the standing point of Christianity. Religion has been hurt by being looked upon as a separate business, a thing apart from practical life. We would have every thing baptized into religion.

We wish to set

These are our fundamental principles. forth Religion as a matter of thought and understanding-of Freedom-as the power of love-as something to animate the whole Life. We devote all our efforts to this-our time, our labor, our thoughts. Silver and gold have we none; what we have, we give. But since printers must be paid, and paper has a price, we depend on our friends to procure us subscribers and to forward payments in due season. Let all who love the principles we maintain, feel it a duty to help us in this work. It cannot go forward except our friends, scattered through the West, are willing to take some pains that it should. We leave it with them. Trusting in God, we will try to do our part; let them do theirs.

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On Faith and a Good Conscience.

By Rev. FRANCIS PARKMAN, Boston, Mass.

I Timothy, I. 19.

No. 10.

Holding faith and good conscience, which, some having put away, of their faith have made shipwreck.

It is a solemn truth, that a sound or a correct faith may be held with a bad conscience; and it is an equally solemn truth, that such faith will not avail either to holiness of living, or to acceptance with God; and these are the truths which the Apostle intimates in the text, and which it will be the object of this discourse to illustrate.

They are truths which approve themselves at once to our judgment. All rational views of religion, every just conception we can form of the will of God concerning us, and of our obligations, conspire to teach, that faith of itself cannot avail; that however just or well founded, may be a man's religious speculations, they cannot avail him, either as motives to action, or as grounds of hope, unless dwelling in a pure heart, and expressed and made manifest in a holy life.

This sentiment is maintained with great clearness and energy, by the Apostle James, in his admirable epistle, written to instruct and comfort the dispersed of Israel, and to show them the necessity, especially under the trials to which they were exposed, of approving their faith by their mutual charity and all the works of righteousness. It is not in the power of words to express more forcibly than does he, the necessity of virtue to render faith acceptable. We are taught, in the most explicit manner, as if it was a truth we were most

in danger of forgetting, that without it faith is dead. And the apostle of my text confirms the same sentiment, when, in writing to Timothy, he says, "That very charge by the authority, which belongeth to me as a teacher, I commit unto thee, son Timothy, that thou mightest fight under it the good warfare, keeping to faith and a pure conscience; remembering that "the end of the commandment is charity: out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned."

And happy were it, if this doctrine, entering so essentially into the very nature of religion, had been kept in view. It is to the forgetfulness of this truth that we must ascribe some of the most serious practical errors that have prevailed in the church. Men have overlooked the principle, that faith is an instrument, and not an end-the means of virtue and holiness, and not virtue itself; that a man may have all faith, and the truest faith, and as far as speculation goes,faith perfect and entire, wanting nothing; and yet that faith be held with an ill conscience and a wicked life. Now, the doctrine of my text is that a faith, thus held, is of no avail.

1. In the first place, there must be a good conscience in regard to the manner of forming it.

The soundest faith may be a mere prejudice, if it come only through education, parentage, the influence of early instruction, the force of mere authority, or any of those nameless undefinable, but all-powerful influences, to which every man from infancy to manhood, and through the successive period of his life, is exposed. If he take up his faith only as it come to him from his fathers, with the teachings of the nursery, with the associations of early childhood, from the contagion or sympathy of example, because it is the faith of others, who choose that it should be his also, from hope of man's favor or fear of man's displeasure,-in fine, from any other source than personal conviction; then that faith is to him a mere prejudice, and however correct it may be as a speculation, it is nothing more and nothing better than a speculation to the individual who thus holds it.

He, therefore, who would satisfy his conscience in the forming of this faith, must draw that faith from the word of God, and not from the traditions or commandments of men. He must examine for himself, and not be satisfied with a prejudice or an impression. In regard to the fundamental doctrines, or what are commonly called the essentials of religion, he is happily not in danger of greatly erring, nor obliged to submit to a very tedious process of examination; yet his faith, even upon these, few and simple as they are, he does not hold

with a good conscience, unless he builds them upon his own personal investigation. He owes it to the greatness and importance of the subject; and to his own interest in the great salvation, not to receive even truth blindly or ignorantly. The being and perfections of God, the mission of his Son, Jesus Christ, the divine authority of his religion, the doctrines he inculcated, and the duties he enforced, should all be the subjects of his investigation. Otherwise, they may fail of being to him, whatever they may be to others, of any practical value. He is bound as a creature of God to employ his reason on the faith offered to his acceptance; to improve the means of knowledge that are put within his reach; he must compare the weight of testimony; and whenever there appears sufficient evidence to command his belief, that belief must be yielded. He must neither, on the one hand, reject what is true, nor yield himself blindly to what is false.

Nor let this spirit of honest investigation be confounded for a moment with a spirit of indifference, and still less with a spirit of scepticism, that disposes a man to doubt of every thing; the offspring, as will be found, of ignorance and vanity; of ignorance that is too blind to discern the nature or the strength of evidence, and of vanity, intent so fondly upon self, that it neither cares for, nor is willing to find the truth. For from this union of vanity and ignorance, as has been well exposed, is to be traced much of the infidelity, that at all different periods has lifted itself up among men. There are those who love the distinction of differing from others; of showing themselves superior to the prejudices and superstitions of the multitude; who disdain, forsooth, to be led by priests; who read and hear, not to enquire, but to cavil and deny; as if mere doubting were an evidence of superior sagacity and intellectual skill.

2. We must hold our faith charitably. The very end and scope of the commandment is charity. It is not enough, as we have seen, that it be a sound faith; or that it be the result of a thorough and impartial investigation. We must connect with it so much distrust of ourselves, and such conviction also of the possibility, after all, of our being in an error, that we shall regard with great tenderness and courtesy the impressions, and what to us may seem even the errors of others. We shall not feel ourselves justified under any pretence of zeal for the truth, by any clearness of conviction or assurance of faith, as to our own views, in condemning our brother, in denying him the Christian name, in withholding from him the charities, which independently wholly of his faith we owe him, as a

partaker of a common nature, as a child of God, and as a brother of the great family of man; as one, moreover, for whom Christ Jesus died. For in doing this, we walk not charitably. We forget that the very end of the commandment is charity, out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned.

3. Nor, thirdly, is it sufficient that we hold our faith with the approbation of our conscience: for that conscience may be erroneous; it may be a mistaken or perverted conscience, and may betray us into fatal errors. How many faults, nay, brethren, how many crimes, foul and dreadful crimes, have been committed in the name and for the sake of conscience. The whole history of the Christian Church, specially of the persecutions its faithful disciples have in different periods endured, is the history of the errors of a deceived or misguided conscience. The murderers of the Lord Jesus, at the very moment they were plotting with wicked hands and baser hearts to slay him, would not enter within Pilate's Hall, lest, forsooth, they should be defiled, and unfit to eat the Passover. Murder was in their hearts, but they were afraid to tread with their feet a Roman tribunal, because that would unfit them for sacrifice. Well did the Master say, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice;" and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings. Even the beloved disciple, who for his mild and gentle spirit Jesus loved, could cal! down fire from heaven upon those Samaritans, who would not receive his Lord. Peter, in a transport of well-intended, nay, generous passion, lifted his sword against one of the servants of the High Priest. And what, says Paul, the servant, the faithful Apostle, of his own rash but conscientious zeal, "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth: which things I also did at Jerusalem, and many of the disciples did I shut up in prison, and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities. Yet did he say; "Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience even to this day." "I was zealous towards God, even as ye all." And doubtless we must concede—(the judgment of charity, which is a judgment according to truth, demands it) that many things contrary to the spirit and even letter of the religion of Jesus; many bitter reproaches and cruel tortures have been inflicted under the misguidings of a deluded conscience. It is not enough, therefore. that we act from conscience. We must take care to enlighten it, we must not suffer pride, prejudice, interest, real or imaginary, to obscure or prevent it. We must pray, "Lord, open mine eyes, that I