minister within reach of almost every family, holds three millions of men in bondage-in a bondage which turns man into a brute, which deadens the intellect, depraves the heart, promotes the foulest licentiousness, educates white men and women to habits of tyranny and cruelty. More than this. By the natural advance of moral convictions the human mind is led to see the iniquity of this system the heart of the age begins to cry out against it in all civilized lands. What do the American clergy? They begin, many of them, to find excuses and justifications for it. They search the records of history to find examples in a superseded dispensation, and precedents in the childhood of the race, by which to uphold its practice in the full light of Christianity. They "Torture the pages of the blessed Bible, Nor is this all. Slavery, weak through its inherent corruptions, and feeling its power giving way before the advancing tide of public sentiment, determines to seize a new and virgin soil to contaminate with its varied pollutions. The majority of the American people assist it to accomplish this design. Intoxicated with success, the nation grasps at more of conquest, and using the flimsiest pretexts, invades the territory of a feeble sister State, overruns its soil, defeats its armies, batters down its cities, and finally compels it to yield a third of its territory by which to purchase a peace. A vote of thanks is proposed to the Generals who have led these piratical expeditions of blood and ruin. In the American Senate but one man is found to say No to this proposal! But the friends of freedom say, "One thing, at least, we may do this new territory can be protected from the inroads of Slavery. None is there now-none need come." In the American House of Representatives, this last feeble attempt at freedom is lost by a vote of one hundred and five to ninety-two; a large number of Northern men voting against it. And this is the nation which listens every Lord's day to fifty thousand sermons! A nation, whose two great parties resemble in their behaviour the two sons in our Master's parable, the one of whom flatly refused to obey his father's order, and the other said, "I go, sir, and went not; " but with a difference for the one party boldly advocates and actively supports an unjust war, and does not afterwards repent, the other denounces the war in words but supports it by its actions. The one maintains that it is right and glorious, the other maintains that it is unjust and wicked, and then proposes to take the General who has carried it on and make him President. What has the Church been teaching for these two hundred years, that these are the results of its teaching? I will tell you what. It has not been explaining the Sermon on the Mount, 3 nor the parable of the Good Samaritan. No. It has been proving the doctrine of the Trinity or Unity, arguing for and against Vicarious Atonement, for and against Total Depravity, for and against Infant Baptism. The weightier matters of the law, the real substance of the Bible, have been postponed to these debates. It has been building its house with wood, hay, and stubble. Otherwise such an amount of moral blindness and sin in our people were impossible. And why has this been the case? Because the Church has been always a Church of the Clergy, not a Church of the People; and because the clergy, as students and thinkers, will always lay a disproportionate stress on mere matters of theology. Now I do not wonder that good men, seeing this result of Churches, should say-We were better without them! But not so. The need of Church union, Church action, is rooted in man's nature. Overthrow these Churches and you must provide others in their place, or men will make themselves others. But the Churches have not been without their useful action. Let us be just to all. The most sectarian, the most bigoted, the most antinomian Church does something to awaken the sense of responsibility in the human mind. It does not direct it, but it rouses it. The fault of the Church is that it has taken the first step, but stopped there. It has called up in man the sense of his infinite obligations, of his awful capacities, of his great dangers and his greater hopes. It has taken him up out of a sensual life, immersed in things, to a life of ideas and principles. Destroy the Church, and you must still do this work before you can go any further. The Churches arouse the conscience, arouse the sense of religious obligation, and till that is awakened, vain would be the attempts of Reformers to promote a right moral feeling on particular subjects. I do not therefore sympathize with those who say, We want no Churches. My hope is not in the destruction of the Churches but in their advance, in progress to something better. I never hope anything from destructive and negative methods. I never look for any good in going backward. Let us ennoble, purify, reform and carry forward what we have. Let us accept what the Past has given us, and do what we may to improve it. Even Christianity, a supernatural religion and the beginning of a new order of life, did not fall out of the skies unprepared for. It grew out of the soil of Judaism, which had been made ready for it, and took up into itself the life and truth of all the Past. Every truly progressive movement must do the same. This brings us to the third and last division of our Discourse, which is Prospective. The Church as it is to be. What will be the elements of the Church of the Future? We have asserted that our Protestant Churches cannot go back to Romanism, nor forward into Individualism and No-Churchism. Nor can they remain where they are, in their present state of division and opposition. Sooner or later they must come together. The Church of the Future must therefore be a comprehensive Church, taking into itself as independent but harmonizing elements all the tendencies which now appear embodied in separate sects. But they cannot unite on any narrow ground, nor upon any compromise or concession of their particular ideas. They must become large enough to admit, each its own limitations, each to confess its own narrowness, each to own a peculiar excellence in the others which may meet and supply its own deficiency. They must understand the deep meaning of the Apostolic Idea — "many members, one body." They must believe in Providence, and if a movement comes, bending the minds of men in one direction, as the ripe wheat bends before the breeze, they must accept in this movement a Providential meaning, instead of rejecting it as a new outbreak of heresy. They must be able to distinguish such a movement, coming spontaneously and universally, from the effects of human wilfulness, brought about by artificial combinations and manœuvres. Guided by this spirit, the Future Church will receive into itself the three leading parties of our own community. I mean the Orthodox, the Unitarians, and the Spiritualists. Each will find in the others a peculiar element in which it is itself deficient. Each |