or churches, but of States? Is there nothing like intolerance here? Is not this the very same spirit (they themselves being the judges) that breathed in Charles, James, and Laud, those eminent and favourite polemics of Prelacy, when to these meek and gentle means of convincing and converting dissenters, were added such cogent and logical arguments as the thumb-screw, the boot, the pillory, the dungeon, and the scaffold? And if we see modern Prelacy following in the footsteps of ancient Prelacy as far as it dare, or can go, are we to be deemed either incredulous or uncharitable, if we think it at least not a matter of regret, that it cannot go any further? And if, when we are met with such arrogant pretensions at every turn, we venture in all humility to make some inquiries as to their authority and tendency, in a land of liberty, will an 66 apostolic institution" object to such a Berean process as "unwarrantable meddling?" Surely, in view of this mass of testimony, we cannot be charged with either illegitimate reasoning or uncharitable deduction, when we conclude from all this, that the influence of Presbytery is at least much more decidedly and positively favourable than that of Prelacy, to the development and establishment of civil and ecclesiastical liberty. In concluding this discussion, we disclaim all intention of assailing or censuring indiscriminately those who compose the Episcopal church. We rejoice to know that there are found amongst them as pure patriots, as sound republicans, as devoted and liberal Christians, and as scriptural and catholic theologians, as ever adorned the doctrine of Christ. There are those who reject and deplore the arrogance, and Romish tendencies amongst their dignitaries, as cordially as we do, but who, owing to the structure of their system, can only weep and pray over what they cannot correct. They have not the spirit of Prelacy, but the Spirit of Christ. With such we most cordially sympathize and fraternize, and would grieve if any thing now uttered should express toward them any feeling but brotherly kindness and charity. Did they give tone to the measures and language of their Church, controversy would cease, and we could unite our forces in the common cause, and against the common enemy. But when claims are made whose insolence is unparalleled, except by their emptiness and wickedness; when spiritual religion, the piety of the heart, is treated with a cold and ribald mockery that chills the blood with horror ;* when it is loudly proclaimed that Prelacy is not only the sole, authorised system of polity, but it is boasted of as eminently even republican; and when our commissions are rudely snatched from us and pronounced in the hearing of our people as forgeries, and impostures; silence becomes at once cowardice and treason, and neither attack nor defence from us requires any apology. When we look at the rapid strides of Prelatical arrogance in our own land, and see in other lands its shuffling, sidelong movement toward Popery; and add to this the political signs of the times; the systematic measures of the British government wantonly to insult the Presbyterians of Ireland in the most sacred and tender tie of human life; whilst it meanly fawns on and crouches to Popery; its disposition to oppress the Presbyterians of England by education bills, and chapel bills; whilst it smiles even on the enemies of a Divine Saviour, if they are also enemies to this turbulent system; its persevering efforts to crush the free sons of Scotland, who have dared to assert principles at once purchased and hallowed by the blood of their fathers; the startling and ominous resemblances that exist between the present condition of England, and that which preceded and produced her two great revolutions; the steady policy of France to cripple and destroy Presbytery, in violation of the very letter and spirit of her primary laws; the evident tendency of all Protestant Europe toward a hierarchy, as the means of propping up the tottering turrets of usurped and frightened power; and look at the accumulation of those internal elements, that may, ere long, burst forth with volcanic fury, in one of those earthquake explosions that scar and notch the record of the past; there is no reflecting mind that does not seriously forecast the future. If that last fearful struggle of the embattled hosts of truth and error, may be at hand, which passed in its mystic and shadowy but terrific grandeur before the eye of the lonely exile of Patmos; and if these ominous warnings may be the first distant clink of busy *The New York Churchman (Feb. 17, 1844) not content with contemptuously sneering at "evangelical religion," actually avows itself drawn to the Christian Register, the Unitarian organ of Boston, "by many cords of sympathy, and among them are hostility to the popular religion of the day, variously called Orthodoxy, Calvinism, Revivalism, and the Lutheran heresy of Justification." This avowal has at least the merit of honesty. preparation that forebodes to the wakeful ear the coming battle; it becomes those whose fathers have always been found in the hottest and bloodiest spot of the contest, to prepare to stand in their lot, and calmly await the future. If peace and quiet shed their mellow light around us, let us stand fast to the truth of God, and not be betrayed into laxity on the one hand, or bigotry on the other: stand fast to duty, that we provoke not God to scourge us to our task by adversity: stand fast to one another, that we fall not by internecine strife and fratricidal phrensy. But if trouble from without, and hot, bitter contests from within, await us; if the storm and the darkness are to gather over our path, yet still let us stand fast: stand fast to the pure mystery of the cross, the stumbling-block and the foolishness of formalism and philosophy: stand fast to the altars that are hallowed with the blood of our fathers: stand fast to the sanctuaries that enshrine their honoured dust: stand fast to that holy and beautiful house that was built in troublous times, on whose stately and snowy turrets are engraved such high and glorious memories of the past, and around whose lofty pinnacle linger and play such bright and cheering visions of the future: stand fast to those pure and noble truths of doctrine and order bequeathed by our fathers, in which they lived and for which they died in a word, "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." Stereotyped by 8. DOUGLAS WYETH, THE END. |