dence, Patience, ("Patia"), Standfast, it be but in thy name and to promote thy Sweet, Hope, Hopestill, Urbane, Rejoice, kingdom."*

Welcome, Desire, Amity, Remember, The other was "the Apostle of the In-
Hasty, Prosper, Wealthy, Mindwell, Duty, dians," John Eliot, whose translation of
Zealous, Opportunity, Submit, Fearing, the Bible into their language remains as
Unite, Model, Comfort, Fidelity, Silence,
Amen, Reason, Right, Rescue, Humble.

president; and hard by lies his grandson, | Dutch Reformed pastor, Nevin," the the Satan of American history, Aaron Burr. author of "The Spirit of Sect," and father One other name of later days belongs of the present accomplished chaplain to alike to the theology of Europe and Amer- the Episcopal American Church at Rome. ica, connected in like manner with the (3.) The next infusion into the ecclePresbyterians or Congregationalists. It siastical elements of America were the is that of Dr. Robinson, the author of two great communions which I have al"Biblical Researches in Palestine." A ready mentioned, the Baptists and the simple solid granite pillar marks the site Methodists. of his grave in the most beautiful of American cemeteries, that of Greenwood, in the neighborhood of New York. He was the first explorer of Palestine who saw it with the eyes of a mind fully prepared for what he was to discover, and capable of seeing what he had to describe. His works may be superseded by later investigators and more attractive writers, but he will always be regarded as the founder of modern sacred geography.

Of the Baptists it is only necessary here to say that in numbers they surpass all other American Churches, except the Methodists, including, as they do, not merely many of the humbler classes in the Northern States, but also a large proportion of the negroes in the South. One interesting feature in their history deserves to be recorded. Many are accustomed in these latter days in England to speak as if the chief mode by which religion is propaIt was inevitable that the Presbyterian gated must be the importance attached to body in America should be increased and sacramental forms. It is worth while for fortified by an influx of those holding the us to contemplate this vast American same creed or form of Church government Church, which, more than the correspond. from Scotland and Ulster. It is in Canada ing community in England, lays stress on chiefly that these have found their home. its retention of what is undoubtedly the There alone amongst the colonial settle- primitive, apostolical, and was till the ments of Great Britain the rancor of thirteenth century, the universal mode of Orangemen against Papists still continues baptism in Christendom, which is still rein unbroken force. The streets of Mont- tained throughout the Eastern Churches, real have been the scene of riots as furious and which is still in our own Church as as those which have disturbed the thorough- positively enjoined in theory as it is unifares of Belfast. There also the distinc-versally neglected in practice, namely, the tion between the Established and the Free Church of Scotland has been carried beyond the Atlantic, and although in the almost necessary absence of fuel to keep alive the division, the two sections have within the last few years been brought to an outward coalition, yet it was only three years ago that a dispute on the question of the duration of future punishment almost again rent them asunder; the members of the old National Church of Scotland maintaining without exception the more merciful and (we trust) Biblical view of this question, and the members of the Free Church equally adhering, according to their characteristic usage, to the more narrow and traditional opinion.

A word should be given to the Dutch Reformed Church, which exists amongst the American forms of Presbyterianism. It has a kind of European reputation in the pages of Washington Irving and of Mrs. Grant's "Memoirs of an American Lady."* Döllinger, when asked what theologians the Americans had produced, answered "Only two Channing" (of whom we shall speak presently) " and the

* II. 92. I. 38, 267.

oriental, strange, inconvenient and, to us, almost barbarous practice of immersion. The Baptist Churches, although they have used our own authorized version, and will, we trust, accept our new revision, yet in their own translation of the Bible have substituted "immersion" for the more ambiguous term, "baptism." The attraction which this ceremony of total ablution, in the burning heats of the Southern States, offers to uneducated minds is said to be one of the most powerful motives which have induced the negroes to adopt the Baptist communion. A measure of the want of education amongst these primitive converts may be given in the story told of the triumphant tones in which a negro teacher of the Baptist Church addressed a member of the chief rival communion. "You profess to go to the Bible, and yet in the Bible you find constant mention of John the Baptist,' John the Immerser. Where did you ever find any mention of 'John the Methodist?'"

(4) This leads us to that other communion whose progress through the United States alone exceeds that of the Baptists. John Wesley and George Whitefield alone, or almost alone, of eminent English teach

ers were drawn beyond the limits of their own country to propagate the gospel, or their own view of it, in the transatlantic regions. John Wesley's career in Georgia, although not the most attractive of his fields of labor, is yet deeply interesting from his close connection with one of the noblest of all the religious founders of the American States, General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia. "In the heart of the evergreen forest, in the deep solitude of St. Simon's Island, is the great oak with its hanging moss, which they still call 'Wesley's Oak,' underneath which he preached to the colony in the wilderness." George Whitefield produced by his preaching the same extraordinary effect which he had produced in England, of which the crowning example is the impression he left on the hard, homely, philosophic mind of Benjamin Franklin; and, thorough Englishman as he was, he terminated his marvellous career, not in England, but in America, and his bones still remain to be visited like the relics of a mediæval saint in the church of Newburyport in Massachusetts.

death not unworthy of the vast Church of which he was the virtual founder. He was the right hand of Wesley-inferior, no doubt, but still his chief supporter. "I want," he said, on his last visit to America, "the wings of an eagle and the voice of a prophet, to proclaim the gospel east and west, and north and south." He was consecrated bishop by Wesley with the full approval of the most saintly and one of the most churchmanlike of Wesley's followers, Fletcher of Madeley. He crossed the Atlantic eighteen times. He traversed for forty years the British Isles, the United States, and the West Indies. He found his grave in the Indian Ocean on his way to the wide sphere of missionary labor in the East Indies.

It would seem as if three elements conduced to the remarkable position of the American Methodists. First, for the more educated classes the Arminianism of Wesley, to which in their uncultured way the transatlantic Methodists still adhered, furnished some kind of escape from the stern Calvinism of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists of New England; and it may be that out of this tendency sprang that remarkable off-set from Congregationalism of which I have already spoken, the Universalists.

Secondly, the Episcopal organization of this community, which, although differing from the more regular forms under which it is preserved in the Roman, English, and Lutheran Churches, has yet justified Wesley's adoption of it by the coherence which it has given to a system otherwise so diffusive.*

Coke, the first Methodist, the first Protestant bishop † of America, has a life and

For the futile attempts of Coke to procure Episcopal ordination for the Methodist clergy from the Church of England and the Episcopal American Church, see Stevens's "History of Methodism," iii. 129, 130. Coke wrote to Lord Liverpool and also to William Wilberforce to offer himself as the first Bishop of India (Ibid. iii. 329. Tyerman's "Life and Times of Wesley," iii. 434).

t The name of bishop, as applied to an episcopal office created by a presbyter, may, in the ordinary parlance of modern Europe, be regarded as a solecism. But in the rude organization of primitive times, such a use of the word was a necessity. All the bishops of the second century must have been created by presbyters of the first century, and this usage continued in Alex

Thirdly, the hymns, originating in the first instance from the pens of John Wesley and his brother Charles, and multiplied by the fertility of American fancy, have an attraction for the colored population corresponding to that ceremonial charm which I have already described as furnished to them by the Baptists through the rite of immersion.

(5.) We now come to the latest, but not the least important developments of American Christianity. Out of the Calvinism of the New England Churches, much in the same way as out of the Calvinism of Geneva itself, under the influence of the general wave of critical and philosophical inquiry which swept over the whole of Europe in the eighteenth century, there arose in the famous city, which by its rare culture and social charms may claim to be the Geneva of America, that form of Congregationalism, which, for want of a better name, has been called partly by its enemies and partly by its friends, Unitarianism. Not great in numbers,* except in Boston and its neighborhood, but including within itself almost all the cultivated authorship of America in the beginning of this century, the Unitarian Church at that period was unquestionably at the summit of the civilized Christianity of the Western continent. Its chief representative was one of the few names which, like Jonathan Edwards, has acquired not only an American but a European splendor, Dr. Channing. The stiff and stately style of his works will hardly maintain its ground under the altered tastes of our generation. But it is believed that his sermons may still from time to time

andria down to the fourth century. See Bishop Lightfoot's exhaustive treatise on the Christian ministry in his work on the Epistle to the Philippians, p. 228, 229. * One-fifth of the population in Boston. Lyell's Second Visit, i. 172.

We may add various passages, which give a just estimate of the catholicity of his theological sentiments. "Read to me," he said to his friend in his last hours, "the Sermon on the Mount." And when they closed the Lord's Prayer, "I take comfort," he said, "and the profound

be heard from English pulpits where we Speaking of Cervantes, whom he could should least expect to find them. And not forgive for his satire on Don Quixote, both in England and America there still he said, "I love the Don too much to remains the strong personal impression enjoy his history." The following paswhich he left on those who knew him. sage in substance singularly coincides Those who can remember him describe with the celebrated but long subsequent the dignified courtesy and gracious humil-passage of Cardinal Newman on the relig ity which gave even to his outward appear-ious aspect of music. "I am conscious of ance the likeness of an ancient English a power in music which I want words to dignitary; and with this was combined, in describe. Nothing in my experience is the later period of his life, a courageous more inexplicable. An instinct has alzeal rarely united with a cautious and ways led me to transfer the religious senshrinking temperament like his, in behalf timent to music; and I suspect that the of the cause of Abolition, then, in his Christian world under its power has often native state and amongst his own peculiar attained to a singular consciousness of circles, branded with unpopularity amount- immortality. Facts of this nature make ing almost to odium. "When he read a us feel what an infinite mystery our nature prayer, it left upon those who listened the is, and how little our books of science reimpression that it was the best prayer that veal it to us." they had ever heard, or when he gave out a hymn, that it was the best hymn they had ever read." To some one who was complaining of the strenuous denunciations in the Gospel discourses, he opened the New Testament and read the passages aloud. As soon as he had finished, his hearers said, "Oh, if that was the tone in which est comfort, from these words. They are they were spoken, it alters the case."* When he came to this country he visited the poet Wordsworth, and years afterwards the poet would point to the chair in which he had sat, and say, "There sat Dr. Channing." Coleridge, after his interview, said of him, "Dr. Channing is a philosopher in both possible senses of the word. He has the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love." When he died he was borne to his grave in the cemetery at Mount Auburn amidst the mourning of all Boston; and the bells of the Roman Catholic chapel joined with those of Protestant church and chapel and meeting-house in muffled peals for the loss of one who, as his gravestone records, was "honored," not only "by the Christian society of which for nearly forty years he was pastor," but "throughout Christendom."

full of the divinest spirit of our religion." "I value Unitarianism," he remarked, "not as a perfect system, but as freed from many errors of the older systems, as encouraging freedom of thought, as raising us above the despotism of the Church, and as breathing a mild and tolerant spirit into the members of the Christian body. I am little of a Unitarian; I have little sympathy with Priestley or Belsham, and stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer light, who look for a purer and more effectual manifestation of Christian faith." *

"I do not speak as a Unitarian, but as an independent Christian. I have little or no interest in Unitarians as a sect."

"Until a new thirst for truth, such, I fear, as is not now felt, takes possession of some gifted minds, we shall make little progress."

"The true Reformation, I apprehend, is yet to come."

"What I feel is that Christianity, as expounded by all our sects, is accomplishing its divine purpose very imperfectly, and that we want a Reformation worthy of the name; that, instead of enslaving ourselves to any existing sect, we should seek, by a new cleansing of our hearts, and more earnestness of prayer, brighter, purer, more quickening views of Christianity."

See his candid estimate of English Theology, ii. 148-151, and of all Churches, i. 352. See also i. 344, 387, 406; ii. 38, 400.

the unruly crew, and who celebrated in Virginia the first English communion of the New World on Sunday, the 21st of June, 1607. We hear little of the early pastors; but any Church might be proud to trace back its foundation to so noble a

"We have reason to suppose, from what has been experienced, that great changes will take place in the present state of Christianity; and the time is, perhaps, coming when all our present sects will live only in history." "God is a spirit, and his spiritual off-character as the devout sailor-hero John spring carry the primary revelation of him in their own nature. The God-like within us is the primary revelation of God. The moral nature is man's great tie to divinity. There is but one mode of approach to God. It is by faithfulness to the inward, everlasting law. The pure in heart see God. Here is the true way to God."

Smith. "In all his proceedings he made justice his first guide and experience his second, combating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers. He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him into no danger would he send them where he could not lead them himself. He never would see us want what he either had or could by any means get us. He would rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay. He loved action more than words, and feared covetousness more than death. His adventures were our lives, and his loss our "Strive to seize the true idea of Christ's own deaths." * An accomplished scholar character; to trace in his history the work of our own time has said "Machiavelli's ing of his soul; to comprehend the divinityArt of War,' and the Meditations of of his spirit. Strive to rise above what Marcus Aurelius 't were the two books was local, temporary, partial in Christ's which Captain John Smith used when he teaching, to his universal, all-comprehend- was a young man. Smith is almost uning truth." known and forgotten in England his native country, but not in America, where he saved the young colony in Virginia. He was great in his heroic character and his deeds of arms, but greater still in the nobleness of his character."

"Could I see before I die but a small gathering of men penetrated with reverence for humanity, with the spirit of freedom, and with faith in a more Christian | constitution of society, I should be content."

It is said that there was in the warmth of Unitarian preachers at that time something quite unlike the coldness frequently ascribed to it. One fervent spirit at least, though divided from it in later days, sprang from the Unitarian Church, But the Church of England in Virginia Theodore Parker. He also, though not did not reach at any time that high state so extensively, was one of the few Ameri- of religious and moral development which can theologians known beyond his own belonged to the Puritan shapes of English country; and with all the objections which Christianity in New England. No doubt may be made against his rough and un- the influence of the founders of Maryland timely modes of thought and expression, and Georgia must have conduced to its he must be regarded as the first pioneer, spread in those southern regions; but in on the transatlantic continent, of those the Northern States it was usually regardlarger views of critical inquiry and relig-ed as a mere concomitant of those Enious philosophy which have so deeply glish governors who resided in their capiinfluenced all the Churches of the Old tal cities. World.

(6.) We now come to what is in one sense the earliest, in another, the latest born of the American Churches. Before the arrival of the "Mayflower" in the Bay of Plymouth there had already entered into the James River that adventurous colony, headed by the most marvellous of all the explorers of the Western world in those days, the representative of Raleigh, Captain John Smith. In him and in his settlement were the first parents of the Church of England in America. The first clergyman was Robert Hunt, vicar of Reculver in Kent, who was the chaplain of

Lyell, Second Visit, i. 176.

The Anglican clergy were more or less treated as Dissenters. In the State archives at Hartford there is still to be seen a petition from the Episcopal clergy of Connecticut urging the governor of the State to use his influence in inducing the Congregationalist clergy to allow them access to the Eucharist. There is something highly instructive in a record which represents the clergy of the Church of Archbishop Laud and Bishop Ken ac

Narrative of Pots. in Smith's "History of Virginia," p. 93, quoted in Anderson's "History of the Colonial Church," vol. i., p. 252. See also the address on "The Historical Aspect of the United States,"

LIVING AGE, No. 1807, p. 259.

t George Long in the preface to the "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," p. 27.