soon be followed by the most mortifying failure. Vague dreams of glory, with no hopes or qualifications of the truc exalted character, after a few years of experience, will vanish before untried realities. And there is no flattery here for that impatience, which is sanguine of immediate conquests without one substantial basis for expectation.

There is much that might be said here, and more than is desirable. An allusion may be made to that ambition which is satisfied only with the most popular fields of labor, and unless such fields are immediately opened, it is thought that there is a lack of appreciation. But that ambition were better confined to a limited sphere; and the experience of years, perhaps, may bring some humiliating lessons of the vanity of inordinate aspirations. There are different fields of labor adapted to different talents, and the servant of Him who went about doing good at the call of humanity, may rest assured that he will be called where his labors are most needed and are the most appropriately adapted. And the more humble the sphere, the less the care, and the more the time for self-culture and the opportunity for noble exertions.

But the difference in the spheres of the ministry may not lead to indifferentism in regard to the importance of the highest preparation and improvement. There are excesses in application to study, and excesses in intellectual indolence. The former will induce failure in pastoral duties, and the latter in the demands of the pulpit. For a failure in the latter, there is no apology that will avail before a discriminating public. We may despise art and education as we please, and contend that apostolical qualifications are as efficient and complete now as they were centuries since; but when an intelligent community calls for an instructive, influential ministry, the call must be answered, or an immense loss of influence be suffered. What shall be done? That a high standard is needed, can no longer remain questionable. The time has passed, when nothing more than a knowledge of theology in its most superficial branches, as requisite in popular religious controversies, and a few smatterings in science and literature, will prove available. We are not prepared to commend modern fastidiousness in every particular, but we cannot, at the same time, avoid the conviction that there

have been some just reasons of complaint against the ministry. Not against ours more than all others; or as much; for we believe that no ministry has excelled it, or succeeded as well, under similar disadvantages, in making a deeper impression in the public mind. But professing the highest moral and religious position, a high position is requisite in regard to all the leading interests and improvements of the day. Our institutions, religious, reformatory and educational, must occupy a commanding platform. Our periodicals for the people need sustaining, but we have need also of sustaining works of the most elevated theological and literary tone. We have publications of this character which have done credit both to the authors and publishers, and they are constantly increasing. As an Annual, the Rose of Sharon now stands equal to any work of the kind in our country. But the fate of the Expositor is known to all. It has been succeeded by the Quarterly; but shall we ask how this elevated work is and has been sustained by many of the ministry during its first years of existence? It is now in its fourth year, and appeal after appeal has been put forth. But it may be regretted that its subscription list speaks but faintly in praise of many whose names are absent. To say that there is a want of taste and appreciation for a periodical like the Quarterly, is more than is freely confessed, and yet without this confession the deficiency in ministerial supporters is wholly unaccountable.

We shall not be understood as idolizing human qualifications, and yet their importance will be admitted as indispensable. The new age demands appropriate thought and style and illustration in presenting Christianity. Helps may be found in the works of the past, but every man is now required, besides, to think and communicate for himself. Without a knowledge of the themes of public interest in present vogue, there is no adaptation to public wants. The skeletons of old sermons that lived and spoke in the last century, need not be raised to life for the present. Men must now build and fill up for themslves, for plagiarism has become an employment of a questionable character. And yet there are some models of the past from which we may derive profitable lessons in thought and style. The earnestness of Massillon, the deep, varied

thoughtfulness of Saurin, the fervent, yet simple eloquence of Fenelon, the rich, chaste simplicity of Blair, may afford the most impressive influences. The sermons of Channing, of Martineau, of Dewey, and of some living divines in our midst, not wholly confined to other denominations, are worthy of the closest perusal in the formation of an efficient style of thought and communication. Yet no extraneous aids can supply a deficiency, in the absence of self-culture, of personal independence and application, of energies capable of educing some amount of freshness and originality, of close perseverance in thought and study, of careful preparation for the desk, and the ability to command a natural and an effective mode of communication. Let individuality be sacrificed, and the pulpit is not only turned into a stage, but the minister becomes a mimicking actor.

But while other things are borne in mind, it may be well also to remember the first requisitions of Christianity. The servant, not above his Master, may ever learn more readily at one school, than at the schools of all other authority, and learn too, with no pride or arrogance to lead into a state of mental self-sufficiency, with no self-assurances of perfection in human tact or attainment, with no inordinate love of ambition to soar above the multitudes, with no mock heroism or philanthropy blushing at the humility of Jesus or the lowliest saintship of his disciples, and with no seeking after the favor or the emolument of men above the self-forgetfulness of Christian sacrifice and duty. There is much still to be learned of Him whom the world's conceited wisdom would disown.

In the love of innovation, and in the refinement of public tastes, heed may be taken lest all taste for the unadorned truth is lost, and the simplicity as well as the usefulness of the gospel become forgotten. A high state of cultivation, it is true, is not expected to tolerate the labors of the ministry without the assistance to be drawn from science and philosophy, from nature and poetry, from history and biography, without a portion of the needed embelishments of elocution, nor without an interest in those reforms which are revolutionizing our race. In fact, the ministry is comparatively powerless without an evinced interest in those tastes and movements which are dictated by a higher state of humanity and intelligence.

The pulpit has long enough been denounced as a century behind the age; but in doing the duty now to be done, and in repelling this charge, no necessity exists to compel Christianity itself to be outstripped. The cry of bigotry need not frighten from the extreme of old conservatism into the other extreme of ranting radicalism; but, grounded on that truth which is as old as time, yet fresh as eternity, the genuine gospel ministry may stand on the equilibrium platform, and remain unmoved in principle among the surrounding revolutions. Well that a steadying balance is held somewhere, in these changing times, and that things long cherished are not too hastily laid upon the altar of sacrilege. New light shall yet come, and new revolutions; but neither the dawn of a brighter intelligence nor the change in human systems of religion, shall alarm the true sentinel of Zion.

U. C.

ART. XXVII.

The Scripture Doctrine of Creation.

Nor more remarkably does the Bible differ from all ancient books in the manner in which its teachings disclose the being, unity, spirituality, and moral government of God, than in its views respecting the origin of the universe, and of the myriad forms of existence with which it is peopled. Though written at different periods, and for the most part by men who knew nothing of the advantages of intellectual culture, its pages are radiant with a philosophy of nature which is transcendently simple, spiritual and sublime, a philosophy, a theory, infinitely superior to all the other teachings of the ancient world; wearing upon its face distinct marks of the reality of its claims to a divine origin. It is marred by traces of none of the systems of pantheism, dualism, polytheism, or scepticism, which hung, spectre-like, over the early ages. Its difference from, and its superiority over, them all, are distinctly indicated by the sentence which forms the commencement of the sacred volume:"In the beginning God created the heaven

and the earth;" and this doctrine, asserting that all things in universal nature have been created, made, or formed, (words having essentially the same meaning in the mouths of the sacred teachers,) by the direct agency of one God, pervades like a thread of gold the entire teachings of the book.

It is a great mistake to imagine, as many appear to have done, that the account of the production of the earth and its inhabitants, in the first chapter of Genesis, usually called the Mosaic Cosmogony, covers the whole subject of creation, as presented in the Scriptures. It is true, this account forms the only instance in which any of the sacred teachers have indulged in anything like detail, touching the order in which things were brought into existence; but if this account were torn from the Bible by the rude hand of a sceptical philosophy, there would still remain in it almost everything essentially important affecting the subject of creation, at least as regarded from a religious point of view. We have no fears, however, that this account will be effectually set aside. In freedom from absurd and sickening details, in simplicity, beauty, and grandeur, it has no parallel in any of the cosmogonies that have come down to us from the past; and if it be compared, in the light of a liberal interpretation, with the disclosures of modern science, disclosures of which the writer could have known nothing, it will be found to be substantially true. It has stood, it will stand, investigation. But we must not allow it to engross our whole attention, in considering what the Scriptures teach in relation to the subject in hand. There is scarcely a page on which we are not expressly taught, that all things have had their origin in a work of creation, in the will and energy of an all-wise and benevolent Creator; as in the following sublime passages:-"O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches." "I consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained." "He commanded, and they were created." "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." "Thy hands have made me, and fashioned me." "The great God formed all things." "The Lord hath made all things for himself." "Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of