the aspect of the Christian Church in its second principal epoch.

For many centuries this great Organization was the efficient instrument of spreading Christian truth through the world. Never realizing its Idea, it often approached it; and its essential defects long lay concealed. But at last it appeared that the Catholic Church, in working out the formula, "Many members but one body," had caused the unity of the body to oppress and destroy the individuality of the members. The Catholic Church in attaining union had lost freedom. And with the loss of individual freedom also went sincerity and depth of intellectual and moral life. Force and fraud usurped the office of reason. The teaching Church, instead of convincing men of the truth of its doctrines, cheated them into an outward conformity or burnt them at the stake for a sincere utterance of their unbelief. Outward pomp and power took more and more the place of inward piety and love. All felt that something was wrong-none knew how the wrong was to be righted. Then God sent the Reformation, as he sends a storm to purify a stagnant and corrupting atmosphere.

In the Protestant Church the principle of individual conscience, personal freedom, and independent religious life again found its utterance. The idea of individual responsibility was revived, and with it came a new moral life— pure and healthy as the breezes which sweep over the hills on an October morning.

This idea was salt, to save the world from corruption. The Protestant Reformation was as necessary to renew the moral life of mankind, as Christianity was at first. Without Christianity, the world was going to ruin. Without the Reformation, the Church was

going to ruin.

I know the defects of Protestantism. They are apparent. In working out the formula—“ Many members, but one body," Protestantism saves the variety of the members, but loses the unity of the body. In attaining Freedom, it loses Union. Hence narrowness, ultraism, bigotry, sectarianism. Hence weakness, and inefficiency in every part, according to the law, that "if one member suffers all suffer,' if one member is isolated, and rejected from the communion of the rest, the life of all is weakened and impaired, for each need all, and all need each.

وو

These evils are now seen and felt by all Protestants. All feel that our disunion will be sooner or later our destruction. Various remedies are proposed, most of them sufficiently superficial. The most common is the sectarian prescription -"let all other sects join mine all other denominations be merged in mine." This we need not dwell upon. It is not only impossible for all Protestant denominations to be merged in one, but if it could be, it would bring only a swifter destruction. If the whole body were the eye, where were the hearing? Nor need we dwell on such shallow devices as the Evangelical Alliance. Two main

tendencies have resulted from the divisions of Protestantism; one, a backward tendency toward Romanism, the other a forward tendency toward a yet greater Individualism. Let us dwell for a moment on each of

them.

In individual instances where our friends and acquaintances join the Romish Church, there may be reason either to be glad of it or to grieve. If they join the Church of Rome because they need its peculiar influence for their own good, if never having found peace in Christ elsewhere they do find it there, ought we not to rejoice in such a result? Why should we doubt that some minds are better fitted to find a personal union with God by the methods of the Catholic Church than by any other? But there are other cases for which we may well grieve, in which these methods are accepted as substitutes for an interior faith, and a partisan rancor and proselyting zeal are the bitter evidences of their wilfulness. In such cases the proselyte is made ten-fold more a child of hell than before. The sense of truth is blunted, the conscience is seared, and the inward eye closed against the sight of God and the Saviour.

Meantime, the main tendency toward Romanism must be regarded as only an eddy in the stream of the Church's progress. Rome has tried its experiment-tried it under the most favorable circumstances, tried it when it had the whole world for its theatre, when it could silence every voice of opposition — it

tried its experiment and failed. Its claim, then, to be the only true Church, the only way to God, the only medium of the Holy Spirit, has been denied by God, and can never be established. To prove that out of its communion there is no salvation, it must also prove that out of its communion there is no goodness. It must prove that the piety which in all Protestant lands has sweetened life, and made death full of peace, is no real piety; that the humane and benevolent enterprises which have sprung up in Protestant lands have no Christian element in them. It must prove that Taylor and Milton, Baxter, Wesley, Penn, and ten thousand more, were neither Christians nor good men. For there is no real goodness except from God, and if these men had no legitimate access to God, their goodness must be false and unreal. It must also prove that the moral condition of those countries in which the Catholic Church has always been the established religion, and from which Protestantism was originally extirpated, and has been always excluded, is infinitely better than that of those lands where Protestantism has always prevailed. That is, it must prove that Italy, and Portugal, and Spain have a higher moral life than Prussia, England, and New England. But the lessons of History and the facts before our eyes are not thus to be set aside. God has judged the Catholic Church by his providence, which called up Protestantism; - He weighed it in his balance, and found it wanting. The world will not

go back to Romanism, therefore, nor renounce Freedom again, even for the sake of Union.

The other tendency of which I spoke is toward a greater Individualism. There are now among us religious men, who think that no visible Church is needed; who think that Churches are of no use; that they rather hinder than help the Progress of Humanity. They would abolish all Churches, and substitute for them Reform Associations, or solitary religion. They accuse the Church of being the bulwark of Slavery, the support of War, and as stupifying men's consciences toward the great moral evils of the age. I do not wonder that these charges are brought against the Church. I wish there were less foundation for them than there is. The Church, in past times, has thought its especial business to be to promote piety, not to promote humanity. It has attempted that which the Apostle John pronounced impossible to love God, whom it has not seen, without loving Man, whom it has seen. It has suffered enormous social evils to spring up and spread and corrupt the heart of Society, without exerting its great influence to remove them. Every Lord's day twenty thousand congregations assemble to worship God, and listen to Christian instruction in these United States. Twenty thousand ministers stand up to teach the people their duties to God and to man-to explain the Christian law of love. And yet this Christian people, with a Bible in almost every house, with a