre- sumptions, the known facts of all time, are against such a notion. I shall claim there were children there, until the contrary is proved. "Well, these children were included in whatever included the parents, whether we call it the Church, or the new covenant, or the Christian system, or what not. So Christ says, " This day is salvation come to this house." To show this church connec- tion of the children, the Apostles use this language of spiritual affection and Christian fellowship : " Sa- lute them that are of Aristobulus's household ; greet them that be of Narcissus's household." Of course, here is implied the Christian and church fraternization and communion of the children. Into whatever house the Apostles entered, they were directed by their Master to say. Peace be to this house ; peace, harmony, love, benediction. Christian harmony, love, benediction ; this was to be their first salutation, first address. Again, when the dis- ciples sold their possessions, when they continued with one accord in the temple, when they went daily from house to house, breaking bread, — men and women, fathers and mothers, — in the nature of the case, they must have had their children with them. I pass now to the direct mention of children. John writes to a church sister thus: " The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth." He closes in these words : " The children of 120 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. thy elect sister," that is, the children of my \yife, my own children, " greet thee." Again, he says, " I re- joiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in truth." Christianity gradually formed itself into an institution ; it developed itself in what I have called the organization of the Christian religious element, in other words. The Church. As we say of our meetings, of any sort, it came to order. It had its officers, its bishops or pastors, and its deacons ; and we trace at once an intimate church connection be- tween these church officers and their children. The bishop or pastor and the deacon are to rule well their own houses and children, having them in subjection with all gravity or soundness. They are directed to have faithful children, children of the Christian faith. Then Paul wills that the younger Christian or church women marry and bear children. These same women, now embraced in the new covenant, are also exhorted to love their husbands and their children. By and by the Apostles meet these assem- bled Christian families, that gradually expand into a more universal Church, and see how he addresses them all alike. Parents, he says, love your children ; children, obey your parents in the Lord, i. e. Christ ; as Christian children, as included in the new cove- nant, as members, of a common household of faith. So he says, Wives, as we now say. Christian wives, church wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands ; husbands. Christian husbands, cherish and nourish your wives even as your own flesh, for so Jesus cher- isheth and nourisheth the Church. In a word, the whole household, children and all, is now presumed THE CHURCH HERBDITABLE. 121 to be a Christian household, and are all gathered into the Church together, and are all spoken to and treated as component parts of one great spiritual communion. The principle is, that if the parents are believers, or if one parent is a believer, the children are holy. Or, as Solomon expresses it, " The just man walk- eth in his integrity; his children are blessed after him." Where the Apostle is writing to one of these entire communities, recently formed, as in the Epis- tle to the Ephesians, for instance, we find it addressed to the saints at Ephesus and the faithful in Christ Jesus, " which does at least mean," argues Dr. Bush- nell, " that the Epistle is addressed to Christian breth- ren. And among these, ' children ' are directly ad- dressed in the same way as other members of the fraternity. The same is true in the Epistle to the Colossians, wherein we see children familiarly recog- nized with their parents among the adult Christian disciples, and addressed in the second person, with as little thought of impropriety as the adults them- selves." I submit, without further citation, that, in the Apostolic times, wherever you look, in all that is expressed by the words Church arrangements, Church privileges, Church distinctions, Church re- sponsibilities, the children were included. I do not know nor care whether Lydia had children or not ; the whole spirit of the system then taking its rise in the world includes the children. The Church which we see the Apostles devoting themselves to erect was not a Masonic Fraternity, or Odd Fellows' Lodge ; it was like the State, or Commonwealth ; it 11 122 THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. was indeed a new, divine Christian state and commonwealth, in which the promise was to them and to their children. The Apostles labored wholly in the spirit of the old covenant with Abraham, that God was making a covenant with those first believers and their seed after them, to be a God to them and their seed for ever. I may say more ; the people of those times knew no other way of doing things ; God, I may say, had trained the mind of the generations to no other modes of thinking; to no other forms of action. A man leaving Judaism or Paganism, and embracing the doctrine of Jesus, on entering the Church, took his wife and children with him, feeling that God had set his sanctuary in the midst of them, that he should dwell therein, and his children, and his children's children, for ever. Than this idea of separating parents from children in the fellowship of the Church, perhaps you could con- ceive nothing more revolting to the whole OrientaL mind, Jewish or other, which always cherished with extremest saeredness the parental and filial ties, and studied to secure the highest blessings to the children. My last — argument, I was about to say, but the subject is beyond argument, it has the force of fore- gone sentiment and conviction, — the last illustration of the great truth I have endeavored to set forth is found in the action of the Christian Church, imme- diately subsequent to the era of the Apostles. The records of that period are few, but all • corroborative of the same general view. Among the earliest Chris- tian gravestones is one commemorative of a little child ; it is inscribed thus : " Here lies Zosimus, a THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. 123 faithful, descended of faithfuls, aged two years, one month, and twenty-five days." Here, as in a pic- ture, the whole thing is seen. That little child was in the covenant of its parents. It was a believer, descended from believers. Gregory Nazianzen, one of the earliest of the Christian Fathers, particu- larly commends his mother, that '' not only was she herself consecrated to God, and brought up under a pious education, but that she conveyed it down as a necessary inheritance to her children." Clement of Alexandria describes a primitive Christian family in these words : " The mother is the theme of the children's praise, the wife is the theme of her hus- band's praise, while God is the theme of the united praise of all." (Neander, p. 175.) The same is ex- pressed in their views about the future world: " There a vast multitude of them that are dear to us await us, a multitude of parents, of brothers, of children." As the "Passover had been the funda-- mental covenant feast of the Mosaic religion, and children partook of it, so the Lord's Supper be- came the fundamental covenant feast of the Chris- tian religion, and the children partook of it." (Nean- der.) "We even find parents frequently giving the sacred emblems to their own children. I do not know as it admits of question, that, in the first ages of the Church, the children of believers were all considered as of the Church; I mean prior to the fourth century, which is the beginning of the great Dark Age of our era. At a later period, chil- dren were received into the Church : not in conse- quence of birth however, but solely by baptism. 124 THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLB. The doctrine of Total Depravity had sprang up, and this at once unchurched, unchristianized, and con- demned all children. But there was not wanting a remedy for this difficulty; the notion was con- ^ ceived that the water of baptism regenerated the child; and so children recovered their standing in the Church through baptism. An unbaptized infant was out of the Church, out of the covenant of grace, out of heaven, and, as St. Augustine unequivocally taught, was damned to everlasting perdition. Such is the doctrine, my friends, and these are its proofs. Such is a portion of my own implicit faith. Nor is the view here advanced without confirma- tion ; and that, too, from a source rather unexpected. First, Dr. Bushnell's book on Christian Nurture is really founded on the doctrine I have endeavored to unfold. He does not say as much as I do, or speak so plainly, but the same train of thought runs all through what he has written. The object of his book is to show, in his own words, " that the child is to grow up a Christian." That too I believe. He lays no substantial basis for such a belief; that I have endeavored to do. A further confirmation is afforded in a little book, entitled « The Baptized Child," by the Rev. Nehe- miah Adams, of Essex Street Church, Boston, a Calvinist. Mr. Adams says, speaking of Christ blessing little children, " If Christ referred to the Church on earth, infants have in his view a certain relation to that Church ; and this relation may have such meaning and benefit in it, that, if they die in infancy, they are transferred to heaven." Infants, THE CHURCH HEKEDITABI-E. 125 then, have a relation to the Church. What rela- tion ? Such that, if they die, they go to heaven. This is a pleasant way of avoiding the real point, or of not exactly saying what one thinks. That rela- tion is, that infants are in and of the Church. Again, Mr. Adams uses this very strong, very significant language: " Children were formerly included with their parents in promises and threatenings, blessings and curses. This is a principle in the government of the world; and when God revived his Church in Abraham, this principle came into view ; and the admission of children into covenant with their par- ents was grafted upon it. It has its foundation in our nature, and cannot cease but with the parental relation. So that the question which some ask, ' Whether the Abrahamic covenant is abolished,' is lost in the question. Has that principle of the Di- vine government ceased, upon which God formerly included the children of believers in his covenant with their parents?" Has that principle ceased, — a principle in the government of the world, founded in our nature, and which cannot cease ? Mr. Adams is apparently in a dilemma, and discordant with himself. He says the principle cannot cease. But as if this were saying too much, he asks if it can cease. This question he does not answer. But a more important, a more momentous question, has not been propounded to the American churches. Mr. Adarns, however, does say that he considers it " a great principle in God's government of the world, which existed even before the Abrahamic covenant, and will last to the end of time," that there is " a nat- u* 126 THE CHURCH HERKDITABLE. ural connection of children with their parents in the divine constitution," in other words, the Church. This really expresses the whole idea, and all I have said, — that there is a natural connection, a birth- relation, an inherited right, of children to the Church ; or that the children of the Church, by " a natural connection," belong to the Church. Again, Mr. Adams says, " God, at baptism, re- ceives the child into the number of those to whom He stands in a peculiar relation " ; that is, in plain words, into the Church, according to the Calvinistic view of it. He adds, that parents, when they join the Church, must avouch Jehovah to be the God and portion of their children" a thing I never saw done anywhere. He says again, " If God has not in any manner signified his will that the admission of children into covenant with him through their parents should cease, — and this we nowhere find that he has done, — the baptized child is of course received into special relation to God." Here Mr. Adams wellnigh asserts, what it has been one ob- ject of this discourse to prove, that the principle in- volved in the Abrahamic covenant has never ceased. Need I say any thing more ? Will any one ques- tion the soundness of my views. Yet here in New England the principle has ceased, practically ceased everywhere. Mr. Adams, addressing the baptized child, says, and underscores the words, " God looks upon you as His child, your parents gave you to Him when you were baptized." Mr. Adams says, the pious Israelite had great comfort in the fact that his children were included in the covenant ; and he THE CHURCH HBREDITABLE. 127 adds, " If believers ncsw do not enjoy this privilege," — they certainly do not, — " they are deprived of a great blessing, and that too under a dispensation which professes to be superior to that which is past, in the richness of its blessings." He continues, " This privi- lege is not restricted to one age or dispensation ; it grows out of the natural relation of parents and children. When God would mark by a peculiar token the covenant made by Him with believers. He selected the natural affection of parents for their chil- dren, and as it were sanctified or set apart this instinct, to be a sign between Him and them." Mr. Adams, in these extracts, does not appear consistent. He at one time rnakes the connection of children with the Church turn on baptism, and at another he says this relation has its foundation in nature, the ^^ natural con- nection of children with their parents in the divine constitution." The idea and import of baptism I shall by and by recur to. I am now simply asking, What is the foundation of the children's relation to the Church? It is not baptism; that is another thing. I conceive it to be, as Mr. Adams again and again admits that it is, the same as it is in the state and the family, the natural connection between par- ents and children. I have a few explanations to make. I have used the word hereditary. I think I am not misunder- stood. / do not mean that personal character is hered- ita/ry, I do mean that that which is potd'nt in forming personal character is hereditary. I do not mean that virtue is hereditary, I do mean that the supports and incentives to virtue are hereditary. I do not mean 128 , THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. that regeneration is hereditary ; I do mean that the divine means and method of regeneration are heredi- tary. I say the Church is hereditable, as I say the State is ; and that there is no other foundation for the perpetuity of either. The Bible is hereditary, the Sabbath is hereditary. This that we call Christ Church is an heritage ; this building, or some other in its place, we shall transmit by natural succession to our children, as we have received it from our fathers ; this worship is conveyed in like manner, the influence of this church, its organic life, our princi- ples, our truths, our liberality, the form and fashion of our thoughts, we likewise send down. In the State we inherit the constitution and laws, the rights and privileges of our fathers. In the State they designed that we should, they covenanted to this very extent. In the Church we have no such cove- nant. Both in State and Church, we often all live at the same time, old and young, parents and chil- dren, testators and heirs, to enjoy these Iplessings in common. There are the terms believers, Christians, the Church, — how would I have them used? There is every shade of belief; all kinds of believers. I certainly do not mean by believers the little company, here or any- where, who to-day may unite in the Lord's Supper. I trust they are believers ; but there are more be- sides. The great majority of t|jis congregation, as to the fundamental truths of Christianity, are be- lievers, to the extent that all the duties and obliga- tions of Christianity may be predicated of their be- lief. And that is belief enough for the true Church theory to proceed upon. THE CHURCH HEKEDITABLE. 129 " Christians" — who are Christians ? I shall quote from the report made to the New York Legislature on a petition for abolishing all laws pertaining to the Sabbath ; a report evidently suggested by Calvinistic clergy, and drawn up by Calvinistic laity. It says : " This is a Christian nation. Ninety-nine hundredths, if not a larger portion of the population, believe in the general doctrines of the Christian religion ; Chris- tianity is the common and prevailing faith of the people, it is the common creed of the people." Now in whatever sense it be true that we are a Christian nation or a Christian people, just in that sense do aU Christian responsibilities on the one hand, and Christian privileges on the other, belong to us. Just .to that extent are we all, parents and children, in- cluded in the Christian covenant, just to that extent are we, as were the Jews, a holy people unto the Lord our God ; whether the sense be loose or strict, high or low, it matters not, as to the argument be- fore us. " Church" — how is that word to be understood by us in the practical application of this discourse ? how the phrase, " The children of the Church belong to the Church " ? Certainly not as an exclusive de- scription of a small band of communicants, but as it is used in the declaration, " We are the Church " ; meaning all who are willing to be embodied in that formula, whether they are communicants or not. So important, my friends, do I deem the doctrine of this discourse, so unquestionable does the truth of it appear, so clearly is it revealed alike in all history, in nature, in Scripture, and the craving wants of our 130 THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. best men, so clearly is it of God and a part of the Divine economy in the government of the world, that I could not, for a moment, consent to assume the pastorate of any church that did not recognize it. I do not think I magnify the subject under any im- mediate impressions of contact with it, or from any sort of idiosyncrasy of feeling or speculation ; and I am disposed to say that no subject, or hardly Einy subject, can be proposed to the consideration, at least, of the New England churches, of magnitude and moment like this. It really underlies the whole mat- ter of Christian nurture and general religious educa- tion ; it underlies the whole matter of the method of a bishop or pastor with his people, and of the Church with whatever comes within its sphere. It is in itself a complete basis of church action towards the young. It determines the mode in which the Christian min- ister is to address his people, and the light in which he is to view them. Are the children in covenant with their parents, or out of covenant ? That is the ques- tion we have got to meet. If they are in covenant, our duty to them is one thing ; if out of covenant, our duty ■ is quite another thing. If in the latter case, I do not say the children are actually different, but we look on them in wholly another light, they assume an oppo- site and contrasted phase. You know how the case now is, — the children are generally out of covenant of the Christian Church. Does any evil result from this ? Consult, if you will, Dr. Bushnell's book. He says, " Our children grow up in sin, artificially averse to religion. Our fam- ilies are irresponsible," — and he might have added, THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. 131 our churches are irresponsible. " Our piety is itself desiccated as it is undomesticated, and whatever progress we make is wrought by methods that are desultory and violent, and remote as possible from all the natural laws of character. In short, the mischiefs we suffer are too evident to be suffered longer. The day has come when God calls us to undertake a remedy." You know how it is, — the children of the Church are all out of the Church, out of the cove- nant ; neither the privileges nor the duties of the Church or the covenant, or of Christ, are supposed to rest upon them. The idea is, that if we can specially convert, transmute, make over these children, then they can be taken into the Church and the covenant. And this idea practically prevails just as much in Unitarian churches as in any other. The notion has been branded into the American mind, that, to use the common phrase, one must meet with a change before he can enter the covenant, take upon himself the obligations of a Christian life, or even partake of the communion. The doctrine of total depravity, I hardly need to say, is the fountain-head of all this notion. This doctrine at once unchurches the whole human race, as repre- sented in a whole generation of children. The Ro- manists get over the difficulty by saying water re- generates. Our modern Calvinists see the absurdity of this, yet, still cleaving to total depravity, they only fall into deeper mire. Revivals are invoked to pre- vent the extinction of the Church. Dr. Bushnell sees evils enough in them. He does not strike at the root of the tree, he does not deny depravity, but 132 THE CHURCH HERBDITABLE. he strikes boldly for this : " We must educate the children into piety, we must treat them as in the covenant " ; and he writes a book, devoted to prove this thesis : " That the child is to grow up a Chris- tian." He says of his book, " It was like a fuse hissing from a bomb, that threw the whole State of Massachusetts into a general panic." Mr. Adams says, " God looks upon the baptized child as his child." Dr. Bushnell says, the child is in the Church, is presumptively regenerated. Paul says, the chil- dren of believers are holy. Now the question, I grant, may not be a question of the absolute nature of the child, but this : " How shall we look upon children." If, as Mr. Adams says, God looks upon the baptized child as his child, certainly you and I may ; if Dr. Bushnell may re- gard the child as presumptively regenerate, you and I may; if Paul regarded them as holy, so may we. Even leaving out the fact, the presumption in this case is every thing. The man whom I traffic with to-raorrow morning may be a dishonest man ; but I have to presume one thing, either that he is honest or dishonest, and it is of all consequence which course I take. One of you, professing to be ray friend, may knowingly give me a counterfeit bank- bill ; the presumption is, you will not. The Jews were not all holy, as Paul says, " For they are not all Israel that are of Israel " ; they were presumptively holy. So after Christ, Christians and their descend- ants, from generation to generation, are presump- tively holy. This presumption, what does it amount to ? I will THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. 133 take Dr. Bushnell's illustration. You look upon a kernel of wheat; that kernel contains, presumptive- ly, a thousand kernels of wheat; if planted, the pre- sumption is, it will grow and bear fruit. There is, however, a possibility, owing to some fault of culti- vation, or some speck of diseased matter in itself, it may never reproduce at all. He applies this to the Christian nurture of children. If properly trairred, the presumption is, they will grow up Christians. So, if Christian parents were faithful, the presump- tion would be that ninety-nine hundredths of these children of America would be growing up Christians. So if the Christian Church embraced the children, the presumption would be that all the children of the Church would grow up Christians. What a truth is here for the consideration of these parents, and-for our consideration as a Church! Here comes in the doctrine, the only reasonable doctrine, of imputation. Imputation, — it means what the presumption is in regard to men, what the light in which we shall regard them. I have a friend at a distance; he is an educated, refined, virtuous, and honest man, — a Unitarian, if you pleage. He send^s his son, whom I never saw or heard of, to me. Now I, instinctively, irresistibly, impute the character of that father to that son. I may be mistaken, but I look upon him in the light of his father. I some- how, without knowing any thing about the matter, presume him to be refined, virtuous, and honest, and a Unitarian, and I approach him, address him in this light. It is in this way' the righteousness, the good- ness, the virtues of Christ, are -imputed to believers. 12 134 THE CHURCH ' HEREDITABLE. Now the* Bible imputes the righteousness of Abra- ham to his descendants, and of Christ to his. In this sense Abraham becomes the federal head of the Jews, and Christ of Christians. Now granting that Adam fell, yet our relations are not with him. Abraham, and after him Christ, is our federal head. We reach another great point. > The children of the Church belong^ to the Church, but " we must be born again," we must have the spiritual birth ! Children are to be regenerated in the Church, and not out of it. It is absurd to say a man must be regenerated out of the Church and then join it. It is like saying one must get an education and then begin to go to school. If Christ be in the Church, and he is in the true Church, if the Church be the body of Christ, then the place for the sinning man to find Christ is in the Church, and not out of it. If the true law, as Dr. Bushnell insists, is nur- ture, then the place to receive that nurture is in the Church, and not out of it. The Church, the true Church, is the mother of her children, and is to train and bring them up within herself, as the mother of a family. What would you think of a mother, who, as fast as her children were born, should send them out into the world, as it were disinherit them, say they were not of her home and heart, and yet say. As soon as my children become truly affectionate and kind, and full of filial duty, I will admit them to the house ? This is the way the so-called churches are treating their children, and in fact losing them ; it is only here and there they can get one back into the THE CHURCH HEEEDITABLE. 135 Church from which in infancy they are so unnatu- rally excluded. " You want to get us all into the Church," says some one. So I do, into the true Church, the Church of God and Christ, the Church of the universe, of humanity, of progress, of all that is lovely, beautiful, glorious: But suppose the child, as he grOws up, becomes dissatisfied, and wants to leave? If he really wants to leave the true Church, I should be sorry for him. If he wants to leave any particular instance of that Church for some other, with prayers and blessings we should let him go. If he really wishes to fall back into the world, sin, and shame, why, he must do it, and we should leave him and the consequences with God. In respect to the baptism of children I have but a word to say. It is the seal or token of their being in the Church ; it is the outward impress of the cove- nant. The Jews circumcised their children, the Ro- mans changed their dress, the Greeks registered their names, the Christian Church baptizes its children. It is a beautiful, an appropriate rite, hallowed by the usages of many ages, hallowed by all the associations of Christian sentiment. Some may say, We our- selves have not been baptized, we are not outwardly recognized as of the Church, and will you baptize our children ? Yes, your children, as many as can be offered. Possibly you may be, unconsciously, members of the Church, and of course we should baptize your children. Perhaps you may be very wicked men, and most certainly we should baptize your children, because, on the very theory of our sub- 136 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. jeet, if this is the true Church, it is anxious that its selectest influences should be about your children ; it is atixious to take them into its own solemn cove- nant with God ; it is anxious for their growth into Christianity, and it feels that within itself, cer- tainly, if not in your family, the work of your chil- dren's regeneration and gracious advancement may go on. The Church,, the true Church, would take the child of a wicked man into its communion and fel- lowship, just as quick as it would into its Sunday School. Nor is this with us a matter of sentiment or feeling, nor is it any finesse, or sectarian device ; -it is a matter of profoundest conviction, of most fun- damental principle ; it goes as deep as our theology or our Christianity goes, it is an incorporate part of the whole system of our religious faith and practice. Therefore we say to each of you who has an unbap- tized child. Bring him to the altar, and if you have it not in your heart to consecrate him to God, and surrender him to the responsibilities and hopes of the Gospel, it is in the power of the Church to do it for you. If the believing wife sanctifies the husband, may we not judge that the believing child will retro- actively sanctify the parents ? If there be any adult persons who have not been baptized, we hope they will present themselves to receive that rite. There is a secondary rite, known in the Romish and other churches as Confirmation ; it is a period when the child, having arrived at years of discretion, takes upon itself the covenant of the Church and God. Dr. Bushnell suggests for our Congregational churches, that it be the rite of Assumption or Ac- THE CHTJRCH HEREDITABLE. 137 knowledgment, as being an assuming or acknowl- edging the covenant. That rite in due time will be solemnized in this Church. Recollect, in regard to the communion or sacra- ment of the Lord's Supper, it is not specially obli- gatory on a few individuals, who in technical phrase have joined the Church. There is a man, an excel- lent man, we presume, who keeps this ordinance ; there is his wife, an excellent woman, she is under just the same obligations to keep it. Any man who, as Abraham did, believes in God, or who loves Christ, or feels that he is, in any sense, of the true Church, should deem it a privilege to participate in this celebration. Do we bind, does the true Church bind, any man's soul, or hinder his independence, or mesh his activities ? God forbid. Every man here is free as God would have him be, free as his own nature virtuously developed would desire to be. Is he a scientific man ? the Church goes with him into the vast domain of the universe. Is he a politician ? the State is holy, and holily to be administered ; the true Church is in harmony with the true State, and the Church blesses the State. The xjhurchman and the statesman are in unity. The Church only asks of the State, what God asks, and nature asks, and humanity pleads for, that it would not sin. Does any one want to have recreation? God has given you that want, and the Church recognizes its sacred- ness, and the Church is just as willing her children should play, as she expects them to pray. If the Church be that body of which God is the supreme head, and Christ the vital heart, and the 12* 138 THE CHURCH HEREDITABLE. Holy Spirit the cementing element, then the Church is just as vastjias all-comprehensive, as liberal, as humane, as genial, as God and Christ and the Sa- cred Spirit are. If this Church be any feeble repre- sentative of the great, universal Church, then it com- bines within itself all these most exalted elements. If it be not the true Church, God forbid it should last another day ; if it be not, God to-day help us to make it so. Three thousand and eight hundred years ago, the Lord appeared to Abram in the plains of Mamre, and said unto him, " I am the Almighty God ; walk before me, and be thou perfect, and I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will mul- tiply thee exceedingly." And Abram fell on his face. SEEMON VIII. WE SEND CHILDEEN TO HEAVEN, BUT DARE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE CHURCH. JESTTS CALLED THEM UNTO HIM, AND SAID, SUITBE LITTLE CHIL- DREN TO COME UNTO ME, AND EOKBID THEM NOT: TOE OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD. — Luke XViii. 16. When a little child dies, we say it has gone to heaven. We rejoice in this, we could be satisfied with nothing else. This not only our hearts demand, but our reason confirms ; with this, all our ideas of God and Christ harmonize. We not only feel that it must be so, but our doctrine definitely asserts it. We predicate heaven of childhood not in spite of our articles of faith ; rather it is one of the Unita- rian, the Christ- Church tenets, that children go to heaven. We have no embarrassment on this sub- ject, no other notions we entertain throw a shadow of doubt on this. In the fulness, the exactness, in all the rigor of the Unitarian faith, standing at the centre of our system, we affirm and feel this. The Unitarian faith, beginning in God as the central unity, is unitary, harmonious, throughout. It takes in the whole of humanity and the whole of divinity. Hence, as a system, it is complete and 140 WE SEND CHILDREN TO HEAVEN, beautiful as that of the astronomic world. It does not say to a mother, agonized at the death of her child, bleeding in all the depths of her affections, " True, you wish to think your child has gone to heaven, true, your maternal desires would carry it to the bosom of its God ; you wish ever after to imagine it happy. "We pity you ; we will pray for you ; but we must be cautious what we say. We know all are born in sin ; we know, without a change of nature, none can find salvation. We hope, in some way we cannot explain, that the atoning blood of Christ will avail for your child ; but we do not know, we have no assurance ; we must submit, leave all to God, and be as easy as we can." No. We say, God, the one God, in whose one-, ness, in whose entire, unitary universe all things are embraced, — this our God, we say, loves the mother and loves the child, and even sent Jesus to tell us how much God loves little children. He has placed an immortal soul in the child's body, and undying instincts of devotion and tenderness in the rrfother's, breast ; and God loves the soul of the child he has made, and loves the heart of the mother he has filled with instincts, and loves to have mothers love their children, and has made it a part of the eternal laws of his own great unitary kingdom, that there should be this mutual love ; and when the child dies, we say God ?till keeps hold of the child he has made, still embraces in his great unitary scheme the little one into whom he breathed the breath of life. In a word, he takes it to heaven ; and to these deep ma- ternal yearnings he says, " You may love your child BUT DARE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE CHURCH. 141 still ; these irresistible emotions are all prophecies of a reunion ; in other worlds, in other stages of being, they shall all be satisfied. One God, one love of God, one purpose of God, one jurisdiction of God, reign throughout the universe, and these shall make mother and child one again." Unitarianism, or the doctrine of the Divine unity, leads directly to this, that children go to heaven ; indeed, it is as a broad path in which little children are conducted to the abodes of bliss. " Go to heaven " ; — what is this ? Heaven is the holiest place in the universe, it is the most beautiful, the most sacred. It is, at least, a state where the selectest influences prevail, where the general atmos- phere is clearest and purest. It is the nearer presence of God, it is where Christ most personally appears, it is where angel and archangel are, and where the best people of whom we can conceive are congre- gated. This is where little children go ; and we sometimes conceive that angels, whose ministry is that of good, take charge of the little ones, and feed them with immortal food, and clothe them with immortal habiliments, and lead them by the crystal brooks. And we most fondly think of Christ, as he did when upon earth, taking them into his arms and blessing them, and saying. Of such is the kingdom of God. And it seems to us sometimes as if the old saints gathered about what indeed died here, but is as a new-born child there, welcoming it to its new position and its untold felicity. We are happy to have it so ; we feel that our child is safe, that it will be taken care of, that it is gar- 142 WE SEND CHILDREN TO HEAVEN, nered in the everlasting fold ; and wherever we go upon the earth, however wide may be our wander- ings, or deep our engrossments, or tried our lot, we feel that our child is sheltered and secure in that spot which we call heaven. This thought, I say, cheers and sustains us ; we would not have it otherwise, we rejoice that the child of our loins has entered the very centre of sanctity and goodness in all the uni- verse. This is all right, this is just as it should be, we say ; we are glad that our faith leads to these con- clusions, and confirms such a result. We would not have our child out of that holy place which we call heaven, out of that inner sanctuary that the spirit- ual wor^d is to us, for any thing. We sometimes speak as if our children ought to go to heaven, as if there were no other place in the realms of thought fit for them. We know the waywardness and fol- lies of childhood, but oh ! every mother feels as if heaven were not too good for her child. If it were suggested that such or such a one was a bad boy, the mother replies, " He will be better in heaven ; he was not naturally bad, and he had so many virtues ! heaven is the true place to develop his character." So, I say, when the child dies, these feelings come in and we are comforted. We not only believe that God is just and good, but that his justice and good- ness extend to the comprehension of the soul and the everlasting destiny of our own little ones. Very well, all well, all reasonable, proper, and gra- cious. But look at another thing. Look at that which stands quite contrasted with what we have BUT DARE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE CHURCH. 143 been speaking of. "When a child is born, what do we do with it ? Do we feel that it belongs to the Church, that it is born into the Church, that it enters the Church, that it is a member of the Church ? O no ! We, or at least the great mass of Christians, feel that their children are born into the world, born out of the Church. They feel that the Church is too good, too holy a place, an institution, or position for their children to be in. They hope, if their children grow up and get a new nature, then they will join the Church. But if they should die, why, they be- lieve their children will go to heaven just as they are. They will go to heaven if they die, but yet here, as they are, they are unfit for the Church ! The popular superstition on this subject, for I can really give it no milder name, virtually makes the Church holier, purer than heaven ! Take the popular idea of the Church, such as pre- vails in all New England, that it is a special collec- tion of people, a small but sacred body, within what is called the Society, and, as is everywhere under- stood, you have a community of good men and women ; they are called saints, or sanctified ones, they are all supposed to have new natures. God is thought to be in a peculiar manner with them, the Holy Spirit dwells especially in their hearts, they are conformed to Christ's image, they pray, they love. In every parish is such a circle, which is thought to be the centre of sanctity, a kind of Holy of Holies here on the earth. Let us suppose for a moment that the theory is true, that they are all really saints, whUe-the rest of mankind are sinners. 144 WE SEND CHILDREN TO HEAVEN, Now let a child be born in one of the parishes, let it be born, if you will, to these church-members, these reputed saints, and what will you do with that child ? where will you put it ? Will you .put it into the Church, to be integrally a part and parcel of it ? Or will you put it into the world, to be part and parcel of that ? One or the other you must do, you always do. The child, according to invariable and omnipotent usage, at birth, enters either the Church or the world. Will you cause it to grow up a Church child, or will you let it grow up as it may, with the hope that it will some time or other join the Church? Practically, there is no question as to what you wiU do, as to what everybody does here in America. They would shudder at the idea of deeming the child to be in the Church. Yet when the little one dies, we say it has gone to heaven ! We put it there in our imagination, our hearts, our hope. We cannot bear to think of its going anywhere else. And even those people who have the narrowest and most pharisaic notions about the Church are everywhere trying to make themselves believe their children, when they die, go to heaven. . Here truly is something to marvel at, to weep over, if there were any to sympathize with your tears. And what is the reason of this conduct 1 Ask yourselves. Why, the Church is so sacred a place, so holy a community, people think it would not be right to let their little children belong to it ; it would seem a kind of profanity to put them into it The Church is taken for a kind of type of sanctity. It is called Zion ; it is supposed to be God's peculiar heri- BUT DAEE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE CHURCH. 145 tage, it is the centre of selectest influences, and we dare not place our children in it. It is the type of sanctity, I say. But what are the elements of its sanctity ? Are they any higher or purer than those of heaven ? Are they in any essential degree differ- ent ? I am willing, for the argument's sake, to sup- pose the idea of the Church everywhere prevalent to be perfectly true, that it is the seat of* highest sanc- tity ; and then I ask, Is it higher than heaven's sanc- tity? God, God's spirit, Christ, holiness, purity, love, obedience, these are supposed to be in the Church ; they are in heaven also. Are you willing, father, that your little boy, or mother, that your little, girl, should be of the Church ? If you feel as most parents do, you say. No. But let your little boy or your little' girl die ; and you say, " Our child has gone, to heaven ! " Now heaven is really only more sacred, pure, and beautiful than the Church ; that is the fact about it. Some may say, " The Church is so bad we will not put our children into it." This is not the common idea, it is not the idea we have to combat. The common idea is, " The Church is too good to put our children into it. We do not certainly know as they will grow up good children, and it would be dreadful to have them grow up bad children, and at the same time be in the Church." But I want to inquire how you can expect your children to grow up good, if they are not in the good place, or become holy, reverent, if they are not in the holy, reverent, sacred place. If you would teach your child to swim, you put him in the water ; if you 13 146 WE SEND CHILBREN TO HEAVEN, would have him healthy, you place him where the air is healthful ; if you would have him a skilful mechanic, you put him where mechanics are taught most skilfully ; if you would have him an accom- plished merchant, you put him where the mercantile art is best understood ; if yo^ would have him polite in manners, you like to have him go amongst the most mannerly people ; if you would have him rise to high rank as a sailor, you send him to sea. When you would have him good, pious. Christian, you keep him farthest possible from those who represent the highest goodness, purity, Christ-likeness, the Church ! "But there is the Lord's Supper, and our chil- dren might become communiTcants of the body and blood of their Lord! " And what if they did? Is there anything dreadful about that ? If they die, are they not to eat of the fruits of Paradise, drink of what is typified as the new wine? Are they not even as little children to be brought into special commupion with Christ in the next world ? I need not pursue the subject. I hardly have a heart to. Only I think we cannot fail to see and feel, not only how heretical, how irrational, but how terribly diseased and grossly erroneous, is public sen- timent everywhere touching the Church, and espe- cially touching the relation of children to the Church. I thought of these things the other day, when I was called to bury a little child. The mother felt her little one had gone, as we say, to a better world. And I felt so too. But was that mother ever will- ing her children should go into what is deemed the best portion of this world, the Church ? On so BUT DARE NOT ADMIT THEM TO THE CHURCH. 147 solemn an occasion, I would not indulge in bitter thoughts, or venture painful suggestions. Only I cannot forbear asking, O ye fathers and mothers ! what are ye doing with your children ? God sends them away into the heavenly world, and you rejoice there is a heaven, holy and pure, for them to go to. Christ, so to say, stands at the door of his Church, and asks them to come in, and no parent is willing. A child is born here on the earth, helpless, weak, undeveloped, unperfected, liable to fall, liable to sin. What will you do with it ? Where will you put it ? Now, I say, if there be a holy spot, a holy community, a holy sphere on the earth, or a holiest, I would put the child into it. If the Church be that holy spot, then the child shall go into that. The primary holy place for the child is, indeed, the family ; but the great univer- sal holy place is the Church. Or rather, all families should be church families, and so all children church children. If the family be a bad, an irreligious one, then all the more should its children be gathered into the Church. If Zion, or the Church, be where God most peculiarly dwells, of all places, the children should dwell there too. If Christ be bread from heav- en, most peculiarly should he be bread for the children. If he be the Shepherd of his people, most peculiarly should he be the Shepherd of the little children. If the Church be the body of Christ, most peculiarly should the children be of it. If the Church consist of pious men and women, regenerate men and wo- men, of persons who pray, who do not lie or steal, or profane the name of God, then that is the place of all others for the children. If the Church feeds on 148 WE SEND CHILDREN TO HEAVEN, ETC. Christ, in a higher, truer sense than the world does, then, on all accounts, let the children taste that im- mortal, that divine food, that they may' grow thereby. If there is less sin in the Church than in the world, then, whenever a child is born, we should at once feel that its true place is in the Church, rather than in the world. SERMON IX. CHILDEEN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. HE SHALt PEED HIS FLOCK LIKE A SHEPHEED ; HE SHALL GATHER THE LAMBS WITH HIS ARM, AND CARET THEM IN HIS BOSOM, AND SHALL GENTLT LEAD THOSE THAT ARE WITH YOUNG. — Isaiah xl. II. This language is thought to be prophetical of Christ. It may refer to Christ, or the Christian Church, or the Christian ministry. At least, it is pertinently and beautifully exemplified in the con- duct and precepts of Jesus. While he was instruct- ing the parents, he took the little children, the lambs, into his arms. His last words to his disciples were, " Feed my sheep," " Feed my lambs." In short, the sentiment of the passage, whether considered in its prophetic intent or evangelical exemplification, is, that the Christian organization comprehends parents and children alike. In the spirit of this entire unity of position and privilege, pervading all ages and con- ditions of a given community, the prophet wrote, and our Saviour acted. Even the unborn are not forgot- ten ; but, as if the covenant of grace anticipated the possibilities of being, its providence and forethought 13" 150 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. extend to the future, and, like a guardian angel, direct into the way of life the generations as they rise. This is a fundamental law of the moral universe ; it is the principle by which God has administered human affairs. It obtained in the Jewish dispen- sation ; it was adhered to by the Founder of the new. In what is here involved is contained a part, a most essential part, of all my ideas of the Church, the true Christian Church. The principle familiarly stated is this : Lambs follow the sheep. However we treat the sheep, so we treat the lambs. If we can find a sweeter pasture or a clearer stream where we will lead the sheep, there we will lead the lambs also. Here you have the germ, the paradigm, the illustration and philosophy of all my theory of the Church. Lambs follow the sheep, children their par- ents. If parents feed on the heavenly bread, children feed on heavenly bread ; if parents commune with Jesus, children commune with Jesus ; if parents keep the Sabbath, children keep the Sabbath; if parents love God, children are to love God. And this from very necessity of nature, this from the law of birth. Lambs follow the sheep because they are lambs ; children follow their parents because they are their children, and fundamentally for no other reason. In more precise terms, if sheep are in the fold, the lambs are in the fold ; if parents are in the Church, children are in the Church. Lambs do not get into the fold because the shepherd performs any ceremony upon them, or they pass through any change ; they are there because they CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 151 are born there. Children do not get into the Church because of baptism, or any permission of the Church, or any formula that may be pronounced ; they are there because they were born there. Just as chil- dren are in the State and in the Family by birth, so are they in the Church. This is common sense, this is sound philosophy ; it is also the Bible from one end to the other. " Feed my sheep," says Jesus, " Feed my lambs." Peter exhorts us to feed the flock of God. Paul enjoins, " Take heed to all the flock, and feed the Church of God." The Church of God and the flock of God are the same. A flock is made up of sheep and lambs. Now, I am called a pastor, that is, a shepherd ; and what is my flock ? You are all my flock, men, wo- men, and children. The children are just as much, just as integrally, just as essentially, of the flock as the parents. Well, I must feed you all alike, give one as good, as pure, as heavenly food as another. The only difference will be, I shall simplify the food for the lambs, or the children. I feed you on Christ, on his truth, his blessedness, his spirit, his emblems ; and I must feed the children just as I do the parents. If there is any doubt about what my flock is, that, in- deed, is another question. Show me what my flock is, and you define at once the sphere and the nature of my duties. You say such or such a one is not of my flock. That may be. But let me say, I con- sider all who are in the habit of worshipping in Christ Church my flock. And my church, that over which God hath made me overseer, is coextensive and uniform with my flock. Now will you allow 152 CHILDREN TO BK COMMUNICANTS, that this or that man or woman belongs to my flock ? Then I shall insist that their children, whom they bring hither, are my flock also, and if my flock, then my church. Some say they do not understand the word church in the sense in which we use it. This ■word flock very neatly and very comprehensively defines it. A flock is a certain number of sheep under the care of one man, or who receive natural food from one man's hand. A church, speaking of things in detail, is a certain number of people that receive spiritual food from one man's hand. If a minister, then, wants to know what his church is, he has only to see what his flock is. If there is any one present who comes not to be fed, but for sinister and extraneous purposes, of course he is not of our flock or our church. If any one — man, woman, or child — is here for spirit- ual food, for religious growth and culture, such a one is of the flock and of the church. I know no church that is made up of only a small part of the flock. I have no food for one that I have not for another ; none for parents that I have not for children. There are no partition-walls within Christ Church, no negro pews, no alien pews. Christ Church is its own wall. Within here, it is an open area of position, privilege, and duty. What is the object in feedingsheep ? That they may live and grow. What is the object in feeding people ? That they may live and grow. Without food we starve and perish. Without spiritual food we starve and perish. A Christian pastor feeds his flock, his church, that they may live and grow. He CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 153 feeds pEirents and children all alike, for the same great end. We need life, spiritual life, in other words, spiritual health and strength, and we cannot have health and strength unless we eat. Our souls need to grow, all our faculties want maturing, our whole being should attain to the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus. In order that we may grow well, that we may have the very best health and strength, we need the best food. Children, or the lambs, need just as choice food as the parents, or the sheep ; there is no difference. What is the design of this whole Church system ? Why do you build a meeting-house ? why have a minister ? why assemble at stated seasons ? It is that you may have true life, that your deepest nature may be developed, that you may be strengthened for every good word and work, that the Holy Spirit may more and more pervade you ; in brief, that you may become good, and better men and women and chil- dren. So that the whole design of the Christian Church touches the young as much as the old. Lambs, we say, are born into the fold, and children are born into the Church ; and being there, we know at once what to do with them. We are to feed them. And we see at once what the whole Church system is for. It is to feed these lambs, these children, that they may grow up Christians, or, if you will, good men and good women. We would save them from starving and perishing. Lambs are not born, and then thrown out of the fold ; neither are children born to be thrown out of the Church ; for if it were so, we should not have anything to do with Ihem. 154 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. Lambs follow the sheep ; children, their parents ; they are never to be separated. When parents are in a Church relation, then are the children also. If it were not so, if they were separated, then we could not feed them alike. Now Christ says, " I am the bread from heaven ; he that eateth me shall live by me." If here is a parent who eats that bread and lives that life, his children must eat the same bread and live the same life. There is no difference. Christ says, " I am the vine, and ye are the branches." If here is a parent who is a branch, his children are parts of the branch, twigs, if you will, or buds, and all alike abidiqg in Christ. Christ gives us water, of which if a man drink he shall never thirst. The children need to drink that water just as much as lambs need milk. Christ says, " Do this in remembrance of me." If parents must do a particular thing in remembrance of Christ, so must the children. If the parents must love God and their neighbor, so must the children. You say that I make all the people in and of the Church, church-members, to use a word nowhere found in Scripture. So I do. But there are bad people here ! Now let us understand each other. The whole object — or at least it is sufficient for my present purpose to say the whole object — of the Churqh, its Sabbaths, its ordinances, its influences, is the attainment of spiritual life in Christ Jesus, or to educate Christians. Now the primary question is, not whether there are good or bad persons here. The primary question is. Are we here for the purpose just indicated? If so, then my duty is clear. I CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 155 must SO teach and pray and act as to aid you to grow up living, healthful Christians. If there are any here for other purposes, for foreign and wholly differ- ent purposes, — if there are parents here, and if par- ents have their children here, for reasons that have nothing to do with the great end of our being here, why, I have nothing to do with such persons to-day. I have nothing to say to them. I am, so to say, feeding out Jesus Christ to-day ; and if there are those here who do not want this heavenly food, pray, do not blame me for giving it to those who do. These others are certainly not my flock nor my church. I regard all my flock and my church, — all, I say, old and young, — who seek the food it is the province of a Christian pastor to give. We have been accustomed to conceive of ihe Church as a select and ordinarily small body of adult persons, who had met with a change, professed relig- ion, communicated at the Lord's table, were in cov- enant with God and one another, and would proba- bly go to heaven when they should die. For one to join the Church was a notable event, something that everybody talked about. The act of joining was scenic and solemn. We have been so trained to this idea, we can hardly think of the Church as anything else. But this is a very imperfect idea of the Church, and practically most pernicious. The Church is the body of the good, in Jieaven and on earth, whose supreme head is God. The Church, again, is a body of people associated to worship God through Christ. It is, again, by courtesy of language, a building in which such people meet to 156 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. worship. More particularly and pointedly, the Church expresses that fundamental form of human society in which mankind unite as religious beings, for the worship of God, growth in grace, and the promo- tion of righteousness. This last describes just what we are to-day ; that divinely ordained form of human society in which men meet for these sacred purposes. What is most striking is that we all meet, — all ages, conditions, sexes. Herein we see how the Church is analogous to the other two great forms of human society, the Family and the State. These comprise all ages, conditions, and sexes. Herein you see how the Church, together with these other two orders, is separated and distinguished from all other, the transient forms of human society. You go to a corporation meeting, there are only men there ; you go to a sewing-circle, there are only women there ; you go to a school, there are are only children there ; you go to a party, there are only invited guests there ; you come to what we call the Church, and there is everybody here, men and women, old and young, parents and children, rich and poor. Parents and children, I say, parents with their children ; par- ents own pews in which the whole family sit. Well, then, you all are the Church, all who meet in this godly way, parents and children. The children are just as much the Church as the parents. This building in which we meet, except by courtesy of speech, is not the Church, not the real Church, but the people who habitually assemble here for religious purposes are the Church. The smallest child here is just as much a part of the Church as the gray- CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 157 headed man. In this view you see at once, not only how narrow; but how exceedingly false, is the common view of the Church. It calls only a select portion of those who habitually assemble for relig- ious purposes the Church, and all the others, the vast majority, it calls no-church, the world. But worse still, in that limited number called the Church are no children! Fatal, dreadful, most inhuman mistake. Parents belong to it, join it, but do n,ot take their children with them ; never, never, in vir- tue of their being their children. Lambs do not follow the sheep, nor children parents. Parents do dress their little children to come to meeting, as we say ; they bring them into this public meeting-place, they seat them orderly in these pews. Why ? Why ? In virtue of their being their children. This is the governing law. But when they unite with the Church, as we say, go forward to the Lord's table, — in a word, the moment parents really enter what is called the Church, the sacred fold, — they leave their children behind; they separate from their children. The Church system that everywhere prevails destroys the sacred unity of the family, breaks up the God-or- dained law, that in religious matters children follow their parents, violates the sacred integrity of the family. " We will have no such Church, we will be no such Church. We will recognize the Divine con- dition of things ; we will throw ourselves back on the polity of God ; we will conform to the unerring statutes of reason and revelation. We are a diifer- ent Church from all that. We, this worshipping l4 158 ' CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. congregation, this regularly constituted assembly, this sober and religious convocation, — we, I say, these husbands and wives, these brothers and sis- ters, these children and children's children, are a Church ; we, the whole of us, who meet in Christ's name, and no particular few, are the Church. Now what' about the Communion ? This is what I say ; it is for the whole Church, and not for a part of it. See how the matter stands. We," the Church called Christ Church, have a holy day, called the Sabbath, a holy house, called a sanctuary ; we have holy ordinances, worship, instruction, singing, bap- tism, and the Communion. Well, all, for all. This is our maxim and law; all for all. But shall the children partake of the Lord's Supper ? Strange, in this nineteenth century of our religion, to hear such a question ; stranger, that any reasonable mind can doubt on the point ! But so it is, the question is asked, doubts are felt. I answer, Yes, of course. I answer this unhesitatingly, unqualifiedly. Not only does my theory lead to such a result, but my convic- tions side with it. Nay, I would have the children partakers of the holy Communion, if it upset every theory I could frame. Peed my sheep, feed my lambs; lambs follow the sheep,children their par- ents, all for all, there is no difference. As did Judah of old, so on this interesting occasion ought we all to stand before the Lord, with our wives, our little ones, and our children. When Christ says, " Do this in remembrance of me," if he means any- body, anybody, he means the children. If Christ is bread from heaven to any, he ig so to the children. CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 159 If these emblems typify the bread that he is to our souls, they typify it to the children. We, the Church, give the Sabbath to our children, as to all others, and expect them to keep it; we give the Bible to our children, and expect them to revere it ; we give public worship to them, and expect them to engage in it; so we must give the Lord's Supper to our children, or we are recreant to every principle of duty, reason, and religion. I know we may imagine our children are not prepared for the communion. And why? Solely, my friends, because we have not prepared them, by training them up to it, and in it. I, your minister, am to blame in this ; ye parents are to blame ; an erroneous sentiment is everywhere to blame. Sup- pose you had never given your children the Sabbath until by some special change they were prepared forit, and had brought them up outside of the Sab- bath, as we have educated them outside of the Communion. Why, they never would be prepared for it. So of the Bible, so of prayer, so of the sun- light, so of roses. The true and only way to pre- pare children for the greatest, holiest, best things of experience or of observation, of this world or an- other, is to bring them up in those things. But the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is more holy than these other things. I deny that it is one whit more holy than the Sabbath, or the Bible, or prayer. But granting that it were ; let us suppose, for argument's sake, it were much more holy, a hun- dred times more holy, the holiest thing in the uni- verse. Blessed be God ! that is the very thing I want 160 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. the children to have, that is just what I would give to the children, I was going to say, sooner than to anybody else. Show me what is most holy, most pure, most heavenly, and I will show you what children most need. He was blessed who gave a cup of cold water in Christ's name to the little one. Doubly blessed he who shall give thecup symbolical of the very life of Jesus to the little ones. Children receive truth through pictures more than adults. These emblems are a species of pictures perhaps of greater utility to the children than to their parents. Did not Christ live and die for children ? and shall we, dare we, refuse to them that in which his living and dying are shown forth ? In Washington, they are erecting a monument to the memory of that great name. If you were in Washington with your family, you would account it a sin to refuse to take your children with you to see that monument. If there were a class of people there who taught that children and others must first meet with a change before they could be deemed patriots, and permitted to see the monument, you w^ould exclaim,, with astonishment. Why, let your children behold the monument, that they may be- come patriots. In this sacrament Christ has erected a kind of monument of himself. It is a very ancient monument, one of rare grace and finish, and covered with touching images and inscriptions. And he says, Visit it, behold it, in remembrance of me. Will you not take your children with you? Of course you will. If any say. The children must first meet with a change, must first become Christians, before CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 161 they can behold the monument of Christ ; you ■will" reply, We bring them to the monument that they may be Christians, that Christianism may be deep- ened in their hearts. The State does well to have its monuments, the Church does well to have its monuments. But, indeed, how much better the State does by its children than the Church has ever done ! Why did Christ die ? To save men, we say. And to save children ? Then, of course, children should commemorate his death. But more particularly, the immediate object of his death was to extend the covenant blessings of God to the whole human race, and to the children, of course. Therefore should the children commemorate his death. Or thus, Christ died a sacrifice to his grand, divine purpose of good to man. His whole life was devoted to such a pur- pose, and in his death it was consummated. In all this, and in all that pertains to it, children are equally interested with others. Shall we, dare we, in the Sunday school, teach the affecting story of the great Redeemer's love and toils and agony, and deny to them the memorials of those things ? God forbid! If, as some imagine, the Lord's Supper, be a saving ordinance, if it peculiarly gathers within itself the life of Christ, if his spirit there gushes and flows and per- vades all who partake of it, then by all means let the children come. If it be a sacred scene, a sweet spot, a gracious, comforting, sustaining, sanctifying rite, then by all means bring the children to it. If Christ be nearer his people there than elsewhere, if his u* 162 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. voice be heard there, his presence felt, if his bleed- ing side be open there, or his benignant countenance appear there, as nowhere else, then, O, then let the children be brought nigh I It was a most searching, truthful, and beautiful idea of the old father, Irenseus, that Christ passed through all ages of man that he might save all by himself, in- fants and little ones, and youths and persons ad- vanced in years. We hardly realize that Christ was once a little child like these children, a good little child, and that these are to become good by him. He is a child for the children, as well as a man for the men. And therefore should the children keep all the tender, affecting memorials of himself. " He was made an infant for infants, that he might sanctify infants ; and for little ones he was made a little one, to sanctify them of that age also.*' The case is this. We and our children are a church, " we and our pos- terity," it matters not how. far the succession de- scends ; it is one church still, the Church of God and Christ. As a church, we have a church-house, or meeting-house, church days or meeting days, a church pastor, church service, church rites ; and all for all ; and the children are, by birth, inalienably, incontestably, and for ever involved in the whole concern, — endowed with its honors, holden to its responsibilities, inheritors of its past, testators of its future. Why should the children partake of the Lord's Supper ? Why anybody ? « To profess religion ? " A foolish reason. But suppose it a good one, the children ought to profess religion as well as others. CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 163 " That people may be in covenant one with another, to watch over one another, and offer a more united front to the powers of evil ? " The very place of all others for the children to be. Why partake of the Lord's Supper, do you ask ? Why do anything in a church way ? The Lord's Supper is not the only church instrumentality. The Sabbath and the Bible are of the same stamp. And the question is an- swered when we reply to the general question, What is the use of the Sabbath, or the Bible, or public worship, or any service of the Church ? The reply, of course, is, to make people good, to train them up Christians, to regenerate the soul. The Lord's Supper is but one branch of this great spiritual ministration. " Children cannot understand the Lord's Supper." I venture to assert, if we bring up our children prop- erly, there is no religious duty, no custom, no truth, children can so easily^ understand as this. I mean this : I think they can understand it better than they can understand the Old Testament Scriptures, or prayer, or coming to the house of God; as ■vvell as they can understand benevolence, or forbearance, or love. If at this moment they do not understand it, it is because we have wholly failed to bring them up to it. Our children would be as orderly and rever- ential in this service as in prayer, or preaching, or singing, if we parents had only trained ourselves and them to it. The doctrine of total depravity and original sin shoved the Church from its true basis, and broke the natural connection between believing parents and 164 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. their cliildren, Unitarianism denies that dogma, and restores the Church to its true basis. It unites parents and children in the Church. It makes the Church consist of parents with their children. It gives back to the Church and the fold, and the arms of Jesus, the children that have been so long sun- dered from him. Such are we before God to- day ; such are we, elders, youths, children ; such are we, or we are nothing, a mere collection of heathen and publicans. Baptism does not admit or initiate into the Church. This was the fatal postulate of the theory of deprav- ity, and is a mere device to save the Church from the pit she had digged for herself. It is here where Ro- manism and Episcopacy and the Baptists all agree. They all alike say to the generations of children as they are born into the Christian community. You cannot enter the Church except you be baptized. Indeed, Trinitarianism almost universally takes this ground. Romanism unequivocally teaches, in its Catechism of the Council of Trent, " Unless infants are baptized, be their parents Christians or infidels, they are born to eternal misery and everlasting perdi- tion." * In other words, without baptism, the children even of the Church, of pious parents, cannot be admit- ted into the Church, into the estate and fellowship of their parents, into the communion of saints, or into the body of which Christ is the head. Episcopacy teaches the same thing. It teaches that baptism is necessary to salvation.. I have before me a sermon * Miller's " Design of the Church," p. 120. CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 165 by the Rev. Mr. Spencer, an Episcopal clergyman of New York, urging this very point. He says, all mankind are born to condemnation ; that, in their natural state, children " are left to the uncovenanted mercies of God." To the unbaptized he addresses these words : " You have no claim to the mercy of God ; you have never been made Christians ; you can never be entitled to this name, or to the privileges of Christ's Church. Baptism is necessary to the sal- vation of every one that can obtain it ; it is the only way in which we can become Christians, the only way in which we can enter the Church of God." This is the way Episcopacy addresses the children of its own Church ; in this way it shows its utter ignorance of what Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Bos- ton, calls " a fundamental principle of God's moral government of the universe." "What then to us is Baptism? I reply, in the language of the Cambridge Platform, "Baptism presupposeth a Church estate, as circumcision in the Old Testament, which gave no being to the Church, the Chicrch being before it, and in the wilderness without it. Seals presuppose a covenant already in being." Children get into the Church just as they get into the Family, or the State, or the Sab- bath, or into the whole course and current of institu- tions and influences that surround them, simply by being born there. And thus being in the Church, along with their parents, beiiig in the divine covenant of God, baptism is the recognition of their birthright, the seal of the covenant of membership; it is an emblem of the Holy Ghost and fire, the purifying 166 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. holy spirit in which Christ baptizes his people. It is an outward act whereby parents- in the Church, on their part, in the presence of the great cloud of wit- nesses, solemnly dedicate their children to God and Christ and the Church, to the Christian life and the Christian destiny, and publicly confess the duty of Christian nurture and admonition. The children being in the Church, indigenous to it, to the manner born, having the Church seal thus impressed upon them, what then? All that the Church is accrues to the children. They are for-, evermore integrant parts of it, they are heirs of God and fellow-citizens of the household of faith'. All that has been regarded in church things as most in- ternal and secret, most solemn and profound, most holy and blessed, is made over to them. But more than this. We have now got the whole congre- gation, the constituent members of the parish, the varied mass that come up hither on the Lord's day, in a position where, as a Christian pastor, we can properly deal with them. We see at once how to preach to them, how to teach them, how the whole series of our service, our praying, otir singing, our baptism, our communion, adapts itself to them. Suppose we consider the Church as a school, and Christ the great teacher, and the people as disci- ples, learners, scholars. The little children are all scholars too, fellow-pupils with their parents, all sitters at the feet of Jesus, fellow-listeners to divine instructions, fellow-disciples of divine truth. We shall have to teach the very small children, the youngest church-members, the a b c of Christian- CHILDPEN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 167 ity. Beautiful, delightful employment f And here at once we see the significancy and the force of the Sunday school. From Sunday to Sunday, accord- ing to what was enjoined under the old covenant, we will gather the people, the whole Church, here together, men and wom^n and children, and the stranger that is within our gate, that we rnay hear and learn and fear the Lord our God, and observe to do all the words of his law, and that our children, which have not known any thing, may hear and learn to fear the Lord our God as long as we live in the land. If we liken the Church to a commonwealth, and it is so likened in Scripture, we see how we all, parents and children, stand related to it. The chil- dren are born into it, they are fellow-citizens with their parents in a divine community, a common law governs all, a common protection is over all. Our children become an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. This Christ Church is a little commonwealth, and other local churches become little commonwealths, and these shall spread into one greater commonwealth ; where evermore shall reign Liberty, Holiness, Love, where suffrage shall be free, independency observed, and office ac- cessible to all. As the fathers are gathered to the dust, the children shall rise to their places. "Where duty leads or dangers threaten, we shall offer the energy of a united people to whatever we may be called, and we shall be blessed in the land which the Lord our God giveth us. " One is not necessarily saved by being in the Church." No, indeed. But we are in the Church 168 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. that we may be saved. This is a cardinal point, a most interesting feature of the case. The children are in the Church, of it, church-members, and this, so to say, is but the beginning of their salvation ; they are now to grow up Christians, to be trained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They are born, as we say, on Church soil, — little sprouts just springing out of the ground. They must be cultivated, watered, dressed, weeded, fertilized. The great work of life is just begun a;t childhood; we are to advance to the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus. Regeneration, or the birth of the spirit, the unfolding of our religious natures, the acquisition of highest truth, the feeding on celestial food, — all this is to go on in the Church, and not out of it. The common idea is, after persons are regener- ated, sanctified, saved, then they may enter the Church ; and this is predicable only of adult persons. Our idea is that the Church incloses, comprehends, all ages, just as the State does ; that it not only takes the lambs in its arms, but gently leads those that are with young ; that infancy is nourished, as it were, at the bosom of the Church ; that childhood is led by its maternal hand ; that all our years, from the cra- dle to the grave, imbibe its spirit and reflect its holiness ; and especially and imperatively, that the very susceptible and critical period of youth is subject to its holiest influences, accepts its highest sanctions, feels its restraints, and is inspired by its wisdom. Now, viewing my flock as one, parents and chil- dren, in the same covenant of a common faith, unit- CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 169 ed in the same responsibility and hope, what, I ask again, about the children and the Lord's Supper, — that tender point ? and what about it, granting this ordinance is really more sacred than anything else ? During the last month we have had common Sab- baths, and now comes what some are pleased to con- sider more holy, a Communion Sabbath. During this past time, I as a Shepherd have been leading you, my flock, sheep and lambs, over common ground. In the great pasture, on the second Sabbath I took you here ; on the third, there ; to such spots as I could. As I piped, the lambs came running along behind their parents ; and I gave you all as good food as I could. But Communion Sabbath comes, a njore holy time, if you will have it so ; in other words, to-day I your shepherd espy in the distance a more attractive spot, of more grateful shade, more delectable herbage, clearer streams, more sunny, more Arcadian. I sound my pipe, and start for that direc- tion. The sheep follow me, but the lambs must not go ! Or thus : to-day is our festival day, when we peculiarly commemorate Christ, when in silence and meditation we get near to one another and the Lord, when we enter the holy of holies, where God mani- fests himself peculiarly to his people, when we stand where the horizon of spiritual intelligence stretches around us, and we come into the infinite circle of the good and the pure. These parents may keep holy time with us, but the children must not ! Or thus : we go to-day to the scene of the Last Supper, we pass over the brook Kidron, to the garden and be- neath the shade of the olive-trees ; we witness that 15 170 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. perilous struggle of all that was human in our Sav- iour with all that was divine in duty; we go to Calvary and look on while this great Martyr of the ages breathes out his soul ; we linger pensive and si- lent about the sepulchre ; we share with Mary and Peter the transports of the resurrection ; we gaze as that image of heavenly beauty rises into the heav- ens ; — and may not the children go with us? The comprehension of children in this rite is not wholly a strange thing. The Passover was the great covenant feast of the Mosaic religion, and Jewish parents were wont to distribute the bread and the wine to their children, with thanksgiving to Almighty God. So the Lord's Supper is the covenant feast of the Christian religion, and the early Christians were wont in their own houses to give the bread and wine to their children. This is a well-known histor- ical fact. And when we read, still earlier, of the disciples breaking bread from house to house, it ad- mits of no manner of doubt to ray mind, that their children partook with them. For some centuries it was customary in many churches to comprise chil- dren in this ordinance. Heathen parents used to take their infants in their arms when they went to sacrifice at the altar, and this seems to have been urged as a motive for Christian parents to do the same by theirs.* The Greek Church to this day universally communicates children. Tasso, the Ital- ian poet, relates that he was scarcely nine years old when he first partook of the Lord's Supper. With- " Bingham's Ant. CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 171 out fully understanding the mystery, he yet partici- pated with the deepest devotion and joy. " Long years afterwards," he says, " he could not forget the sensations with which he received the symbols of his Saviour into that earthly body of his, a dwelling- place yet uncontaminated, simple, and pure." * Need I repeat that the Jews and Gentile nations univer- sally, so far as I know, join their children with them in their most sacred rites. We see, then, how the so- called Church almost everywhere has departed from the primitive and apostolic antecedents, and how especially it has forgotten that fundamental law im- pressed by God on human nature, and written in all human history, whereby in religious matters the family is a unit, and children are in covenant with their parents. I will ask you, mother, however you may reason on this subject, however conventional prejudices may arise in your heart at the thought of what we say, as you to-day think of your boy far off on the restless, treacherous ocean, or away in some other place, amid strangers and perplexities and profaneness, seeking respite from toil, yet finding more onerous struggle with temptations that environ him, in some city, perhaps, where even the multitude creates an uneasy sense of solitude, and the rest of the Sabbath often gives rein to every baser passion, — I will ask you, fond mother, if you would not take greater satisfaction to-day, immeasurably greater, if you could think that you had not only prayed for * Life, Vol, I. p. 61. 172 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. your child, and brought him to the house of God, and had him instructed in the Sabbath School, but also from his earliest years had likewise taken him to the communion-table with you, had made him feel that he was coequal and absolute part and par- cel of the Church with you, had identified his grow- ing years with all the purposes and all the rites of Christianity, and enrolled, I will not say his name, but his thoughts, his imagination, his destiny, in that book where the whole fraternity of the good in heav- en and earth are recorded ? And, my friends, when our children die, and we so easily, and so naturally, so irresistibly, assign them their place in the Church above, will we ever again be negligent, or hesitat- ing, or sceptical, in bringing them into the Church below? Have I, your minister, been to blame in this matter, God forgive me, and forbid that I should ever be so again! As things now are, our young people have no sense, no deep, vital sense, of Chris- tian responsibility. And I maintain, that, however we may try to give them a Christian education, and awe them with Christian admonitions, and store them with Christian advice, so long as we keep them out of the Christian Church they never will have this sense ; and for the reason that this whole thing of Christian responsibility centres within the Church, and is, so to say, monopolized by it. We are so trained as to feel that this solemn burden is taken up, and its whole weight borne, by those who join the Church. If then we would that our young men and women possess this sense, in its fulness and en- tireness, a thing so essential to their happiness, their CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 173 usefulness, their moral perfection and complete sal- vation, they must be in the Church. In England, the Rev. Mr. Armstrong, a Unitarian clergyman, in a recent pastoral letter, adverting to the fact of the general recklessness of youth, says they must come under a higher sense of kesponsibility. To this end, he proposes what I have just intimated, they must be in the Church. Awhile since I preached a discourse to this effect, that duty was irrespective of profession, — that a man was bound to be religious whether he had made a profession or no. This was addressed to that condition of things in which we find all our parishes, a few professors and a mass of non-profes- sors. As the term is used, and the affair is managed, I think very little of what is called making a pro- fession of religion. I have sometimes thought I would none of it. The question is not whether we will make a profession of religion, but whether we will be religious and Christian, and especially train up our children to be religious and Christian. Nor is it now the question how the multitude of us will act in view of that little collection called the Church, but whether we all, parents and children, enter that sphere and occupy that, post at once of obligation and sustentation, of duty and of hope, — the Church ? Question ? No, it is no question. I have never preached to you but as one, I have never enforced duty upon you but as one, I have practically ignored the pale by which a few may be surrounded. What I now do is to take that pale and surround the whole of you with it. And this brings me round 15* 174 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. to the poipt where I have ever stood, but now more perfectly defined, that of preaching duty and obliga- tion to you as all alike church-members ; that is, all occupying before God the highest position of respon- sibility. If any do not like such preaching and such a position, all I can say is, I do not see how, since God has raised such a standard for us in his word and in our own consciousness, I can lower it for any man. Some will say they wish their children to grow up free, perfectly free. So do I, in any just sense of the word. But I take it you do not wish them to grow up free to be atheists, to be profane, to sin, — free from the highest Christian obligations. If you do, you would of course not bring them here. You wish them, I shall presume, to grow up Christians, rooted in Christian principles, and determined to a Christian life, to be such freemen as the truth makes free. You wish them free from sin, and free to do right, wherever they go. To this end, as one gra^cious means of good, I insist this whole thing of what we caU the Church, all that it is and possesses and promises, its sanctions and solemnities, its worship, instruction, and communion, must be given to them, must inclose them, fold them as an atmosphere, guard them as a divinity ? " Man is evermore liable to fall, young men are liable to go astray." I know this, I know it, and therefore all the more would I secure their uprightness and shield their steps by every possible instrumen- tality. Some may imagine their children will not grow up Christians, do the best they can for them. CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 175 Possibly. But the promise is, " Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." And I am sure that, so long as we keep our children out of the position of highest responsibility, a responsibility graduated according to capacity in every case, call it Church or what you will, so long will they not be what we wish them to be. Suppose you wish your child to learn at school, to be a scholar, and after a sort send him to school, yet refuse to let him take on himself the respon- sibility of the school, or to put him in the position of a scholar ; you say to the teacher, I wish my boy to come in here occasionally, I wish him to hear what you have to say, but I do not wish you to regard him as of the school, as a scholar, nor to lay any rules upon him, or enforce any lessons. Just so long, your child never will be a scholar. Now if there be in this building, in this assembly, in this parish, in these gatherings together, a position of high | Chris- tian responsibility, which our children cannot reach, to which we refuse to take them, and unto which we dare not commit them, however we may bring them here from Sunday to Sunday, just to look about, or hear what they please to hear and feel what they please to feel, just so long there is a moral certainty they will not grow up Christians. Home influences, and various causes cooperating with the nature that is in them, may make them Christians. But bringing them to meeting in this way never will. Will it be said, we may reach the position of highest moral and spiritual responsibility out of the 176 CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. Church ? I say, when you have reached that pointj you have reached the true Church point, you are the Church. Let us suppose that in the Old South Church, Boston, the large mass now out of the Church should begin to assume the position of highest Christian responsibility, should 'endeavor among themselves to grow up Christians, and do Christian deeds, and keep holy time, and pray, and have the Lord's Supper and baptism among them- selves ; why. they instantly become a church. That is the fact about it. What I teach is, that inas- much as the word Church is only a convenient term for expressing the organization of the religious or Christian element, or since religious society merely defines -the word Church, the highest responsibilities commence at the moment of initiating such an or- ganization, and one who enters a truly religious society, duly constituted, enters the Church. Or, in other words, that Church, instead of being confined to a few, covers all that religious society covers, all that flock covers, or all that worshipping congre- gation covers, and especially that it includes the children. In bringing what I have to say to a close, let me go back to the children, and ask what, to take it for all in all, is the most critical period of human life ? I answer, it is the period of the development of the passions, between the age of twelve and eighteen. This I take to be, on the whole, the most susceptible period for good or evil we pass through. Now I wish to ask. Where shall our youths be at this pe- riod, in the Church or out of it ? I ask parents, I ask CHILDREN TO BE COMMUNICANTS. 177 ministers of parishes everywhere, I ask the philan- thropist and the legislator, I ask people of all doctrines and all forms, Where shall our youths be at this peri- od, in the Church or out of it ? They must be in one position or the other. As things are, there is no mid- dle ground. I fancy I hear but one answer. They ought to be in the Church. "What is most sacred should impress them, what is most benign should embrace them, what is most edifying should mould them, what tends in the highest degree to adorn their natures, crorrect their selfishness, and sanctify their being, should be theirs. Well, then, to be in the Church during that time, they must be there before they are twelve years old. And now I ask you if you dare to trust so amazing a result to the hazards of special conversion, or the contingencies of a revival. For one, I dare not. There is no al- ternative, then, recognizing, as we do, the great fact of birth-connection with the Church, but for us to train our children up at once in the Church for the Church, in the Church for the world, in the Church below for the Church above. SERMON X. EDUCATION, CONSIDERED AS THE GREAT CHRIS- TIAN LAW. BRING UP YO0K CHILDREN IN THE NURTUEE AND ADMONITION OB THE LORD. — Ephesians vi. 4. EKTpe