THE 
 
 CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE IN OUR LITERATURE. 
 
FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D. 
 
 BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
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 - 
 
 Vid 
 
W 
 
 The Conservative Principle in our Literature 
 
 AN ADDRESS , JUN 1 1938 
 
 L 8t^ 
 
 ** 
 
 BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES 
 
 HAMILTON 
 
 ■ literary and theological institution, 
 
 (MADISON COUNTY, N. Y.) 
 
 DELIVERED IN 
 
 THE CHAPEL OF THE INSTITUTION, 
 
 OS THE EVENING OF 
 
 TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 1843. 
 
 BY WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, 
 
 Pastor of the Amity -street Baptist Church, New- York, 
 
 NE W-YORK: 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 JOHN GRAY, 104 BEE KM AN -STREET. 
 
 MDCCCXL1V. 
 
[published bt request of the societies.} 
 
 Other engagements which prevented the author from preparing this Address for the press, and 
 for a time entirely banished it from his mind, must be, in part, his apology with the Societies who 
 requested its publication, for its late appearance. Yet what of truth it may contain is not less true 
 now, than at the time of its delivery. Some additions made at the commencement of the Address, 
 with regard to the proper extent of literature, and the permanent influence which may belong even 
 to its more transitory productions, will, we trust, not be found alien to the theme. But the chief 
 cause of delay has been the writer's consciousness how far his treatment of the subject fell below 
 the intrinsic importance of the topic. This consciousness, had he not bound himself to publish, 
 would have prevented his appearance even at this late hour. 
 
 To prevent misconstruction, he would add the remark, that a full review of our national litera- 
 ture in all its aspects, the more encouraging as well as the more gloomy, was no part of his design. 
 It was his task but to point out the perils and to indicate the sufficient and sole remedy. 
 
TO 
 
 THE UEV. JOHN 3. MAG-INNIS, 
 
 PROFE3SOF. OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY 
 
 HAMILTON LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION, 
 
 THIS ADDRESS 
 Is, as a slight mark of high esteem and affection, 
 Kuscri&efc 
 
 By his Friend, 
 
 W. R. W. 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 In acceding to the request with which you have honored me, and 
 which brings me at this time before you, I have supposed that } T ou expected 
 it of the speaker to present some theme relating to the commonwealth of 
 literature ; that commonwealth in which every scholar and every Christian 
 feels naturally so strong an interest. The studies in which you have 
 here engaged, and which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, 
 have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves and its power 
 over others. That love of country, which in the bosoms of the young burns 
 with a flame of more than ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an addi- 
 tional interest in the cause of letters ; for you know that the literature of the 
 nation must exercise a powerful influence on the national destiny. Acting 
 as it does not merely on the schools, but also upon the homes of a land, it 
 must from those fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of 
 blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our goodly land. You 
 know that it is not mere physical advantages that have gained or that can 
 retain for our country its political privileges. You have seen how the phy- 
 sical condition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst the moral condi- 
 tion of a people is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. You remember that 
 the same sun shone on the same Marathon, when it was the heritage and 
 the battle-ground of freemen; and when, in later and more disastrous days, 
 it re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his Ottoman oppres- 
 sor. You look to literature, and other moral causes, then, as determining 
 to some extent the future history of our land. You know that literature is 
 not always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise a conser- 
 vative influence. It is like the vegetation of our earth, of varied nature. 
 Much of it is the waving harvest that fills our garners and piles our boards 
 with plenty ; and, alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the 
 decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the edifice it seems 
 to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your country, you must therefore feel an 
 eager anxiety for the moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. 
 And of your number most are looking forward to the work of the Christian 
 ministry ; and, from the past history of the world, you know in what mode 
 the progress of literature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been in its 
 
turn acted upon ; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press have some- 
 times heen found in friendly alliance, and at others enlisted in fearful anta- 
 gonism. How shall it be in your times ? 
 
 By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps the place to say, 
 more than the mere issues from the press of a nation. The term is gener- 
 ally applied to describe all the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people 
 as far as they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art of 
 printing. But it may well be questioned whether the term does not in jus- 
 tice require a wider application. Language, as soon as it is made the sub- 
 ject of culture, seems to give birth to literature. And such culture may 
 exist where the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. 
 Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have acquired the art 
 of writing. The melody and rhythm of their dialect may have been par- 
 tially developed, and their bards, their musicians, and their orators, have 
 become distinguished, ere the language has had its grammarians or its histo- 
 rians. The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its Cadmus has 
 appeared to give it an alphabet. And even in nations having the use of 
 letters, there is much never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded 
 as forming part of the literature of the people. The unrecoided intercourse 
 of a community, neither transcribed by the pen, nor multiplied by the 
 press, may bear no inconsiderable part in the literary culture of that people, 
 and form no trivial portion of their literary products. Thus the arguments 
 of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the floating proverbs, or the current 
 legends of the nation, and the ballads, and even the jests, which no anti- 
 quary may as yet have secured and written down, are expressions of the 
 popular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored only in the me- 
 mory, instead of receiving the surer guardianship of the written page, may, 
 with some show of reason, be claimed as forming no small and no uninflu- 
 ential part of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a land 
 embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, whether that inter- 
 course be oral or written. It is the exponent of the national intellect, and 
 the utterance of the popular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises 
 all the intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to the news- 
 paper ; from the body of divinity to the primer or the nursery rhyme — the 
 epic poem and the Sunday School hymn — the sermon and the epigram — 
 the essav and the sonnet — the oration and the street ballad — the jest or the 
 bye-word — all that represents, awakens, and colors the popular mind — all 
 that interprets, by the use of words, the nation to themselves, or to other 
 nations of the earth. 
 
 This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual advancement 
 of the people at the time of its production, but it exercises, of necessity, a 
 powerful influence in hastening or in checking that advancement. It is the 
 Nilometer on whose graded scale we read not merely the height to which 
 the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, or the degree to which 
 it has sunk, but also the character and extent of the harvests yet to be 
 reaped in coming months along the whole course of these waters. Thus 
 it registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but presages as 
 
■well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant future. The authors of a na- 
 tion's literary products are its teachers — in truth or in error ; and leave 
 behind their imprint and their memorial in the virtues or vices of all those 
 whom their labors may have reached. The errand of all language is to 
 create sympathy ; to waft from one human bosom the feelings that stir it, 
 that they may awaken a corresponding response in other hearts. We are 
 therefore held responsible for our words, because they affect the happiness 
 and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips takes its irrevocable 
 flight, and leaves behind its indelible imprint. It is in the stern language 
 of the apostle, in the case of some, a flame " set on fire of hell ;" and con- 
 suming wherever it alights, it " setteth on fire the course of nature;" 
 as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of salvation, "min- 
 istering grace unto the hearers." Reason and Scripture alike make it idle 
 to deny the power of speech over social order and morality. And literature 
 is but speech under the influence of art and talent. And a written litera- 
 ture is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form than it usually 
 wears. We know that God and man hold each of us responsible for the 
 utterance of the heart by the lips. Human tribunals punish the slanderer 
 because his words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts its 
 reckoning for " every idle word," because that word, however lightly 
 uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and went out to influence, for good or 
 for evil, the souls of others. 
 
 And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, of a man's lips 
 are thus influential, and enter into the matter of his final account, it cannot 
 be supposed that these words when fixed by the art of writing, or scattered 
 by the art of printing, either have less power over human society, or are in 
 the eye of heaven clothed with less solemn responsibilities. A written 
 literature embalms the perishable, arrests the progress of decay, and gives 
 to our words a longer life and a wider scope of influence. Such words, so- 
 preserved and so diffused, are the results too of more than ordinary delibe- 
 ration. If malicious, their malice is malice prepense. If foolish, their 
 folly is studied, and obstinate, and shameless. The babbler sins in the ears 
 of a few friends, and in the privacy of home. The frivolous or vicious 
 writer sins, as on a wider theatre, and before the eyes of thousands, while 
 the echoes of the press waft his words to distant lands and later times. And 
 because much of this literature may be hasty and heedless, ludicrous in 
 tone, and careless in style, soon to evaporate and disappear, like the froth on 
 some hurried stream, we are not to suppose that it is therefore of no practical 
 influence. The English stage, in the days of the last two Stuarts, was of 
 a reckless character ; — the child of mere whim, the progeny of impulse and 
 license. Many of its productions were alike regardless of all moral and 
 literary rules, — the light-hearted utterance of a depraved generation : full 
 of merry falsehoods and jesting blasphemy, fantastic and barbarous in 
 style, as well as irreligious in their spirit. Yet he must be a careless 
 reader of history, who, because of its reckless, trivial, and profligate cha- 
 racter, assigns to it but a limited influence. It did in fact grievously 
 aggravate the national wickedness whence it sprung. 
 
The trivial and the ephemeral as they float by, in glittering bubbles, to the 
 dull waters of oblivion, may yet work irreparable and enduring mischief ere 
 their brief career ends ; and the results may continue, vast and permanent, 
 when the fleeting causes which operated have long gone by. Who now reads 
 Eikon Basilike, the forgery of Bishop Gauden, ascribed to the beheaded 
 Charles I. ? Yet that counterfeited manual of devotion is thought by some 
 to have done much in bringing back the house of Stuart to the English 
 throne. 1 "Who in this age knows the words of Lillebullero? 2 yet the author 
 of that street ballad, now forgotten, boasted of having rhymed, by his song, 
 the Stuarts out of their kingdom. Thus a forged prayer book aided to 
 restore a dynasty, as the ragged rhymes of a street song helped to overturn 
 it. We err grievously, therefore, if we suppose that the frivolous is neces- 
 sarily uninfluential, and that when the word passes its effects also pass with it. 
 According to Eastern belief, the plague that wastes a city may be communi- 
 cated by the gift of a glove or a riband. The spark struck from the iron 
 heel of the laborer may have disappeared ere the eye could mark its tran- 
 sient lustre, yet ere it expired have fired the train which explodes a maga- 
 zine, lays a town in ruins, and spreads around a wide circuit, alarm and 
 lamentation, bereavement and death. Trifles may have no trivial influ- 
 ence. What is called the lighter literature of the age may be even thus 
 evanescent yet not inefficacious. By its wide and rapid circulation it may 
 act more powerfully on society than do graver and abler treatises, and its 
 authors, if unprincipled, may thus deserve but too well the title which the 
 indignant Nicole gave to the comparatively decorous dramatists and ro- 
 mance writers of France, in his own time ; a title which his pupil Racine 
 at first so warmly resented, that of " public poisoners ." 
 
 Of literature therefore, thus understood, thus wide in its range and various 
 in its products, thus influential even where the most careless, and thus 
 clothed with most solemn responsibilities because of its influence, it is 
 our purpose now to speak. 
 
 You perceive, gentlemen, that amongst ourselves, as a people, literature 
 is subject to certain peculiar influences, perhaps nowhere else found in the 
 same combination, or operating to the same extent as in our own land. We 
 are a young nation, inhabiting, and called to subdue a wide territory. Youth 
 is the season of hope, enterprise, and energy — and it is so to a nation as 
 well as an individual. Our literature is likely, therefore, to be ardent, 
 original, and at times perhaps boastful. They are the excellencies and the 
 foibles of youth. As a people we enjoy, again, that freedom which has 
 ever been the indulgent nurse of talent, in all times and in all lands. The 
 people are here the kings. And whilst some of our sovereigns are toiling in 
 
 1 " Many have not scrupled to ascribe to that book the subsequent restoration of the royal fa- 
 mily. Milton compares its effects to those which were wrought on the tumultuous Romans by 
 Anthony's reading to them the will of Ca?sar. The Eikon passed through fifty editions in a twelve- 
 month." — Hume. 
 
 2 " It may not be unworthy of notice, that a merry ballad, called Lillibullero, being at that time 
 published, in derision of the papists and the Irish, it was greedily received by the people, and was 
 sung by all ranks of men, even by the King's army, who were strongly seized with the national 
 spirit. This incident both discovered, and served to increase, the general discontent of the king- 
 dom."— Hume. 
 
9 
 
 the field, others are speaking through the press. Our authors are all royal 
 by political right if not by the birthright of genius. Providence has blest 
 us also with the wide diffusion of education, and the school travels, in many 
 regions of our land, as it were, to every man's door. It is not here, if it 
 may elsewhere be the case, that the neglected children of genius can com- 
 plain that chill penury " repressed their noble rage." In addition to the 
 advantages of the common school, our writers, publishers, and instructors, 
 are sedulously preparing literature for the use of the masses. The popular 
 lecturer is discussing themes of grave interest ; while the cheap periodical 
 press is snowing over the whole face of our land its thick and incessant 
 storm of knowledge. This knowledge, it is true, is not all of the most val- 
 uable kind. The wonders of steam are dragging the remoter portions of our 
 union, daily into closer contact, whilst a free emigration is bringing us the 
 denizens of other lands and the men of other tongues, until the whole world 
 appears about to be made neighbors and kinsmen to America ; and the nation 
 seems daily melting into a new and strange amalgam, in consequence of the 
 addition of foreign materials from without, to the heterogeneous mass already 
 found fusing within our own country. 
 
 All these causes are operating and must operate long and steadily upon 
 the character of American literature. It becomes an important inquiry 
 then, what moral shape this literature is assuming under these plastic influ- 
 ences. You ask, as change follows change, and as one omen of moral pro- 
 gress, or social revolution follows close upon another: "Watchman, what 
 of the night ?" And gazing into the deep darkness of the future, you would 
 fain read what are the coming fortunes of our people and their literature. 
 Allow me then to dwell upon some of the evils that endanger our rising lit- 
 erature, and threaten to suffuse the bloom of its youth with their fatal virus. 
 I would next bring before 3'ou the remedy which as scholars, patriots, and 
 Christians, we are bound to apply to these evils, and to which we must 
 look as our preservative against the approaching danger. 
 
 The evils to be found besetting and perilling American literature and the 
 remedy of those evils, will afford our present theme. I may seem to dwell 
 for a time, at least, upon the darker shades of a picture, that may, I fear, 
 appear to some of my respected hearers, overcharged in its gloom. I must 
 also from the nature of the subject enter into some details, that will, I fear, 
 severely tax the patience of all who are listening. I can only cast myself 
 upon your indulgence ; find an apology as to the length of some state- 
 ments, and the denser shade cast by others, in the wide and varied nature of 
 the subject, and its mingled difficulty, delicacy, and importance ; asking 
 the aid of Him whose blessing can never fail those that trust in Him, the 
 author of all knowledge, and the final arbiter who will bring into judgment 
 all our employments, whether literary or practical, social or solitary. 
 
 We would then dwell for a time, on some of the dangers that threaten 
 the rising literature of our land. If the foreground of the landscape be 
 dark, we trust to show in the distance the sure and sufficient remedy of 
 these dangers ; and though night be spread on the summits of the nearer 
 and lov-er mounmins, we see glir.tp.ring on the crest of the remote* and loftier 
 
10 •* 
 
 heights beyond, the Star of Hope, that portends the coming day, and undef 
 •the edge of the darkest cloud we seem to discern already the gleams of the 
 approaching sun. Our country may suffer and struggle, but we trust it is 
 not the purpose of Him who has so signally blest and so long defended us, 
 that she should suffer long, or sink far, much less sink finally and for ever. 
 
 First then among the evil tendencies that beset our youthful literature, 
 and are likely to thwart and mar its progress we would name, the mechanical 
 and utilitarian spirit of the times. "We are as a nation eminently practical 
 in our character. It is well that we should be so. But this trait in our 
 national feelings and manners has its excesses and its consequent perils. 
 Placed in a country where labor and integrity soon acquire wealth, the 
 love of wealth has become a passion with multitudes. The lust of gain 
 seems at times a national sin easily besetting all classes of society amongst 
 us. Fierce speculations at certain intervals of years engross the hearts of 
 the community, and a contagious frenzy sends men from all walks of life 
 and all occupations into the field of traffic. Fortunes are rapidly made and 
 as rapidly lost. The nation seems to be lifted up as on a rushing tide of 
 hope and prosperity. It subsides as rapidly as it had risen ; and on every 
 side are seen strewn the wrecks of fortune, credit, character, and principle. 
 All this affects our literature. We are, in the influential classes, a matter-of- 
 fact, and money-getting race. This tends, in the minds of many to create 
 a distaste for all truth that is not at once convertible into wealth, and its 
 value to be calculated in current coin. In the clank and din of our never- 
 tiring machinery, the voice of wisdom is often drowned, and the most mo- 
 mentous and stirring truths are little esteemed because they cannot be rated 
 in the Price Current or sold on the Exchange. We are impatient to see the 
 material results of every truth, and to have its profits told upon our fingers, 
 or pressed into our palms. So, on the other hand, if any principle, plan, or 
 expedient, be it true or be it false, will effect our purpose, produce a needful 
 impression, and secure an end that we deem desirable, we are prone to think 
 it allowable because it is effective. We idolize effect. And a philosophy of 
 expediency thus springs up, which sacrifices ever}' thing to immediate ef- 
 fects and to mere material results — a philosophy which, in practice, if not in 
 theory, is driving rapidly against some of the very bulwarks of moral princi- 
 ple, that our fathers believed, and believed justly, to be grounded in the 
 law, and built into the very throne of God. 
 
 Now we need not say that where this utilitarian and mechanical spirit 
 acquires the ascendancy in our literature, it must operate dangerously on 
 the state and the church. The prosperity that is built on gain, and the 
 morality that is built on expediency, will save no nation. The declining 
 glories of Tyre and Holland, each in her day mistress of the seas, and 
 guardian of its treasures, ma} r read us an admonitory lesson as to the fatal 
 blight that such a spirit breathes over the freedom, the arts and the learning 
 of a land. 
 
 We are by the favoring Providence of God, placed under political insti- 
 tutions which more readily yield to and reflect the popular will, than the 
 government and laws of other lands. The literature of our nation, more 
 
11 
 
 Teadily than that of earlier times, or of older countries, moulds the political 
 action of the nation. Let but the spirit of expediency and of gain sway our 
 political literature in the thousand journals of our country, and in the my- 
 riads of voters whom these journals educate and govern. Let the same 
 spirit possess the great parties ever to be found in a free nation, and the 
 aspiring leaders who are the champions and oracles of those parties, and 
 what would soon be the result ? A peddling policy, that, disregarding the 
 national interest and honor, would truckle to power and favor, carry its 
 principles to market, and convert statesmanship into a trade. The country 
 would be visited with an impudent, voluble and mercenary patriotism, that 
 shrinking at no artifice, and blushing at no meanness, would systematize 
 the various arts of popularity, into a new science of selfishness. The 
 legislation of the land and its intercourse with foreign nations would be 
 engrossed by trading politicians; huckstering their talents and influence 
 to the party or the measure or the man, that should bid in the shape of 
 emolument or office, the highest price for the commodities which they vend. 
 The expert statesman would then be he who consulted most assiduously 
 the weathervane of popular favor, that he might ascertain to what point 
 his conscience should be set. And should such time ever come over our 
 beloved land, could our liberties endure when guarded only by hands so 
 faithless, or our laws be either wise or just, when such men made and 
 such men administered them ? 
 
 Let the same love of selfish gain pervade the pulpits of our land : let 
 the messengers of the gospel learn to prophesy smooth things, and instead 
 of "the word in season," let them substitute the word in fashion — let them 
 retail doctrines that admit no personal application, truths that wound not 
 the conscience and pierce not the heart, and morals enforced by no motives of 
 love to God, but. by mere considerations of gain or honor — let them compile 
 unoffending truisms and dexterous sophisms, and put these in place of un- 
 palatable truths — let them listen to the echoes of popular opinion ever- 
 more, that they may m them learn their lessons of duty; and where 
 soon is the gospel so administered, and where is the church if left but to 
 such instruction ? The far-sighted law of right as God ordained and admin- 
 isters it would be overthrown, that in its stead might be set up the law of 
 interest, as short-sighted man expounds it ; and a creed by which the world 
 is to be humored, flattered and adored, would be audaciously preached at 
 the foot of a cross which ransomed that world only by renouncing and only 
 by defying it. No — gain is not godliness. 
 
 But man was made for other purposes than to coin or exchange dol- 
 lars. The fable of Midas pestered with his riches, and unable to eat be- 
 cause his food turned to gold, is full of beneficial instruction in such times 
 as ours. Man has wants which money cannot supply, and sorrows which 
 lucre cannot heal ; although cupidity may teach him often to make expe- 
 diency or immediate utility the standard of his code of morals. Conscience 
 too, will utter at times her protest, slip aside the gag, and reclaim loudly 
 against practices she cannot approve, however they may for the time 
 profit. A literature merely venal will not then meet all the necessities of 
 
12 
 
 man's nature. And not from conscience only is the reign of covetousnesg 
 threatened and made insecure. Mere feeling and passion lead men often 
 to look to other than their pecuniary interests, and in quest of yet dearer 
 objects they trample on gain, and sacrifice the mere conveniences to secure 
 the higher enjoyments of life. But here, in this last named fact, is found 
 the source of yet another danger to our literature. Passion is not a safer 
 moral guide to a people than interest. 
 
 2. Let us dwell on this new inimical influence by which our literature 
 may surfer. Our age is eminently, in some of its leading minds, an age of 
 passion. It is seen in the character of much of the most popular literature 
 and especially the poetry 7 of our day. Much of this has been the poetry 
 of intense passion, it mattered little how unprincipled that passion might 
 be. An English scholar lately gone from this world, it is to Southey 
 that we refer, branded this school of modern literature, in the person of 
 its great and titled leader as the Satanic school. 3 It has talent and ge- 
 nius, high powers of imagination and language, and boiling energy ; but it 
 is ; much of it, the energy of a fallen and revolted angel, with no regard for 
 the right, no vision into eternity, and no hold on Heaven. We would not 
 declaim against passion when employed in the service of literature. In- 
 
 3 Another English scholar whose writings may be quoted, as affording evidence of a re-action 
 that has followed the influence of Byron, holds this language. Speaking of the heroes of Byron, 
 he remarks : " They exhibit rather passions personified than persons impassioned. But there is a 
 yet worse defect, Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty materials 
 of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of perception 
 of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroe? are creatures abandoned to their passions, and 
 essentially, therefore, weak of mind. They must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no 
 strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions, — in whom all is vanity ; their exertions 
 being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name 
 of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as heroical, where in human nature are we to 
 look for what is low in sentiment, or infirm in character?" It is not the language of theologians 
 we are now quoting, but the words we have transcribed are those of " a prophet of their own," — 
 of a living dramatic poet, Henry Taylor, the author of " Philip Van Artevelde." Elsewhere be 
 uses the aid of verse, to pronounce a similar judgment. 
 
 " Then learned I to despise that far-famed school 
 
 Who place in wickedness their pride, and deem 
 Power chiefly to be shown where passion* rule, 
 
 And not where they are ruled : in whose new scheme 
 
 Of heroism, self-government should seem 
 A thing left out, or something to contemn, 
 
 Whose notions, incoherent as a dream, 
 Make strength go with the torrent, and not stem, 
 For ' wicked and thence weak' is not a creed for them. 
 
 I left these passionate weaklings : I perceived 
 
 What took away all nobleness from pride, 
 All dignity from sorrow; what bereaved 
 
 Even genius of respect; they seemed allied 
 
 To mendicants that by the highway side 
 Expose their self-inflicted wouuds, to gain 
 
 The alms of sympathy— far best denied. 
 I heard the sorrowful sensualist complain, 
 If with compassion, not without disdain." 
 
13 
 
 formed by strong feeling, truth becomes both more awful and more lovely ; 
 and some of the ages which unfettered the passions of a nation have given 
 birth to master-pieces of genius. But Passion divorced from Virtue is 
 ultimately among the fellest enemies to literary excellence. When yoked 
 to the car of duty, and reined in by principle, passion is in its appropriate 
 place, and may accomplish a mighty service. But when, in domestic life, 
 or political, or in the walks of liteiature, passion throws off these restraints 
 and exults in its own uncontrolled power, it is as useless for purposes of 
 good, and as formidable from its powers of evil, as a car whose fiery coursers 
 have shaken off bit and rein and trampled under foot their charioteer. The 
 Maker of man made conscience to rule his other faculties, and when it is 
 dethroned, the result is ruin. Far as the literature to which we have 
 alluded spreads, it cherishes an insane admiration for mere talent or mental 
 power. It substitutes as a guide in morals, sentiment for conscience ; 
 and makes blind feeling the irresistible fate, whose will none may dis- 
 pute, and whose doings are beyond the jurisdiction of casuists or law- 
 givers. It has much of occasional tenderness and can melt at times into 
 floods of sympathy : but this softness is found strangely blended with 
 a savage violence. Such things often co-exist. As in the case of the 
 French hangman, who in the times of their great revolution was found, 
 fresh from his gory work at the guillotine, sobbing over the Sorrows of 
 Werther, it contrives to ally the sanguinary to the sentimental. It seems 
 at first sight, much such an ill-assorted match as if the family of Mr. 
 Wet-eyes in one of Bunyan's matchless allegories, were wedded to that 
 of Giant Blocdy-man in the other. But it is easily explained. It has 
 been found so in all times when passion has been made to take the place 
 of reason as the guide of a people, and conscience has been thrust from the 
 throne to be succeeded by sentiment. The luxurious and the cruel, 
 the fierce and the voluptuous, the licentious and the relentless read- 
 ily coalesce ; and we soon are made to perceive the fitness of the classic 
 fable by which, in the old Greek mythology, Venus was seen knitting her 
 hands with Mars, the goddess of sensuality, allying herself with the god of 
 slaughter. We say, much of the literature of the present and the last gen- 
 eration is thus the caterer of passion, lawless, fierce, and vindictive passion. 
 And if a retired student may " through the loopholes of retreat" read 
 aright the world of fashion, passion seems at times acquiring an unwonted 
 ascendancy in the popular amusements of the age. The lewd pantomime 
 and dance, from which the less refined fashion of other times would have 
 turned her blushing and indignant face, the gorgeous spectacle and the 
 shows of wild beasts, and even the sanguinary, pugilistic combat, that 
 sometimes recals the gladiatorial shows of old Rome, have become in our 
 day, the favorite recreations of some classes among the lovers of pleasure. 
 These are, it 'should be remembered, nearly the same with the favorite en- 
 tertainments of the later Greek empire, when plethoric by its wealth, and 
 enervated by its luxury, that power was about to be trodden down by the 
 barbarian invasions of the north. 
 It is possible that the same dangerous ascendancy of passion may be fos- 
 
14 
 
 tered, where we should have been slow to suspect it, by the ultraism of 
 some good men among the social reformers of our time. Wilberforce was, 
 in the judgment of Mackintosh, the very model of a reformer, because he 
 united an earnestness that never flagged with a sweetness that never failed. 
 There are good men that have nothing of this last trait. Amid the best in- 
 tentions there is occasionally, in the benevolent projects even, of this day, a 
 species of Jack Cadeism, if we may be allowed the expression, enlisted in 
 the service of reform. It seems the very opposite of the character of Wil- 
 berforce, nourishes an acridity and violence of temper, that appears to delight 
 in repelling, and seeks to enkindle feeling by wild exaggeration and personal 
 denunciation ; raves in behalf of good with the very spirit of evil, and 
 where it cannot convince assent, would extort submission. Even truth 
 itself when administered at a scalding heat, cannot benefit the recipient ; 
 and the process is not safe for the hands of the administrator himself. 
 
 Far be it from us to decry earnestness when shown in the cause of truth 
 and justice, or to forget how the passion awakened in some revolutionary 
 crisis of a people's history, has often infused into the productions of genius 
 an unwonted energy and clothed them as with an immortal vigor. But it 
 is passion yoked to the chariot of reason, and curbed by the strong hand of 
 principle ; laboring in the traces, but not grasping the reins. But set aside 
 argument and truth and give to passion its unchecked course, and the effect 
 is fatal. It may at first seem to clothe a literature with new energy, but it 
 is the mere energy of intoxication soon spent, and for which there speedily 
 comes a sure and biiter reckoning. The bonds of principle are loosened ; 
 the tastes and habits of society corrupted, and the effects are soon seen ex- 
 tending themselves to the very form and style of a literature as well as to the 
 morality of its productions. The intense is substituted for the natural and 
 true. What is effective is sought for rather than what is exact. Our lite- 
 rature therefore has little, in such portions of it, of the high finish and se- 
 rene repose of the master-pieces of classic antiquity, where passion in its 
 highest flights is seen wearing gracefully all the restraining rules of art ; 
 and power toils ever as under the severe eye of order. 
 
 3. A kindred evil, the natural result and accompaniment of that to 
 which we have last adverted, and like it fatal to the best interests of 
 literature, is the laivlcssness, unhappily but too rife through large districts 
 of our territory, and in various classes of its inhabitants. Authority in the 
 parent, the magistrate or the pastor, seems daily to be held by a less firm 
 tenure. Obedience seems to be regarded rather as a boon, and control re- 
 sented as usurpation. The restraints of honesty in the political and com- 
 mercial intercourse of society seem more feebly felt. In those entrusted 
 by the state and by public corporations with the control of funds, the charges 
 of embezzlement and defalcation have within the last few years multiplied 
 rapidly in number, and swelled fearfully in amount. Until, catching the 
 contagion of the times, sovereign states are found questioning the obliga- 
 tions of their own contracts, and repudiating their plighted word and bond. 
 In the matter of good faith between man and man, as to pecuniary engage- 
 ments, the wheels of the social machine groan ominously, as if they were, by 
 
15 
 
 Borne internal dislocation and collision, ready to tear asunder the fabric of 
 society. Private revenge and the sudden ebullitions of popular violence 
 disregarding all delays and setting aside all forms, seem in some districts 
 ready to supplant the quiet administration of the laws, and dispensing alike 
 with judges and prisons. The laws of God too are often as lightly regarded 
 as the laws of human society. In the growing facility of divorce, the stat- 
 ute of Heaven intended to guard the purity of home, and lying at the 
 foundation of all society, is to some extent infringed upon : while our rail- 
 roads and canals have run their lines fearlessly athwart the Sabbath; and 
 it seems a question whether the flaming Sinai should be allowed to stand 
 any longer in the pathway of modern improvement. 
 
 And amid such scenes of disorder and commotion, it is, — scenes illustrat- 
 ing so fearfully the depravity, inveterate and entire, of the human heart, — 
 it is, we say, amid such scenes that men are rising up to remodel all society* 
 At the attempt we ought not perhaps to be surprised, so much as at the 
 principles on which it proceeds. On these we look with irrepressible asto- 
 nishment. They assume the natural innocence of man, and trace all his 
 miseries and all his crimes to bad government, to false views of society, and 
 to ignorance respecting the true relations of man to man, — relations which 
 after the lapse of so many centuries they have been the first to reveal. 
 They would not merely overlook, but deny that melancholy truth, the Fall 
 of Man from his original state, and his consequent native depravity; — a 
 truth never to be forgotten by all that would exercise a true benevolence to 
 their brother man, and by all that would build up a stable government. In 
 denying this truth, they contradict all the experience, all the history, and shall 
 we not add, all the consciousness of our race. A truth which even blinded 
 and haughty heathenism mournfully acknowledged, — a truth which Reve- 
 lation asserts so emphatically and so often, cannot with impunity be forgotten 
 by any that would attempt the reform of man's condition. Vague and wild 
 in principle, and comparatively barren of results, must all reforms be that 
 would make all their improvements from without, and feel that none is 
 needed within. We would honor even the misguided zeal of our brethren 
 of the race who seek in any form to lessen the amount of human misery 
 and wrong ; but the claims of our Common Father, and the wrongs He has 
 met at our hands, are to be acknowledged by all who would pity, with an 
 effectual compassion, human sorrow, and remedy with an enduring relief, 
 social disorder and wretchedness. To forget or to contradict these truths, is 
 to reject the lessons alike of history and scripture. All reform so based is 
 itself but a new, though it may be unconscious, lawlessness. 
 
 We have said that proposals of social reform are not causes of wonder. 
 Already human life is less secure in many portions of our republic, than 
 under some of the European monarchies ; and frauds and embezzlements 
 are less surely and less severely punished. In some of our legislatures, in the 
 very halls, and under the awful eye, as it were, of the embodied Justice of 
 the State, brawls and murders have occurred, in which our legislators were the 
 combatants and the victims. And yet in such a state of things, when human 
 
16 
 
 life is growing daily cheaper, and the fact of assassination seems to awaken 
 scarce a tithe of the sympathy, horror, and inquiry, which it provoked irt 
 our fathers' times, — it is in such a state of things, that by a strange paradox, 
 a singular clemency for the life of the assassin seems springing up. In a 
 nation lax to a fault in the vindication of human life when illegally taken 
 away, the protest is made most passionately against its being taken away 
 legally; and the abolition of Capital Punishment is demanded by earnest 
 and able agitators. Would that the picture thus dark were but the sketch 
 of Fancy; unhappily its gloomy hues are but the stern coloring of Truth. 
 Can the patriot, as he watches such omens, fail to see the coming judgment? 
 Can he shut his eyes against the fact so broadly printed on all the pages of 
 history, that anarchy makes despotism necessary ; that men who are left 
 lawless soon fly for refuge even to a sceptre of iron, and a law of blood ; 
 that a Robespierre has ever prepared the way for a Buonaparte, and the 
 arts of the reckless demagogue, like Catiline, have smoothed the path for 
 the violence of the able usurper, like Caesar ? Of all this, should it unhap- 
 pily continue or increase, the effects must with growing rapidity be seen in 
 the injury done to our literature. There is a close and strange connexion 
 between moral and literary integrity. Not only does social confusion dis- 
 courage the artist and the scholar, but disjointed and anarchical times are 
 often marked by a want of laborious truth, and of seriousness and earnest- 
 ness on the part of the popular writers. A passion for frivolity, a temper 
 that snatches at temporary triumphs by flattering the whim of the hour, and 
 a science of agreeable, heartless trifling, spring up in such days to the bane 
 alike of all eloquence, and of all truth. 
 
 4. Another of the perils which seem to us lying in the way of our rising 
 literature, is a. false liberalism. To a manly and Christian toleration we can 
 never be opposed. Something of this toleration is required by our free inter- 
 course with many lands. The wonders of steam are melting the nations most 
 highly civilized into comparative uniformity and unity. Our colonists are the 
 emigrants of many shores. In this audience are found blended the blood of 
 the Celt and the Saxon, the Norman and the Roman. We are scions alike 
 from the stock of those who fought beneath, and of those who warred sue- 
 cessfully against the eagles of the old Latin empire. Our varied origin 
 seems giving to America, as its varied learning has given to Germany, a 
 "many-sided mind;" a sympathy at many points with mankind, and with 
 widely diversified forms of society. More easily than the English, the 
 ancestors whom many of us claim, we adopt the peculiarities of other na- 
 tions. And all this is well. But when we suffer these influences to foster 
 in us the notion that all the moral peculiarities, and all the forms of faith, 
 marking the various tribes from which our country is supplied, and with 
 which our commerce connects us, are alike valuable ; — when, instead of an 
 enlightened love of truth wherever found, we learn indifference to all truth, 
 and call this new feeling by the name of superiority to prejudice ; — when 
 we leara to think of morals as if they were little more than a conventional 
 matter, the effect of habit or tradition, or the results of climate or of the 
 
17 
 
 physical constitution of a people, we are learning lessons alike irrational, 
 and perilous, and untrue. 4 
 
 The spirit of Pope's Universal Prayer seems to many, in consequence of 
 these and other influences, the essence of an enlightened Christian charity. 
 They cannot endure the anathemas of Paul against those who deny his 
 Lord. They would classify the Koran and the Shaster with the Scriptures. 
 Some have recently discovered a truth of which those writers were them- 
 selves strangely ignorant, that the Deistical and Atheistical scholars of France, 
 the Theomachists who prepared the way for its Revolution, the men who 
 loaded the Crucified Nazarene and his religion with all outrage, were in 
 truth Christians, although they knew it not themselves. Just as much, it 
 seems to us, as Nero was an unconscious Howard; just as much as Catiline 
 was, in modest ignorance of his own merits, an anticipated Washington. 
 It is worse than idle thus to confound all moral distinctions. To suit these 
 new and more liberal views of Christianity, it has become of course neces- 
 sary to revise the gospel, and to supersede at least the ancient forms of the 
 Christian religion. Thus in a land the literature and religion of which are 
 becoming more and more known to some of our scholars, Strauss has evis- 
 cerated the New Testament of all its facts, and leaves in all its touching and 
 miraculous narrations but the fragments of a popular myth, — intended to 
 shadow forth certain truths common in the history of human nature in all 
 ages. The nation to which he belongs, and which claims to be the most 
 profound in metaphysical speculation and in varied learning, of all the na- 
 tions of our time, is reviving in some of its schools an undisguised Pan- 
 
 4 It is well that we should cherish a humble sense of our own fallibility; but, whatever may be 
 true of us, God and Scripture are infallible. The Creator, too, so constituted his universe, that 
 there is truth in it, and throughout it ; and he has so constituted man as to thirst, with an inex- 
 tinguishable longing, after truth. An utter despair of obtaining it, aud a general acknowledgment 
 that we are all together and inevitably in the wrong, is alike a state of misery to man, and a dis- 
 honor done to God. It may give birth to a sort of toleration, but it is the spurious toleration of 
 Pyrrhonism, a liberality that patronizes error, but thac can be fierce against the truth, for as the 
 wise and meek Carey complained, skeptics may be the most intolerant of mankind against the truth. 
 A Christian toleration appreciates the innate power of truth to diffuse and protect itself; and pities 
 error while resisting it. The liberality of skepticism denies existence to truth, and canonizes error 
 as a sufficient substitute, and sets men afloat on a shoreless, starless ocean of doubt. Or as a young 
 poet of EngHnd has not infelicitously described it, it prescribes to mankind the task of conjugat- 
 ing falsehood through all its moods, tenses, and cases, and teaches them mutual forbearance as the 
 result of their common infatuation. 
 
 1 " Let them alone," men cry, 
 " I lie, thou liest, they lie : 
 What then ? Thy neighbor's folly hurts not thee !" 
 Error is Freedom ! such the insensate shout 
 Of crowds that, like a Paean, hymn a Doubt : 
 Indifference thus the world calls Charity. 
 
 " Battles at last shall cease." 
 
 At last, not now -. we are not yet at home. 
 The time is coming, it will soon be come, 
 When those who dare not fight 
 For God, or for the right, 
 Shall fight for peace !' 
 
 From " The Waldsnses, and Other Toems^ by Aubrey de Vcre. Oxford, 1843. P. 127. 
 
 3 
 
18 
 
 theism, which makes the universe God ; and thus, in effect, gives to Job arret 
 the dunghill on which he sate, the ulcers which covered him, and the pot- 
 sherds with which he scraped himself, the honor of being all, parts and 
 parcels alike of the same all-pervading Deity. And this is the wisdom, 
 vaunted and profound, of our times ; a return, in fact, to those discoveries 
 described of old in a venerable volume which we all wot of, in the brief and 
 pithy sentence, — " The world by wisdom knew not God." The result of 
 its arrogant self-confidence was blindness to the great fact blazing on the 
 whole face of creation, and deafness to the dread voice that speaks out of all 
 history, the truth that there is a God. And hence, not so much from any sin- 
 gular cogency in his reasoning as from the palatableness of the results which 
 that reasoning reaches, Spinoza, the Pantheist Jew, is, after a long lapse 
 of years of confutation and obscurity, rising again in the view of some scho- 
 lars in Germany, Britain, and America, to the rank of a guide in morals 
 and a master of religious truth. 5 When such a form of philosophy becomes 
 
 5 Of the system of Spinoza it had been said by the acute Bayle, certainly no bigoted adheren* 
 to Christianity, and no prejudiced enemy of skepticism, that "it was the most monstrous scheme 
 imaginable ;" and again, that "it has been fully overthrown even by the weakest of its adversa- 
 ries." In a similnr spirit, Maclaurin, the celebrated British mathematician, had remarked, " It doe3 
 Dot, indeed, appear possible to invent another system equally absurd." — (Dvgald Stewart's Pro- 
 gress of Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 116. Am. Edition.)— Stewart quotes from Colerus, the author 
 of a Life of Spinoza, the singular anecdote, that " one of the amusements with which he was 
 accustomed to unbend his mind, was that of entangling flies in a spider's web, or of setting spiders 
 to fighting with each other : on which occasions (it is added,) he would observe their combats with 
 so much interest that it was not unusual for him to be seized with immoderate fits of laughter." — 
 (Ibidem, p. 351.) Stewart, we think, lays too much stress on this incident, when he finds in it a 
 proof of Spinoza's insanity. It. was, certainly, not the most amiable trait in the character of a 
 philosopher for whom his disciples have claimed a remarkable hlamelessness and even piety. We 
 cannot imagine such an amusement as delighting the vacant hours, and such merriment as gl 
 ing the heart, of a Christian philosopher like Boyle or Newton. Trivial as it was, it betrayed the 
 spirit, and furnished no unapt emblem, of the system he elaborated in his philosophy, where an 
 acute mind found its amusement in entangling to their ruin its haples> victims in a web of sophistry, 
 that puzzled, caught, and destroyed them : and grim Blasphemy lay waiting to devour those who 
 fluttered in the snares of Falsehood. 
 
 Yet this system, the product of such a mind, has been recently, with loud panegyrics of its au- 
 thor, commended anew to the regard of mankind on either side of the Atlantic. Paulus, the cele- 
 brated Neologian divine of Germany, had issued, years ago, an edition of his works. Amongst 
 ourselves and the scholars of England, such views have obtained currency mostly, it is probable, 
 from the admiration professed for Spinoza by such men as Goethe, and others, the scholars and 
 philosophers of Germany, for whom we have contracted too indiscriminating a reverence. Goethe'3 
 course was paradoxical. Rejecting revelation as impossible, for the singular reason that if it came 
 from God it must be unintelligible to men, and declaring God as presented in the teachings of Christ 
 Jesus, to be an imperfect and inadequate conception, Goethe held that the Divinity revealed in the 
 Bible involved difficulties which must drive an inquirer to despair, unless he were " great erough 
 to rise to the stand-point of a higher view ;" in other words, a higher point of observation than 
 that occupied by Christ. " Such a stand-point Goethe early found in Spinoza; and he acknow- 
 ledges with joy how truly the views of that great thinker answered to the wants of his youth. In 
 h\m he found himself , and could therefore fortify himself with Spinoza to the best advantage.'' 
 These are the words of Eckerman, (Eclcerman Convers. with Goethe. Boston: p. 37,) who 
 played with Goethe the part that James Boswell acted to the great lexicographer and moralist of 
 England, recording as a humble admirer, the conversations of his oracle. Of the moral character 
 of some of the productions of Goethe we need not pause to remark. There are principles devel- 
 oped in his writings that needed "fortifying." We would but notice a difficulty which the lan- 
 guage of iiis admirer suggests. Goethe is made to speak of Spinoza as the thinker " in whom he 
 found himself.' 1 To us, the uninitiated, it seems hard to reconcile this test by which he recognised 
 and adopted his master's system, with his passionate words elsewhere, recorded by the same adrair- 
 
19 
 
 prevalent, all forms of religion are alike true, or in other words, are alike 
 False ; and room is to be made for a new religion by which man shall wor- 
 ship Nature or himself. So difficult is it for the gospel to suit men's way- 
 wardness. It was the objection of the old Pagans to Christianity, as we 
 learn from Origen, that it was too universal a religion : that every country 
 should of right be allowed a religion of its own ; and Christianity was arro- 
 gant in asking to be received as the one faith of all countries. But now the 
 opposers of this gospel discover that it has the defect of not being universal 
 enough ; and they wish a wider faith, that will embrace the race, let them 
 think as they please, and worship as they may. Thus would this school 
 reconcile all religions by evaporating them. 
 
 In Germany, the country that has most cultivated this hideous error, 
 it has as yet, we believe, prevailed chiefly among portions of the 
 literary classes, and not reached the peasantry ; and the nation thus 
 affected are less prone to reduce their opinions to action, and are both more 
 speculative and less practical than ourselves. But let such a doctrine come 
 amongst us and grow to be popular. Let it pass from the libraries of a few 
 dreaming scholars into our common schools, our workshops, our farm-houses, 
 and our homes. Like an active poison released from its confinement in the 
 dim laboratory of the chemist, where it was comparatively unknown and 
 innocuous, let it be sprinkled into every pipkin simmering upon the cottage 
 
 ing Eckerman, (p. 309.) " Man is a darkened being ; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither 
 he goes ; he knows little of the world, and less of himself. I know not myself, and may God pro- 
 tect me from it." How the rule of the old Greek wisdom, " know thyself," might seem folly to the 
 modern German we can conceive : and how the view of his own heart might shock and appal one 
 who would fain idolize his own wisdom and virtue, we can, with as little difficult) ■, imagine. But 
 how one who shrunk from knowing himself, could, by knowing himself, recognise the truth of a 
 system of Pantheism, is to us inconceivable. A religion that begins in dogmatic ignorance as to 
 our own nature, and ends in dogmatic omniscience as to God's nature, does not commend itself to 
 our reason, more than it does to our sympathies, or our hopes. 
 
 An affecting proof may be gathered from the same volume, (pp. 405, 407,) how easily the Panthe- 
 ism of the schools slides into the Polytheism of the multitude. Goethe had received a cast of a 
 piece of statuary. A model from Myron's cow, with the sucking calf, was sent him by a young 
 artist. " Here," said he, " we have a subject of the highest sort — the nourishing principle which 
 upholds the world, and pervades all nature, is brought before our eyes by this beautiful symbol. 
 This, and others of a like nature, / esteem the true symbols of the omnipresence of God.'' What 
 the omnipresence of the Deity, in the system of Pantheism is, we need not linger to remark. 
 Skeptics have affected to wonder at the unaccountable perverseness of the children of Israel forging 
 and adoring their golden calf at the foot of Sinai ; but here we have the practice palliated by a 
 master-spirit of skepticism, amid the boasted illumination of the nineteenth century. A cow with 
 her calf is, according to Goethe, " the true symbol," of the all-pervading, all-sustaining Divinity 
 who comprises, and himself is, the universe. Did Pantheism but rule the schools, we can see how 
 easily idolatry in its most brutish forms might be revived among the populace ; and the ox-gods 
 and onion-gods of Egypt, at which even a heathen Juvenal jeered, might, amid all our vaunted 
 advance in knowledge, receive again the worship of our scholars. Pantheism is the philosophy of 
 Braminism with all its hundred thousand graven images. The men who had outgrown the Bible, 
 and found themselves wi*cr than the Redeemer, might, under the auspices of Pantheism, return 
 lo the worship of Apis, and adore the gods of the dairy and the stall, as they stood chewing their 
 cud, or suckling their calves. 
 
 Thus does the philosophy that would fain soar over the head of our Saviour, to a higher and 
 more adequate view of the Divine Nature, find itself grovelling at last in the very mire of beast- 
 worship. It is, with no impaired reverence for his Bible, that the Christian student turns from 
 such spectacles of human presumption and impiety, to muse on the sovereignty and adore the wis- 
 dom of Him, who thus " taketli the wi§e in their own craftiness." 
 
20 
 
 hearth on either side of the Alleghanies ; let our newspapers drop the doc- 
 trine, as a manna of death, from their multitudinous wings, around every 
 hamlet and habitation of the land, and what were the result ? Where, in 
 one short week, were our freedom, our peace, or our morals ? — all a buried 
 wreck, submerged beneath a weltering ocean of misery and sin. The soul 
 with no immortal heritage, — crime released from its fears of the avenger, — 
 and sorrow stripped of its hopes of a comforter ; — the world without a Go- 
 vernor, and the race left fatherless, with the fact of the redemption and 
 the hope of the resurrection alike blotted out;— surely these are doctrines no 
 false claims of liberality can palliate. And yet to such tremendous results 
 is tending much of the miscalled liberality of our times. 
 
 This false liberalism is aiding the lawlessness of which we have before 
 spoken, in rejecting all regard to precedent, and all reverence for antiquity. 
 
 5. But in the natural antagonism of the human mind to such excesses as 
 these, is seen rising a fifth principle, that of Siqjerstition ; and though op- 
 posed to the last error, yet in its way preparing injury, from still another 
 side, to the literary interests of our nation. It may seem to some idle to 
 talk of superstition as a peril of the nineteenth century. But an age that 
 devours so eagerly the prodigies of Animal Magnetism, is not quite entitled 
 to talk superciliously of the superstition of their forefathers in having been 
 believers in witchcraft. Much of the history of the human mind is but a 
 history of oscillations between opposite extremes of error. There is naturally, 
 in the soul of man, a recoil from the narrowness of the mechanical and utilita- 
 rian spirit, as well as from the lawlessness and the false liberalism of which 
 we have already spoken as evils of the times ; while the deification of passion, 
 another of those evils, makes welcome a religion of absolutions and indul- 
 gences. And in this recoil, that antiquity which these former influences 
 would reject, this new principle would not only retain but idolize. It is dif- 
 ficult to cast off all regard for those who have preceded us. It is not easy 
 to persuade ourselves that we are men and that our ancestors were but brutes. 
 ArA there are, consequently, several indications in the science, literature, 
 and art of the times, of a current setting steadily and rapidly towards reve- 
 rence for the past, a regard for the imaginative and the venerable, in place 
 of the cold idolatry of the useful ; a drifting back of the popular mind to- 
 ward the times when the Roman church was a dominant power in European 
 civilization. The Dark Ages once spoken of in our school-boy days, are 
 now more respectfully entitled the Middle Ages. Their schoolmen, once 
 derided, are now studied by some scholars, and quoted by more. Cousin, 
 the leading metaphysician of France, has edited an unpublished work of 
 Abelard, as some of the Protestant theologians of England have been repub- 
 lishing treatises of Aquinas. In church music the ancient chant is 
 revived. In church architecture, the Gothic, but a few years since 
 thought uncouth and cumbrous, and almost but another name for bar- 
 barous, the architecture of the old time-worn cathedral, and the ruinous 
 abbey, is now regarded as the very perfection of beauty — " the frozen mu- 
 sic" 6 of the art. In English poetry, the classical school of Pope has given 
 
 6 Mad. de Stael. 
 
21 
 
 place to the romantic school of Scott and Byron, in which the customs and 
 the religious opinions of the old ages of chivalry are more or less brought 
 again to recollection; whilst most of the scholars of Britain seem inclined 
 to transfer the honors of the Augustan age of their literature from the reign 
 of Queen Anne to the elder days of Queen Elizabeth. A powerful party 
 in its Established Church are attempting to revive the doctrines of Laud, 
 Sancroft, and the school of the Nonjurors; and to develope the Catholic 
 element in their church polity to an extent which to others it would seem 
 must render union with, and subjection to Rome, the final and inevitable 
 result of the general ascendancy of the party. Indeed the practical cha- 
 racter of the English mind, and their disposition to reduce to action all 
 opinions, would seem to forbid that the proselytes of the new school should 
 retain a foothold on the steep declivity where their teachers contrive to stand, 
 by the aid of subtle distinctions. The nation once indoctrinated must rush 
 down to Rome. By a sort of moral gravitation inherent in the Catholic 
 system, the lesser must be attracted to the larger body, and the more recent 
 to the more ancient. All attempts to stay them, on such a system, would 
 be like arresting an avalanche, midway on its descent, and securing it to the 
 sides of the Alps by strips of court-plaster. 
 
 In the literature of France, the contest a few years since so eagerly waged 
 among that mercurial people between the classical and the romantic schools, 
 would seem now to have been decided to the advantage of the latter, thus 
 attaching the European mind, as by a new bond, to the Mediaeval times. 
 In some of the French historians, and the French are now among the best 
 of the modern writers of history, a return has even been made to the pic- 
 turesque style of the old Mediaeval chroniclers. Much of this may be, and 
 probably is the fleeting fancy of the season. And all these things may seem 
 to some minds but fantasies of the day, and fashions that are soon to pass ; 
 but it should be remembered that such fantasies have in passing shaken 
 thrones, and subverted dynasties ; and that such fashions of feeling, if we 
 call them so, have maddened whole nations, and in the days of the French 
 , Revolution armed France, almost as one man, against the rest of Europe, 
 as in the days of the Crusades they had hurled Europe, in one embattled 
 mass, upon Asia. 
 
 Favored by these, among other influences, the Church which is the great 
 representative of superstition in Christendom — it is the Romish Church we 
 mean — is rising rapidly to some of her lost eminence and influence. She 
 is multiplying amongst us her colleges, many of them under the charge of 
 that order, the Jesuits, who were once the most renowned instructors of 
 Europe. She is entering our common schools, and laying her hand upon 
 the Bible to eject it. Upon the field of Foreign Missions she is jostling 
 eagerly each successful Protestant Mission in Asia, in Oceauica, or on our 
 own continent. De Smet, a Jesuit Missionary, boasts of the hundreds of 
 Indians baptized near the mouth of the Columbia River, far beyond the 
 Rocky Mountains, and rumors are already spread that the Papal See is to 
 be requested to constitute Oregon into a Romish bishoprick. 7 But what is 
 
 7 Since created. 
 
22 
 
 far more wondrous is the rejuvenescence of this Church in the old strong 
 holds of Protestantism in Europe. Germany, a few years since, saw scho- 
 lars like the Stolbergs and the Schlegels passing over from Protestantism 
 into the Papal communion. Scotland, over whose gray mountains' seems 
 yet brooding the stern and solemn earnestuess of her old reformers, — the 
 land where Knox destroyed the monasteries, " dinging down" the rookeries 
 that the rooks might not return, has seen of late her Romish chapels not 
 only but her Romish nunneries erected, aud not left untenanted by votaries. 
 In England, the bulwark of European Protestantism, the progress of the 
 Romish Church in numbers, wealth, boldness, and influence, within the 
 last few years, has been most rapid. And in some portions of the earth, 
 this artful and versatile power, rich in the arts of centuries of diplomacy, 
 and so long the ally of Despotism, and herself almost an incarnation of 
 Oppression, seems coquetting with Democracy, and courting the spirit of 
 Social Progress. It reminds one of the prediction of the excellent Bengel, 
 who, with all his errors in prophecy, was a scholar eminent for learning, 
 acuteness and profound piety, that the last days would witness a league of 
 Socinianism and Romanism — the spirit of tradition and the spirit of ration- 
 alism. In fact this Apostate Church, branded as the Babylon of New 
 Testament prophecy, seems disguising her wrinkles, and painting her face 
 until it is rent 8 again, — rent, we mean, with some unseemly contradictions 
 of her old principles. Like Jezebel, in her gay old age, with tired head 
 and lacquered eyes, she is seen looking out from her palace windows, not 
 like the relict of Ahab, to upbraid, but to soothe and to allure the Jehu of 
 the age — the Spirit of Radicalism, and the party of the movement, as with 
 glowing axle, it drives the chariot-wheels of innovation over every obstacle. 
 And literature must feel, and is already feeling, in various departments, the 
 weight of this new element, the element of superstition amid the conflicting 
 influences of our age. The contributions, for instance, of Romish authors 
 to English literature, have both in amount and ability been trebled probably 
 within the last twenty years. As to the cramping and degrading power of 
 all superstition on the mind, the restraints it imposes on the march of science, 
 and its violence wrought against physical as well as moral truth, let the 
 story of Galileo tell, and let the records of Spain and her inquisition attest. 
 We would never forget, in speaking strongly of the errors of the Romish 
 Church, the piety and genius that have been found in members of her com- 
 munion. The memory of her Kempis, her Fenelon, her Pascal, her Ar- 
 naulds, and her Nicole, must ever remain dear to the Christian. But we 
 would remember that to some of the best of these her children, she was but 
 a harsh and persecuting step-mother, and that she cast out that most able and 
 devout body of men, the Jansenistsof France, with ignominious cruelty. — 
 branding their name, suppressing their books, and sparing not their dead. 
 Nor while we cherish, with the tenderest reverence and affection, the names 
 of some among her saints whose shoe-latchets we are not worthy to unloose, 
 can we forget the wrongs she has inflicted upon humanity, and her blasphe- 
 
 s Jerem. iv. 30. 
 
23 
 
 mies against God, — can we blanch the long and dark catalogue of her cor- 
 ruptions and errors, or dare to overlook the sentence of prophecy, branding 
 her with infamy, and dooming her disastrous splendor to a fatal eclipse, and 
 her power to a final and utter overthrow. 
 
 Here then, if we have not deceived ourselves, are perils besetting the 
 future course of our literature, not only real but formidable. Many of the 
 details, that were unavoidable, may have seemed to some of our hearers 
 trivial, but in our view the}- are trivial, only as are the weeds which float in 
 the edge of the Gulf-stream. Light and valueless in themselves, they yet 
 serve to remind the wary navigator what coast he is nearing, and what the 
 currents whose noiseless power is drifting his bark away from her appointed 
 course. Did any one of these several causes operate separately, it would be 
 more easy to prognosticate from the signs of the times, regarding the desti- 
 nies of American literature. The utilitarian and mechanical spirit, would 
 threaten our literary glories with the fate of Holland, whose early splendor 
 of scholarship was so fatally beclouded by her subsequent lust of gain. 
 The prevalence of passion would conform us to the imbecile, luxurious, tri- 
 fling and vindictive character that mars so much the glory of modern Italy. 
 The reign of lawlessness would revive in our history the later ages of Re- 
 publican Greece, its anarchy, violence and misery. The sway of a false 
 liberalism would renew on American shores the crimes and sufferings of 
 the reign of terror in France, when Anacharsis Clootz led his motley repre- 
 sentatives of the whole human race to do homage to the French Republic, 
 and the A.rchbishop of Paris abjured Christianity ; as the victory of supersti- 
 tion would bring us into a resemblance with the former condition of Spain, 
 when rejoicing, as her king did, in the title of the " Most Faithful"' among the 
 subject monarchs of the Romish See, the country saw absolutism filling 
 the throne, and the inquisition filling every other place. Utilitarianism, 
 the first of these evil influences, would replace the Bible by the leger, the 
 price current, and the bank note list. Passion, the second, would fill our 
 hands with the viol, the song-book, and the stiletto, or perchance the bowie 
 knife. The third, or lawlessness, would compel every man to put on 
 sword and pouch, and turn robber and homicide in self-defence, snatching 
 what he could and standing sentry over his spoils. The reign of a liberal- 
 ism, such as we have seen in Germany, would send us to the study of Po- 
 lyglott grammars, and furnish us for our religious reading with a manual 
 of Pantheistic Philosophy: while the domination of the fifth would give us 
 the chaplet of beads, and the index of prohibited books to guide our pravers, 
 and direct our studies ; and meanwhile the inquisition would take under its- 
 paternal charge the erring and refractory press. But acting, as we have 
 said, not separately, but conjointly, it is more difficult to predict the coming 
 history of our literature. The several causes we have indicated will, when 
 acting as antagonist forces, hardly neutralize, although they may often ex- 
 asperate, each other ; and some of them are likely ultimately to acquire the 
 ascendancy over and extinguish the others. 
 
 The influence of a demoralized and demoralizing literature it is scarce 
 possible to portray in too gloomy colors. There were days in the history 
 
24 
 
 of revolutionary France when it would have been difficult to say which 
 had been the more destructive engine, the press as worked by Marat, or 
 the guillotine as managed by Robespierre. If the one was reeking contin- 
 ually with fresh blood, and heaped up its hecatombs of the dead, the other 
 ran with a more deadly venom, that corroded the hearts of the living. Our 
 cheap press, from its powers of diffusive influence, would make a literature 
 that should be merely frivolous, and not flagrantly vicious, one of no little 
 harm to the mental soundness of the nation. A race of heroes, such as 
 Plutarch portrays, could never grow up if fed only on the spoon-meats and 
 syllabubs of an elegant literature, and finding their entertainment in the 
 lispings and pulings of a feeble sentimentalism. If the press be more 
 than frivolous, if it have become licentious, its ravages on a reading com- 
 munity, and in a free country, and such a community and country God has 
 made ours, are incalculable. For character and private peace, for honesty, 
 and morals, for the domestic charities, and for life itself, there remains no 
 asylum on earth, when such a press is allowed to run a muck against the vic- 
 tims that its caprice, its interest or its pique may select. There have been 
 newspapers circulating in Christian America, that would have been hailed 
 in the cities of the plain, on the day ere the avenging fires fell from Heaven, 
 as the utterances of no uncongenial spirit, the work of men morally accli- 
 mated to breathe that atmosphere of putridity and death. There have 
 been seen, as editors, men whose hearts seem to have become first ossified, 
 and then carious, in the exercise of their vocation, alike hardened in feel- 
 ing and corrupted in principle, men who had no mercy, no conscience and 
 no shame. And such men have been not only suffered but applauded, 
 courted and bribed, while " a reading public," to use a phrase of the times, 
 has been found to gather eagerly around the moral slaughter houses, over 
 which such spirits presided ; and has delighted itself in snuffing the fumes 
 of each fresh sacrifice, feeding on the garbage, and drenching their souls 
 in the puddles there supplied. The extent of the moral taint already spread 
 from such foul sources of corruption, who can estimate ? Were such to 
 become the pervading and controlling spirit of our literature, that literature, 
 and the society which sustains it, must collapse and perish, a loathsome 
 mass of festering corruption. 
 
 For a profligate literature destroys itself and the community who patron- 
 ize it. Let literature be sold into bondage to immorality, and its days are 
 thenceforward numbered, as well by the very nature of the human mind, 
 as by the laws of the divine government. Genius, when grinding, like a 
 blind Samson, in the prison-house of vice, ultimately perishes in its task, and 
 leaves no heir. It may not so seem at first. A delirious frenzy may seem 
 to call forth fresh eloquence and harmony, and every Muse, dissolute and 
 shameless, may wave aloft the thyrsus of a mad Bacchante. Science and 
 art and wit and eloquence have thus aided in the erection of shrines to im- 
 morality ; but they have languished and died amid their toils. A profligate 
 people soon ceases to be intelligent, and their literature loses all living power, 
 all ability to perpetuate itself. The literature of the dead past is soon all 
 that remains to a vicious community. And when the proudest monument 
 
25 
 
 of unprincipled talent and perverted genius has been completed, and stood 
 perfect in beauty, its last chapiter carved and fixed, its topmost pinnacle 
 glittering on high, its last statue polished and fitted in its appointed niche, 
 the nation may have exulted in the splendor of their immoral poetry, and 
 eloquence and art. But that nation, even in the hour of its triumph, stands 
 before its trophies, bereft of the talents that had aided in its work, desolate 
 and lone, like him who reared from its ruins the city of palm-trees, the 
 fated city over which hung the old but unslumbering curse of Heaven. 
 His children fell as the walls of his new foundation rose ; and he stood 
 at the last in the home he had reared, a solitary man, with none to inhe- 
 rit his labors. "For Hiel the Bethelite in those days built Jericho. He 
 laid the foundations thereof in Abiram, his first-born, and set up the gates 
 thereof in his youngest son Segub." Literature slays its children when 
 building under God's curse. Talent prostituted in the cause of vice pines 
 amid its successes and dies ; and an imbruted community, it is generally 
 seen, by a just retribution of Providence, soon buries in oblivion the litera- 
 ture that has corrupted and barbarized it. 
 
 Whether then we love the cause of letters or of religion, whether our 
 country or its honor, whether science or piety be dear to us, we need to 
 dread a corrupt literature, and we have cause with jealousy to watch every 
 influence that may threaten to work such corruption. We have seen that 
 perils of this kind are not wanting amongst us. 
 
 II. But where, it may be asked, is the remedy of the evils that beset us, 
 and against these perils is it in our power to find and apply any pre- 
 servative ? 
 
 Such defence, we reply then, against the possible corruption of our lite- 
 rature is not, amongst us at least, to be found in legislation. We look with 
 jealousy on every thing that seems to abridge the freedom of the press. 
 And again legislation is with us but the emanation of the popular taste. 
 When that taste has itself become vitiated, it will of course hardly seek to 
 reform itself, or submit to the necessary restrictions. Nor is there a suffi- 
 cient guard in education. Our newspapers are in this land almost an inte- 
 gral part of our education, and no process that reached the schools only 
 and not the journals of the land would be sufficient. And our scholastic 
 education is itself but the utterance of the moral taste and fashion of the 
 times, and will therefore be very slow to detect and check its own defi- 
 ciencies. Nor is there hope for us in philosophy. That never yet reached 
 the masses, and often in the classes it has reached, it has been like the Epi- 
 curean philosophy in Roman society, a fermenting principle that hastened 
 the decay and dissolution of the commonwealth. Not in general knowledge-, 
 for that may be the knowledge of evil quite as much as of good, and the 
 intelligence that stores the head and neglects the heart, has cursed many, 
 but saved none. And if all these resources are insufficient, what have we 
 left? 
 
 The remedy that shall guard and purge, and invigorate and fructify our 
 literature, must have power, and to possess power it must come from with- 
 out ; — not from man, not from society — but from something older, higher 
 
 4 
 
26 
 
 and mightier than society or man. But to avail with us, it must not only 
 have power, but popular power. Our government is a government of pop- 
 ular opinion, and no doctrine that confines itself to the schools or to certain 
 select classes in society, a sacerdotal or an aristocratic class, can suffice. 
 It must also have permanent power, and be beyond the reach of change 
 from the changing customs and fashions of the time. And where shall such 
 a remedy be found ; rebuking a cold utilitarianism, curbing the fierceness 
 of passion, awing the lawless, enlightening and shaming the falsely liberal, 
 and emancipating the slave of superstition ? Looking at the variety and com- 
 plexity of the evils to be overcome, where it may be asked shall we seek it ? 
 Human authority is insufficient, and mortal wisdom is dumb. Yet we believe 
 that such a principle of recovery and conservatism exists, and one that has in 
 perfection all the several elements needed to success. It has power ; for it 
 comes from God and stretches into eternity — popular power ; for it was made 
 by the maker of man's heart, and has in all ages of history and amid all 
 varieties of culture proved its power over the masses, and commended itself 
 to the hearts of the people — permanent power ; for it has lasted while em- 
 pires have fallen, and sects and schools of philosophy have risen, vaunted, 
 flourished, faded and been forgotten. It claims all times, and its rewards 
 and denunciations are fetched from beyond the grave and lay hold upon 
 another world. Is it again asked : Where is this remedial agent — this 
 branch of healing for the bitter waters, the Marah fountains of our lite- 
 rature ? 
 
 We answer : It is the cross of Christ. Let us not shrink to say it. 
 
 The Cross of Christ is the only Conservative Principle 
 of our Literature. 
 
 Towards this point, as will be seen, all our earlier remarks have tended ; 
 and it will furnish the theme of all that yet remain to be made. Nothing 
 else can save our literature. This can — though alone, it is sufficient. 
 The cross of Christ, we say it again, is the only conservative principle of 
 our literature. Nor let any be startled. Bacon spoke of Theology as the 
 haven of all science. It was said by a highly gifted woman, Madame de 
 Stael, who cannot be charged as a professional or prejudiced witness in the 
 matter, that the whole history of the world resolved itself naturally into 
 two great eras, that before Christ's coming, and that which has followed 
 his advent. And we find Muller, a distinguished scholar and historian of 
 Germany, holding this language as to his favorite science, in which he had 
 made such eminent proficiency. Animadverting on a defect of Herder in 
 his " Philosophy of History," " I find," said Muller, " every thing there but 
 Christ, and what is the history of the world without Christ ?" 9 
 
 The whole history of our world has looked forward or backward to the 
 fatal tree reared on grim Golgotha. The oblation there made had the 
 promise and immutable purpose of God with it to insure its efficacy over 
 the whole range of man's history antecedent and subsequent, and along the 
 
 y Tholuck iu Princeton Bibl. Repertory, vol. if, p.229. 
 
27 
 
 whole course of the Mystery of Divine Providence, as seen in the govern- 
 ment of the world. 
 
 Let us, we entreat you, be understood. By the Cross of Christ we do 
 not mean the imaged cross, as borne on the banners of the Inquisition, with 
 the emblems of Judgment and Mercy floating over the scenes of the Auto 
 da Fe, where the judgment was without justice, and ihe mercy was a mere 
 lie. 10 Nor the cross as borne on the shoulder of the crusader, whilst, plead- 
 
 10 A rugged and knotty cross, with the sword of Justice displayed on one side and the olive 
 branch of Mercy on the other, was the device borne on the banner of the Spanish Inquisition, 
 and its motto was " Arise, O Lord, and plead thine own cause."— Limborchi Histor. Inq. Amsiel., 
 1692, p. 370.) The inscription on that of the Inquisition at Goa was " Misericordia et Justitia," 
 and its emblem a figure of St. Dominic, with the right hand proffering the olive branch and the left 
 displaying the sword.— (76 idem.) 
 
 The remark in the text, on the utter falsehood of the claims made by the Inquisition to mercy, 
 refers mainly to its usual forms in passing judgment. As the canonical law forbids ecclesiastics 
 from shedding blood, the clerical judges of that tremendous tribunal were accustomed, in handing 
 over the heretic to the secular courts for execution, to annex the earnest recommendation that he 
 should be treated by these secular judges with mercy, and not harmed in life or limb, whilst expect- 
 ing and even requiring that these executioners of their will should destroy limbs and life in the fire. 
 Llorente, in his history of the Spanish Inquisition, animadverts severely on this hollow and heart- 
 less mockery of Christian tenderness. It appears in a very prominent manner on the singular re- 
 cords which Limborch, an earlier and Protestant historian, published, as an appendix to his His- 
 tory, containing the sentences of the Inquisition established at Toulouse, in France, and among 
 whose victims were found many of the Albigenses and Waldenses. The sentences are the identi- 
 cal records of the sacred office, at Toulouse, from 1307 to 1323. 
 
 Amongst their victims was John Philibert, a priest of the Romish church, who had, after having 
 been sent to apprehend a fugitive Waldensian, become, himself, a convert to the sect. The Church 
 *' having nothing more in her power to do, adequate to his demerits, (cum ecclesia ultra non ha- 
 beat quidfaciat pro tuis demeritis contra te,) pronounced sentence of degradation from the priest- 
 hood ; and, upon his degradation, that he should be abandoned to the judgment of the secular 
 court, at the same time affectionately beseeching such secular court, as the requirements of the 
 canon law demand, to preserve to thee life and limbs unharmed," (eandem affeciuose rogantes prout 
 suadent canonica sanctioned ut tibi vitam et membra illibata conservet.), p. 255. Two other W al- 
 densians are, with the same gentle phraseology and earnest entreaty, committed to the secular 
 court— (p. 265.) In the recorded degradation of Philibert from his priestly office, (p. 275,) the 
 recommendation of mercy is repeated with new emphasis. The seneschal of Toulouse, the secu- 
 lar judge into whose hands he passes, is " earnestly required and entreated to moderate his sen- 
 tence regarding the heretic, so that it extend not to peril of death or mutilation of limb." — (Ipsum 
 tamen instanter requirimus et rogamus ut ciira mortis periculum et membri mutilationem suam 
 circa te sententi am moderetur) A husband and wife, Waldensians, are again committed to the 
 mercies of the secular tribunal in the like select and chary phrases, (p. 291.) A similar affection- 
 ate entreaty (affectuose rogantes) is used in delivering a female Waldensian to the chief judge of 
 the king, the lieutenant of the seneschal of Toulouse, (p. 331,) and two Beguins to the same secu- 
 lar judge, (p. 336,) and yet two other Beguins, who are relinquished into the same hands, (p. 393.) 
 
 It was, then, part of the gracious etiquette of the Inquisitorial tribunal, like Pilate, at the sen- 
 tence of Christ, to wash her hands clean of the blood of those she gave up. More eager than Pi- 
 late, she insisted on the penalty she required others to inflict. But chary as she was of allowing 
 the violent death which followed to appear as her act, or to stain her records, the truth breaks out 
 in several places on these same records ; as where one Petrus Lucensis, who abjured his errors, 
 speaks of some earlier victims of the Inquisition as having been condemned by the inquisitors and 
 prelates of the Roman church, and " left to the secular arm and burnt"— (condemnati per inqui- 
 sitores et prelatos ecclesia Romance, et relicti seculari brachio et combusti,) p. 360. The for- 
 mula of abandonment to the secular arm was followed by the stake as its invariable sequent — " con- 
 demnati et per secularem curiam combusti,''' pp. 310, 313, 319, 320, 323, &c. 
 
 And the inquisitors not only expected this sequent, but, as it appears from Llorente's history of 
 the kindred Inquisition in Spain, they required and enforced it. It is from the second edition of 
 his original work, as published at Paris, in 1813. in 4 vols., 8vo, and not from the American re-prh.t 
 ef his abridged work, that we quote. The sentence of the Inquisition, he remarks, closes with a 
 
2S 
 
 ing the name of Christ, he moved through scenes of rapine and massacre 
 to lay his bloody hand on the Holy Sepulchre. Nor do we mean the cross, 
 as, carved and gilded, it is seen glittering on the spires of a cathedral, or 
 hung in jewels of gold around the maiden's neck, or embroidered on the 
 
 prayer to the judges to treat the sufferer with humanity, (I. 122 :) but there were, he observes, 
 several instances in which the secular magistrate, choosing to take the inquisitors at their word, 
 and to suppose their language sincere, did not send the culprit to punishment, and the judge was, 
 in consequence, arraigned himself, as one suspected of heresy, (I. 125.) " The prayer, then," it is 
 his language that we use, "was but a vain formality, dictated by hypocrisy."-— (Ibid.) So again, 
 in animadverting on the case of Marine de Guevara, (II. 253, 254,) he exclaims, " Who would not 
 be moved with indignation to see this act of the tribunal closing with a recommendation, on the 
 part of the inquisitors, to the royal judge in ordinary, that he should use with the accused gentle- 
 ness and mercy, whilst they were not ignorant as to what was to ensue? * * * If, on the con- 
 demned being placed in the hands of the corregidor, this officer should allow himself to sentence 
 the victim to perpetual imprisonment in some fortress, instead of sentencing to capital punishment, 
 they would have carried their complaints to the king, and perhaps even have launched their cen- 
 sures against him and have brought him to judgment as one guilty of having opposed himself to 
 the measures of the holy office — of having violated his oath to lend to them aid and assistance, and 
 of being a favorer of heretics. What, then, means this hypocritical affectation? * * It is for 
 their purposes to induce the belief that they have no share in the death of the accused, who is their 
 neighbor, and that thus they have not incurred the penalties of ecclesiastical irregularity, pro- 
 nounced against those priests who have had a share in the death of any person." Llorente, it will 
 be remembered, was a Romanist, had, himself, been for years an officer of the Inquisition, and 
 wrote with its records before him. 
 
 Of such infamous jugglery with truth and the forms of Christian kindness it is not, then, harsh to 
 say, that '' its mercy Kas a mere 7?"e." 
 
 Several of the victims of the French Inquisition are charged, amongst other offences, with con- 
 fessing their sins to Waldensian or other pastors, " uko, as they f:netc,icere not priests ordained by 
 any bishop of the Romish church"— Limborch, pp.264, 226, 230,234, 236, 237, 238,239, 240,241,242, 
 290, &c. The tenet of apostolic succession, as coming through Rome, and necessary to a valid min- 
 istry, was then one element in the storm of wrath that burst upon these sufferers. One of them, 
 Raymond Dominic, who seems to have been arraigned in 1322, is charged, amongst other errors, 
 with holding that " the baptism of water, given by the Church to boys was of no worth, because 
 the boys consented not, but rather wept." We give the misspelt Latin of the inquisitorial scribe : 
 " Item quod baptismus aquef actus per ecclesiam pueris nichil valebat,quia puen non consenciebant 
 ymoflebant:' — p. 348. He and his wife had been fugitives for eleven years. When asked why. at 
 his first citation, he had not appeared and confessed, but fled, he replied, it was from pity for his 
 seven children of either sex, for whom he feared that they would die of hunger if he and his wife 
 had been then imprisoned, and that he proposed to come in and confess when his children should 
 have become able to help themselves. — p. 349. So also his wife, being asked the reason of their 
 flight, replied, it was chiefly from love and pity for their little boys — " propter amoremet compas- 
 sionem puerorum suorum parvulorum 1 '' — who would perish of hunger. — p. 250. Such incidents re- 
 veal some of the scenes of domestic anguish this ruthless tribunal created. 
 
 The same records of the Tribunal at Toulouse may throw some light on a question lately agitat- 
 ed — whether the oath of the Romish bishop, taken at his consecration, is to be translated as re- 
 quiring of him the persecution of heretics. In the proceedings of the French Inquisition we find 
 the Latin word in question occurring in the oaths taken of the secular magistrates to aid the Inqui- 
 sition in the detection and suppression of heresy ; in the penances assigned those who recanted 
 their heresy and were to prove their sincerity by informing against and delivering up others ; in the 
 forms of abjuration imposed upon penitents; aud in the complaints of the sufferers against the Ro- 
 mish church for its treatment of them ; and again in the statement, by her own officers, of that 
 church's conduct towards errorists. On page 1, the secular magistrates of Toulouse, under the French 
 king, are sworn to defend the faith of the holy Roman church, and to "pursue (or persecute) and 
 take, and cause to be taken, accuse and denounce to the church and inquisitors, heretics, their dis- 
 ciples, favorers and harborers — " htreticos credentes, fautores et rectptalore.s eorumdem perse- 
 quemur, Sec. This was sworn on the Holy Gospels of God, and a similar oath was taken ot the 
 " consults" of Toulouse, p. 1. Similar oaths may be found imposed on the secular tribunals, in pp. 
 292, 334, &c. So those admitted to penance, on recantation, are charged, " Praterea perseqnamini 
 heretics quibuscunqiie nominibtis censeontur et credentes et fautores et reuptatoies et defen- 
 
29 
 
 slipper of a pontiff. 11 The cross, as we understand it, has no sympathy with 
 a religion of shows and spectacles, of mummeries and pageants, of incense 
 and music, and long-drawn aisles, and painted windows, and gorgeous pic- 
 tures, and precious statuary. 
 
 soj'es eorum," to persecute heretics, by whatever names they be designated, and their disciples, fa- 
 vorers, harborers and defenders, p. 341 ; and a similar penance, on p. 347, includes also " fugitives for 
 heresy." A William Garrick, Professor of Laws, admitted to penance, but banished from the king- 
 dom of France, in the year 1321, " swears and promises to the best of his power to persecute here- 
 tics of every condemned sect, and those whom he knows or believes to be fugitives for heresy, and 
 to cause them, to the best of his power, to be apprehended and delivered up to the inquisitors of 
 heretical pravity" — p. 283. Certain offenders, condemned to imprisonment, " abjure heresy and 
 swear to keep hold and defend the orthodox faith — to persecute heretics and their favorers, and to 
 disclose and reveal them, wherever known to be." p. 202. A relapsed Waldensian is charged with 
 falsifying his oath, " parere mandatis ecclesie et inquisitorum et persequi Valdcnses et alius here- 
 ticos," to obey the mandates of the church and its inquisitors, andpersecute Waldensians and other 
 heretics, and is charged with thus returning, tanquam earns ad vomilum, p. 254. So the church, 
 describing her own conduct, uses the same word. Philibert, already named, one of their own priests, 
 whom the purer faith of the Waldensians had won over, is charged with holding these Waldensians 
 to be good men and a good sect, and of good faith in which men might be saved, " although he knew 
 that the Roman church and the inquisitors of heretics persecuted and condemned them" — quamvis 
 
 SCIRET QUOD ECCLESIA RoMANA ET INQUISITORES HERETICORUM PERSEQUERENTUR IPSOS ET CON- 
 
 dempnarent. Here is the church describing herself, p. 254. John Brayssan, another of these Wal- 
 densians, is charged with belonging to that sect of Waldensians, or Poor Men of Lyons, " which the 
 sacred Roman church, mother and mistress of all (churches,) long since has condemned as heretical, 
 and the same, as being truly such, persecutes and condemns" — quam sacrosancta Romana ecclesia 
 mater omnium et magistra dudum tanquam hereticam condempnavit et eam tanquam vere ta- 
 lem persequitur et condempnat, p. 207. So, too, the complaints of the sufferers use the same 
 word. The Waldensians are represented as asserting rashly (temerarie asserunt,) " that the sa- 
 cred Roman church sins and deals with them unlawfully and unjustly, because it persecutes and 
 condemns them" — {quia ipsos persequitur et condempnat,) p. 207. Another, John Chauoat, of 
 the same hapless sect, is charged, amongst his other misdemeanors, with saying and asserting {dicis 
 et asseris,) " that those who persecute these same {Waldensians,) to wit, the prelates of the Ro- 
 man church and the inquisitors of heretical pravity, act unjustly, and in unrighteously apprehend- 
 ing and detaining them, and in giving up to the secular arm those who will not desert that sect," p. 
 263. We have seen, and the martyrs of the valleys felt, what the inquisitors call their " canonical 
 sanctions," which, amongst other things, required the use of a heartless form of mercy, while giving 
 up the victim to merciless tortures and death. We need not be surprised to find, though the in- 
 quisitors seem to regard it as unaccountable temerity, that these " canonicas sancciones," " the 
 aforesaid sect, wandering from the right path, neither receives nor regards as of any worth, but 
 spurns, rejects and contemns" — (spernit, rejicit et contempnit,) pp. 263 and 207. Familiar as 
 were those blessed confessors with the Bible, they probably recollected, in connexion with at least 
 this portion of the venerable " canonical sanctions," the language of the Psalmist, an earlier suf- 
 ferer : " His words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords." — (Ps. lv. 21.) 
 
 If the Episcopal oath is, then, to be construed by the analogy of other ancient usage of the word 
 on the part of the same church, we can be at no loss as to its signification. The word " persecu- 
 tion" is become, through the growth of Protestant influence, an odious word. Many excellent Ca- 
 tholics, as individuals, repudiate the thing itself. But, as Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont, has shown 
 in his 9th lecture on the Reformation, the Roman church has authoritatively established persecu- 
 tion as her duty. Individuals have no right to create or decide the doctrine of the church. She 
 claims infallibility and immutability ; and, although from the force of public opinion and the stress 
 
 11 "The Pope is present. He is seated on a throne or chair of state ; the cardinals, in succession, 
 approach and kiss his hand, retire one step, and make three bows or nods : one to him in front, and 
 one on the right hand, and another on the left ; which, I am told, are intended for him, (as the per- 
 sonification of the Father,) and for the Son, and for the Holy Ghost, on either side of him ; and all 
 the cardinals having gone through these motions, and the inferior priests having kissed his toe — 
 that is, the cross embroidered on hi* shoe — high mass begins." — Rome in the Nineteenth Century 
 Harper's Edition, vol. ii. pages 246, 247. 
 
30 
 
 But by this title, we mean the cross naked, rugged, and desolate, not 
 pictured, save on the e} r e of faith, and upon the pages of scripture, — not 
 graven but by the finger of the spirit on the regenerate heait; — the cross as 
 Paul preached it, and the first Christians received it. This doctrine, we 
 suppose to have two aspects. The first, Christ crucified, as becoming our 
 
 of circumstance?, she may allow certain doctrines and claims to remain in abeyance, they wait but 
 the fitting season to revive and reclaim their old influence. And what the supreme Pontiff, him- 
 self, judges of sucb individual and modern modifications of the old doctrines we may augur from 
 that Encyclical letter issued by the reigning Pontiff of our own times, Gregory XVI, in the year 
 1832. {La Hernials. Affaires de Rome. Bruzellcs, 1837. pp. 352-393) Writing as under the pa- 
 tronage of the Virgin Mary, whose aid he invokes to guide his mind, (celesli afflatu suo,) by her 
 heavenly inspiration, into salutary counsels, (p. 356,) he reminds the bishops and dignitaries he ad- 
 dresses, in the language of his canonized predecessors in the Pontificate, that every novelty, what- 
 soever, shakes the entire church, and that nothing once regularly established (by the church) ad- 
 mits of being in aught diminished, in aught altered, in aught increased, but is to be preserved un- 
 impaired in terms and in signification,'" — pp. 362-364. Rejecting, therefore, indignantly, the 
 proposed restoration and regeneration suggested by some, as necessary to the well-being of the 
 church, Cp. 368.) he denounces, as M an absurd and erroneous sentiment, or rather the raving of de- 
 lirium, the opinion tliat, for every one, whatever, is to be claimed and defended, the liberty of 
 conscience," p. 376; " to which most pestilent error, (pestilentissimo errori.)'' he goes on to remark. 
 '• the way has been prepared by that full and unbounded liberty of opinion which prevails widely, 
 to the injury of the church and the commonwealth ; some with extreme impudence pronouncing that 
 from it are to flow advantages to religion," p. 376. Reading history by lights of his own, he pro- 
 ceeds to declare that " experience has shown, from the earliest antiquity, that States, the most 
 eminent in wealth, power and glory, have fallen by this one evil, the ungoverned freedom of 
 opinion, license of discourse and the love of innovation,' 7 p. 376. " To the same class," he proceeds, 
 " is to be referred that worst and never enough to be execrated, and detestable (deterrima ac 
 nunquam satis ezsecranda et detestabilis,) liberty of the press," (libertas artis libraries.) — 
 p. 378. We must close our quotations ; but such language proves distinctly that the principles of 
 toleration and freedom that, in our country, have made persecution for religion unpopular, are 
 not yet the principles of the Romish See. Individuals may disavow aud repudiate the use of force 
 to compel religious uniformity : but with such declarations before us. from the head of the Romish 
 church, the very " Seat of Verity aud Unity," as the Romanists term it, it requires great heedless- 
 ness, or singular credulity, to suppose that Rome has changed her principles, however she may 
 varv her policy or modify her tactics to the emergencies of the time and the scene. 
 
 That Rome has not repented of the blood she shed in former centuries, for the suppression of 
 heresy, the same document sufficiently attests, where, in the face of all history, and in spite of ad- 
 missions as to their moral excellence, made by such high Catholic authority as Bossuet. the reign- 
 ing Pontiff goes on to speak of the " Tf'aldensians. and other sons of Belial of the same class, ,f 
 (aliorumque hujusmodi fliorum Belial,) as being " the filth and shame of the human race" (qui hu- 
 mani generis sordes ac dedecora fuere.) aud " therefore deservedly so often smitten by the anathe- 
 ma of the Seat of the Apostles. " — p. 388. It is not for any man to use such language of such con- 
 fessors of Christ, and especially for one holding the seat once held by Alexander VI, to talk so un- 
 reservedly of" the filth of the human race." 
 
 He might well remember that the connexion of his own Pontifical line with the Borgias of the 
 one sex and the Marozias of the other, is a fact much later and surer, as to the evidence establish- 
 ing it, and the influence emanating from it — both much nearer and much clearer, than the Apocry- 
 phal claim that line has set up of apostolical descent and authority. To an American Christian 
 it affords but little evidence of the possession of an " apostolical seat," or the inheritance of an 
 apostolical spirit, to have launched such butchery of old, and to scatter such Billingsgate now, upon 
 
 " O, Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains, cold ; 
 E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old. 
 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled 
 Mother with infant down the rocks." 
 
 Milton. 
 
31 
 
 free and full justification by a blood that purges from all sin, and avails for 
 the world. It was the reassertion of this doctrine which wrought the glo- 
 rious reformation. The second, Christ crucified, as the principle of our 
 sanctifi-cation, under the influences of the renewing spirit, that conforms the 
 believer to his Lord, and crucifies his evil nature within him. Thus it was 
 that Christ was not only crucified himself, but required also every disciple 
 to come after him, taking up also his own cross, and Paul speaks of himself 
 as crucified unto the world. This last aspect of the doctrine of the cross, 
 we have thought, has been rather overlooked by some of trie reformers, in 
 their zeal against self-righteousness, and against a false and ascetic piety. 
 Such was Cecil's opinion, 12 whom none can suspect of any want of reve- 
 rent feeling for the reformers. But if we look to the New Testament, it is 
 very evident that &£>:/& were blended in the doctrine as the early Christians 
 received it. The cross was not only their confidence, but the model of their 
 conformity. It is, we have supposed, a defect here. — a neglect of aiming 
 at this high standard of devoted ness. on the part of many of us Protestants, 
 that has given to the Oxford Tractarian movement, and to the present ef- 
 forts of Romanism, most of their hold upon the public mind. Apparent 
 estrangement from the world, and a self-denial that rises superior to the or- 
 dinary* idols of society, will commend to the respect of mankind even much 
 error in those thus estranged and self-denying. It throws a glistering veil of 
 sanctity even over the gross corruptions of Romanism; and her impostures 
 and enormities are often overlooked by those who see standing in her shrines 
 her martyrs of charity, her Vincent de Pauls, and her Francis Xaviers. 
 A pining recluse, scourging himself in sober sadness, as the expression of his 
 deep sense of sin, may be a pitiable spectacle of delusion; but he is not in 
 the eyes of the world generally, as odious a sight as that presented bv a 
 self-satisfied, self-indulgent professor of a purer creed, riving in all ease and 
 pleasure, conformed to the world in all its follies, and vaunting of a doc- 
 trinal orthodoxy that produces no eminence in holiness. Christians must 
 live more upon the cross, seeing in it not only the principle of their faith, 
 but also the pattern of their obedience, — the cross not only as cancelling 
 their sin, but also as crucifying their lusts. Such is the two-fold aspect of 
 the great truth, the basis of all scriptural doctrine and practice, the centre 
 of all its mysteries and all its morality- — the cross of Christ. 
 
 Let us now, for a moment, turn to the history of that Cross, in order 
 that we may perceive more clearly its strange elements of power. Place 
 
 12 -'Man is a creature of extremes. * * * * Popish heresy of human merit in Justification, 
 drove Luther on the other side into most unwarrantable and unscnptural statements of that doc- 
 trine."— Cecils TTo'ks. X. I. Iri5. Vol. iii. p. 419. 
 
 "The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional haeit. The Church of 
 Rome made much of this habit. The contests accompanying and following the Reformation, with 
 something' of an indiscriminate enmity against some of the good of that Church, as well as the 
 evil, combined to repress this spirit in the Protestant writings : whereas the mind of Christ seems 
 in fact, to be the grand end of Christianity in its operation upon man.'' — Ibid. p. 30S. 
 
 •• A want of the spirit of the cross in its professors increases the offence of the cross — that hu- 
 mility, patience and love to souls, which animated Christ when he offered himself on the cross for 
 th6 sun of the world."— Ibid, p. 351. 
 
32 
 
 yourselves then, in imagination, amid the multitude, that swayed by curi- 
 osity, or inflamed by hate, are rushing from the hall of judgment, and 
 sweeping along their hurried and tumultuous way to the hill of crucifixion. 
 Reeling under insults, a meek sufferer, whose head is bound with a crown 
 of thorns, and his face swollen with blows and wet with the spewings of 
 the mob, is threading, slowly and painfully, his way through that exas- 
 perated crowd, all athirst and ravening for his blood. He has reached the 
 spot selected for his death. There he stands faint, but mute and uncom- 
 plaining, whilst the cruel preparations are made that shall consummate the 
 sacrifice. Amid shouts, and taunts, and fiercest blasphemy, he is nailed 
 and lifted up. As the cross becomes erect, and he hangs at last before that 
 excited multitude, methinks I see exultation, like a rising breeze, 
 ruffle that sea of upturned faces. And there he is lifted, how utterly 
 friendless and abject to the eye of man ; for even the thieves upbraid him, 
 that hang and writhe besides him. 
 
 But were your eyes unsealed, as the prophet opened chose of his servant 
 at Doth an, you would discern, besides and above that howling rabble, a 
 more august gathering. Legions, whose feeblest warrior would have turned 
 to paleness the cheek of Caesar at the head of all his hosts, are gazing 
 there; yet withheld by some dread sentence, they do not interpose. Angels 
 that excel in might and in glory, watch that desolate sufferer with adoring 
 interest. That much outraged victim, seemingly rejected of man and 
 abandoned of God, is my Maker. In that lowly form is veiled the incar- 
 nate Godhead. The angels that smote Sennacherib's camp, and slew the 
 first-born of Egypt, have bowed often their heads to this being, as their 
 Lord and their Creator. Excited as are his enemies, they could frame no 
 consistent accusation against him to justify their enmity. There, under 
 reproach, anguish and cursing, dies the only one of Adam's race that knew 
 no sin. For no guilt of his own is he suffering, but to cancel that of his 
 murderer, man. Thus viewed, what elements of grandeur and tender- 
 ness, of the loftiest splendor and the lowliest condescension, blend in that 
 dread sacrifice. Do men look with interest on greatness in misery ? It is 
 here. The King of glory dying as a malefactor. Are they touched with sym- 
 pathy for distress ? How deep was the anguish even of his patient spirit, 
 when he cried out, invoking a Father who had hidden his face. Should 
 wisdom attract, here was the great Teacher whom all Judea had admired, 
 speaking as never man spake, — the heavenly Teacher for whom Socrates 
 had taught himself and his scholars to hope. He is here giving his 
 lessons on the cross. The good man dying ignominiously, of whom Plato 
 had glimpses, is here, the exemplar of perfect innocence, enduring the treat- 
 ment due to consummate wickedness. That sacrifice stirs all worlds. 
 Hell misses its expected prey, and the spell of despair over the accursed 
 earth is broken. That sacrifice may well have power with man, for it has 
 power with God. To the human mind, it presents in the closest union and 
 in their highest energy, all the elements of sympathy, awe and tenderness. 
 It blends a Divine majesty that might well overawe the haughtiest, with 
 a winning gentleness that would re-assure the most desponding. It may 
 
33 
 
 well be, at the same time, a theme for the mind of an angel to study, 
 without grasping all its vastness, and a motive for the mind of the Sabbath- 
 school child to feel, without being repelled by its loftiness. It has power, 
 practical power — popular power — permanent power. It is God's remedy 
 for sin ; and with the accompanying influences of his Spirit, it can avail as 
 the remedy for all forms of man's sin, as that sin is infused into, and as it is 
 found envenoming either the literature of the world, or any other product 
 of the human mind. Let us but transcribe that truth into the heart, and 
 illustrate it in the life, or rather let the renewing grace of God's spirit so 
 transfer it into the soul of man, let me be enabled to believe in this Divine 
 Sufferer, as my Saviour — to feel that with him I am dying to the world, 
 and that with him too, I shall rise again from the grave, see him on the 
 judgment throne, and follow him into the gates of Paradise : and with 
 these truths firmly grasped by the mind, what has the world left where- 
 with to allure, wherewith to appal me ? I have thrown myself loose from 
 the trammels of earth. Its cords have perished at the touch of an ethereal 
 fire. Disengaged from its entanglements, its bonds sundered, and its snares 
 parted, I soar aloft, to sit, in the language of Paul, in heavenly places in 
 Christ Jesus. I rise yet higher, and in the awful language of Peter, I, 
 the heir of corruption, and once the bondsman of death, am made " a par- 
 taker of the divine nature." Here is power. 
 
 Let that power of the Cross but go forth in its appropriate channels, 
 in a holy, devoted ministry — in the more elevated piety of the Church, 
 and in a christian education of the young, given by the church, if the 
 State will not give it : — let that power, we say, but go forth in these chan- 
 nels, and with God's blessing upon it, the world is saved. Carry that 
 truth into all the scenes of human activity, or suffering — into the market- 
 place, and the halls of legislation; into the schools of philosophy, and the 
 student's cell, and the editor's desk, the cabins of poverty and the dun- 
 geons of crime, let it fence the cradle and watch the death-bed ; and it will 
 be found equal to every task, competent to every emergency, and mighty to 
 exorcise every evil spirit. The earthly miracles of our Lord, were in 
 some sense but anticipations and earnests of the moral miracles which that 
 doctrine of the cross has wrought, is now working, and will continue to 
 work. Yet, — yet, does this Saviour open the blinded eyes of passion, and 
 breathe strength wherewith to obey him into the palsied will of the sinner. 
 
 1. And first let us test the energy of the cross, in its application to the 
 mechanical and utilitarian spirit of the age. It meets all the just wants 
 of that spirit. Utilitarians demand the practical, and this is a doctrine emi- 
 nently practical. Let us but observe this trait in Christ's own history. He 
 might have theorized brilliantly and perhaps safely to himself. He might 
 have been the Plato or the Homer of his age, a Plato far more profound, 
 a Homer far more sublime than the old Grecians. But he threw aside all 
 such fame. He furnished the substance and subject of the most glorious 
 literature the world has seen, but he left it for others to write that literature 
 His business was doing good. He was a practical teacher, and a practical 
 philanthropist. And as to the actual working, and the every-day results 
 
 5 
 
34 
 
 of the doctrine since the Saviour's times, it is seen how Commerce confesses 
 that her way has been often prepared and protected by the missionaries of 
 this cross ; and how the statesman bears witness that his government 
 lias owed the stability, order and virtue of the community to the preaching of 
 this cross ; and how the scholar attests that science has flourished best 
 under the peaceful and sober influence of this religion of the cross. The 
 gospel is eminently practical, then, and so far, it conciliates the spirit of 
 utilitarianism. 
 
 But the doctrine of the cross is not sordid and selfish, and, so far, it cor- 
 rects the mechanical, utilitarian tendency of our times. Against the lust 
 of gain, it sets, in strong contrast, the example of Christ's voluntary pov- 
 erty, and in solemn warning, the Saviour's declaration, how hardly the 
 rich man enters the kingdom of heaven. Against the disposition which 
 would set material interests above all others, and teach us to regard the 
 tangible goods of earth as the only real or the only valuable possessions, 
 the gospel shows Christ setting moral far above all material interests — and 
 uttering the brief and pithy question, before which avarice turns pale, and 
 ambition drops his unfinished task : " What shall it profit a man if he gain 
 the whole world and lose his own soul, or what shall a man give in ex- 
 change for his soul ?" If, as the great English moralist said, that which 
 exalts the future, and disengages man's mind from being engrossed by the 
 present, serves to elevate man to the true dignity of his nature ; how great 
 the practical value of a faith, in whose far-reaching visions, time dwindles 
 into a speck, and eternity becomes the paramount object of man's anxieties 
 and hopes, where Truth is made more valuable than all things, to 
 be bought at all risks, while Truth is not to be sold for the world.— 
 And the prevalent selfishness which lies at the basis of that me- 
 chanical and utilitarian spirit of which we have spoken, is sorely re- 
 buked by the very thought of a Divine Redeemer, who, moved by no sel- 
 fish aims, but in disinterested kindness, compassionately visits, and by the 
 sacrifice of himself ransoms his envenomed foes ; and whose gospel makes 
 all mankind my brethren in a common sin, doom, and ransom ; and bids 
 me freely give to my fellow man what I have most freely received. 
 
 Imbue, then, your literature with that spirit, and men learn that they are 
 not mere calculating, money-getting machines, that they have an immortal 
 soul within them ; — and that the earth which they till and parcel out, and 
 conquer and govern, is but the lodge of their few way-faring years, as they 
 are journeying to their home in the far eternity. Then the miser, as that 
 world, revealed by the cross, heaves into view, unclutches his gold. Then 
 the manoeuvres and tactics, the trickery and juggling of parties in the 
 church and the state, show in their native meanness, beside the simple, 
 sublime and unselfish scheme of the Redeemer. The views of eternity, 
 gained at the foot of that cross, open a wider horizon to the noblest flights 
 of science. The views of duty there learned, give a higher finish to all 
 the details of industry and art. Give literature thoroughly to feel and 
 diffuse this doctrine of the cross, and while, on the one hand, it is saved 
 from fruitless speculations, and made eminently practical ; it is on the 
 
35 
 
 other hand, effectually snatched from under the wheels of a mechanical 
 age, and saved from being trodden into the mire beneath the hoofs of a 
 sordid selfishness. Thus the human mind, in its pursuit of letters, is 
 made practical, but not mechanical ; and while taught to aim at the widest 
 usefulness, is raised above a grovelling utilitarianism, that measures all 
 good by selfish advantages, and the standard of present expediency. 
 
 2. Bring again, this doctrine to the trial, in its power over passion. We 
 have remarked its effects on the tyranny of Mammon ; let us try its ener- 
 gies on the prowling spirit of Belial. In the death of the Mediator and 
 Victim, it has provided for the free forgiveness of the most aggravated 
 sins. To those who have become the slaves of their unbridled passions, 
 it holds out therefore the prospect of recovery, and the promise of a pardon, 
 full and immediate. It cheers those who had learned to despair of their 
 own moral renovation. It announces hope for the world's outcasts. Those 
 whom human society had shut out as irrecoverable, it pursues and reclaims. 
 In circumstances the most discouraging, and characters the most hopeless, 
 it delights to work its miracles of mercy. It rears the flowers and fruits 
 of virtue on the scarce cooled crust of the flowing lava of passion, that but 
 lately had poured forth its devastating floods over every green thing. But 
 while thus welcoming the vilest, it makes no peace with their evil passions. 
 It exorcises the fiercer, to foster the gentler of these impulses and affec- 
 tions of man's heart. Of this religion, the Lamb and the Dove are the 
 chosen emblems, meekness and kindness the instruments of its triumphs, 
 and its law the law of love. 
 
 Hence its signal power to humanize and civilize when introduced into 
 those portions of society where it had before been unknown. See how it 
 has tamed the rude, uplifted the degraded, and cleansed the polluted, and 
 righted the oppressed in the islands and upon the continents to which the 
 missionary has carried it. It has, indeed, much yet to accomplish even in 
 the bounds of the Christian church. Bring it to bear more fully upon the 
 habits and feelings of the church, and it will destroy there the supremacy 
 of mere emotion and excitement, operating as they sometimes do to pro- 
 duce a false fire not from Heaven. It substitutes principle as the guide of 
 life instead of that treacherous and changeful sympathy which is often made 
 the rule of our way. It summons the disciple, in view of his Master's 
 journey and end, to lead no random life, the mere sport of caprice and im- 
 pulse. It rebukes those Christians who may be described as living by 
 jerks, and whose fitful activity has all the contortions of the adventitious 
 life of galvanism. When allowed its full scope over the inner world of 
 the heart, see its power to produce high and symmetrical excellence in 
 Leighton and Doddridge and Baxter and Pearce, and why should we hesi- 
 tate to add, in the heavenly minded St. Cyran and Fenelon ? See the men 
 whom it has thoroughly possessed, in whom it operated pervading all 
 their passions, and making them to become like Brainerd or Martyn or 
 Xavier, " living burnt sacrifices" on the altar of God. We see no lack 
 of noble feelings and high emotion there. It is no painted flame that 
 shines there ; much less are they the lurid fires of a malignant, persecuting 
 
36 
 
 zeal. The victim i9 consumed in the flames of a heaven descended char- 
 ity, a holocaust to God, while all around is made radiant with the golden 
 and lambent lustre of his love. 
 
 For the doctrine of the cross is far from extirpating passion. It but reg- 
 ulates it. No doctrine like it awakens and sustains the holier passions. 
 All is purified and subordinated to the love of God, and man returns thus 
 to the likeness of his unfallen self — to bear again some traces of his original 
 character ere sin had marred his nature, or sorrow darkened his path ; and 
 when all his powers and passions ministered to virtue and contributed to his 
 happiness. 
 
 Let literature then become but the handmaid of this doctrine of the 
 cross, and it can no longer pander, as it has too long done, to the fiercer or 
 baser appetites of mankind. How much has the cultivated talent of the 
 race, in its various literary tasks, set itself to divide and destroy, to corrupt 
 and intoxicate mankind. Genius has shouted to swell the discord, and its 
 cry has exasperated the strifes, of the world, instead of being their peace- 
 maker. How often has the scholar yoked himself to the brazen car of Mo- 
 loch, or served to heighten the idolatrous revel in the groves of the wanton 
 Ashtoreth. How much of literary achievement has perished in conse- 
 quence of the corruption that so deeply engrained it, or has continued and 
 lived only to spread around moral infection. Looking back over the history 
 of our world, as preserved by those who knew not, or obeyed not this gospel, 
 it is a humiliating record. The tumult and rage of passion seem endless. 
 One wide and restless sea overspreads the scene. But when the gospel 
 moves over this waste, dovelike in spirit, it comes like the dove to the ark 
 of our diluvian father, bearing the message of peace and the omen of hope 
 — the leaf that betokens the assuaging of the waters, the cessation of the 
 storm, and the re-appearance of earth, from its long baptism of death, all 
 radiant in new-born verdure and beauty. 
 
 No skill in negociation or prowess in war can avail like this gospel to 
 establish peace among the nations. No police, however well-appointed 
 and vigilant, has equal power to give order and security to the nation or the 
 city within itself. No principle or art, no degree of refinement and no 
 measure of knowledge can succeed like the religion of the cross in giving 
 true peace to the household. To destroy in all these relations of soci- 
 ety, the tyranny of the vindictive passions, no power is like that of the 
 gospel. Its efficacy to raise and restore the slaves of the baser appetites of 
 our nature, we have already seen. A literature then controlled by this 
 gospel, will not be the literature of mere blind passion. And no principle 
 is so likely to eject from our literature this passion, as the great truth of 
 Christ crucified, iterated and reiterated in the ears of our people. 
 
 3. Apply it again, as a conservative principle, to counteract the lawless- 
 ness of our times. If ever it appeared as if there might be a just revolt 
 against the will of Providence, it seemed to be at the time when the meek 
 Saviour, innocent, lowly and loving, was sold by the traitor, deserted of his 
 disciples, assailed by the false accuser, and condemned by the unjust judge. 
 But though the cup was bitter, it was meekly drunk, for it had been the 
 
27 
 
 Father's will to mingle it, and his was the hand that held to the lips of the 
 Son the deadly draught. Lawlessness is hushed at the sight of Gethsem- 
 ane. In the garden and at the cross you see illustrated the sanctity of law 
 as it appears no where else. It was Mercy indeed that was forcing her 
 way to the sinner ; but as she went, she was seen doing homage to Justice, 
 and paying the debt, ere she freed the captive. That dread transaction 
 proclaimed the truth that transgression could never in God's universe occur 
 with impunity ; and that if one did not suffer, another must. Tenderness 
 was there lavished, such as the heart of man never conceived in its hour of 
 most impassioned and concentrated affection. Yet that tenderness leaned 
 on the sternest principle. The Father loved the Son thus sacrificed as his 
 well-beloved one ; yet it "pleased the Father to bruise Him." Surely here 
 is found no precedent for the lawless tenderness that exonerates the crimi- 
 nal and blames the law. It is not at the cross of Christ that ministry has 
 learned its lessons, which employs itself in weaving silken scabbards, in the 
 vain hope to sheath the lightnings of God's law; or which is full of dainty 
 contrivances to muffle " the live, leaping thunders" of Sinai, and make them 
 no longer a terror to the evil-doer. In the last scenes of the Saviour's life 
 that law was not contemned, but " magnified and made honorable." So 
 Christ would have it be ; and a true Church of Christ would say : So let it 
 be. What submission is here taught as to the appointments of God — even 
 though he slay us. Where can self-denial, that rare and splendid grace of 
 the Christian, be so effectually acquired as in watching the scene of his 
 Master's passion, presented beneath the Olives of Gethsemane, while the 
 sod beneath is wet with great drops of bloody sweat, and the leaves above 
 are stirred with the sobs of that ascending prayer: "not my will, Father, 
 but thine be done." Subjection to the law of God is one of the best prepa- 
 ratives for submission to all the just laws of human society. And send the 
 spirit of Christ's cross through a land, and what a law-biding community 
 would it become. The sanctity of law and right would then hedge around 
 the property, character and interests of each member of society. It would 
 make a latch sufficient protection for the vaults of a bank. Men's word 
 would be their bond. Our schools and colleges would then be filled with 
 youth, docile and modest, who would not begin their studies by undertaking 
 to teach their instructors, nor consider it their earliest duty to exercise a 
 paternal authority and supervision over the Faculty of the Institution, 
 whose instructors they deign to patronize by being there matriculated. Our 
 sanctuaries would present the spectacle of Christians united in affection, 
 bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfilling the law of love. Far as the 
 spirit of the gospel has already influenced literature it has been made a 
 literature friendly to public order, and the ally of law, thinning where our 
 popular literature too often serves but to multiply the tenants of our jails ; and 
 teaching his disciples to render honor unto whom honor is due, and fear to 
 whom fear. 
 
 4. Look, next, at its power to check the false liberalism of the times, in its 
 wretched effects on the moral integrity and purity of our literature. This 
 form of evil has many shapes. All we cannot discuss. We would but 
 
38 
 
 enumerate its strange speculations as to Scripture ; its false liberality as 
 to religious faith; its false toleration in morals; and lastly, its demon 
 pride setting itself up to supersede Jehovah. All these how sternly does 
 the cross of Christ rebuke and repudiate. 
 
 Trust some of these liberal teachers, and all the old truths of scripture 
 vanish. Instead of its solid grounds of history, its significafxt prophecy, 
 and all its varied, unerring inspiration ; they would usher us into a mere 
 cloud-land of shifting speculations, unsubstantial and formless and evan- 
 escent. They would disembowel the Bible of its facts, and leave behind a 
 few cold truths of Natural Religion, most awkwardly told, the fragments 
 of a myth about the development of Human Nature. But take their 
 theory to the cross. Look up at that sufferer. Read his discourses ; follow 
 his miracles ; and believe, if you can, that this is not a history of facts. 
 The confession of the infidel Rosseau bursts to your lips: " If this be a 
 fiction, the inventor is yet more wondrous even than the hero of the narra- 
 tive." You have the fullest circumstantial details of Christ's life, the 
 country and age in which he lived, the cities he visited and the persons he 
 met. Pilate and Herod were facts. Jerusalem was a fact. Gethsemane 
 was a fact. Calvary was a fact. And he who hung there, on the fatal 
 tree of anguish and shame, asserted not myths, but facts — wrought not 
 myths, but facts — loved not in myth but in fact; and the salvation he has 
 offered, the Heaven which he has opened, and the Hell from which he has 
 warned us — all — all are facts. Wo to those, who treat all as myths, until, 
 not mythically but really, they for ever forfeit the one, and plunge irrevo- 
 cably into the other. To study the narrative of the gospels, apart from the 
 prejudices of a preconceived system, and believe it a fiction, is impossible. 
 Then were all history a fable. 
 
 Try by the same test, the spirit to which we refer, in its false liberality 
 as to religious faith — its chameleon character, finding true piety in all creeds 
 and worships, and identifying as being but one God, Jehovah the God of 
 the Scriptures, with the Baal and the Moloch whom he cursed, with Jug- 
 gernaut, whose worshippers are crushed beneath chariot wheels, and Ka- 
 lee even, wearing her necklace of human skulls, and invoked by the Thug, 
 ere he strangles his victim. No, the Bible knows no such toleration and 
 liberality as this. It exclaims, " Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and 
 buildeth temples." 13 A man may be, as a liberalist would term him, reli- 
 gious, and rear costly shrines from his religious feeling, and yet God say of 
 him that he had forgotten his Maker, and his religion was therefore value- 
 less. The exclusive character of Truth, disdaining all compromise, was 
 apparent in all Christ's course. He did not blend Sadduceanism, Pharisa- 
 ism, and Herodianism, and Heathenism into one religion; and sanction 
 all as meaning the same thing. On the contrary, he denounced all, pro- 
 voked all, was assailed by all, and at last is seen dying by the confederated 
 malice and hate of all. Truth was not, on his lips, a motley compound 
 of all human opinions, an eclecticism from all varieties of human error, 
 
 !3 Hosea viii. It 
 
39 
 
 but like its Divine Author, immutable and one, sanctioning no compromise 
 and allowing no rival. 
 
 Try these falsely liberal views, as to the toleration to be shown in ques- 
 tions of morals. Literature in our day professes to cultivate a sympathy 
 for all classes, even for those who trade in vice, and eat the bread of wick- 
 edness. It has discovered that highwaymen, prostitutes and pickpockets, 
 have their literary rights, and should be fully represented in their own 
 fashion in the great commonwealth of letters. A literature of felons is 
 accordingly written, and alas, it is also read, corrupting our language with 
 the slang of cui-throats, and our youth with their immorality. Was this, 
 now, the spirit of our crucified Lord ? He was indeed the friend of sinners. 
 He sate in the publican's house as a guest ; he frowned not from his feet 
 the weeping penitent whose very presence seemed to others to shed around 
 contamination. But although thus forgiving to the sinner when contrite, 
 he never dallied with sin itself. Paul seems to have found converts to the 
 cross in the household of the atrocious Nero ; but he never improves 
 the advantages thus afforded him, to draw revolting pictures of the excesses 
 of Nero's drunken hours ; nor has he recorded what, to our modern novelists, 
 would have been invaluable, the confessions he might have heard from the 
 criminals who were wafted with him over the Mediterranean, in the prison 
 ship that bore him to Rome. There were things which Paul says he 
 thought it a shame even to speak of. Well had it been for the purity of 
 our literature and the innocence of our youth, had the writers of our age 
 condescended to learn wisdom at the feet of Paul, the apostle of the Gen- 
 tiles. Peter, another of the first preachers of the cross, speaks of sinners 
 who had "like the dog turned to their own vomit again, and like the sow 
 that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." But the apostle of the 
 circumcision never stooped to picture the loathsome detail, and thus in ef- 
 fect to partake the banquet of the one, and share the bath of the other. 
 Modern literature, aye, elegant literature, amid all the vaunted refinement 
 of the nineteenth century, has done both, in order to enlarge our knowledge 
 of nature and life, and to teach us superiority to the exclusiveness of vul- 
 gar prejudices. With such forms of liberalism the cross and its preachers 
 have no sympathy. 
 
 The cross repudiates the demon pride of this false liberalism. In 
 Eden, Satan but ventured to promise " Ye shall be as Gods," hinting a 
 distant likeness to God, as the reward of sin. Modern Pantheism has 
 renounced the qualifying terms, laid aside all hesitation, and converting 
 the promise of future good into an assertion of present privilege, it ex- 
 claims audaciously "Ye are God." Hence at the funeral a few years 
 since, of a great metaphysician of Germany,u one of the leaders of this 
 philosophy, it is said that some of his admirers spoke of him reverently 
 as a singular incarnation of God. But bring such dreams of pride to the 
 atoning cross. He who hung there, tasted death for every man. And 
 why ? We had all sinned. He died, the just for the unjust, and without 
 
 U Hegel. 
 
40 
 
 the shedding of blood there is no remission. And there I learn my desert. 
 In the fate of the second Adam I read the character of the first Adam, 
 whose place he took, and whose doom he averted. I am a doomed sin- 
 ner, by nature a child of wrath. The taint of an endless curse is on my 
 soul. The blood of a divine atonement was necessary to purge me from 
 fatal blots. I must come down into the dust of lowly penitence, or I perish. 
 His kingdom is for the poor in spirit. And his most diligent followers are to 
 confess themselves but unprofitable servants. Is it in such scenes, and 
 under the eyes of such a teacher, I am to claim equality and oneness with 
 God? No! such thoughts, every where absurdly impious, are there most 
 offensively absurd, and most unpardonably impious. And, as with a battle 
 axe, does the cross of Christ cleave and annihilate these arrogant fictions 
 of that liberalism cherished by some who yet call themselves Christians. 
 
 Yet on the other hand, the gospel meets all those just claims of the soul, 
 to which this liberalism has addressed its flatteries. The doctrine of the 
 cross, with a true liberality, allows all national peculiarities not in them- 
 selves sinful. It welcomes the savage and the slave into the brotherhood 
 of the race, and is prepared in the most degraded and forlorn of all the 
 tribes of the earth, to eject the brute, acknowledge the man, and develope 
 the saint. It lays the basis of a true, universal, Catholic church ; — not the 
 local, arrogant, and usurping church of Rome, which to make plausible its 
 poor claim to universality, must anathematize the myriads of the Greek and 
 Syrian churches, and all Protestant Christendom ; but that one church, real 
 though invisible, which comprises the multitudes no man can number, and 
 no man can name, the Christians of every land, age, and sect, that hold 
 the head, and love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. The idea of unity, 
 so dear to the liberalist, the cross alone truly reveals. It shows a unity 
 of Providence in the whole history of the world — a unity of piety in all 
 dispensations from those days ere yet the ark was launched, to those of a 
 new Heaven and a new earth, when there shall be no more sea — a unity 
 of origin, in the common descent of our race — a unity of transgression in 
 our common sin — a unity of account in our gathering before Christ's bar, 
 and a unity of brotherhood in our one ransom paid at Christ's cross. 
 
 Let but our literature be saturated with this doctrine of the cross, and it 
 will conquer all miscalled liberalism by showing the source of its errors 
 and meeting its just claims. It will set up the truth, and require the re- 
 nunciation of every error. But it will set up the truth in love ; and there 
 will be ultimately one Lord, and his name One ; and He will not be the 
 material and sinful God of Pantheism, but the Everlasting One, uncreated, 
 impassible, spiritual, sinless and supreme, distinct from the universe he 
 made and governs, — the Creator, and not the creature. 
 
 5. And lastly, would we say, the cross thus mighty to demolish libe- 
 ralism, has also equal energy as the antagonist of superstition, which was 
 spoken of as the last of the evil influences besetting our youthful literature. 
 
 Instead of forms and rites, the great resource of superstition, the gospel 
 of the cross requires a spiritual worship, and an inward conversion. It has 
 no regard for mere penances and austerities as practised for their own sake, 
 
41 
 
 or from a belief in their intrinsic merit. The doctrine of self-torture, so 
 dear to the saints of Romish legends, is unknown to the gospel. Christ did 
 not hew his own cross, nor was he his own scourger, as have been many 
 saints that shine in the papal calendar. Instead of that antiquity of ten or 
 twelve or fifteen centuries, of which Anti-christ vaunts so much, the cross 
 reveals a more ancient antiquity of eighteen centuries. Instead of its hazy 
 and dubious traditions, scripture verity ; and instead of its councils and fa- 
 thers, and a long succession of sinners wearing tiaras, and claiming names 
 of blasphemy — a primitive Apostolic church, and Christ for " the chief 
 Apostle and Bishop of our profession," whose priesthood is the unchangea- 
 ble priesthood of Melchisedec, and whose dominion is an everlasting do- 
 minion. It acknowledges no religion that is merely a religion of the senses 
 or the imagination. The feelings that stirred Paul at Athens, as he stood 
 amid its altars and gazed on lines of images crowding its every street, 
 would have sprung up as naturally within him, had he stood beneath the 
 vaults of many a cathedral, with its " dim religious light," and rich with 
 the trophies of the pencil and the chisel. As Christ gave it, and as Paul 
 dispensed it, the gospel of the cross is the grand Iconoclast principle of the 
 age. And, as of old it routed the gods from the summit of shadowy 
 Olympus, and in later days drove into darkness all the deities of the 
 Valhalla ; so will it ultimately abolish all the idols out of the earth. And 
 not the graven image only of wood and of stone, but the idols also of which 
 Bacon has spoken, the idols of the forum and the cavern, the prejudices of 
 the busy, and the errors of the studious. 15 
 
 15 The writer has long believed and elsewhere remarked years since, that in the inevitable conflict 
 of the truth with Romanism in our days, we need to allow and to emulate more than some Pro- 
 testants seem disposed to do, the excellencies of individuals and of individual practices in that an- 
 ti christian communion: and that, especially in the field of missions we may learn from her history 
 much to inspirit, and somewhat to instruct us. Since the delivery of this address he has met 
 with the following observations from a writer on missions, whose work is probably in the hands of 
 but few American Christians. Though containing incidental expressions the present writer 
 might not have preferred to employ himself, they seem so admirable on the whole, in sentiment, 
 temper and style, that he could not deny himself the gratification of copying them. They are 
 from the French of M. Bost. He is known to English Christians as the author of a history of 
 Moravianism, published by the London Religious Tract Society, and of a life, and collection of 
 the letters of Felix Neff, whose intimate friendship he enjoyed, and whose opposition to Roman- 
 ism, we need not say he shares. He is an active and efficient laborer in the revival of evangelical 
 truth in the churches of Switzerland. He published in four volumes, a French version of the 
 History of Christian Missions, written by the excellent Blumhardt, formerly head of the Mission 
 School at Basle, which has sent so many laborers into most quarters of the earth. Blumhardt's 
 death left the work incomplete. In his own original preface to his French translation from the 
 original German, 31. Bost has these observations on the justice to be rendered the Romish 
 church. We present them in a free and hasty version from his French original. 
 
 " But here I reach a point yet more important than any that has preceded it. It is one upon 
 which I am happy to find my sentiments in unison with those of my author* ; as they will also 
 prove to be, I think, with those of every man who has studied history in a spirit of impartiality. 
 I refer to the twofold judgment to which the facts of history conduct us, as to the good and the 
 evil, the two sides that are found in the Romish church, whether regarded at any given moment 
 in her existence, or at different eras in her career. I shall dwell, at some length, on this 
 grave topic. 
 
 '•If all that were required, were but to discuss this subject in generalities and as an abstract 
 
 * M. Blumhardt. 
 
42 
 
 Bring up all forms of error, and we say, however numerous and how- 
 ever venomous the viperous brood, the heads of all are yet to be crushed 
 against the cross of Calvary. Produce all the spiritual diseases, aggra- 
 
 question, the affair would be one of the utmost facility. History presents us in this church, on 
 the one hand, objects so grand and lovely, and on the other, those so atrocious, that it becomes 
 impossible to persist, as regards this community, in that narrow judgment which sees in her only 
 every thing divine, or only every thing devilish. On the contrary we find there to a demonstra- 
 tion a decided intermixture of God's work and of the work of Satan ; just as one may see a few 
 paces from the spot where I am writing, two streams that flow the one beside the other, in the 
 same channel, the one all turbid and discolored — the other blue as the skies.* A little farther on 
 they intermingle, but even yet they remain distinct : the good does not destroy the evil, the evil 
 does not destroy the good. It would then be a matter of no difficulty to decide this question in 
 the peaceful study, and amid the silence of our retirement. There it is perfectly simple, and 
 admits of no dispute. The Romish church has exhibited in all ages, just as she continues in our 
 own times to exhibit, a decided alliance of evil and good ; and of these, each perhaps is carried 
 to a degree in which it surpasses what is to be found any where else. 
 
 " But if we utter this judgment before the public, immediately passions are inflamed, interests 
 are wounded, and we touch, so to speak, the raw flesh. In fact, the papacy, like a snake bruised 
 beneath the wheels of a passing chariot, but that is not killed, is so far from dead, as to be rising 
 again, and beginning anew to hiss and bare its fangs. Powerless as it will be before God when- 
 ever God shall see fit to command it again into the pit, it is as yet more powerful than man, and 
 seems, under more than one aspect, to resemble the strong man armed who is named in the gos- 
 pel. She is all the stronger and all the better armed, from the fact that to all the weapons of 
 brute force, she knows how to unite those of artifice and restless intrigue, and even to associate 
 with these, in many cases, the influence of a profound piety. By turns, with clasped hands, the 
 eyes raised to heaven, and clad in sackcloth, she is the ardent and high-minded missionary ; 
 and next she is the courtier, climbing, flattering, and domineering; attacking by the arts of 
 policy, no less than by the aids of religion, bearing down the devout by appeals to his conscience, 
 and holding out lures to the ambition of the diplomatist ; caressing now the anarchist, and now 
 the despot; the foe of republics, and yet the assassin of kings ; changing her hues like the cha- 
 meleon, as you observe her at Dublin, at London, at Madrid, or at Paris ; winning over the sterner 
 spirits by her Trappists, and the libertines by her Madonnas: drawing you heavenwards by her 
 incense, her concerts, and her sacred processions ; and allowing you to slide into hell by her 
 cheapened absolutions, and by penances, that exempt you from the repentance of the heart; 
 founding schools in Italy, and overturning them in France ; by turns, O'Connel, La Mennais, 
 Xavier, Vincent de Paul, Ravaillac and Feuelon ; it is the same church who, in the middle ages, 
 copied for us the sacred scriptures, and who, in our times, is burning them. At the present time, 
 the blows which are aimed at her, have been called forth, it must be allowed, rather by skepticism 
 than by zeal for God. And although we may know what will be her last end, yet we know not 
 its exact moment; and above all, we know not how much she may yet grasp, before she sinks. 
 She is threatening England. She is infiltrating herself into all parts of the United States. She 
 is rising anew in France ; and there she is met, (and this is the observation we have been desirous 
 thus to introduce,) by a spirit of partizunship on the side of her adversaries, which, inclining 
 them to treat her as enemies are usually treated, with blows, blows continually, and nothing but 
 blows, does not stop to ask, if even she have not, in some points, claims upon our justice. 
 
 " And yet, it is to Protestants that we speak, if we believe that on our side is found the truth, 
 let us walk in the truth, as did the Master whom we claim to follow. Let us, in consequence, be 
 just even towards the most unjust. Let us learn to guard ourselves against that absurd and heed- 
 less vanity which sees in its own ranks but splendid virtues, and in the opponents but faults and 
 wrongs. Let us recollect that injustice never yet was able to found an enduring structure ; — 
 that the disciple of Jesus is teachable towards all, ever ready to learn, prompt in humbling him- 
 self, eager to find good wherever it is to be met, readily and with joy acknowledging it, and, 
 above all, having sufficient confidence in the sacred cause of Christ's gospel, never to fear being 
 generous to any party, be it what it may. Many see danger in the concessions that might possibly 
 be made. But in what concessions'? In those which should be unjust? We ought never to 
 make any such ; not because they would be concessions, but because they would be errors. In 
 those which should be just ? We ought to make all such, and to make them without fear. With- 
 
 * The allusion is probably to the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve, near Geneva. 
 
43 
 
 vated, various and loathsome, that have made earth one huge lazar-housc, 
 and we lay our hand upon the cross and say, here is the catholicon, the 
 sure and sufficient remedy for all the countless maladies of the soul. Re- 
 
 out fear, did I say ? — We ought to tremble lest we should leave a single one unmade, — to tremble, 
 lest we leave to our enemy a single point in which he would have the advantage over us ; a single 
 virtue in which he surpassed us. In truth, the kingdom of God is a combat of holiness against 
 sin, much more than it is a conflict of opinions, of dogmas, or of hierarchies. Let this rule, then, 
 without ceasing, be heard resounding over our heads: ' By their fruits shall ye know them.' 
 And let us not say, or rather let us cease saying, as it often has been done, that this rule is a 
 vague one ; for on whom does our censure in such case fall? And who is He that gave us it, but 
 the only wise, the friend of the lowly and simple in heart, who brings down questions the most 
 profound and the most abstract, to principles the most popular and practical, reducing thera to 
 questions of obedience, of love, and of lowliness. 
 
 " Protestants then let us continue to be ; but let us be humble. Protestants let us be ; but let 
 us not proceed, from an apprehension of wronging the doctrines of divine grace, to fall into a 
 dread of good works, or perhaps to regard as good works, and works quite sufficient, the style of 
 doing good, as by turning a crank, adopted in certain societies, in which one does good with bis 
 neighbor's money, and in his ambition to convert the world, forgets too often his own proper and 
 personal sanctification. Protestants let us be ; but let us know how to pardon others besides St. 
 Paul, if they mortify their body, and keep it in subjection, through fear lest having preached to 
 others, they become themselves castaways. Let us relinquish those vague and contemptuous 
 declamations against superstition, which better become the enemies of the gospel than disciples 
 of the Saviour. And let us remember, that if it be wrong to build on a good foundation ' hay, 
 wood and stubble,' we must yet, at the same time, know how to respect that laborer who, besides 
 these worthless materials, brings gold and precious stones, and this, perhaps, in greater abun- 
 dance than ourselves. Let us not fear to make the declaration. From that moment in which the 
 Protestant church shall have imitated, embraced and reverenced all that there is of excellence 
 and superiority in the Romish communion, from that moment the Romish communion must fall, 
 and will in fact fall, because of the crying abuses contained within her: but not one instant 
 sooner. And until that time, she will, on the cottrary, continue to exist, for the purpose of 
 humbling us, for the purpose of holding us in check, for the purpose of counterpoising us in those 
 points in which we refuse to obey, and for the purpose of accomplishing a sort of good which we 
 have not learned to do. God compensates for one extreme by allowing another ; and it is not 
 until the day when our principles shall no longer present any void and any vacant spot, that we 
 can claim to look for the fall of a system which will then oppose to us nought but inferiorities. 
 Then the two communions, like two dark clouds, surcharged with opposite electricity, will ap- 
 proach each other to intermingle and become one : a spark from the higher regions will produce 
 a sudden fusion, and a shower of grace pouring itself upon the earth, there will then start up in 
 abundance new harvests, on the one side and on the other. 
 
 " But it is not the mere exactitude of doctrinal orthodoxy, that will be honored to bring about 
 this wondrous result. It will be rather the sacred union formed between Truth and Holiness ; and 
 our God will then be glorified, not amid some of his people only, but iu all his saints. 
 
 " Such are the declarations that I have believed myself bound to make in the outset, when 
 publishing this work : there are, I believe, some readers that will need them. We shall, along 
 our way, and this long before the sixteenth century, find many Protestants, it is true : but yet we 
 shall see too, that God glorified himself also in men who were imbued with many prejudices ; and 
 the reader must have little Christian feeling, who is not touched with admiration, and softened 
 into tenderness, at the sight of a multitude of things that present themselves to our view, even 
 in those ages when superstition had already invaded the church. 
 
 " Finally, when all this shall have been said and admitted, it is yet most true, and history 
 proves it to demonstration, that in proportion as Rome more and more intermingled herself in 
 the government of the church, in that same proportion also did the Spirit of God withdraw from 
 it. The safety and the life of every church whatsoever are found in obedience to the laws of 
 Christ 
 
 "I would no further anticipate the details contained in the body of this work; but I found 
 myself compelled to defend, as in advance, those views, and as I may emphatically call it that 
 comprehensiveness of principle, which it has seemed to me are demanded alike by Christian 
 truth, by Christian wisdom, and by Christian humility." — A. Bost. Histoire de Vetablistemcnt 
 du Chrislianisme, Geneve, 1838. 1. 1. Preface du Tradvcteur, pp. viii— xiii. 
 
44 
 
 ceive, love, diffuse and exemplify that doctrine ; and every error is sub- 
 verted, and every truth is ultimately established. 
 
 We might glance at the effects upon the interests of literature, of the 
 resurrection of the true doctrine of the cross at the era of the Reformation. 
 We might look to the splendid and varied literary results of the revival of 
 this doctrine among the Jansenists of France, when the literature of the 
 nation in logic and in style, in sobriety and manly vigor of thought, as well 
 as in purity of moral and religious character, was so rapidly advanced by 
 the devout Port Royalists. — when Tillemont produced the erudite, candid, 
 and accurate history that received the praises of Gibbon, when Nicole 
 wrote so beautifully on Christian morals, De Sacy furnished to the nation 
 what remains yet their best version of the Bible, Lancelot aided by his 
 grammars the progress of classical science, Pascal in so many walks dis- 
 played such rare and varied excellence, while Arnauld thundered as the 
 doughtiest theologian of the schools — when Racine, the pupil of the com- 
 munity, became the most finished of French poets, Boileau, their friend, 
 the most perfect and most pure of French satirists, and Mad. de Sevigne, 
 their admirer, the most graceful and simple of French letter-writers. 
 
 The cross of Christ thoroughly appreciated and ardently loved is an 
 adequate remedy for all the evils of the world, and necessarily, therefore, 
 for all the evils of the world's literature. It contains the only elements 
 which can counteract all the perils we have described, satisfy the demands 
 of the human heart, and correct the wanderings of the human reason, 
 and thus remedy the evils, be they literary or political, of society, by sup- 
 plying those wants of our nature out of which these evils have sprung, and 
 by restraining the excesses to which these wants lead. As to the casuistry 
 and superstition, the fanaticism and persecution, that have sometimes 
 abused the name of the cross for their shelter, we can only say that the 
 doctrine is no more chargeable with these its perversions, than is the dread 
 Name of God responsible for all the fearful profanation made of it, when 
 it is used as an oath to give sting to a jest, or to add venom to a curse. 
 
 But some feel, and others have intimated that the cross of Christ has 
 been tried, and has failed. The church has tried substitutes for it indeed, 
 and these have ever failed. But the cross itself has not yet been tried by 
 the church continuously and fully. Protestantism even has talked too 
 much of it as justifying the sinner, but shrunk from it as sanctifying him. 
 As to its failures, when really tried, they have never been more than ap- 
 parent. In the hurry and cry of the conflict, the voice of evil is louder 
 than that of good. When most seeming to fail, the cross is but like its 
 Founder, when amid the growing darkness of his last agony, the Dragon 
 seemed writhed around him, and the fatal sting of death was transfixing 
 him. For a time the race of mankind might seem to have lost their Re- 
 deemer, and the gates of Hope as they swung slowly back, seemed about 
 to close for ever upon a sinking world. But when that darkness was past, 
 and the field of battle was again seen, it was the Dragon that lay out- 
 stretched and stiffened, with bruised head — all feeble and still, in the 
 shadow of that silent cross ; while radiant in the distance, were the open 
 
45 
 
 portals of Heaven, and earth lay bathed in the lustrous dawn of a 
 new Hope. 
 
 " For the gates of paradise 
 
 Open stand on Calvary." 
 
 And when some forty days have passed, there is seen in the glittering 
 air over the summit of Olivet, the form of the unharmed and ascending 
 Redeemer. As victor over death and hell, he is leading captivity captive, 
 returning to his proper and native glory, and going before to prepare a 
 royal mansion and a crown of righteousness for all his cross-bearing fol- 
 lowers. Thus, was seeming failure the secret and the forerunner of real 
 victory. So has it since been. The days of the French revolution, when 
 infidelity was ready to triumph, ushered in the era of foreign missions, 
 when Satan's oldest seats underwent a new invasion. So will it continue 
 to be. Every conflict, sore and long though it may be, will but add to 
 the trophies of the Redeemer's cross, till around it cluster as votive offer- 
 ings, the wreaths of every science and the palms of every art — and that 
 instrument of shame and anguish be hailed as the hinge of the world's 
 history and destiny, the theme of all our study, and the central sun of all 
 our hopes, the sanction to the universe of all God's laws, and the seal to 
 all the elect of our race of an endless redemption from the belief, power, 
 and practice of all evil. In the coming years of the world's history, the 
 presaging eye may look forward to the fierce clash of opinions, the tumult 
 of parties, and the collision of empires. But when the waters are out, 
 and one barrier after another is overwhelmed, and one sea-mark topples 
 and disappears after another beneath the engulfing flood, God is but over- 
 turning what man has built. The foundation of his own hand will remain 
 unshaken. The floods of the people cannot submerge it ; the gates of heU 
 cannot prevail against its quiet might. 
 
 We feel that we need your forgiveness for the length to which we have 
 pursued this topic. But the subject, in its earlier portion at least, was a 
 complex one ; on the latter portion of it, if any where, the Christian loves 
 to linger ; and dwelling as we had been compelled to do on the gloomier 
 side of the picture, we may now be pardoned, if the eye loves to rest on 
 that light from heaven, and those radiant and celestial omens, that de- 
 scend upon this darkness from the cross of our Lord. 
 
 And now, in conclusion will you allow, gentlemen, the stranger, as he 
 is to most of you, who addresses you, to appeal to you as students ? Your 
 studies have taught you how the best interests of the nation are bound up 
 with those of learning; and we have endeavored at this time to revive a 
 lesson your respected and beloved instructors have often enforced, that 
 the interests of learning are bound up with those of the gospel, and that 
 there only is found a knowledge which to have learned, will form the best 
 preparation for rightly improving all other knowledge ; — which not to have 
 learned, will render all other learning finally nugatory to its possessor. 
 
 Amid the various and multiform evils that threaten our literature, the 
 cross of Christ is the one conservative principle, and it needs but to be 
 
46 
 
 fully presented, to prove ever the sufficient remedy. We entreat you then, 
 for yourselves, to view habitually this cross in either of its aspects, as re- 
 vealing the way of the sinner's justification, and as showing the process of 
 the believer's sanctification. 
 
 Look to it as your salvation. You need to be transformed by its holy 
 influences. There learn the love of God as poetry cannot paint it, — the 
 wisdom of God as philosophy in her boldest flights never discovered it, — 
 the holiness of God, as not even Sinai proclaimed it. Receive this cruci- 
 fied Christ as your Saviour. Say, as you raise your eyes to that throne 
 of suffering mercy, in the language of that old monkish verse from the 
 Dies Iras, which Johnson, stern as was his rugged nature, could never re- 
 peat without bursting into a flood of tears. 
 
 " Quaerens me sedisti lassus, 
 Redeinisti crucem passus : 
 Tantus labor non sit cassus !16 
 
 Again, many or most of you look to be preachers of this gospel. Be 
 the cross your theme. Christ as there lifted up, will draw all men unto 
 him. And the more the school or the press may eject this doctrine, but 
 
 16 ii Wearily for me thou soughtest, 
 
 On the cross my soul thou boughtest : 
 Lose not all for which thou wroughtest" 
 
 It is to Mrs. Piozzi that we owe this anecdote of Johnson. " When be would try to repeat the 
 celebrated Prosa Ecclesiastica pro Mortuis, as it is called, beginning Dies Ira, dies ilia, he could 
 never pass the stanza ending thus, Tantus labor non sit cassus, without bursting into a flood of 
 tears: which sensibility I used to quote against him when he would inveigh against devotional 
 poetry, and protest that all religious verses were cold and feeble, and unworthy the subject." 
 Croker's Boswell, London, 1839. Vol. ix. p. 73. 
 
 A small volume, not without interest, might be compiled from the literary history of the Dies 
 Irae, and the versions it has received into various European languages, and from examples of the 
 powerful influence it has exercised upon the feelings and course of individuals. It can scarce be 
 regarded as a waste of time, to observe and analyze the power this hymn, from the awfulness of 
 its theme, and its own quaint, antique and massive grandeur of structure, has acquired over the 
 hearts of men. Unlike the Stabat Mater, another hymn of the Romish service, with which by 
 mere critics it is ordinarily classed, it is free from idolatry. A devout Protestant cannot unite in 
 the Stabat Mater. It degrades the Redeemer by idolizing his earthly parent. But in the Dies 
 Irae, salvation is represented as being of Christ alone, and as being of mere grace : " Qui salvan- 
 dos salvas gratis." Combining somewhat of the rhythm of classical Latin, with the rhymes 
 of the Mediaeval Latin, treating of a theme full of awful sublimity, and grouping together the 
 most startling imagery of scripture, as to'the last judgment, and throwing them into yet stronger re- 
 lief by the barbaric simplicity of the style in which they are set, and adding to all these its full and 
 trumpet-like cadences, and uniting with the impassioned feeling of the South whence it emanated, 
 the gravity of the North, whose severer style it adopted, it is well fitted to arouse the hearer. It 
 forms a part of the Romish service for the dead. Albert Knapp, one of the living sacred poets of 
 Protestant Germany, and the compiler of a large body of hymns, the Liederschatz, has inserted a 
 German version of it in his voluminous collection. (Evang. Liederschatz. Stuttgart, 1837. Vol. 
 II. p. 786, Hymn 3475.) He compares the original to a blast from the trump of the resurrection, 
 and while himself attempting a version of it, declares its original power inimitable in any trans- 
 lation. (Ibid. p. 870.) He refers to other versions of it made by the distinguished scholar, 
 Aug. Win. Schlegel,by Claus Harms, one of the most eminent of the living evangelical preachers 
 of Germany, as well as by J. G. Fichte, by A. L. Follen, J. G. Von Meyer, and the Chevalier 
 Bunseu. The translation of Bunsen, with some slight variations, is appended by Tholuck to his 
 sermon on the Feast day of the Dead. (Tholuck, Predigten. Hamburg, 1838, vol. I. pp. 28, and 
 1 49.) Professors Edwards and Park, in their Selections from German Literature, (Andover, 
 
47 
 
 ihe more let the pulpit insist upon, reiterate, and thunder it forth, in all 
 the tongues of the earth. For it is to you a surer pledge of success than 
 that imaged cross which Constantine put into the labarum of the empire, 
 was of victory to the imperial hosts whom it so often guided to conquest. 
 
 1839,) quote the remark of Tholuck, as to the deep sensation produced by the singing of this 
 hymn in the University church : " The impression, especially that which was made by the last 
 words, as sung by the University choir alone, will be forgotten by no one." They introduce also 
 the words of an American clergyman, present on the occasion, who says : "It was impossible to 
 refrain from tears, when at the seventh stanza, all the trumpets ceased, and the choir, accompa- 
 nied by a softened tone of the organ, sung those touching lines, " Quid sum miser tunc dic- 
 turus, &c." Like Knapp,they unite in the judgment, that no translation has equalled or can 
 equal the original Latin. (German Selections, p. 185.) Dr. H. A. Daniel, another German 
 scholar, in his Bluethenstrauss. alt-latein. Kirchenpoesie, Halle, 1840, has inserted, besides the 
 original Latin, and the German version of Bunsen, (pp. 78 and 116,) another version of his own 
 ('p. 119.) Goethe has introduced snatches of the original Latin into the first part of his Faust. 
 
 The admiration which Sir Walter Scott felt for it is well known. He has introduced an 
 English version of a few of its opening stanzas into the Lay of the Last Minstrel, whence Bishop 
 Heber adopted it into his Hymns for the Church Service. They are too few to give any just idea 
 of the original, and the measure of the old hymn is not as well retained as in the best German 
 versions. Knapp, Daniel and Bunsen all preserve the double rhymes of the Latin original ; 
 Scott and the earlier English translators have given but a single rhymed ending to their verses. 
 In this respect the English version of the London Christian Observer, (Vol.xzvi. p. 26,) copied by 
 Edwards and Park, (German Selections, p. 185,) also comes short of its model, as does that of the 
 Rev. Isaac Williams, one of the writers of the Oxford tracts, and who contested unsuccessfully 
 with the Rev. Mr. Garbett, the election to the Professorship of Poetry in Oxford, on the retire- 
 ment of Keble. Williams' version may be found in his Thoughts in Past Years, (Am. ed. p. 308.) 
 A writer in the New -York Evangelist, (October, 1841,) has judiciously retained the double rhyme, 
 but the reader misses the antique simplicity and rugged strength of the original. Sir Walter 
 Scott in his letter to a brother poet, Crabbe, remarks : " To my Gothic ear, the Stabat Mater, the 
 Dies Ir a, and some of the other hymns of the Catholic church, are more solemn and affecting 
 than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan ; the one has the gloomy dignity of a Gothic church, 
 and reminds us constantly of the worship to which it is dedicated ; the other is more like a pagan 
 temple recalling to our memory the classical and fabulous deities." (LockharVs Life of Scott, 
 Philad., 1838, vol. i. p. 430.) In his last days of life and reason, he was overheard quoting it 
 with fragments of the bible, and the old Scotch Psalms. " We very often," says his kinsman and 
 biographer, " heard distinctly the cadence of the Dies Ira." (Ibid. vol. ii. p. 734.) Its lines 
 haunted iu like manner the dying hours of an earlier aud inferior poet, the Earl of Roscommon, 
 He was the author of an English version of the hymn, and, as we learn from Johnson's Lives of 
 the Poets, he uttered, in the moment when he expired, with great energy and devotion, two lines 
 of his own translation of the Dies Iroe : 
 
 "My God, my Father and my Friend, 
 Do not forsake me in my end." 
 
 Milman, another distinguished name in English poetry, has, in his history of Christianity, rated 
 this hymn as superior to any of the poetry of the Christian church in the early ages. "As to the 
 hymns, (setting aside the TeDeum), paradoxical as it may sound, I cannot but think the latter 
 and more barbarous the best. There is nothing in my judgment to be compared with the 
 monkish "Dies ira, dies ilia," or even the " Stabat Mater." (Milman, GalignanVs Ed. II. p. 
 336, note.) Roscommon's translation, already the subject of reference, is said by War ton to be 
 largely indebted to the earlier version of Crashaw, a sacred poet of true genius, whose rendering 
 of the Die* Ira, was in the judgment of Pope, the best of his compositions. (WillmotVs Lives 
 of Sacred poets, Land. 1839, Vol. I. p. 317). This work of Crashaw may be found in Anderson's 
 British Poets, (Vol. IV. p. 745.) Crashaw was one of the clergymen of the English church, who 
 during, or soon after the days of Laud, and probably from the influence of that school whose 
 leader and martyr Laud was, went over, as by a natural progression, unto the Romish communion. 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, has also imitated the Dies Ira. (Anderson, IV. 682.) Evelyn, 
 the author of the Sylva, and the friend of Jeremy Taylor, seems also to have tested his strength 
 
48 
 
 Do not crucify that Lord " afresh" by your sins. Nor trust to your office and 
 work as preserving you from these. See in Paul, the distress an apostle 
 felt, lest having preached to others, he himself should prove a cast-away. 
 The anxieties of such a hero and martyr, lest he should turn and perish, 
 may well arouse you to a salutary self-distrust. The pulsations of that 
 
 upon the same task. Id their correspondence, Taylor asks a copy of his friend's version. {Me- 
 moirs of Evelyn, Vol. IV. p. 26). 
 
 Upon the Dies Ira, Mozart has founded his celebrated Requiem, the latest and not the least 
 celebrated of his works. The excitement of his feelings whilst employed on this musical compo- 
 sition, is supposed to have hastened his end, which occurred, indeed, before he could fully com- 
 plete the task. 
 
 What has wrought so strongly on the graver temperament of the North, was not, although 
 Gothic in its structure, likely to remain without any effect on the quicker feeliDgsof the South. 
 Ancina, at that time a professor of medicine in the University of Turin, was one day hearing 
 mass, when the Dies Irae, as chanted in the service for the dead, so strongly affected him, that 
 he determined to abandon the world. He afterwards became Bishop of Saluzzo. (Biogr. 
 Diet, of Soc. Diff. Usef. Kn. " Ancina:') 
 
 The authorship of the hymn is generally ascribed to one of the Franciscan order, or the 
 Minorites as they are also called. Thomas de Celano, the friend and biographer of Francis of 
 Assisi, the founder of this order, and who lived in the thirteenth century, is generally supposed to 
 have written it about the year 1250. ( Gieseler's Ch. Hist. Am. Ed. II. 288. Knapp. Liederschatz 
 II. 870. Tholuck and Daniel, ut supra.) Celano, it may be observed by the way, is one of 
 those on whose authority is made to rest the legend that Francis received the stigmata or miracu- 
 lous impressions of Christ's wounds. (Jlban Butler, Lives of Saints.) It has also been attributed 
 to others of the same order, Matthew of Aquasparta, a general of the Minorites, who died with 
 the rank of Cardinal, in 1302, and Frangipani, a Minorite and a Cardinal, who died in 1294. 
 {Knapp.) Churton, the author of the " Early English Church," would give it, however, a 
 much earlier origin, or he has fallen into a gross anachronism ; for he places it in the lips of the 
 dying Thurstan, the Archbishop of York, who ended his course in the year 1140, a full century 
 before the time generally fixed for its composition by T. de Celano. (Churton. Am. Ed. p. 272.) 
 Issuing as it certainly did, from an age of great superstition and corruption, it is remarkable 
 that it should be so little incrusted with the prevalent errors of the time. The lines " Quern pa- 
 tronum rogaturus, Cum viz Justus sit securus V seem almost a renunciation of the Romish doctrine 
 of the advocacy of saints. Like the Imitation of Christ by Thomas aKempis, it remains as a 
 monument of the truth, that in ages of general declension, God had his own bidden ones, and that 
 beneath the drifting and accumulating mass of heresies and human inventions and traditions, 
 there was an under-current of simple faith in Christ, that kept alive and verdant some less noticed 
 portions of the blighted vineyard of the church. If really the work of the historian of the stig- 
 mata of the fanatical Francis of Assisi, it affords another of the many examples that show how 
 much excellence and how much error may exist together. 
 
 A composition that has, with ho effort at elaboration or poetic art, so long attracted the admira- 
 tion of poets like Goethe and Scott, distinguished for their skill in the mere art; and yet met 
 also the wants and won the sympathies of men who, disregarding poetry, looked mainly to piety of 
 semiment — a poem that his thus united the suffrages of religion and taste, deserves some study, 
 as a model, in that walk of such difficulty and dignity, the walk of sacred poetry. 
 
 The Latin original has, within a few years, become accessible to American readers in Edwards 
 and Park's German Selections, p. 185 ; in the Encyclopaedia Americana, art. (Dies Ira:,) ; and in 
 Isaac Williams' Thoughts in Past Years, Am. Ed. p. 309. The readings of the first stanza at 
 Rome and Paris differ. The former has as the second line, " Crucis expandens vexilla," in allu- 
 sion to the old itomish tradition that the "sign of the Son of Man," to be seen in the heavens ou 
 his coming to judgment, is the cross. The latter, omitting this line, has for its third line, " Teste 
 David cum Sibylla" a reference to the Sybilline oracles, whose genuineness as Christian pro- 
 phecies seems never in the Mediaeval times to have been questioned, and whose authority Bishop 
 Horsley has sought to revive. (Journee du Chretien, Paris, 1810, pp. 82, 84.) This seems the 
 more ancient, and to Protestants, is perhaps the less objectionable reading. The closing sentence, 
 *• Pie Jesu, Domine, Dona eis requiem, Amen," is a prayer for the dead ; but not having the 
 rhymes of the rest, we should suppose the words rather a part of the burial service into which 
 the hymn is inlaid, than a portion originally of the hymn itself. 
 
49 
 
 mighty heart, in its strong apprehensions, are yet to be felt, as after the 
 lapse of centuries, it seems yet to throb and heave under the pages of the 
 epistles. Value not any professional learning apart from an experimental 
 knowledge of - the cross of Christ. Remember that the man mighty in 
 prayer, and full of the Holy. Ghost, and who knows, as a preacher, but the 
 scriptures in his own vernacular tongue, may take his place as a theolo- 
 gian' 7 aDd a pastor, far above you, with all your knowledge of criticism 
 and languages, if you rely on that learning and neglect to cultivate piety. 
 The true exegesis of the Scriptures is, after all, that put upon them by the 
 Holy Spirit who first indited them, as He unfolds them to the prayerful 
 student, and he who puts himself, with few earthly helps, under that 
 teaching, will profit more than the man who with all earthly helps, neg- 
 lects that teaching. Steep then all your attainments in prayer. And never 
 so far forget your obligations to true learning, and your vows to Christ, 
 as to speak or think lightly of the devout, though less learned student of 
 
 i7 We may well ponder the language upon this subject of a scholar who is not liable to the impu- 
 tation of enthusiasm, ignorance or partiality. Speaking of the Bereans who searched the scrip- 
 tures, Bishop Horsley, in his Nine Sermons on the Resurrection, fyc. (New-York, 1816, pp. 165, 
 166,) takes occasion to remark upoa the knowledge that may be gained from the mere English 
 version, by a collation diligent and prayerful, of its parallel passages. "It is incredible to any 
 one who has not in some degree made the experiment, what a proficiency may be made in that 
 knowledge which maketh wise unto salvation, by studying the scriptures in this manner, without 
 any other commentary or exposition than what the different parts of the sacred volume mutually 
 furnish for each other. I will not scruple to assert that the most illiterate Christian, if he can but 
 read his English bible, and will take the pains to read it in this manner, will not only attain all 
 that practical knowledge which is necessary to his salvation, but by God's blessing, he will be- 
 come learned in evert/ thing relating to his religion in such degree, that he will not be liable to 
 be misled, either by the refined arguments, or the false assertions of those who endeavor to 
 ingraft their own opinion upon the oracles of God. He may safely be ignorant of all philosophy 
 except what is to be learned from the sacred books ; which indeed contain the highest philosophy 
 adapted to the lowest apprehensions. He may safely remain ignorant of all history, except so 
 much of the history of the first ages of the Jewish and of the Christian church, as is to be gath- 
 ered from the canonical books of the Old and New Testament. Let him study these in the manner 
 I recommend, and let him never cease to pray for the illumination of that Spirit by which these 
 books were dictated ; and the whole compass of abstruse philosophy and recondite history shall 
 furnish no argument with which the perverse will of man shall be able to shake this learned Chris- 
 tian's faith." 
 
 This testimony as to the amount of theological science to be attained from the study of the 
 English version, has the more force, coming as it does from a controversialist of the highest rank, 
 a scholar of groat robustness of intellect, and eminent for his attainments not only in biblical 
 criticism, but also in physical science ; and who was known, withal, to have few sympathies with 
 Methodists and the dissenters of England, and their pious but often uneducated ministry. The editor 
 of the works of Sir Isaac Xewtor., the chaplain of Bishop Lowth, and the antagonist of Priestley 
 was no vulgar scholar. Orme has said of him, that he " never wrote what did not deserve to be 
 read," and characterizes him as "stern, bold, clear and brilliant, often elegant, sometimes argu- 
 mentative, and always original, and as a critic, learned but dogmatic." ( Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 
 249.) Such a man was little likely to indulge in language of undue disparagement as to those 
 literary advantages in' which he himself so abounded. We allude hereto his testimony, only for 
 the sake of enforcing a protest we would, here and elsewhere, now and at all times, make against 
 the language of depreciation, sometimes incautiously used, regarding the competency as theolo- 
 g ; ans,of some of our ministers who have missed the advantages of a classical education; but 
 who are yet vigorous thinkers, and prayerful and most diligent students of the English version. 
 We must record our humble dissent from such sweeping, censure and depreciation, and while 
 the name and memory of Andrew Fuller remain, we scarce need to quote even the authority of 
 Horsley in our favor, who with all his stores of learning and his vigorous genius, was certainly not 
 a sounder or abler theologian than the Kettering pastor. 
 
 7 
 
50 
 
 the scriptures, who bears meekly, and commends earnestly that cross it 
 is your business and his, in common, to exemplify and extol in the eyes 
 of the world. 
 
 Lastly, let that cross be your pattern. Let Christ and him crucified, 
 be not a mere phrase or profession, but a living reality. That sacrifice 
 on the cross was the embodiment of all true glory, and the concentration 
 of all moral excellence. Be prepared to suffer in the school of Christ. 
 " If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." Such is the law of success 
 in the world of mind and of eternity. Remember that your rest, and your 
 reward and your record are not here, as His were not here. It was not 
 that you might seek a snug parish and a fat salary, that the Master en- 
 listed you — not that you might gather round you the flatteries, and become 
 the idol of an attached church and an admiring congregation. You were 
 bought by the agonies and shame of Calvary for a sterner task. You are 
 not carpet-knights, come out to shiver a lance in sport ; the actors in some 
 gay tournament, where "ladies' eyes rain influence." Your work is a sad 
 reality in a world of sin and wo, where you are called to a continuous 
 and perilous onset, fighting against principalities and powers, and spiritual 
 wickedness in high places ; and the field around you is strewn with many 
 a memorial of defeated hope, of successful temptation, and exulting wick- 
 edness. You will not then content yourself with a mere decorous, dozing 
 and perfunctory discharge of your weekly task -work in the pulpit. You 
 are a man of the cross — it will be your aim to train up the churches to the 
 same standard and in the same spirit. They will learn that the charity of 
 the cross is one seeking rather to enrich others, than to hoard for itself. 
 When the churches are more thoroughly pervaded by this spirit, there 
 will be no longer a lack of funds or of laborers for our foreign missions ; 
 nor will the nations rush by myriads into hell, whilst the church is grudg- 
 ingly telling out her few dollars for the work of evangelization, and calcu* 
 lating how much money may be saved from the expense of the world's 
 salvation, not economizing for the cross, so much as economizing from its 
 demands. You will remind the churches that they were enlisted beneath 
 the gory cross, the badge of the Master's anguish and shame, that, as far 
 as man is concerned, they might rather give than receive ; — that no vulgar 
 pangs bought their peace ; and it was no easy task for their Lord to pur- 
 chase for them their hope of Heaven. If impelled and permitted yourselves 
 to go forth to the heathen, you will look to Golgotha, and find there motives 
 whose impulsive power is never spent, and an example, whose self-sacri- 
 ficing benevolence can never be rivalled. It is one of the traditions of the 
 age of chivalry, that a Scottish king, when dying, bequeathed his heart to 
 the most trusted and beloved of his nobles to be carried to Palestine. En- 
 closing the precious deposit in a golden case, and suspending it from his 
 neck, the knight went out with his companions. He found himself, when 
 on his way to Syria, hardly pressed in battle by the Moors of Spain. To 
 animate himself to supernatural efforts as it were, that he might break 
 through his thronging foes, he snatched the charge intrusted to him from 
 his neck, and flinging it into the midst of his enemies, exclaimed, "Forth, 
 
51 
 
 heart of Bruce as thon wast wont, and Douglas will follow thee or die t" 
 and so he perished in the endeavor to reclaim it from the trampling feet of 
 the infidels, and to force his own way out. Even such, will you feel your 
 own position to be when encountering the hosts of heathenism. Your 
 Master's heart has flung itself in advance of your steps. In the rushing 
 crowds that withstand you, there is not one whom that heart has not cared 
 for and pitied, however hostile and debased, unlovely and vile. It is your 
 business to follow the leadings of His heart, to pluck it, as it were, from be- 
 neath the feet of those who, in ignorance and enmity would tread it into 
 the dust. From the cross, as from a lofty eminence, it has cast itself 
 abroad among these "armies of the aliens." And not like Douglas, is it 
 yours to follow it and die, you follow it and live. You follow it and the 
 heathen live. And whether your post be at home or abroad, among the 
 destitution of the West, or that of the ancient East, whenever glory, 
 ease, or wealth may seek to lure you aside from your work, look to that 
 cross, and remember him who hung there in agony for your sins. Let the 
 look which broke Peter's heart, check your first infirmity of purpose, recal 
 each wandering thought, and rally anew all the powers of your fainting 
 spirit. Be Paul's determination yours. " God forbid that I should 
 
 GLORY SAVE IN THE CROSS OF OUR LORD JeSUS CHRIST, BY WHICH 18 
 THE WORLD IS CRUCIFIED UNTO ME, AND I UNTO THE WORLD." 
 
 May we all believe in, and bear that cross here, that it may bear us up 
 in the day of the world's doom. 
 
 '8 «« Whereby." Versions of Tyndale, Cranmer, and Geneva, and not " by ickom," as the 
 Rbemish and the English Rec. Version.