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V 



ADDRESSES 



REV. DRS. PARK, POST, & BACON, 



AT THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE 



AMERICAN 



CONGREGATIONAL UNION, 



MAY, 1854. 



PUBLISHED FOR THE AM. CONG. UNION. 



NEW YOEK: 

CLARK, AUSTIN & SMITH. 
BOSTON : S. K. WHIPPLE & CO. 

1854. 



BV " *- 



1854 



EMMANUa 



STOR 



THE FITNESS OF THE CHURCH TO THE CONSTITUTION OFj RENEWED MEN. 



ADDRESS, 



DELIVERED MAY 10, 1854, IN BROOKLYN, N. Y., BEFORE THE 



AMERICAN CONGREGATIONAL UNION, 



EDWARDS A. PARK, 

ABBOT PROFESSOR IN AXDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 



THE FITNESS OF THE CHURCH TO THE 
CONSTITUTION OF RENEWED MEN. 



ADDRESS. 



EVERY one is familiar with the distinction between the 
positive and the moral, as applied to laws and institutions. 
It is well to retain these terms in their distinct sense. There 
are positive enactments of men, which are not moral, having 
no intrinsic propriety of their own. On the other hand, 
there are moral duties which are not positively commanded 
by human governors. Under the divine administration, 
however, the positive and the moral do not entirely exclude 
each other. Laws and institutions which are positive, have 
an inherent fitness, although not so apparent as those which 
are moral. On the other hand, laws and institutions which 
are moral, receive the positive sanction of Jehovah, although, 
apart from this positive sanction, they have an authority 
from Heaven. It is, then, in a modified sense, that divine 
statutes are called arbitrary or thetical ; their intrinsic value 
being just as real, but not as obvious, as is the inherent 
worth of moral statutes. Thus we denominate the Chris 
tian Sabbath a positive institution ; for, independently of 
the divine command, we should be slower to detect its im 
portance, than the importance of supreme love to our Maker. 
It has, however, a moral or philosophical basis. It is adapted 
to the constitution of man. It meets the wants of the human 
body, as well as of the intellect and heart. It is so con 
formed to the structure of a nation, that our political as well 
as ecclesiastical prosperity depends upon our observance of 
the Lord s day. "We prove the divinity of the Sabbatical ordi- 



6 

nance from its harmony with our constitution, and we infer 
its harmony with our constitution from its divinity. The 
ministerial office, also, is prescribed in the New Testament, 
and it thus has a positive, which is of itself a sure basis. 
But this basis overlies a moral groundwork. The adapta 
tion of the office to the very make of the soul is a signa 
ture of its divine origin, and is alike a cause and a proof 
of its irrepressible influence. The religious sentiment 
demands a consecrated order of men, who shall be an em 
bodiment of the religious idea. It insists on having a 
specific organ of communication between earth and Heaven. 
By their very nature, men are impelled to demand such an 
organ for expressing their devotedness to a superior power ; 
because, themselves being disturbed by the turmoils of life, 
they confide so much the more in a selected band who dwell 
amid the stillness of the temple, and are imagined to have 
the spirit, as they are seen to have the marks, of unusual 
godliness. On the same principle, it is an impulse of nature 
that men desire a special organ for receiving their choicest 
gifts from Heaven; because, immersed as men are in the 
cares of life, they need a class of instructors from whom they 
may gain spiritual wisdom. They have a faith in the teach 
ing, instruction, and example of those who devote their 
life to the mysteries of religion, as they have a faith in the 
instructions of professed mechanicians, or philosophers, or 
jurists. Thus, if the Christian ministry were not prescribed 
in the New Testament, it would still be a divine institution. 
The Church, likewise, by which, in its Biblical form, I mean 
a society of ostensible Christians, bound together by cove 
nant, and! meeting together for the worship of God, the 
observance of sacramental and other divine ordinances, is 
justly called a positive institution. It was formed by 
Christ in the most solemn, though simple manner. Unless 
it had been expressly organized by its Divine Head, the 
authority of it would have been less clear than it is now. 
But the Church has, moreover, a moral ground. It is 



beautifully accordant with the aims and aspirations of a 
devout mind. It is admirably fitted to express many deep 
thoughts, to address many fine sensibilities. It is none the 
less, but all the more divine, because it satisfies a class of 
wants otherwise inappeasable. It is none the less, but all 
the more accommodated to our wants, because it is divine. 
The wisdom of God is manifest in setting an ecclesiastical 
structure over against our religious sentiments, and mak 
ing the outward significant of the inward. The dignity 
of man is evident from the fact, that he needs a divine 
sanction for his religious observances, and these observances 
lose their power over him if they be separated from his 
Maker. A Bible, as a positive revelation, must be added 
to natural instruction. Faith must combine with reason. 
Men were made for God, and God adapts his administration 
to men. We may augment our reverence for the divine 
government, if we consider the tendency of its various insti 
tutes to ameliorate the character and condition of our race. 
Therefore it will be the aim of the present address, to specify 
certain principles of the renewed mind to which the Church, 
particularly in its purest forms, is fitted, and by which it edu 
cates men* 

It is obvious, in the first place, that the institution of the 
Church is fitted to express and to exalt our estimate of the 
soul s value. We have a consciousness that the mind is of 
rare dignit}^. The refinement of its thoughts, the grace of 
its sentiments, the loftiness of its aspirations, the wide and 
ever widening reach of its powers, have given to men the 
irrepressible conviction of their being so formed that they 



* When we speak of " the Church, particularly in its purest forms," we, of 
course, imply that there are various forms of a true Church, some less, some 
more in unison with the Biblical standard. They range from the Church 
of the Pilgrims to the Church of Rome, and as they include both of these, 
so they embrace the intermediate churches. ; 



8 

may even please God by worshipping him. They have 
aspired to be like their Maker. They have conceived of 
him as the model of which they are the images. Even the 
Greeks, with all their nice regard to decorum, fashioned 
their divinities in the likeness of the most athletic or grace 
ful men. The Bible heightens, rather than lowers our 
estimate of the soul s worth. It assures us that our nature, 
in the person of our Eedeemer, is elevated to a seat at God s 
right hand; that the sublimest act of Jehovah has been 
performed in his union with man ; that the glory of the 
Most High is not fully revealed except in the atonement 
which has identified our history with his. Such is the soul. 
This is the inspired record of its greatness. Our sense of its 
value needs to be expressed. How shall we express it? 
Not by pyramids to its honor, not by proud monumental 
inscriptions, so well as by assemblies convened for the 
praise of the Infinite Spirit ; by a visible communion with 
the Sovereign who treats us, although his subjects, as his 
children. Here is the true dignity of men, that they band 
themselves together in a brotherhood for the reception of 
spiritual influences from the Father whom they adore. 
There is no man so beggared, but he may join with the 
company of those whom God calls his chosen ones. Supe 
rior to our Saviour s miracles of causing the deaf to hear, 
and the blind to see, and the dead to rise, was the ordinance 
that the sublimest truths ever revealed should be proclaimed, 
in the most emphatic way, not to the rich only, but " to the 
poor." And the Church, even the most corrupt, has in some 
degree accommodated itself to the ignoble in all ages, even 
in the darkest. In the Eomish communion, monarchs are 
seen washing the feet of paupers. At the Eeformation, 
Luther addressed the men of learning and the men of 
authority ; but his main reliance was on the people. His 
hymns fascinated the men, women, and children, who sung 
them in the fields and streets; his musical compositions 
were suited to the taste of the populace, as well as the 



amateurs. He thus moved the masses. Without them, the 
Electors themselves would have feared to go forward. In 
fluence worked from the lower orders to the higher upward. 
More than once, when a Eomish divine began to inveigh 
against the doctrines of the Reformation, the people, throng 
ing the sanctuary, and strangely forgetting all decorum, 
would drown his voice in the congregational singing of some 
Lutheran and deeply evangelical stanzas. For whenever 
the mind of the populace is moved, it is like the sea and the 
waves roaring. For there is an energy found nowhere so 
stirring as in the soul when quickened by communion with 
kindred spirits, and when conventional restraints are laid 
aside, and each gives vent outright to all his emotions. 
Every Church organization should cultivate a high sense of 
Christian propriety, a punctilious courtesy, but it cannot be 
appropriate to the real endowments of a soul, unless it 
repose a confidence in the practical wisdom of that soul 
when renewed by its great Author. It must educate the 
affluent powers of the mind which was made that it may 
be developed. It must give to each mind its healthful 
activity, and thus pay homage to the grace that has enriched 
the humblest disciple; for what God hath honored, let 
none of his servants despise. A pure Church will not 
withdraw its trust from a man merely because he is a lay 
man ; for he is a 7nan, and a renewed man is (rod s noblest 
work. Few divines had ever studied the Bible so pro 
foundly as the Puritan fathers of New England ; few had 
learned, from experience, such costly lessons as they on 
ecclesiastical government ; few had studied so minutely the 
records of the Church, Ante-Papal, Papal, and Reformed ; 
they perceived that the true ecclesiastical spirit, so far as it 
was a religious spirit, had fraternized with men in humble 
life ; had lived in them eminently ; and from them the great 
movements of the Church had received impulse. Hence, 
our Pilgrim ancestors characterized their Church system by 



10 

its brotherly regard for man as man, apart from his office. 
It is said, they had no ecclesiastical emblems ; but the 
very words of their ecclesiastical documents were emblems 
of their respect for the dignity of a church composed of 
souls. Their councils did not cite a church, nor summon a 
church to appear before them, nor order a church to send 
up a document, nor direct a church to keep any human 
ordinance ; but, if the church asked their advice, they gave 
advice in a respectful, and thus a manly style ; if it desired 
them to recommend some remedy for a grievance, they 
yielded to the desire, and recommended measures which 
they were too deferential to enforce. They inserted in their 
form of church discipline a most beautiful provision illus 
trating their reverence for the mind of every visible Chris 
tian, even the most obscure. So they gave a meaning to 
the phrase, " mother church." If the humblest disciple be 
aggrieved by an act of his companions, he is entitled to the 
arbitration of a mutual council. A majority of the church 
have pronounced their decision against him, but it is possible 
that an ambitious or envious feeling controlled them. He 
is not to be summarily excluded from all hope ; he is a 
soul, capable of indefinite expansion ; he has claims for 
relief if he be wronged ; he is not compelled to bow down in 
silence before a priest who may be unhealthily elated with a 
consciousness of power, nor to abide by the decision of certain 
men around him who form one standing judicature, and who 
may be disqualified for a fair decision by partisan hopes or 
fears, by social affinities, by personal obligations ; nor is he 
shut up to a trial before a state or national tribunal, who are 
commissioned without any view of their fitness for arbitrating 
in precisely such a cause, and who have neither the serenity 
nor the leisure to examine with care and faithfulness the 
claims of this one man, a stranger, whose interests are but a 
small item in the multiplicity and the novelty of the con 
cernments pressing upon the mind of his numerous judges. 



11 

He refers his case to a few men, selected for their skill in 
exactly such arbitrations. Some of them are chosen by 
himself and are the especial objects of his regard. They 
are not compelled to conduct their investigations according 
to technical canons, but they are confided in as men, 
having good sense, able to meet an exigency, to examine 
minutm for which there can be no fixed rule. Their can 
did discursive judgment is exercised and strengthened by 
being trusted ; the community rely on their decisions more 
than on the decisions of a civil jury. A secular court has 
sometimes condemned a man whom an ecclesiastical Council 
has acquitted, and sometimes acquitted a man whom an 
ecclesiastical Council has condemned ; but the decision of 
the Council has prevailed over that of the Court as more 
impartial, less embarrassed by conventional formalities, 
more consonant with the fair demands of a free mind. 
Such aid is provided for even the weakest of the elect saints. 
If he be refused the arbitration of a Council chosen mutually 
by himself and his accusers, still he is not crushed, the dignity 
of his immortal being is not forgotten ; he is allowed to call 
in for himself the churches good and true in which he may 
confide; and their wisdom may sketch out a straight path 
through his perplexities. It has happened to me within a 
few days, to read several old documents written by the elder 
Edwards, and his friend Hopkins ; and I have been touched 
by the moral sublimity of several councils which they attend 
ed, investigating for an entire day, and with more than a 
father s patience, the complaint of some hired laborer, and 
then adopting no magisterial tones, but adjusting their advice 
to his necessities, as if they were the exigencies of an empire. 
For the mind is an empire, and the care of its virtues is a 
more than regal responsibility. For what shall it profit a 
man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul! 
The sense of freedom nurtured by the congregational polity, 
is a fruit of no rampant Jacobinism, but of a brotherly inter 
est in the mind for which Christ died. The spirit of our 



12 

communion is to leave the ninety and nine, and search for 
the one sheep lost upon the mountains. It remembers that 
whom the Father did foreknow, them he also did predes 
tinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, and whom 
he did predestinate, them he called, and therefore justi 
fied, and consequently glorified. Such minds, if not 
looked for and cared for by the church, whom can they 
trust on earth? and whoso doeth an ill to the least of 
them, doeth the same ill to Him who includes them in 
himself. Hence it comes, that a church faithful to the 
spirit of our Puritan ancestors, to their history and their 
influence, is in its inmost heart a society for the extension 
of freedom. Even when it abstains from political disputes, it 
silently moulds political institutions. It is effective in its 
operations on the State, by simply enforcing the truth that 
whom the Son makes free, the same are free indeed.* By 
the diffusing of a pure ecclesiastical system, we redeem the 
sons of God from captivity ; for the genius of the system is, 
that all believers Greek or Barbarian, bond or free, are 
brethren, foreordained alike to reign as kings and priests 
unto God. It says to the slave, who has been refashioned 
in his Sovereign s image : If thy brother, who claims the 
ownership of thee, shall trespass against thee, go and tell him 
his fault between thee and him alone ; if he shall hear thee, 
thou hast gained thy brother ; but if he will not hear thee, 
then take with thee one or two more of thy fellow bond- 



* " It soon became apparent (in the reign of Elizabeth in England), that 
they (the Puritans) tended naturally towards republicanism ; for certain it 
is, that monarchy and episcopacy, the throne and the altar, are much more 
nearly connected than writers of bad faith or little reflection have sought 
to persuade mankind. Besides this insensible, but natural inclination 
towards democracy, which arises from the principles of a popular church 
government, there was another cause why the current should set in that 
direction ; it was only under Commonwealths that the Puritans saw their 
beloved discipline flourish." London Quarterly Review, vol. xvi., pp. 517, 
518. 



13 

men ; and if he shall neglect to hear them, tell his fault to 
the church, even if they be all his legal property ; and if 
he neglect to hear that church, let him be unto thee as a 
heathen man, and whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall 
be bound in heaven. No scheme of despotism can survive 
the liberalizing spirit of such a discipline. Here is compress 
ed a political power, illustrating the foresight of him who 
buries the seeds of a lengthened history in one brief statute. 
The moral of this statute is, that all men whom the Spirit of 
the Lord has made free from sin, have essentially the same 
rights. Hence it was the opinion of Mr. Pitt, that if the 
Church of England had been efficiently established in the 
North American colonies, they would never have refused 
allegiance to the British crown. It was the policy of 
not a few English statesmen to introduce into these 
colonies an ecclesiastical regimen which would favour 
rather than oppose a spirit of subjection to the father 
land. It is true that the advocates of our political free 
dom were found in sects of all names ; some manly defend 
ers of it arose from the Eomish communion ; still we are 
not arrogant in claiming, what our political and ecclesiasti 
cal opponents have often conceded, that the self-sustaining 
spirit of the New-England churches emboldened their mem 
bers to resist the usurpations of Britain. Partly by the habit, 
which these churches fostered, of independent thought on 
the most momentous themes, the colonies were, in the signifi 
cant phrase of Lord Clarendon, " already hardened into re 
publics." The zeal for political freedom was quickened, per 
petuated, and made authoritative by the religious sentiment, 
that a mind is too noble to be in bondage ; that the law of 
God commands and the glory of God requires the free thought, 
free speech, and free act of a spirit which can be developed 
only by freedom. The temper of a New England church- 
meeting suggested the idea of the political town-meeting : 
and the principle of the town-meeting is the basis of our re 
public. One of our fond_ hopes for this republic is derived 



from the affinity of its germinating law with that of the 
church brought over in the May Flower; from the known 
influence which that church organization had upon the colo 
nial spirit and history, and upon the mind of the framers of 
our national Constitution,* and from the faith that He who 
made the soul for unshackled activity in the right, will 
honor the principles of government established by himself. 
It is objected that an ecclesiastical regimen which gives to the 
poorest man an equality with the richest, can never satisfy the 
select classes. The select classes ? Who are they ? Such as 
dream of being elevated above their race in mere etiquette or 
office, and will not recognise the dignity of a soul as such? 
The church was never designed to satisfy men who give 
themselves up to the fripperies of fashion. If it com 
plied with their instincts, it would forfeit its honor as a 
church. It might be respectable as an association for pur 
poses of emolument or pleasure ; but, as an ecclesiastical 
institution, it will lose the general homage, unless it exem 
plify the greatness of the mind that was in Christ Jesus, who 
for the rescue of our spiritual being, emptied himself of the 
divine glory. There is no right-hearted church that does 
not aspire to an honor above that of aristocratic fortunes, 
even the honor of being composed of men who are men, and 
who feel a meaning in the word, human. Other things 
may be admired for other reasons ; but that it is the admira 
ble religion which expresses and reveres the wisdom of God 

* "Several years before the American Revolution, there was near the house 
of Mr. Jefferson, in Virginia, a Church which was governed on congregational 
principles, and whose monthly meetings he often attended. Being asked 
how he was pleased with their church government, he replied that it had 
struck him with great force, and interested him very much ; that he con 
sidered it the only form of pure democracy that then existed in the world, 
and had concluded that it would be the best plan of government for the 
American Colonies." See Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge ; Article 
" Congregationalists," prepared under the supervision of Drs. Emerson and 
Wisner See also Memoir of David Hale, pp. 275, 6. 



15 

in appending to every, to one single moral act of a soul, an 
infinite retribution. Seldom has there been consecrated 
to the Christian ministry a mind so majestic as that of 
Eobert Hall. When one of his blundering parishioners 
prayed for him in his own presence at a meeting of the 
church, and characterized him as deficient in certain ministe 
rial qualifications, the great man, while grieved at the inde 
corum of his reprover, responded Amen to the prayer. The 
uncouthness of the suppliant was incongruous with the true 
order of the church ; for the spirit of the church is that of 
an accurate taste. No one could reprobate it more than he 
whose faults were thus solemnly exaggerated; but the 
earthly shepherd was kindred with the Chief Shepherd of 
our souls ; he devoted his vast learning and his large heart 
to the culture of minds needing improvement ; he allowed no 
obliquities and no vulgarities of his flock to intercept his 
view of their substantial worth. Far from being ashamed of 
his people, he honored them as a royal priesthood ; and 
while the nobility of England hung with delight upon his 
eloquence, and the doors of the Establishment opened for 
his admission, and the highest preferments awaited him 
there, he manifested the true nobility of a Congregational 
pastor, remembering that every soul is capable of infinite re 
finement, and the grandeur of the most accomplished mind 
is seen in its self-denial for the most necessitous. Our great 
office is to elevate men who require elevation. In this up 
ward progress we must encounter many roughnesses ; our 
sensibilities must be often pained; we must be conversant 
with those from whom some of our more delicate tastes 
would shrink; but the soul is worthy of all this cost; its 
education is more of a good than our aBsthetic pain is an 
evil ; and if the most refined of all men could live for three 
weary years with Judas Iscariot, we may join in conference 
and in counsel with the most uncultivated brother, who is 
also a brother of his Lord. 



16 

Secondly, the institution of the Church is fitted to ex 
press and to exercise our sense of individual responsibility. 
Intimate as our social alliances are, they can never eradicate 
our conviction that a soul was made for personal duty. In 
all his corporate relations, the moral sense of every man in 
dividualizes him. He reads : Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God, with all thy heart. The promises are addressed to him in 
the singular number. Each man is to repent for himself, 
and to believe for himself in Jesus, who tasted death for 
every man as singly as if there were only one man to be re 
deemed. Every individual is to die on his separate couch, 
to be " in his narrow cell for ever laid," to rise again as if he 
were alone, to meet his Judge face to face, to enjoy his own 
bliss, or to endure his own woe. This consciousness of an 
insulated responsibility struggles to be expressed. The 
church was designed to body it forth and give it strength. 
Our Puritan fathers, remembering that there had ever been, 
and foreseeing that there would continue to be a tendency to 
merge the individual into an organism, and to forget all per 
sonal duty in the imposing form of an ecclesiastical unit, 
labored to restore the Biblical idea, that there is no real visible 
church, other than an assembly of individuals, covenanting to 
meet together for the purpose of discharging the most solemn 
personal duties to God, and to themselves in Him. Our history 
has proved, that this feeling of separate accountability, as it 
stands related to a conviction of the soul s worth, is a central 
wheel in the apparatus of philanthropic movement; it 
starts as many benevolent enterprises as there are minds that 
recognize their private duties. Hundreds of eleemosynary 
institutions have sprung from this impulse of personal re 
sponsibility for the souls of men, and for their physical as 
conducive to their mental welfare. Our creed, representing 
the society of believers in one place as a church complete in 
itself, does not allow it to throw off upon a national organi 
zation any part of the responsibility for the moral culture of 
that one place. It thus quickens the vitality of the local 



17 

organism, and makes it a germ of philanthropic societies for 
the relief and the culture of man. It devolves the momen 
tous interests of religion upon every member of that church 
as really as if he stood by himself. A monarch has said, " I 
am the State." But no Committee, or Session, or Pastor, or 
Board of Pastors, have a right to say : We are the 
Church." It is a truism, that the church are the men who 
compose it. Every man has his own vote on every grave 
proposal. For this vote he must prepare his mind and his 
heart. ^ He has a judgment and a conscience, and the com 
mand is to him, as to the Jewish king: " Be strong and 
show thyself a man. " Tell thy brother s trespass not merely 
to the officers of the church, but to the church, is the rule ; 
to all the men whom God has called into it, and who are 
therefore worthy of your confidence. Let each of these men 
recognize his obligation to study as a juror, or an ethical 
philosopher, the peculiarities of this individual wrong, the 
mode of reparation and rebuke. So are the varied sensibilities 
of every believer educated. What searchings of his own heart, 
what purifying of himself, what penitential faith have been 
quickened within him by this critical discipline. Cicero has 
discoursed eloquently on the advantages of a civil prosecu 
tion to the men who conduct it. The Apostles intended that 
the community of believers should be disheartened from sin 
by their mingling in the ecclesiastical reproof of it. Deep 
and prolonged reformations of the church have risen from 
this participating of its members in the solemn duty of ad 
judging the demerits of a fellow communicant. His heart 
has reflected theirs as face answereth to face in a mirror; and 
in censuring him they have learned, almost as from a sacra 
ment, their own individual need of expiatory blood. 

And when the discipline of transgressors is devolved 
upon the body of the communicants, it will be performed, 
unless the peculiar aptitudes of our organization be pecu 
liarly neglected. If it rest upon the minister alone, there is 
danger that he will fear to encounter the titled dignitary 

2 



18 

who lias been accused of wrong. If the duty be assigned to 
an established board of officers, they have a strong tempta 
tion for recoiling from the peril. They are too few, too 
conspicuous, for a conflict with some erring brother who 
may enlist the sympathies of the people against them. But 
there is a courage in the assembly of the brethren. Accord 
ing to the very laws of mind, the individuals meeting as a 
band of equals, rejoicing in their responsibility to God and 
to God alone, stimulate and fortify each other. An absolute 
monarchy forbids the public convocation of a church as 
hazardous to tyrannical sway. Good men, in such a con 
course, become valiant in resisting wrong wherever it be 
detected. A titled offender does not overawe the multitude 
of faithful men. What philosophy teaches, history confirms ; 
the churches of New England, as compared with those of 
Germany, bear plain witness that the most healthful disci 
pline is administered where every man is responsible for a 

voice in it. 

Nor is it only administered it is felt, when it assumes a 
popular form. The censure of a pastor is the word of but 
one man. A small number of church officers do not speak 
with the authority which comes from the people. There is 
a sometimes inexplicable power in the decision of a church, 
when every individual member of the church aids with 
deliberateness and with prayer in the forming of that deci 
sion. The New Testament bids the mass of believers to 
discipline an offender; because, if each of them seek to be 
led by the Spirit, the voice of them all is the voice of God. 
Good men, every one of them, searching for the truth can 
didly, dispassionately, cautiously, in reliance on the divine 
word, and in supplication for the divine wisdom, will not 
bind on earth one who is to be loosed in Heaven, nor will 
they loose on earth one who is to be bound in Heaven. Is 
it too much to anticipate, that all the brethren in the church 
will bring an earnest, candid, humble temper to the act of 
Christian discipline ? This is their responsibility. Here is 



19 

their motive for scrutinizing their hearts, and educating 
themselves for the grave office assigned them. The theory 
is, that all ought to unite in the godly discipline of an 
offender, and a just theory helps to secure a right prac 
tice. 

There is, too, an emphatic meaning in a popular vote, 
when taken, as it may be, as it always should be, as it 
sometimes is, to admit a member into the church ; and every 
one who gives that vote is called to purify his own con 
science, in fitting himself for his decision. There are various 
symbols of ecclesiastical dignity. The lofty arches and 
spires of the cathedral are said to body forth this idea. 
And other communions are said to be superior to our own 
in their symbols of the grandeur belonging to the assembly 
of the saints. But when an humble pastor in the obscurest 
hamlet propounds a man or a woman for admission to the 
elect society, and thereby invites all the communicants, if 
they deem it well, to examine the candidate, to propose objec 
tions or queries, and to prepare for a solemn assent or dissent, 
there cannot be a more eloquent emblem of the loftiness and 
the purity of the institution, guarded thus by all its mem 
bers, every man responsible for watching at its gates, and 
securing the entrance of those only who are "the beloved 
of God," "called to be saints." 

This very fact of the responsibility of each man to make 
the visible church, as far as he may, conterminous with the 
invisible church on earth, is the spring which historians have 
strangely failed to notice, but which moved our divines in 
the last century, to examine the laws of church membership 
with more thoroughness than these laws had been canvassed 
for ages before, and to unfold principles which have exerted 
a purifying influence on various other communions in this 
and in our mother country. 

It is human nature it is sanctified human nature to feel 
the significance of the vote by which an assembly of men, 
moved of their own proper impulse, unawed by ecclesiasti- 



20 

cal patrons or ecclesiastical courts, invite a minister to pre 
side over them. He feels that he has been elected to his 
genial work. The heart of the multitude comes out after 
him. "With spontaneous acclamation they welcome him. 
He is the friend of their choice rather than acceptance. He 
educates the souls who have thus, by their independent love 
of him, received him into their affections. In qualifying 
themselves to elect a pastor, hundreds of laymen have read, 
and reflected, and reasoned more than in any process of 
their secular life. 

It is objected for a regimen that calls up every man to a 
grave work is not congenial with our love of ease, and will 
not escape opposition it is objected that our ecclesiastical 
system is noisy and clumsy ; every man must think his own 
thought and say his own word ; every measure must wait 
for majorities of the people ; and every individual among 
the people must be convinced in his own way, and at his own 
time. We are obliged to admit that no popular government 
can hush its processes into an absolute stillness. The train 
ing of the general conscience results in some debate. An 
enlightened vote is preceded by discussion. But the excel 
lence of our system is, it aims to confine our discussions 
within the lines of their appropriate usefulness. It disci 
plines the spirit of those men who are best fitted to examine 
the questions in debate, and who are so situated that they 
must act upon the questions. As we make every church 
responsible for itself, exempt from the authoritative inter 
ference of distant churches, we do not convulse the eccle 
siastical bodies of the entire land by one village contro 
versy. We do not arouse a national organization for the 
trial of some recreant bishop or deacon. Ours a noisy sys 
tem ? It is open, frank, ingenuous ; it exposes whatever is 
wrong in its administration, but as it limits the number of 
ecclesiastical rulers, it tends to repress officious inter 
meddling, to hush a contention by lessening the area over 
which it can spread itself, to soften a controversy by exclud- 



21 



ing remote combatants from lordly participation in it. Ours 
a clumsy system ? It is clumsy for the purposes which it 
was never intended to serve. It does not multiply facilities 
by which an ambitious man may climb into high office, or 
an envious man may depress his rival. In order to preserve 
the church pure, it holds out few glittering offices for ambi 
tion to seize at, and in order to keep the church peaceable, 
it discourages those national preferments which inflame the 
envy of ten men, while they gratify the pride of one man. 
Various controversies of the church have arisen, not so much 
from any serious question of doctrine, as from the official 
question, "Who shall be the greatest in the kingdom of 
God?" Various ecclesiastical trials have been prompted, 
not so much by a brotherly concern for the errors of the 
accused, as by an envious uneasiness at his high station. 
Therefore, our church system does drag heavily, when men 
would pervert it to rolling forward any scheme of personal 
aggrandizement or resentment. It was contrived for ob 
structing rather than accelerating the progress of selfish 
men. It does not transform ministers into lawyer,*, nor pro 
vide a machinery by which a manoeuvering partizan may 
work at his will a complicated organization. If the church 
be designed for sustaining a secular or sectarian aristocracy, 
rather than for religious growth, our ecclesiastical regimen is 
a failure. We have an awkward apparatus for securing the 
co-operation of the multitude in a scheme of doubtful use 
fulness. Our measures must commend themselves to the 
good sense of good men, or they cannot be urged on by our 
system, misshapen as it is for ecclesiastical ambuscades. The 
merit of a pure church is, that it aims in toilsome ways to 
elevate society in general by educating the particular men 
who compose it. Its end is gained not by authoritative 
movements of a hierarchy, but by the distinct efforts of each 
individual in rectifying his own perceptions, and purifying 
his own feelings by obedience to the truth through the 
Spirit. If these individualizing aims make the progress of 



22 

the church, slow, they tend to make it sure. If our eccle 
siastical plan stimulate every church member to inquire, 
11 Lord, what wilt thou have me to do," it also favors a kind 
of discussion that heightens the dignity of a mind ; and this 
discussion is the opposite of noise. The very clumsiness of 
its machinery for sectarian stratagems, is its expertness in 
training the individual for the world to come. Its distinc 
tive and disciplinary motto enjoins one of the hardest, as it 
is one of the choicest of the virtues : " Let every church," 
as Paul writes of every individual, " study to be quiet and 
to do its own business ; ambitious of no sovereignty over 
its neighbors, except the moral sovereignty of an example 
dissuading from pride, ostentation, selfish ease ; persuading 
to self-rule, self-denial, condescension for the good of all 
men, devout fellowship with the brethren. 

We often hear the inquiry, Why is it that so many 
churches, of so many sects, are eager to obtain teachers and 
pastors from the ecclesiastical institutions of New England ? 
Doubtless, out of her rugged soil has come up some strength 
into the intellect of her sons. Her chill atmosphere has 
breathed an energy and a fortitude into their spirits. But there 
are Canadian winds which have not thus stimulated the Cana 
dian mind. There is a soil in Nova Scotia, that might have 
been as disciplinary as the soil of Vermont. There are 
varied causes of this difference, and among these causes is 
the fact, that our churches have individualized their mem 
bers, made them responsible for religious, the most invigo 
rating and expanding of all duties, imparted to them spiritual 
wisdom in the committee-room, the conference-room, the 
business meetings of the brethren. These brethren have 
lived in an ecclesiastical school. They have drawn instruc 
tion from their ministers, as from doctors of educational in 
stitutes. They have not been bound down to rubrics and 
minute formularies, but have been thrown upon their own 
discretion. Their main book of discipline has been their 
own fair judgment, enlightened by the Bible. Instead of 



23 

being servants of arbitrary rules, they have exercised them 
selves to become men of principle. There is nothing that 
so arouses the activity of the intellect nothing reaches 
down so far into the very elements of our being, as the con 
viction of our own personal duty in conducting the affairs 
of the kingdom of God on earth. The obligation to select 
wise legislators in the state, to secure the passage of whole 
some laws, invigorates the mind less, expands the charities 
of the heart less, than the obligation to watch over, to advise, 
and to aid the assembly of the brethren. If the pious men 
in the provinces of France had been trained, during the last 
two centuries, under the discipline of New England churches, 
judging for themselves with regard to doctrine and practice, 
feeling themselves called of Heaven to give their individual 
advice, on their own individual reasons, at the assembling 
of the local church, and at the ecclesiastical council, there 
would have gone forth from these men an influence quick 
ening the mind of the entire community, and the nation 
which is now too ill-trained for preserving a republic, would 
have been too well-trained to endure a usurpation. And it 
is partly for the maintaining of our political institutions, for 
the educating of our people to give an intelligent suffrage ; 
that we desire to see the same ecclesiastical principles mould 
ing the character of our Western States, as helped to form 
the intellect and conscience of our New England colonies. 

In the third place, the institution of the Church is 
fitted to address and to quicken our sense of nearness to 
Jehovah. At a table in New York, Mr. Webster was once 
asked by the late Col. Stone, " What is the most important 
thought that ever occupied your mind?" After a pause, 
the statesman replied: "My individual responsibility to 
God." Our nearness to our Judge is seen in our account- 
ableness to him for the powers which he has given us, and 
upon which his eye is fixed ever. So far forth as we love 
him, we are united to him ; he dwells in us by actuating our 



24 

wills ; we dwell in him by intercommunion with him. Our 
feeling that he is not far from any one of us, seeks expres 
sion in the church. Eomanism has essayed to give it an 
outward symbol in the sacrifice of the mass. The Godhead 
abides in the sacristy, is touched in the bread, looked at in 
the wine. The Puritan fathers of New England, fearless as 
they were of men, trembled before God, and they adopted a 
form of church polity that bodied forth the idea of their 
ceaseless contact with Him. This polity exalts inspired men 
above the fathers ; because inspired men are the conduits 
through which the wisdom of Heaven flows down to us : it 
refuses to erect any creed to an equality, or an approach to 
an equality, with the sacred volume. 

It has been objected to us, that we have no creed. None ? 
"We have a richer collection of creeds than is possessed by 
any other body of Christians on earth. And these creeds, 
being drawn out for individual churches, are apt to be more 
carefully and less superstitiously studied by the communi 
cants to whom they are appropriated, than are any human 
symbols composed for promiscuous use. Such is the ten 
dency, even if not the fact. And the substance of nearly 
all of these creeds is the same, their form only being diver 
sified. Our generic confession of faith is the essence of our 
hundreds of local compends. The appositeness of our creeds 
is, that they are framed by the individual churches, as the 
prayers of the sanctuary are composed by the individual 
ministers who offered them. So are these creeds emblems 
of an immediate communion with God. They are drawn 
out of the Bible directly. Several of the early New Eng 
land churches framed elaborate catechisms for themselves. 
There were other catechisms which these churches approved 
in the main ; but they chose to exhibit the idea that they 
derived their faith from no human reservoir, but from the 
fountain of all truth. The God of truth was near them and 
led them into the knowledge of himself. 

Our ecclesiastical system honors the Christian ministry as 



25 

a divine institution. It is divine as the New Testament. 
It is divine as the religious sentiment itself. It is divine as 
the human soul. It was no more devised by man than his 
constitutional instincts were devised by him. It is a cha 
racteristic of the Puritan system to honor the ministry as 
an exponent of the will of (rod. But this system is careful 
to bedizen the ministry with no artificial splendors, that 
will intercept the clear view of Him whom it was intended 
to serve. Our system fears to accumulate those titles which 
flatter vanity and ambition ; for a vain man cannot preach 
with effect, and an ambitious man cannot preside over the 
church with safety. The epithets Yery and Most Eeverend, 
His Holiness, His Grace, Father in God, Head of the Church, 
are epithets which, like stars, spangle until their effulgence 
is drowned in the brighter light of the Sun of Kighteousness. 
We fear, also, to multiply the official gradations of the 
clergy, lest the parade of clerical ranks bedim our view 
of the Eeal Head of the Church. All our offices are to be 
expressive of His in working. We believe that order is 
Heaven s first law ; that some are and must be greater than 
the rest ; so we think more of the distinctions made by God, 
than of those made by accidental or capricious votes. He 
gives to one man especial wisdom ; we defer to the wisdom 
as coming from the Most High. He gives to another man 
richness of grace ; we prize the gift as honoring the Giver. 
His elect will be discovered, not by the decision which a 
corporation of ecclesiastics may happen to make, but by the 
tenor of the life which we perceive that they lead, day after 
day. The structure of our system prompts us to note all worth, 
to revere God who reveals himself in his elect. We believe 
in the formal ordination of the clergy ; Kobert Hall never 
was ordained, but in his later years, he regretted the omis 
sion. John Foster ridiculed the practice of ordaining the 
clergy, and would not condescend to participate in it. Here 
he erred; for the rite is an appropriate and an apostolical 
method of illustrating the idea, that a pastor is called of 
Heaven to a great work, and is to be acknowledged as a 



26 

co-laborer with Christ. But our creed recognizes in ordina 
tion no talismanic efficacy, and teaches us to value more 
that daily ordination from God, which we discover in the 
devout life of his ministers, and which is the substance, 
while the other is but an appropriate form. 

It has been objected to our church order, that one of our 
pastors has as much authority over his people as a pastor 
has anywhere. He has authority among those who wit 
ness his good works, which ought to be revered as prompted 
of Heaven ; he has influence over men who know of his 
comprehensive views and large heart, which illustrate the 
generousness of his Eedeemer ; he has power, for his cha 
racter is power, and the tendency of our system is to 
develop and to reveal personal merit ; and this personal 
merit, as it cometh down from above, is the great ordination 
of which the outward ceremony is but a fitting shadow. It 
has been further objected, that we, as well as other churches, 
have an order of bishops, superior to the common clergy. 
But we have none made by artificial enactment, or human 
manoeuvre. If the aptitudes of our system be regarded, our 
bishops are those whose learning and meekness and zeal and 
wise counsels and unspotted life have raised them to their 
chairs ; and their chairs hold out as long as these good quali 
ties last, and no longer. Whenever and wherever we have 
men deserving especial reverence, then and there, if the capa 
bilities of our church system be filled out, we have bishops, 
consecrated by Him who gave the virtues which we revere. 
They have a divine authority, flowing through its normal 
channels. The bishopric of one man may be confined to 
one topic, that of another man to a different theme ; here it 
may be developed in scientific discussion, there in practical 
wisdom ; by one man it may be retained many years, by 
another occasionally for a few months. Nathan Strong 
was a bishop in sterling sense ; Jeremiah Hallock was a 
bishop in simple-hearted piety; Timothy D wight, in the 
education of youth ; Samuel Worcester, in the cause of 



27 

Missions. It is the genius of our system, to detect that 
bishopric which the laws of God in nature and in grace 
have instituted, and to revere it more than all conventional 
dignities, and thus to honor the Providence which bestows 
upon men gifts differing as the stars differ. It was their 
virtues and endowments, rather than their superiority in 
office, that distinguished Peter and John from their fellow 
ministers; so has it been with all successors of the 
Apostles. 

We have heard it again objected, that in fact, though not 
in form, we have ruling elders in every church. But we 
reply, that they are daily appointed of Heaven and not by 
human votes cast once for all. These adventitious votes do 
not remain permanent indices of the varying merit that 
descendeth from God. So far forth as a man is known to 
have a good judgment, and a pious aim, he will be a ruling 
elder in a congregational church, unless the historical spirit 
of that church be thwarted. His eldership comes, or ought 
to come, day by day from his seen and felt worth. He rules, 
yet not he, but the grace of God that is in him. If our 
churches remember the distinctive idea of their polity, 
they will respect the opinion of a wise man, in office or out 
of office, rich or poor. It is a reverence not for the man, 
but for the wisdom that is an expression of heaven. 
Kichard Mather said, that the decision of a council has just 
as much force, as there is force in the reason for that 
decision. And on the same principle, it is the aim of our 
institutions, an aim not fully reached, to clothe our ruling 
elders whom God has elected unto Christian wisdom, with 
just as much authority as their varying character deserves, 
no more, no less. Their office is revered as an index of 
their merit, and their merit is venerated as an emanation 
from him, who is to be recognised in all the excellences of 
his children. 

It is objected, on the other hand, for the complaints 
against our system are of Protean diversity, that our ecclesi- 



28 

astical regimen is too democratic. It is no more democratic 
than is the government of Jehovah. It aims to be his 
government, conformed to the principles which he has 
exposed in his word and in his works. His laws are 
intended to permeate our laws. He makes every man 
responsible to Heaven. He makes every one of his 
own children a kingly spirit. Is this an unfitting demo 
cracy, which exalts a soul to its true elevation, and makes 
the Monarch of Heaven supreme ? What is meant by the 
charge that Congregationalism is of a levelling tendency ? 
That it levels the character of good men upward, by treating 
them as the elect, precious? So does the Bible. That it 
gives to every man a vote in the church ? But, if he be fit 
to remain in such an assembly, he is fit to vote in it. The 
idea of the church is, that it is composed of the best men, 
T V upto-Tuv, and hence it has been often called a moral aris 
tocracy. Can our system be reproached as an unduly 
levelling system, when its aptitude is to honor the Most 
High, in paying deference to his children, and in elevating 
the church even as it is elevated in the doctrine of the 
atonement. By inspired men this church is denominated 
" the family of Jehovah,"" his sons and daughters," " the 
flock of Christ,"--" he lays down his life for the members 
of it ;" " the bride of Christ," he encloses it in his tenderest 
love ; the very body of Christ, and no man despiseth his 
own flesh ; the temple of God, He dwelling in it ever. 
Is it an unbiblical democracy, then, to repose confidence 
in the peculiar people of the Most High, and listen to the 
voice of every one of this royal generation ? What is meant 
by the charge, that we give to the masses too much power 
over the cultivated few ? The masses of good men, honored 
for the praise of Him who chose them in Christ Jesus, who 
are termed the sanctified in Christ Jesus, members of his 
body, of his flesh, and of his bones, these men too much 
honored? The cultivated few, unshielded ? the very per 
sons whom it is the nature of the regenerate masses to 



29 

honor ! These masses love to substitute the erudite ministry 
for the gew-gaws of Komanism. Intelligent defenders of 
the faith! God is their shield evermore, for he gathers 
around them the multitude whom he has sanctified. The 
responsibility of the church to Jehovah is the protection of 
the clergy. No mere theory is this, no merely ideal repre 
sentation. Our churches are not without stain. They do 
not perfectly discriminate between good and ill-desert. But 
they do illustrate the tendencies of our ecclesiastical freedom. 
The instances are rare, in which a layman complains of 
oppression, or a clergyman of injustice. The exceptions are 
noised abroad, the general rule is apt to be unobserved. It 
is the characteristic of an untitled multitude, meeting 
together on terms of equality in one place, for expressing 
their love of God, to be accommodating, kindly, charitable ; 
and, anomalies apart, for all rules have their deviations, 
there is more reason to fear that superior minds will have 
too great, than too little influence over the mass of the faith 
ful. A frequent complaint has been that our laymen pay 
too great homage to expert metaphysicians and accurate 
philologists. It is true, that we do not exalt the artificial 
prerogative of church officers ; but we assign to them all 
the power which the laws of Heaven give them, all the 
power which instructors can exercise over the public intel 
lect familiar with the Gospel, over the public conscience 
sensitive to personal responsibility, over the public will 
intent on obeying Christ as supreme. Our principle is, 
certainly it ought to be, we do injustice to the very genius 
of our ecclesiastical regimen unless it be our devout aim, to 
stimulate the religious enterprise of a minister, so that he 
may wield a godly influence over discerning men, to dis 
courage him from relying on any dominion that comes from 
a church clique, or from side-long appliances; on any 
adventitious lordship, for this lordship endangers his mind 
and heart as well as the heritage over which he would bear 
sway. He becomes the abler and the better man, if he be 



30 

compelled to rely for influence on the demonstration of the 
Spirit, and if his power come by the laws of the human soul 
and of divine grace ; it being then not his power, but that of 
the Holy Ghost. 

In the fourth place, the institution of the Church appeals 
to, and bodies forth, our love of divine truth. Nearness to 
God endears his word to us. Error will never satisfy the 
intellect of even unrenewed men. It impoverishes their 
sensibility also. The truth which they reject has a strange 
fascination over them. They gaze, and admire, and hate. 
All along they have fears, perhaps undeveloped to them 
selves, that the doctrines which they try and pretend to dis 
believe are right. They will often resolve never to hear 
again a teacher of the simple gospel. But they will hear 
him again, and re-resolve to hear him no more, and then 
will listen to him anew, and make another vow to absent 
themselves, but still they come. The moral preferences of 
regenerate men combine with their religious instincts in 
clinging around the truth for which the soul was made. 
These men have felt its power, and therefore believe it; 
they need no sign-manual to testify that the medicine has a 
sanative energy. They have tried the medicine, and it has 
cured them, and they know its genuine virtues. They need 
no certificate proving that the key will move through the 
wards of the lock. They have used the key, and it has 
turned the bolt, and they are sure of its fitness. Loving this 
truth they long to band themselves together into a society 
for celebrating it. The church is that society. It honors 
the reason, judgment, conscience of men ; and the doctrines 
ot the gospel afford the noblest exercise for all our mental 
powers. It is concerned for the mind of posterity, and 
therefore stimulates us to search for principles which will be 
healthful to future generations. It reverences the Bible as 
the book exactly adapted to the wants of all men in all 
times ; but the very style of the Bible awakens a curiosity 



31 

to make advance in religious knowledge. The chureli was 
founded for the honor of him who is the objective truth. Its 
primitive usages were intended to make the right faith pro 
minent. They rendered meek and unobtrusive service to 
the truth. The very badges of the church are means of sober 
instruction. They are not mesmeric charms, but embodi 
ments of reasonable biblical ideas. The outward structure 
of the church ought to be eloquence itself. The rite of bap 
tism is a lucid exposition of the fact, that we are sinners by 
nature and need a thorough purifying a radical transform 
ing of the heart. It is not a mere artificial remembrancer of 
regeneration, but a vivid portraiture of it, a visible discourse 
upon it; not a rationalistic discourse, but one which the 
Spirit of Jehovah has framed and will bless. He is espe 
cially present at the baptism. The Lord s Supper is an elo 
quent exhibition of the doctrine, that we need a costly 
atonement for sin that the body broken and the blood shed 
are essential for the possibility of our escape from penal 
justice. This ordinance is not a bare mnemonical sign of 
the atonement, but a clear elucidation of it, a sermon 
addressed to the eye as well as to the ear ; not a rationalistic 
sermon, but one which the Head of the Church has indited 
and will honor. He has an especial, a real presence at the 
sacrament. His truth is consubstantiated with our souls, 
transubstantiated into us. Our ecclesiastical system has been 
stigmatised as degrading the sacraments. It does exalt them 
as edifying portraitures, accompanied with a divine sanction, 
of doctrines so great that merely articulate language fails to 
impress them upon the heart. A love of these doctrines is 
fostered by all the appropriate acts of worship ; for worship 
is not a simple recumbency on velvet cushions, an easy sen- 
timentalism, a gentle movement of the heart s surface, a 
routine of genuflexions and bows and crosses ; it is a manly 
and solid and severe thing, a stirring of the depths of the 
soul, a consecrating of the intellect, and feeling, and will to 
the Most High ; it is an outpouring of love not to the letters 



32 

that compose the name of Jehovah, but to himself, in the 
impenetrable depths of his being ; and it implies that we pay 
to him an intelligent homage, that in our finite way we toil 
to comprehend a portion of the length and breadth of his 
excellence. A pure church will make the house of God a 
sanctuary for thought, not display ; a temple, where truth 
reigns in her unveiled majesty, her figure ever foremost, 
uppermost; all outward observances being like glass, at 
tracting no attention to themselves, but inviting the wor 
shipper to look through them to the doctrine that lies behind 
them. A spiritual church will introduce few ceremonies, 
and make them expressive of good sentiment ; a multiplicity 
of forms being like the multiplication of emphatic words, co 
vering the idea which ought to stand up and stand out,through 
and above all formalities. The incense ascending in grace 
ful wreaths from the Eomish altar rises into a cloud, and 
hides from our view the very truths which we most need to 
see. The preaching, and the prayers, and the sacraments 
lose their simple dignity in a service overloaded with orna 
ment, and encompassed with superstitious theories. A well 
ordered church allows no ceremonial so cumbrous as to 
indispose the wearied observer for reflecting on the divine 
mysteries; so protracted as to crowd out the appropriate 
expositions of sacred writ ; so unbending as to preclude the 
due flexibility and fitness of thought and feeling; so hetero 
geneous as to prevent a wise unity in the exercises of a single 
Sabbath. A well-balanced church makes the liturgical ser 
vices conspire in alluring the worshipper to a study of the 
truth, and makes the unfolding of the truth a stimulus to the 
hearty interest in prayer and praise. It commends a large 
variety of doctrine, and dissuades the preacher from a mo 
notonous reiteration of thoughts as pertinent anywhere as 
here, at any time as now. It requires him to imitate in his 
addresses the ever fresh and ever salient style of the divine 
word ; not always to preach in the hortatory way, but some 
times ; not always to discuss doctrine, but sometimes ; not 



33 



to discuss it philosophically always, but only when he can 
thereby corroborate the faith of his people ; not to discuss it 
philologically always, but only when the words of inspira 
tion may become thereby the more impressive on the heart; 
to make the epistles of Paul a model for some discourses 
and the Psalms of David a model for others; to preach now 
historically, and then biographically, if abstract statements 
fail to educate the will of his hearers; to venture on a long 
sermon, if a full treatment of his theme demand length ; to 
give a political sermon if the godliness of his people need 
this practical turn; to cast out of the church all species of 
error, by all appropriate means, as our Saviour expelled 
from the temple-porch money-changers and market-men, and 
sheep and oxen ; to become all things to all men so that all 
may be variously trained; the reason strengthened, for what 
so invigorates the mind as the truth for which it was created ; 
the conscience illumined, for how can we enlighten the moral 
faculty unless by the doctrines which emanate from the Light 
of the world ; the sensibilities refined, for what influence is 
so spiritualizing as that growing from the character of God 
in Christ; the will regulated, for nothing gives life and 
strength to virtuous principle but the word of Jehovah 
applied by his Spirit. This was the wisdom and the taste of 
our fathers in adapting the usages of the church to the exact, 
diversified, complete illustration of the truth : in exalting 
the pulpit so that the altar may become the more sacred; 
identifying the prosperity of the church with the moral cul 
ture of its individual members. Our ecclesiastical system 
depends upon sound doctrine ; it cannot flourish unless good 
and practical thought flourish with it. Of set purpose it 
sweeps from under the minister a gorgeous ceremonial, on 
which he might love to lean. With a wise design, it takes 
from around him an authoritative coterie, who will hold him 
up when he is unable to stand up. It leaves him to the 
truth, and the God of truth. His life depends upon his 

3 



34 

evangelical sentiment. If he fail to plant his feet upon 
right doctrine he falls ; and there is no redemption for him 
while in the wrong. It requires that its ministers be men, 
and thus stimulates them to vigorous thought. Still more 
does it require that they be masters of the truth and ena 
mored of the truth. It thus illuminates the intellect for the 
sake of purifying the heart. Our associations of ministers 
are designed for communion with the divine word. The time 
given to them is not consumed in adjusting a church ma 
chinery, in debates on forms of order, rules of business, in 
sharpening the forensic acumen, perfecting the tactics of 
ecclesiastical warfare ; but in prayer to God, in examining 
his doctrine, in the softening, mellowing influences of Chris 
tian meditation. Hence, our clergymen are seldom adepts 
in strategy; but, if they move in the lines drawn out by our 
church government, they will be men of independent thought, 
and of religious growth. They have no bands of a national 
organization holding them together when the truth does not 
cement them, but they fly apart, unless reciprocally attracted 
by the principles of the Gospel. 

This is said to be the weakness of our ecclesiastical struc 
ture ; it will not stand of itself; it might endure while the 
apostles touched the springs of pious though tfulness, or 
while the stern mind of the Puritans bore rule ; it might 
work well if the interest of men in the truth were always 
fresh ; but it cannot outlast the whirl of steamboats and rail 
roads, the fascination of orchestras and operas. It must be 
a provincial and evanescent polity. So we are told. But 
wherein we are weak, there our strength lies. "We cling to 
the system which tends to prolong the solemn life of the 
Puritans and the Apostles. We prefer the church whose 
body does not move when the soul of it is gone. "We choose 
to be shut up to the faith, and not to succeed if that faith fail. 
Thus does our interest allure us to our duty. Thus does our 
, success require that we become the more firmly rooted and 
grounded in right principle ; and if we hold out in putting the 



35 

truth into the foreground, and all human authority and human 
formularies into the background, our distinctive polity will 
last as long as the divine word itself, for which, as a picture, 
this polity is a fitting frame. For in despite of the entire 
sinfulness of men, the substance of the Gospel will arouse 
them, and if enforced by his grace, will subdue them. The 
church founded upon the simple Gospel is built upon a 
rock, and the constitution of the soul is predestined to come 
up for its defence. That ecclesiastical structure which sets 
off this truth to the best advantage will be prized like Doric 
architecture, on account of its very simpleness. The ad 
ventitious power of a diocesan may drive some men into 
the sanctuary ; the vivid thoughts of the Gospel will draw 
more. We cannot overawe true minds, for any length of 
time, by a display of ecclesiastical authority ; but they will 
be overawed by fair exhibitions of God s electing love ; his 
sovereign, more than imperial sway ; his justice that is the 
very archetype of majesty. We cannot long attract men to 
the temple by a painting of the murder of Abel; but they 
will feel a deep, though a painful interest, in intellectual, 
and therefore the more quickening descriptions of the far- 
reaching tendencies of sin, as illustrated in the fall of Adam, 
and as the depth of its guilt is measured by a woe never to 
end. The artistic, operatic intonations of a choir may ravish 
the auditors with an ecstasy as high as it is evanescent ; but 
the clear proofs of the necessity of an instantaneous regene 
ration, the honest, earnest entreaty to immediate repentance 
will give them a healthier and more enduring stimulus. 
Wise men will tire at last of a splendid pageantry in the 
house of God. But there is one truth, embracing in itself 
a rich circle of kindred doctrines, which will ever take hold 
of men, even when they would if they could escape from it, 
and the more simply it is presented, so much the firmer if, 
its grapple upon the mind. Those deep laws which the 
Author of our being has prescribed for our moral action, 
will ever be unmet, unsatisfied, without a vivid idea of the 



36 

atoning sacrifice. It is the Lamb slain, and there is no other 
name, no ceremony, no official privilege, given under 
Heaven among men whereby the cravings of their inmost 
heart can be appeased. Sooner or later, if Christ be lifted 
up in the sanctuary, he will draw all men unto him. The 
thoughts involved in his life and his death, are the perma- 
nentattractions to his temple ; and any rites, forms, order, 
or etiquette, that are obtruded before these thoughts, will 
deter men from the worship of him who is a Spirit, and is 
to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. 

In the fifth place, the institution of the Church harmo 
nizes with our desire of uniting a conservatism of the truth 
with an activity in diffusing it. There is a diseased conser 
vatism, which represses all zeal in disseminating the right 
faith. There is a kind of religious activity, which over 
looks the importance of sound doctrine. One distinctive 
excellence of the system which our fathers borrowed from 
the Apostles is, that it moves us to retain the truth invio 
late, and also to spread it through the world. It aims to 
gain these ends, by giving a due influence to an instructed 
and a pious laity, and the wants of such a laity are them 
selves conservative of right doctrine. It makes the pastors 
dependent in the last resort upon their flock. The power 
of selecting and dismissing a minister rests ultimately with the 
people. A minister cannot be forced upon them by an out 
ward authority, overriding their own tacit or expressed will. 
They may bind themselves to certain conditions which 
afterward they must respect. They may be advised, but 
cannot, in the final issue, be governed by an ecclesiastical 
council. If the hungry sheep look up and are not fed, they 
may obtain another shepherd. No creed can be imposed 
upon the people, no brother can be excommunicated from 
their fellowship, more than be introduced into it, not even 
a new collection of Psalms and Hymns can be substituted 
for the old, no church scheme can be consummated, without 



3T 

the individual votes of the people. And the people having 
this power, are disciplined for its wise use. The adapta 
tions of our ecclesiastical regimen are perverted, unless the 
laymen, who are the depositaries of this authority, are 
trained to use it with discretion. Knowing the worth of 
their souls, they are incited to examine for themselves the 
truth which is revealed for their study. Feeling their indi 
vidual responsibility to God for their belief, they are in 
duced to search the Scriptures daily, whether the sermons 
which they hear be true. Hence, they derive a meditative 
faith, through grace acting upon them by these means. 
That is no tenacious faith which is received passively, and 
comes from a fear of a hierarch ; but that is the masculine 
belief, which comes of the Holy Ghost in the processes of 
careful thought and ripe intelligence. That is not faith 
which is transplanted from one mind into another, but that 
is faith which springs up and takes root, and grows in each 
individual mind under the dews of heavenly grace. When 
the clattering of church machinery does not drown the still 
small voice of truth for the ears of the people, when the 
brilliancy of an outward ceremonial does not blind their 
eyes to the meek visage of the Gospel, they learn to hold 
fast the pure word for its own sake. They are often ill 
fitted to analyse the scholastic theories of clergymen ; 
but they well know the substance of the Gospel, and 
this they bind close to them ; for it has comforted them 
at the birth of their children, or at the burial of their dead, 
or in some nameless peril or woe. They have a complexity 
of individual interests, and all these interests converge upon 
the Gospel. Their homely, but lasting, attachments are 
fastened upon it. When one man is alienated from the 
right way, the multitude are not ; they have no spirit of 
caste ; they are ill-adapted to form a cabal. If the clergy 
were separate from the people, and independent of them, 
their clerical profession would expose the adepts in its 
mysteries to a clannish influence. They would be tempted 



38 

to combine with each other, and all to go where a chief man 
goes. They would be liable to the seducement of a mistaken 
philosophy, which might have been rebuked by the round 
about sense of godly laymen. They would be ensnared by 
poetical vagaries, which the stern discipline of practical life 
might have dissipated. Hence, our church system unites 
the minister with his people in such an interdependence, 
that he finds their cordial philanthropy flowing up into him 
self, even as the head is nourished by the heart s warm 
blood. This philanthropy helps to regulate his specula 
tions, make them true to the wants of the soul, and true to 
the volume which was adapted of Heaven to these wants. 
If the clergy were independent of the people, they would 
often be misguided by partizan influences ; and religious 
parties are in danger of distorting some part of the compre 
hensive truth. They seize upon an insulated doctrine, 
magnify it out of its just proportions, and each faction is 
repelled from the other into some extreme views. The lay 
men, however, when our polity has its normal influence 
upon them, are not so easily pushed into sidelong measures. 
They must perceive some broad, tangible good to be gained, 
or they will not rally around a turbulent dogmatist. If a 
false doctrine, or a clannish scheme begin to fascinate the 
community, every distinct church is a new obstacle, and in 
the church itself, every distinct member is a new impedi 
ment to the proposal, unless the proposal have some palpa 
ble and sterling merit. Hence, it is notorious, that when 
false doctrine has inundated the church, it has flowed in 
from the clergy, and not from the people ; and when the 
people have been trusted with power commensurate with 
their spiritual culture, they have stimulated tbeir pastors to a 
maintenance of the simple truth. Our ecclesiastical system 
educates the people for their responsibilities, and by their re 
sponsibilities ; it honors them in training them, and in the pur 
pose for which they are trained. It thus gives them a conser 
vative influence, and prompts the clergy to respect that influ- 



39 

ence. Accordingly, we find that an immense majority of the 
churches standing on the republican platform, have re 
tained the evangelical faith; while the larger part of those 
which have been ruled by a hierarchy, have lapsed into 
error. A small fraction of the Church of England, with its 
Calvinistic creed and its skilful apparatus for enforcing it, is 
designated by the epithet evangelical ; while the Congrega- 
tionalists of England, with all their aversion to oecumenical 
symbols, are a model of unity in the evangelical belief. 
If the pastors were to abandon their faith, the people would 
stand fast upon it. It has been often objected, that among 
the fifteen hundred and twenty-one churches in the State of 
Massachusetts, one hundred and seventy-two are Unita 
rian.* Still, Unitarianism has not flourished so vigorously 
in this Puritan commonwealth as Deism has flourished 
under a more concentrated church government; not so ex 
tensively as in the opinion of wise observers it would 
have prevailed under any other than our free polity ; for if 
the churches of Massachusetts had been amalgamated into 
one state confederation, it is supposed that nearly all of 
them would have gone, where the few dominant spirits had 
led the way, and the Congregationalism of that venerable 
commonwealth would probably have been what the Pres- 
byterianism of England now is penetrated with Socinian- 
ism. The gracefulness of Buekminster, the amenity of 
Greenwood, the sober sense of Ware, the wit of Kirkland, 
the genius of Channing, the strength of Theophilus Parsons, 
himself a host, the fame of the University, the princely for 
tunes of the metropolis, would have carried the churches 
headlong, unless every church had been trained to stand on 

* In the State of Massachusetts are four hundred and seventy-three Tri 
nitarian congregational churches, two hundred and fifty Baptist churches, 
two hundred and fifty-five Methodist, one hundred and seventy-two Uni 
tarian, and three hundred and seventy-one churches of other denominations 
Episcopal, Catholic, Presbyterian, &c. Nearly one-third of the churches, 
then, are orthodox congregational, and nearly half of all the churches in the 
state unite the orthodox faith with the congregational polity. 



40 

its own foothold, and feel its responsibility to God rather 
than to the dignitaries of the state. The life of the churches 
in Massachusetts, after the irruption of Unitarianism, when 
contrasted with the death-like torpor of the Prussian churches 
after the irruption of Rationalism, affords an indisputable 
argument for the policy which trusts the conservation of the 
truth to a free people. It is a note- worthy fact, that those 
\ churches of New England, whose Congregationalism was the 
* most unshackled, remained the firmest against the Unitarian 
onset. While ecclesiastics, who had a centralized govern 
ment, were oscillating or yielding, the Baptists, who 
stretched Congregationalism into Independency, stood erect 
in the faith. The late Prof. Edwards, a divine eminent 
alike for his candor and accuracy, remarked, at the close of 
an extensive tour: "Throughout all my travels in Europe 
and in the southern states of our own country, I have never 
heard the doctrines of total depravity, regeneration, atone 
ment, sovereignty, decrees, and eternal punishment, pro 
claimed in so pungent and uncompromising a style, as I have 
ordinarily heard them among the congregationalists of our 
north-eastern states." 

The world has heard of New England divinity ; and the 
aim of this divinity has been, as its result has been, to 
maintain and to perpetuate a consistent Calvinism. Certain 
technical terms it has exchanged for others more strictly 
English. It has introduced some sharp distinctions where 
the words had been vague ; but the substance of it is the 
old idea, which, in the main, the fathers mean to express, and 
around which the minds of good men have always clustered ; 
this idea made more definite, more congruous with the sys 
tem of which it forms a part. That word sin, which had 
been loosely employed to denote various kinds of evil con 
nected with the transgression of the law, is used by New 
England divines in a more exact way, and limited to volun 
tary disobedience. That word punishment, which had been 
indefinitely employed to signify all the sufferings resulting 



41 

from sin, is used by New England divines in a more precise 
sense, and limited to the pains which express the divine and 
human disapproval of the sufferer s personal transgression. 
In the more guarded language of Dr. D wight, the main 
spirit of his theology would have been sanctioned by Tur- 
retin himself; and in the more ambiguous phraseology of 
Turretin, his real meaning would, in the main, have been 
sanctioned by Dr. D wight. The Edwardean definitions 
were introduced not to subvert the substance, but to con 
serve the substance of the old Calvinistic faith, and to pro 
long its influence over the mind of an intelligent commu 
nity. The people, intent on having a creed that may be 
preached to them, impatient of any religious system that 
must be hidden under a set of obscure technical terms, have 
emboldened, and even required their ministers to make the 
Edwardean analyses, and thus to portray fully and boldly 
the ancient faith in a form more consonant with its ruling 
spirit, and with the idioms of our speech ; and this is a sound 
conservatism. ISTot a conservatism of words that have 
changed their meaning not a conservatism of jargon, which 
the men who use it do not themselves understand, and for 
which they wrangle, because they are perplexed about it, 
but a conservatism of the truth, the essence of the same 
truth to which the sensibilities of good and plain men will 
ever cling. 

When President Edwards promulgated his views, the 
clergy opposed him. His friends were few, his foes were 
the vast majority of staid and gentlemanly divines. Had 
he and they been trained under an authoritative organiza 
tion of churches, there is little doubt that he would have 
been summoned before their tribunal, and in its summary 
action, every member of the court inflaming every other, and 
all of them in a state altogether unfit for grave deliberation 
on intricate themes, he would have been condemned, and in 
all likelihood a new denomination would have been started, 
and its differences from the old would have been exag- 



42 

gerated, and its distance from the old would have been 
looked upon as a great gulph. But he appealed to the 
sober men of the country, wherever he could find them ; 
they reflected, each man for himself, and some approved, 
others doubted ; and the more part could see no reason 
broad enough to warrant their refusal of fellowship with 
him ; and so the truth increased mightily. His friend 
Hopkins was thus encouraged to show his opinion. The 
clergy resisted him. He was reasoned against and rhymed 
against. If he and his enemies had been drilled under a 
concentrated government of churches, he also, in all likeli 
hood, would have been summoned for trial, and in the haste 
and heat of his judges, each one igniting the other, and dis 
qualifying the other for a patient study of his analyses, he, 
too, would have been the cause of a new explosion in the 
church, one fragment repelling, and repulsed by its antago 
nist. But he sought out the calm thinkers of the land, fit 
readers, though few ; he sent his volumes to the farmers and 
the merchants. They read ; each man by himself reflected ; 
some received, others disowned his views ; and the majority 
chose to see them discussed, rather than to see the church, 
divided ; and so again, the word of the Lord grew. The 
essential spirit of Calvinism made a bold stride. The friend 
of Hopkins, Emmons, was thus emboldened to publish his 
investigations. He had more clerical friends than either 
Edwards or Hopkins ; but they were less numerous than his 
opponents ; and if a church court could have seized upon 
him, he would have been crushed under its quick-rolling 
wheels, and schismatics would have been multiplied, and 
the denomination would have again been riven asunder. 
But he knew the patience of the people, their proverbial 
slowness to condemn any man who means well, and is about 
right ; and he threw his sermons among them ; they looked 
and pondered ; many disbelieved ; some approved ; but the 
dominant opinion was, that a sound creed would be pre 
served by candid thought longer than by judicatories and 
schisms ; and thus again the old faith of the church was yet 



43 

more surely imbedded in the heart of the people. Once and 
again argument has been followed by reply, and this by 
rejoinder, and these have called out the truth, and called 
up her friends ; and free minded men have rallied around 
her, and graced her triumph as she has marched forward 
scorning to drag bound captives in her train. Men who are 
interested in the truth will be sensitive to its differing 
phases, and sensitive men are eager to debate, and if multi 
plied controversies will save the church from rupture, let 
them come ; there is evil commingled with them, but they 
may deliver us from a sadder evil, spiritual torpor or 
violent schism ; and as it has been, so it will be, the truth 
is perpetuated by the free conflict of honest, earnest minds. 
Ever and anon among men to whom doctrine is presented 
simple, and who are anxious for its sure stay, there will be 
an outward commotion ; the cataract is troubled ; the sides 
of it are tremulous; we hear a deep rumbling at its base; 
and after ominous heavings, the crater is opened, and out 
comes a pamphlet ; and we call that a discussion, not a con 
cussion ; and if the pamphlet be a strong one, the people 
believe that it is strong, and so that matter is settled ; and 
if the pamphlet be a weak one, the people believe it is weak, 
and so that matter is settled. And the people trained to 
think for themselves on their bosom it is that every honest 
thinker may rely ; the men and women and children of the 
churches, incompetent as they may be for his scholastic 
subtleties, will feel the moral bearing of his arguments, and if 
this agree with their strong sense, and their Christian sense, 
they will come to his rescue from the ecclesiastical volcano, 
and not a hair of his head shall be singed, neither shall so 
much as the smell of fire pass upon his garments ; and he will 
remain a thinker still ; and it is by the pensive thought of 
erudite men in communion with their God, and in sympathy 
with his plain-hearted children, that the faith once delivered 
to the saints shall continue to be preached. For this faith is 
not conserved as an Egyptian king is embalmed, lying breath 
less in his cerements, under a pyramid that holds him safe, 



44 

but it is preserved living, in the free air, and amid ele 
ments that move. It is the indication of all history in this 
land, and in every land, that the principles of Biblical 
science are to be retained in their healthful vigor, and kept 
free from partizan distortions, by that ecclesiastical regimen 
which relies on argument rather than human authority, and 
on the plain sense of men acting, as God has assorted them, 
with a manly faith in their equal rights, rather than on the 
irresponsible mastership of a few who are accustomed to hold 
empire. There is nothing which so intoxicates the mind of 
the ruler and enfeebles the mind of the ruled, as the domi 
nion of a small coterie over a wide-spread ecclesiastical com 
munion. 

But the spirit of a pure church is not merely retentive ; it 
is aggressive also. We have been visited with the charge, 
that our distinctive polity, while it will hold its own on its 
own ground, has no power of advancement; it is not the 
form for the world- religion, nor even for the religion of our 
entire land ; it still remains blocked up within a few ice 
bound states. This attitude of repose, however, has resulted 
from a benevolent concession rather than a want of vitality. 
Because we relied on the noble temper of our neighbors, 
and voluntarily yielded our denominational interest to 
theirs, we are said to have made a virtue of our necessity, 
and to have abstained from our church extension because 
we were incompetent to carry it forward. These are un 
grateful charges. The very fact that our regimen is elastic, 
and will open itself so as to adopt all appropriate beauties, 
or will close itself so as to shut out all offensive ornaments, 
and will bend itself to all tastes which are not bad, and will 
be pliable enough to encourage all predilections that are 
good, is enough to prove that it encloses the springs of an 
onward movement. Its germinal principles give it a progres 
sive life ; for if a man revere the souls of his fellow-men, 
and feel his responsibility to God for them, and a love of the 
truth which is their vital strength, he must be earnest in 



45 

diffusing this truth in its best forms. He loves the forms, 
because they aid sound doctrine. He desires to extend the 
free principles of the church, because they favor a candid 
and a pure orthodoxy. Our fathers acted out the real feel 
ing which their ecclesiastical system inspired, when they 
sent preachers to the red man, as soon as they had built 
churches for themselves, and had scarcely reared their own 
cottages at the time of their beginning to erect a university 
for the defence and the dissemination of the gospel ; and 
they established a system of collegiate instruction better 
fitted for their times than the present system is for our times. 
Nearly all the colleges of New England were founded 
expressly for the spread of religious doctrine. The prime 
necessities of our system require that our schools be well 
endowed ; that they give an impulse to every species of 
literature, send forth ministers able to instruct intelligent 
laymen, and to commend the truth to every man s con 
science. The same divine,* who was one of the most active 
in originating the oldest Theological Seminary in the land, 
was also one of the most active in starting the associated 
effort for our domestic missions, and was one of the two 
men who projected the oldest board for foreign missions; 
the cause of learning and the cause of an aggressive Chris 
tianity being identified in his esteem. Two of the same 
divinesf who originated that ancient seminary, were the first 
to propose our most ancient education society, and one of 
the most honored pupils of that seminary,;): stated, a few 
months before his demise : "1 could never have done what 
I did in the incipient movements of the American Tract 
Society, nor in the forming of the American Temperance 
Society, nor in the establishment of the American Sabbath 
Union, unless I had enjoyed the aid of a popular and un 
fettered church government, allowing me to combine the 
agencies of enterprising individuals whenever and wherever 
I could find them men accustomed to act for themselves 

* Dr. Samuel Spring, f Drs. Pearson and Morse. \ Dr. Justin Edwards. 



46 

minute-men, ready for every good work, without waiting 
for the jarring and warring of church, courts." All these 
benevolent societies are for the extension of truth in its 
diversified forms ; and when the genius of congregational- 
ism hovers over these societies, as they hold their annual 
jubilee in Boston or New York, she does not exclaim, 
" These are my jewels," because some of them came from 
her mines; but she does say, that if her friends, in propor 
tion to their means, are one whit behind the very chiefest of 
the churches in spurring onward the movement for the 
world s obedience to the truth, then they are recreant to the 
primal law of their system ; they are the ossified sons of a 
flexile parent; and while there is impulse in their principles 
and their history, there is a paralysis only in themselves. 



the institution of the Church harmonises with 
our desire for our intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and religious 
improvement. We often hear, that even in our most inac 
curate translations of the Bible there is presented a clear 
view of the evangelical system. Equally true is it, that in 
the most corrupt forms of the church there is some tendency 
to gratify our innate love of progress. The Romish commu 
nion has elevated the mind of its members above the stan 
dard of heathenism. Her Aquinas and Abelard, her Paschal 
and Bossuet have suggested ideas which would have en 
larged the intellect of Plato or Aristotle. The taste of the 
world has been refined by her lofty Basilicas, her Gregorian 
chants, and we all bow with reverence before the piety of 
her Bernards, Anselms and Fenelons. It is a mistake to 
suppose that all desire of improvement has been crushed out 
by her compact organization. Still there is danger that when 
ever honest rnen, exposed to heterogeneous influences, are 
brought under a consolidated and extended church-govern 
ment they will experience frequent checks to their progress in 
good. There is danger that every individual will be less or 
more subdued by the fear of advancing farther or faster than 



47 

the unit advances, of which unit he feels himself to be but 
an insignificant fraction. When the man sinks under the 
polity, he loses somewhat of his impulse to form his own 
opinions, and is sometimes persuaded to abnegate the right 
of private judgment. He sacrifices the freshness and vitality 
of his conceptions to the idea, often romantic and fascinat 
ing, of the one church absorbing all its members. He is 
tempted to aggrandize the stereotyped creed of a human 
tribunal, above the ever living Word. The love of improve 
ment is fostered by nothing more than freedom from artifi 
cial restraint. This freedom is the element in which the 
soul was destined to move. He thinks well, who thinks as 
God inclines him. 

It has been objected, that while the desire of intellectual 
progress may be gratified by the ecclesiastical system of the 
Pilgrims, the taste is neglected by it. The commissioners of 
Charles II. uttered an oft repeated complaint when they said 
of the churches of Massachusetts, that u their way of govern 
ment is Commonwealth-like ; their way of worship is rude, 
and called Congregational." We own that careless 
preachers may give to our ceremonies an appearance of 
rudeness. Whoever does so, however, himself wants sensi 
bility, not the material, for a graceful worship. Destitute 
of a rubric, ministers may deviate into offensive peculiarities 
of style, and hence arises a new motive for them to cultivate 
their sense of propriety and beauty, but the Congregational 
worship may and should be conformed to the canons of the 
most exact taste. In its freeness lies its capability of grati 
fying our love of aesthetic culture. The paintings of 
Raphael do not adorn our temples ; but the august doctrines 
of which the canvas gives but a faint outline, may be pic 
tured forth with a fulness and variety which would refine the 
character of the most delicate artist, and which are excluded 
by the pericope and the liturgy from what are called the 
more elegant churches. The statues of Canova and Thor- 
waldsen do not ornament the niches in our sanctuaries, but 



48 

by the ricli thoughts expressed with comely phrase in our 
Psalms and Hymns, and iti the sermons of such men as 
Bates and Howe, the genius of the most cunning sculptor 
may be quickened ; and these thoughts will do more than a 
cathedral in refining the taste of worshippers. The plain 
announcement of a district prayer-meeting where the God 
of truth is to be supplicated, educates a sensibility to the fit 
and the noble, better than it can be trained by swinging cen 
sers or marble altars. Our church covenants have been stig 
matized as inexpressive and crude ; but when properly com 
posed and read they are eloquent symbols of Christian 
charity and care. Our communion service has been repre 
sented as bald and unattractive ; but its very simplicity is 
eloquence ; the modesty of its outward forms makes men 
sensitive to inward beauty ; and while sitting in silence with 
the consecrated bread in his hand, the communicant gains a 
clearer idea of the grandeur of truth, than he would ever 
gain from the disquieting ceremonies of a more showy reli 
gion. We learn the delicacy of Christian themes by such 
external observances as subject matter to mind, and are so 
chaste and suggestive as to raise the attention above them to 
the truths which they eloquently signify. He who cherishes 
an intelligent love for comprehensive doctrine, is prepared 
to delight in all beauty ; and he who exhibits the truth in 
forms which most clearly set forth and show out its own 
sublimity, cultivates therein a taste for all that is symmetri 
cal and grand. Such a careful discipline in the divine word 
as our church services allow us to give, nurtures a reverent 
spirit; and such unobtrusive ceremonies as conceal the least 
and expose the most of those doctrines which awaken 
reverence, are in the most admirable harmony with the 
aesthetic laws. It is a vitiated taste that studies to introduce 
unnatural insignia of the church ; and a pure church is, in 
fact though not in seeming, a kind of university for aesthetic 
as well as intellectual culture. Much more then is it a school 
for moral and religious improvement. All our powers and 



49 

sensibilities are so connected that the advance of one facili 
tates the advance of all. As a simple ritual refines the 
taste, so a simple government purifies the moral feeling. It 
tends to repress ambition and envy, to elicit a sense of fair 
ness and honor, to nurture a fraternal spirit. The church 
makes a daily appeal to the conscience, to gratitude for the 
past, and hope for the future, to all our religious feelings, 
and aims to make every virtue luminous, shining brighter 
and brighter unto the perfect day. It does in fact secure a 
regular growth of right feeling, and thus it breathes into the 
mind that serenity which results from a consciousness of pro 
gress in the highest of all excellence. It facilitates and 
expedites improvement, by assuring the pious of their being- 
predestinated to improve. There is one grace, in particular, 
which it is eminently fitted to nurture and I therefore 
remark : 

Seventhly, the institution of the Church appeals to, ex 
presses, and strengthens, the catholic spirit of renewed men. 
Because they prize their individual responsibility, they re 
joice so much the more in their moral oneness with the en 
tire kingdom of God. Their freedom from outward liga 
ments which restrain spontaneous movement, makes their 
charity the heartier ; for the peace of men is the more undis 
turbed when they are not unnaturally tied together. Some 
divines are fond of describing the visible church as an undi 
vided organism comprehending all visible Christians. But in 
so far as they amalgamate separate churches into one exter 
nal organization, they diminish the number of true churches ; 
they lose in extent what they gain in intensity ; and for the 
sake of an historical genus, they lessen the variety and the 
opulence of the species. But the Biblical theory is more 
august ; it represents the ecclesiastical organism as a spiritual 
one, all obedient men being the body of which Christ is the 
head, and he and they animated by one soul, and this life-giv 
ing-spirit, this Holy Ghost, being also the vital principle of the 

4 



50 



church in heaven, cementing them with us in one commu 
nion. This moral organism widens our charities, that they 
take into their embrace all who are embosomed in God s 
love. 

There is a sectarian spirit. It multiplies the outward 
insignia of a church, and attracts men to a sect by the super 
ficial adornings or the skilful machinery of that sect. But 
the church system of our fathers and of the apostles, drops 
the external badges that are not in themselves an edifying 
species of eloquence, and puts in their place the main prin 
ciples of the gospel, and these principles are Catholic. A 
sectarian temper aggrandizes the positive peculiarities of a 
church, and is tardy in recognising the merits of those who 
neglect some outward rite, or disown some philosophical 
theory. But the ecclesiastical creed, which our fathers 
learned from inspired men, lets its few positive peculiarities 
fall behind and sink beneath the cardinal doctrines of the 
Bible. And these doctrines are oecumenical. The fewer arti 
ficial rites are associated with them, so much the more 
readily may they be diffused through the world. A pure 
church is ample in its benevolence, and is ashamed to con 
tract the charity of its friends, by detruding from its fellow 
ship any good men who utter sibboleth for shibboleth. 
Here is the grandeur of our communion, that it stands forth 
large-hearted, grasping the essential truths of Christianity, 
and inviting to its brotherhood all who love these truths, 
even if in minor particulars they follow not us. There are 
churches outnumbering our specific organizations, and ex 
cluding from their communion Luther and Zuingle, White- 
field and "Wesley, Carey and Fuller, Eobinson and Eliot. 
But our organization, specifically limited, is generically 
large, and sweeps into itself the pious men of all evangelical 
sects, adopting as essentially its own disciples, not only the 
Eliots and the Kobinsons, the Fullers and the Careys, the 
Wesleys and the Whitefields, the Zuingles and the Luthers, 
but also the Fenelons and the Pascals, the Anselms and the 



51 

Bernards. All churches whom G-od owns are ours, and we 
are Christ s, if we inspire the generous breath of a living 
Puritanism. A sectarian will not unite with other denomi 
nations in beneficent enterprises, unless his own sect can be 
repaid for its contributions, by well-counted and well-pro 
portioned gains ; so much for so much. But the churches 
of the Pilgrims have poured out their treasures, and parted 
with their men more than jewels and have consecrated 
these gifts with their prayers for the noble charities in which 
they have fraternised with other sects, and have never asked, 
and have never received, any private emolument meted out 
as a recompense for their public services. No. It is the 
honor of our Catholic communion, that she has forgotten her 
sectarian welfare in her zeal for the general good, and loves 
her name because it allies her with the whole congregation 
of the people of God. A sectarian will resist the ingress 
and the progress of other churches upon territories which he 
has appropriated to the exclusive benefit of his favorite sect, 
and will rejoice in " union" only when it is, or promises to 
be, an amalgamation of other parties in one, and that his 
own. It must be a " union" all on one side. But a church 
that aims to be Catholic welcomes all good men, of all 
names, to do in their own way, on their own soil, or on any 
soil, all the good which they can do by all fair means which 
they can use. It reprimands no sect for attempting to live, 
but only for attempting to take the life of its brethren. It 
demands of no church that it abandon its ecclesiastical creed, 
but only that it have a benignant temper toward all the 
faithful in Christ Jesus. We call heaven and earth to wit 
ness, that we rejoice in the welfare of any church whose pure 
aim is to gather the wanderers from virtue into the congre 
gation of the saints. Our comparative indifference to exter 
nal rites has been interpreted into a sign of conscious weak 
ness and want of self-respect. It has been reported that we are 
grown tired and sick of our Congregational platform, and 
are willing to see it crumble down piece by piece. We can 



52 

never flourish, it is said, unless we become more exclusive. 
Often has it been objected against us, that we are not sec 
tarian enough ; that we have no denominational apparatus 
upon which our zealots can play with ease ; that hearers 
who attend upon our services, and happen to be pleased with 
our divines, have yet no love for our system as such, and 
escape from it when they leave the repulsive climate of 
New England ; that we do not even retain our own children 
within our ecclesiastical embrace ; that we bring men up to 
habits of diffusive charity, and this charity eases their escape 
into other denominations, and some of these denominations 
insinuate their own spirit into men whom they induce to give 
up for a party what was educated for mankind, and thus the 
very spirits once in fellowship with us become alienated from 
us, and the children are bigoted against their mother. "We 
admit that some of our most vehement opposers are men 
who have eaten of our bread, and thence derived their 
strength. Even in the church of Rome are divines who dug 
up their treasures from our fields. It is not true, however, 
that our ecclesiastical system is barren of allurement to those 
whom it has trained. Its very liberality is fitted to attract 
wise men. They love it because it is not sectarian. They 
cling to it because it saves its friends from narrow schemes ; 
they toil for it as an antagonist to bigotry ; they desire the 
extension of it as conducive to the spiritual enlargement of 
its neighbors. We love the generous churches of our fathers, 
because we love all other churches, and hold the world in 
our embrace. We venerate the memory of our ancestors, 
and in our heart of hearts cherish the polity bequeathed to 
us by men who were better qualified than any uninspired 
men to detect the adaptations of a church for the structure 
of society. We adhere to the polity which they recom 
mended to us, because, while certain other polities have 
become bad masters of their adherents, our system is a good 
servant. It recognises a broad distinction between a deno 
minational interest and a sectarian zeal. A denominational 



53 

interest is a regard for the characteristics of a denomination 
on account of and in proportion to their real worth ; it cul 
tivates the deeper reverence for the more important excel 
lences ; and it honors all denominations just so far as they 
exalt the essential truth above incidental theories or notions. 
But a sectarian zeal is a fe vid attachment to the peculiari 
ties of a sect, whatever the sect may be ; it is more conten. 
tious for the minor distinctions of a system than their rela 
tive value justifies ; it demands of all differing sj^stems, even 
if they be right in the main, that they yield their peculiari 
ties while itself yields nothing, their concessions tallying 
well with its exorbitancy. The records of the past assure 
us, that our system has been kindly and charitable, has gone 
about doing good, and has often given up its life for its 
brethren. So it deserves to live. So our trust is in the 
God of our fathers it will live. 

This day are we convened to polish the golden chain that 
binds us together. From the East and the "West are we 
come, that we may perpetuate and enjoy the Catholic spirit 
of our communion. We have diversities of opinion among 
ourselves, but there is no harmony that comes not from 
variant voices. A true union is of different men. Some of 
our brethren may be belligerent, as everywhere are persons 
with a peculiar genius for the church militant. Others of 
our brethren may prefer a dormant attitude, and shrink 
from the faintest whispers of a controversy. Let not these 
two classes separate from each other ; but let the chivalrous 
impart of their vigor, and let the pacific give of their cha 
rity, each to each. Some of our brethren may be young 
men, predestined to remain young whatever may be their 
years ; young by nature and younger by practice. Others of 
our brethren may be old men ; old by original inheritance, 
superannuated not from the lapse of time, nor of their own 
free will, but superannuated from their very birth. Let not 
these two races of Christians repel each other. Let those 
who are constitutionally safe cleave to the imprudent and 



54 

guide them ; and let those who are organically impetuous 
rally round the lethargic to stimulate them and spur them 
onward. Some of us may be expert in nothing but loading 
the ship with ballast. Others of us may be quick in nothing 
but spreading out the sails. Let neither party leave the 
ship, because of their differing tact ; lest the party who are 
eager for progress should be wafted to the shore and there 
stayed and stranded, and lest the party adverse to movement 
should overload themselves, and make their progress down 
ward. Our wisdom is to remain together, with a fellow- 
feeling and in loving kindness toward each other and 
toward all men. Forgiving those who misinterpret our 
measures and misjudge our motives, let us illustrate the 
benevolence of our own communion ; let us develop its 
power to apprehend and advance the spirit of the gospel ; let 
us exemplify its salient energies ; let us be more faithful 
than, we have been to its diversified aptitudes for the moral 
culture of the race in every benevolent scheme ; and, above 
a ll j for without this all effort is fruitless, let us feel, each 
man in the depths of his own heart, that all our help is in 
God ; that without prayer to Him we have no hope ; that all 
our failures are our own fault, and that all our successes are 
to the praise of the glory of His grace, to whom as in the days 
of our fathers, so now and for ever more, be honor, and power, 
and dominion. 



THE MISSION OF CONGREGATIONALISM AT THE WEST. 



ADDRESS, 



DELIVERED MAY 10, 1854, IN BROOKLYN, N. Y., BEFORE THE 



AMERICAN CONGREGATIONAL UNION, 



BY 

T. M. POST. 



THE MISSION OF CONGREGATIONALISM 
AT THE WEST. 



ADDRESS. 



BRETHREN OF THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION : I attri 
bute my invitation to address you, on this, your first anniver 
sary, to my geographic position. The kind missive of your 
committee, which reached me beyond the great Father of 
"Waters, I ascribed to a wish on their part to express the 
national, I may say, continental reach of the sympathy and 
fraternity of this Union ; and to aid this expression I am 
come. 

I suppose, also, I am called here to-day as an outlier to 
wards our frontier ; if not of the extreme west of our denomi 
nation and country, at least as far towards it as the call of 
this Union to its annual rendezvous can at present expect 
a regular response. When the great pathway to the Orient, 
through the gates of the sunset, shall have been achieved, and 
the commerce of teas and ideas between London and Pekin 
shall be expressed and telegraphed through the gorges of 
the Eocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, then we may 
look for our brethren of Oregon and California, with the 
dust of the golden shore and the spray of the ocean that 
washes the Spice Islands, fresh on their garments, coming up 
with a week s whirr across the continent to our yearly con 
vocation. But for this we have to wait, though I believe 
not long. 

At present, those living under my line of longitude may, 
perhaps, truly be regarded by our denomination as border 
men, a sort of wardens of the marches ; though in no very 



58 

distant future, the centre of Congregationalism as well as 
Anglo-Saxondom on this continent, will, I believe, be a hun 
dred leagues beyond our western horizon. It is only the 
fact of our nearer vision of the ever-flying frontier, our com 
parative proximity to where the outer wave of our popula 
tion, with a flow that never ebbs, dashes on the great wilder 
ness, and each year wins an empire from the waste, that 
gives whatever of peculiar interest may now attach to utter 
ances from what a decade since was the " far west." Ours 
is a post of nearer outlook on the genesis of a new world. 
It is of the relations of our denominational system of faith 
and order to that world, in its genetic agitation, that in this 
time and place I interpret it as my call to speak. lias Con 
gregationalism a mission and sphere amid the creative forces of 
that world ? 

By Congregationalism, I do not mean simply our church 
polity, or simply our church creed. Each already exists and 
thrives there, in various ecclesiastic bodies. But I mean our 
faith wedded to our polity. Is not our faith entitled to 
whatever advantages of disembarrassment and energy would 
be rendered to it by our polity ? and ought not our polity 
to have its power enhanced in beneficence by blending it 
with our faith ? Is not their combination demanded among 
the organic powers of this perpetuated new creation ? The 
church of the Pilgrim Fathers, a power so mighty and 
beneficent in organizing the East, is it a requisite and desira 
ble element in the elaboration of a Christian civilization at 
the West ? Has it an especial adaptation, sphere, or duty 
there ? 

This question is proposed in no invidious or exclusive 
spirit. We are not asking whether as aggressor and com 
batant, with effort and aspiration after solitary or supreme 
dominion, Congregationalism is to enter the field of the 
West. No ; nothing like this ; nothing in disparagement 
at all. Not a jot or tittle would I bate of respect for the 
many noble, gifted, and earnest men of various ecclesiastic 



59 

banners, that are now, and for toilsome and weary years 
have been, laboring there in the name of the Lord. Of such, 
many sleep in Jesus, in the solemn shadows of the wilder 
ness ; but their memory is fragrant through all that land. 
Many of them toil on in obscurity and penury. But their 
riches and their record above are such as monarchs might 
covet ; they are men tried and true, with the scars of honor 
able warfare on them ; they bear on their bodies, their toil- 
worn and thought- worn countenances, their forms bent under 
life s many burdens, the marks of the Lord Jesus. They 
are the heroes of many a sore conflict with hardship, and 
want, and care, and pain, and unattended sickness, and life 
long griefs ; conflicts unwitnessed, save of God and the 
angel. Such men I delight to meet with, to preach with, to 
pray with ; I give them my hand and heart ; my sympathy ; 
my admiration ; my love. Heaven forbid that differences in 
opinion, which do not divide from Christ, should ever divide 
me from such men. For such men, under any symbol, I 
thank God ; and would they were a thousand fold more 
numerous and more successful than they are. Of such, too, 
I have confidence that they would willingly grant to me 
the same liberty of denominational opinion and argument 
which I cheerfully accord to them ; and will feel no offence 
in a freedom in utterance of preferences and convictions, 
which I am sure their Christian frankness and conscientious 
ness would lead them in like circumstances to use. 

The question I propose to discuss is simply this : Has 
Congregationalism a work of its own in the social problem 
of the West ? Has she some peculiar adaptation to the wants 
of that world ? Some especial capacities for beneficent action 
there that constitute to her an imperious duty of the present 
time ? If so, what is that duty ? Or, on the other hand, is 
there some reason why she, of all the Christian sisterhood, is 
to be excluded from that vast field ? why she alone should 
refuse to accompany her children in their migration westward, 



60 

or to extend her institutions as fast and as far as the people 
may desire ? 

I put the question because, in consequence of measures 
springing primarily from laudable aspirations after Christian 
unity, Congregationalism has come to be regarded beyond 
certain degrees of longitude, as an exotic and an intruder ; 
as if ruled out of the West by some tacit or formal compro* 
mise, or excluded from it by some unhappy antipathetic 
idiosyncrasy. While her sons and daughters have to flee for 
their lives from the fogs and frosts of the east, she, alas! can 
live nowhere else. Her temperament would seem most 
decidedly antibilious. Beyond a certain line, she has been 
expected to resign her identity, and submit to a transmuta 
tion, or translation 

" Into something rich and strange " 

passing by a sort of euthanasia into another ecclesiastic sys 
temsimilar in creed and worship, and embodying a noble 
order of Christian men, eminent for intelligence, piety, and 
power, but widely distinctive in the principles of its polity. 
The attempted union by compromise or suppression of 
essential organic principles, has bred manifold disasters ; in 
ternal agitation and oppugnancy, convulsions and disruption. 
Are these disasters necessary ? Different denominations may 
combine for many objects most beneficently. But is the in 
corporation of different organic ideas in the same ecclesiastic 
structure expedient or desirable? Is it for the peace or 
power of the church ? Is there anything in the condition 
of the West that renders it necessary ? Anything forbid- 
ding Christian denominations there as elsewhere, pursuing 
distinctively, with their proper natural force and adaptive- 
ness, their peculiar methods of Christian work ? 

To answer these questions fully, would require an analysis 
of mind and society at the West, their tendencies, tastes, and 



61 

aptitudes, their action within themselves, and their relation 
to the general interests of our civilization and Christianity. 
We should then have to inquire, what characteristics of 
ecclesiastic order and action this analysis of the West would 
indicate as requisite to conciliate and mould it? what it 
needs ? what it demands ? what it will bear ? what will most 
effectively co-operate with its dominant spirit and ideas ? In 
the third place, we should have to complete our argument 
with the inquiry, to what extent does the church of the 
Pilgrim Fathers meet these exigencies of the West? This 
method of argument we shall aim to pursue ; though our 
present limits will allow us to develope it but imperfectly. 

From the first glance at the West, considered by itself, or 
in its general relation to the kingdom of Christ, springs our 
main proposition, viz. The West requires the mightiest forces 
we can there introduce for the creation of a Christian order. 

All colonial civilizations exhibit this requirement, ours 
especially. Our republic presents a peculiar blending of the 
Colonial and Metropolitan in its aspects. The "West," of 
which we inquire, is no fixed territory. No map of it is 
good for more than a year; its boundaries are constantly 
wavering, ever-receding lines. It is that ever-moving belt 
of increment, with which our nation is expanding towards 
the setting sun, the ever renewed ring of growth on our 
national tree. The West, therefore, is the part constantly 
being incorporated with whatever new elements it may bring 
into our national life, the part where deadliest injuries and 
poisonous influences are most readily introduced, and where 
blossoms of fruit, too, are thickest, and richest, and frailest. 
It is consequently the place where the vital energy, assimi 
lative, eliminating, and organic, is especially in requisition ; 
the place of ever-fresh peril and promise, and of ever-renewed 
vital conflict"; the " West," thus, is synonymous with the ever 
receding battle-ground of our national life. 

Again, the "West," in the shifting map of the world, marks 
especially the birth-place of empire, I might almost say, the 



62 

birth-era; for our "West" is a composite idea of time and 
place combined. It is that portion of our territory over 
which the zone of the births of empires is casting its ever- 
westering shadow the ever-drifting natal " Delos" of new 
nations, following the sun in his flight. Its definition is its 
plea. A plastic era a formative zone a social deep, 
momently crystallizing to the marble and granite of new 
worlds ; it surely needs no argument for the urgent appli 
cation to it, of the mightiest and most beneficent forces of 
social order. 

This plea of the West, found in its very definition, becomes 
awful in its force, in view of its relations to the vast problem 
of American history and civilization. The constant blend 
ing of the colonial and metropolitan influences in the life of 
our empire, presents to us vast perils and vast prizes. The 
colonies of other nations, as subject dependencies or inde 
pendent off-shoots, have been separate from themselves. 
With us they grow immediately upon the main body of the 
empire, and become constantly incorporate with it. The 
relation thus established between the colonial and metro 
politan elements, constitutes our trial ; because all dangers, 
disorders, and distemperatures incident to the former, are 
immediately communicated to the latter. It constitutes an 
advantage as it presents peculiar facilities for combining con 
servatism with reform, and progress with order. It may 
blend in union salutary for both, the enthusiasm of novelty 
with reverence for the old ; the sobriety of experience with 
the daring of adventure ; the wisdom of age with the ardor 
and hopefulness of youth. There is a play of forces and 
influences thus constantly kept up between the metropolitan 
and colonial elements, favorable to energy and activity, and 
generative of that highest kind of power which results from 
the rare combination of discipline with liberty, and a free 
life with a strong order. While growth is free and bound 
less, that whereto and whereon it grows, is fixed strong and 
deep, a granite peak, the centre of accretion, amid coralline 



68 

seas. So, while the metropolitan east furnishes, to a great 
extent, the organic principle, the plastic mould, and the 
norm of crystallization, the colonial west, on the other hand, 
exhibits constantly new exigencies for the application or 
modification of old ideas and institutions; and the startle of 
a limitless empiricism amid new scenes, with new material, 
and in a magnificent and ever-moving theatre. It exhibits 
a constant necessity of primordial and organic works ; com 
pelling minds to look through forms to primal principles, 
and to pursue principles to their ultimate consequences ; and 
tending to make them bold, energetic, inventive, resourceful, 
and sagacious. These qualities, through the quick sympa 
thies of national unity, imbue our entire civilization, and 
impart to the national character the impress of a bold, saga 
cious, generous, and powerful life. 

Colonization, with its novelty and freedom, its emancipa 
tion from old ideas and institutions, and its stimulus of new 
facilities and necessities, was among the mightiest motive 
forces of ancient civilization. The transfer of the elder 
Egyptian and Phoenician to the shores of Greece, was a vast 
step in the history of humanity. Ionia, again, daughter 
more beautiful of a beautiful mother, presenting to antiquity 
the first fruits of Grecian Philosophy, Poesy, and Art, 
attested the benefits of a second transplantation of the 
" Hellenic" stock to Asia. So of Carthage in reference to 
"Tyre," and of the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent 
compared with the aboriginal stock. But in all the above 
cases, the reaction of the colonial upon the metropolitan 
civilization was comparatively slow and feeble, because of 
political and geographic separation. With us it is instanta 
neous and pervasive, as in a single living organism. Con 
sequently the freedom, energy, bold practical sagacity, and 
the spirit of reform and adventure of young communities, 
will, in our case, blend more perfectly with the riper, richer, 
and more polished culture, the graver and more conservative 
temperament, and the stronger genius of order in the metro- 



64 

politan section. From the combination we may expect a 
resultant civilization of singular brilliancy and power. 

But offset to these advantages, are peculiar dangers: 
rashness, recklessness, irreverence, presumptuous empiri 
cism ; social, religious, and political charlatanism ; anarchy, 
barbarism, infidelity ; these are vices that, through constant 
colonial contact, may infect the nation s life-blood. 

To increase these hazards a medley of all nations, kindreds, 
languages, and civilizations, mingle on our colonial border. 
This may make the resultant order more composite and 
complete ; but it vastly enhances the difficulties of the for 
mative period, and multiplies the dangers of colonial influ 
ence to our civilization and empire. Such are the prizes, 
and such the perils of our national expansion; and such 
they must be till we incorporate our belt of the continent. 
The trial is for stupendous issues ; for a resultant social 
structure more perfect than the earth has hitherto seen, or a 
ruin that shall fill the darkest cycle of history with the 
clangor of its conflagration and fall. 

Everything then the work to be done, the exigency of 
the crisis, and the vastness of the issues demands of us the 
mightiest powers for social fusion and assimilation, and for 
the creation of a Christian civilization that we can introduce 
into the West. Now then, is or is not our ecclesiastical 
system one element, at least, in such a force? Has it not 
already proved in history its aptitudes as the church of a 
colonial era, showing itself one of the mightiest elaborators 
of an intelligent and powerful social order? and in the stu 
pendous process of world-building, now going forward in 
the West, may she not still do good service as a social 

architect ? 

To answer these questions, let us first inquire a httJ 
analytically what must be some of the characteristics of an 
ecclesiastical system that shall have most power to subdue 
and form to Christian order the western mind ? What must 
be its spirit, method, and organic idea? And then, again, 



65 

to what extent does Congregationalism exhibit these cha 
racteristics ? 

1. First, then, in order to be the most effective architect 
of Christian civilization, the western ecclesiastical system 
must be one of genuine and earnest sympathy with liberty, 
spiritual and civil From causes I cannot stop here to detail, 
but which are obvious to the first glance at our colonial con 
dition and elements, democratic liberty, in church and state, 
is to the West as its breath of life. "No church can acquire 
great and lasting power that is not, or does not profess to be, 
in sympathy with this master passion. Aside from all con 
siderations of the morality and the reasonableness of this 
sentiment, the democratic genius of the West requires it in 
order to any effective working in its presence. 

2. Again, the West requires of a system that claims to 
meet her wants, that it be an effective creator and diffuser of a 
general and commanding Christian intelligence; that it be a 
mighty and universal educator, intellectual and moral. By 
such an instrumentality alone, can a social fusion and unity 
be effected of its heterogeneous elements. Thus only can 
the millions be fitted for the work of social architecture 
which the millions there have to do. By virtue of the demo 
cratic prerogative, which there sweeps through the lowest 
circle, and the democratic spirit which there pervades all 
things, the million, be they blind, godless, degraded, or the 
reverse, still are eminently the destined builders of civiliza 
tion and empire at the West. Beyond all other lands, there* 
fore, just now, the West needs to have its millions pervaded, 
leavened, and organized, by a profound and universal Chris 
tian reason. It, therefore, needs a system, not only most 
effective to diffuse truth, but to discipline the popular mind 
to a vigorous and sagacious logic, endue it with a practical, 
resourceful, and independent understanding, and with clear 
and profound thought. Such qualities are eminently neces 
sities of western society in the formative era. 

3. Again, the West demands a system that shall attempt to 

5 



66 

master its mind, not through authority or dogmatism, hierarchical 
prerogative, orsynodical edict; much less through pageant, dumb 
show, puerile mummery ; lut through intrinsic evidence and 
independent argument addressed to its free reason and conscience. 
Nowhere is the philosophic method more Cartesian, or the 
habit of the popular mind more that of direct, bold, prac 
tical insight into things themselves. Prescription, formulary, 
dogma, have been extensively left behind by emigrants to 
the western wilderness ; as in the ancient world were 
Patriarchism, Caste, and Priest-rule, by the Orientals in 
their migration to the Occident of that age Europe. 

4. Again, the West requires a church system, that, in its 
interior structure and tvorJdng, developes the greatest power for 
the attainment of the proper supreme end of a church, viz. the 
greatest power for giving Gods truth its ascendency over the 
human mind. In other words, it requires that system, that, 
in its interior adjustment, hits the nearest possible that 
medium between organic unity and authority on the one 
hand, and individual freedom and activity on the other ; that 
most perfectly llends these two opposite forces in harmonious 
co-operation for the attainment of the great common end. 

The highest power of an organization for a given end, is 
in that combination that most completely unites for its 
attainment the forces of Order and Liberty, Progress with 
Conservatism, Corporate Concert with Individual Kespon- 
sibility. The Christian church, therefore an organization, 
whose end respects what is essentially and eternally free, the 
individual reason, conscience, and will must present to the 
West, in order to subdue it to Christ, a living and not a 
mere mechanic order ; the unity of free reasons, consciences, 
and wills, and not of command, compulsion, or fear ; a self- 
wrought organism, "vital in every part," and not the force- 
wrought inertia of dead enginery. 

Such are some of the requirements of the West, of a church 
that is to meet its exigencies. Our next inquiry is, how 
Congregationalism meets these requirements ? Its harmony 



67 

with the democratic spirit of the West, its natural sympathy 
with liberty of body and soul, and with the bold philosophic 
method of the western mind, I shall not stop to argue. 
These are obviously of its very essence ; they lie in its defi 
nition. Nor need I advocate its claim as an educator of the 
million. History is her most eloquent advocate in this 
claim. Freedom, individual responsibility, and activity, are 
always educators. These, as they attach to our system, are 
a constant gymnastic of the intellect and conscience, a per 
petual discipline of the individual and the multitude to a 
sagacious, practical, self-regulative reason and will. The 
tendencies of such a system to establish and maintain a 
beneficent, powerful, and wise social order, need no argu 
ment. Indeed the land in which we meet to-day makes 
such argument in behalf of Congregationalism nugatory. 
We are too near the roar of her own ocean. Standing 
where we are, she can point to the results of centuries of 
trial ; to busy marts, cities of machinery ; fields of rich agri 
culture, a thousand flock-clad hills ; a thousand mountain 
torrents subdued to the service of art; to barren strand and 
the bleak granite draped with the purple of commerce and 
glittering with the trophies of genius and the spoils of dis 
tant El Dorados; she can point to a thousand spires gleam 
ing through the mountain gorges, to schools, colleges, and 
universities, dotting the vale and the height; to a land 
where order is strongest, and liberty is freest, and the 
majesty of law most awful ; a land eminently of intellectual 
and moral activity and progress, whose millions are living 
with ideas ; a land the mother of noble, gifted, and gentle 
women, and of heroic, hardy, and powerful men, whose 
children, in liberal adventure and generous enterprise, or on 
errands of Christian philanthropy, are on every wave and 
every shore pointing to these results of a civilization first 
planted by her in a clime most ungenial, and pervasively 
and continuously impressed with the type of her genius, she 
may well group her monuments around her and be silent 



68 

But how, again, does Congregationalism meet that other 
demand of the West, for an organization whose interior struc 
ture and working are mightiest for the attainment of the proper 
supreme end of a church the enthronement of God s truth 
over the human mind, the true evangelization of the mil 
lions ? To answer this inquiry, we must examine the rela 
tions of order and liberty in her system, the adjustment of 
organic unity with individual life. 

And here we find, as we believe, the power and freedom 
most complete girt round, disciplined, and regulated by the 
strongest vital order ; an order whose bands are the more 
mighty because they are little palpable, and resemble elec 
tric attraction or the organic forces of light rather than 
chains of iron. Indeed her order seems to us the very 
strongest which the nature of Christianity a religion essen 
tially spiritual and free admits. The highest power of any 
organization for a given end, we have defined to be in the 
most perfect combination possible of liberty with order for 
its attainment. Let us see how this demand is met by Con 
gregationalism ; how these elements blend in her system. 

And, 1st, of the element of liberty. This is obviously as 
perfect as the nature of things admits. There is not simply 
independency of the state, and of all civil or ecclesiastical 
authority exterior to the local church, but, interiorly, of all 
prerogative of hierarchy or class, or of human standards ; 
and of all close orders or successional office, and all power 
not immediately accountable and returnable to the brother 
hood. Each church is free of any and all other churches ; 
each individual, with restrictions essential to the simplest 
primary organization, of any and all other individuals ; each 
age of all precedent ages ; each time of all other times. 
There is a perfect equality of ecclesiastical franchise, and of 
the individual reason and conscience. Not that the spirit of 
the system is anarchical or irreverent. Its aim is to bring 
the individual reason and conscience constantly into contact 
with God s word, and the intrinsic and essential reality of 



69 

things ; to imbue them constantly with the sentiment of per 
sonal responsibility and duty, and make each separate 
church, each separate time, and each individual mind an 
independent centre, elaborator, and trier of Christian truth. 

Is not the element of liberty therefore perfect? And 
must not such liberty, unless abused to dissoluteness and 
anarchy, be a generator of vast power ? First, as a mighty 
quickener of mind, bringing dead faiths into perpetual con 
tact with the living word and the living reason of things ; 
whence dead faith starts to new life, as did the corpse laid 
in Elisha s tomb from the touch of the prophet s bones ? Of 
power, again, in discovering, elaborating, and enforcing 
truth? Must it not, moreover, be powerful with a con 
stantly disciplined and widely diffused logic? "With a 
vigorous and partial reason? A quick insight into intrinsic 
evidence, and a quick sympathy with the thought and 
feeling of the masses ? Strong, again, through the joint sym 
pathy it establishes in each soul, with both God and our 
brother; like an electric conductor constantly connecting 
with both, blending in alliance mutually healthful, genial 
fellowship with awful adoration ; wedding faith to reason, 
love to logic, work to worship, a common sense that walks 
among men to a spiritual-mindedness that dwells in the vision 
of God ; making Christianity, in brief, like its great author, 
a constant mediator between earth and heaven. 

Must not such liberty be powerful, again, in the number 
of independent and disciplined thinkers it creates and sets to 
work? Strong in that it trains and summons to the conflict 
for Christian truth and duty, the million? Every other 
department of modern society is calling in the million as 
workers. Christianity must do the same, or fall behind her 
relative place in the civilization of the age. The great con 
flict of our times, and at the West especially, is to be fought, 
not between the ranks and orders, not between principali 
ties and powers battling in mid-sky. The battle, like that 
seen in the Apocalypse, has been cast down to earth. It is 



70 

to be waged man with man, mind with mind, word with 
word ; not in councils ; consistories, chapters, or conclaves, 
but in each circle, in every walk, amid all work, in every 
class, and at all firesides through universal society. That 
system, therefore, that best arms and trains a whole people 
for the conflict, and practises the popular mind in a Chris 
tian logic, is the one in peculiar requisition at this time at 
the West ; especially in view of the exigencies of the forma 
tive era. In that seething caldron of mind, where a me 
chanical union is fast fermenting into a chemical one, and 
each individual particle, with its peculiar attractions and 
antagonisms, is struggling into fresh combinations and a new 
social order, that system that best arms each d.n dividual ele 
ment with the affinities of truth and love, will insure the 
most beneficent ultimate combination, and will most effectu 
ally eliminate from it superstitions, despotisms, and misbe 
liefs. Liberty, therefore, as applying itself to the mind of 
the million, is the mightiest power for the church against 
spiritual usurpation and error. 

The freest church organizations, or those with the least 
of the hierarchical element clinging to them, can alone 
encounter successfully that hierarchical despotism that is now 
projecting its portentous shadows over the West. Freedom 
alone can fight despotism. Churches trammelled by the 
still cleaving, though partially broken fetters, are disabled 
for that battle. In their attempted blows at their foe they 
are liable to brain themselves by the fragments of their 
clinging chains. In a simple game of despotism, Rome can 
have no rival. Hers alone is consistent, and with armory, 
appliances, and environment of unapproachable infernal 
completeness. Protestantism must thoroughly purge herself 
of the accursed thing before she can drive the foe from the 
land. On her own ground, and in her own circle, Rome is 
invincible to mortal force. The battle with her is not one 
of prerogative and prescription, but of principle and of the 
Divine word ; of liberty with slavery, of inspiration with 



71 

tradition, of private judgment with ecclesiastic edict, and of 
manly and enlightened reason with ignorant and puerile 
fear. Consistent and complete liberty is therefore the only 
stable and defensible logical stand-point against unlimited 
spiritual usurpation, and alone arms nations with that philo 
sophic method by which its sophisms can be baffled. 

Again, church liberty is true church power, in that it 
alone produces an intelligent and vigorous faith. Indeed 
genuine faith cannot exist at all without a degree of liberty, 
and just in proportion as liberty is impaired, will faith 
become spurious, feeble, and timid. True faith, of its very 
nature, must be consciously intelligent and cognisant of evi 
dence, and this it cannot be unless it is conscious of having 
freely and fairly inquired. Despotism kills the faith it 
forces. It can no more produce it than mechanic forces can 
extract the plant from the earth, or than it can compel a 
proposition in geometry to be true or false. Perfectly abso 
lute over mind, it annihilates faith ; and in proportion as it 
approaches that hideous consummation, it makes faith imbe 
cile, ignorant, cowardly, and incompetent to wrestle with the 
epidemic passions and moral distemperatures of the age. 
The freest faith will, therefore, of its very nature be strong 
est; and other things being equal, the freest church will be 
the mightiest religious builder and champion. 

Liberty, again, is power in an ecclesiastical system, inas 
much as it is generative of th&t progress, in the development 
and application of truth, which are requisite to that life, 
passion, and enthusiasm that are the permanent fountains of 
power. Passion and enthusiasm feed on mystery, ever 
opening, ever deepening. They live in an endless vision of 
dissolving views that are ever passing to aspects deeper, 
fairer, holier in the everlasting unveiling of immortal truth. 
True progress, in the Christian system, walks in an ever- 
lengthening, ever-unfolding perspective of the new, the 
wonderful, the glorious. God s truth is immutable; but 
man s stand-point is ever-changing. We are voyaging ever 



72 

towards the same starry Heavens. They are awfully and 
eternally one. But our ever moving position, and ever- 
deepening insight, opening new aspects, keep up a perpetual 
excitement and passion of delight. Liberty is power, as it 
presents the stimulus of this ever-progressive stand-point, 
through fields of vision momently new yet eternally old. 

In all the above respects, and many others, church free 
dom is true church power; and our system, as being emi 
nent in its completeness of liberty, we should anticipate 
would be eminent in efficiency, and would peculiarly suit 
the demand of the West for a church order of the highest 
evangelizing power. But our conclusion waits on the 
answer to another inquiry, viz. Has Congregationalism the 
requisite bands of order? Freedom generates energy, 
excitement, activity, courage. But these are not necessarily 
power. They may all result in mere blind, idle, disastrous 
agitation ; may waste themselves in dispersion or internal 
antagonism and convulsion. Liberty without order is weak ; 
its energies spasmodic, sporadic, self-exhaustive, often sui 
cidal ; its victories, the achievements of Bastile mobs strong 1 

O 

only to demolish, ineffective to rebuild, and incompetent for 
persistent systematic labor or conflict. Energy, that it 
may become power, needs combination, unity, concert. 
These are to be secured by a wise order. The union of 
liberty with such order constitutes our ideal of power. 

But a general idea of the aims and uses of order is apt 
to mislead many, when applied to the church. Their minds 
immediately rush to political analogies, to legislations, judi 
catures, graded prerogatives, dignities, castes, congresses, con 
federacies, autocracies, and other arrangements and methods 
of the kingdoms of this world ; and they imagine the order 
of Christ s kingdom must emulate these. They forget that 
the ends of these kingdoms are entirely diverse, and that 
their proper order is the internal arrangement fitted to secure 
their appropriate ends. They need to be reminded that the 
aim of a church is not to establish a police or collect and 



73 

disburse revenues, systematize commerce and finance, guard 
person and property, or enforce uniformity of law and right, 
throughout extensive realms, and accomplish other purposes 
which require a single and forceful rule over vast territories 
and multitudes. It seems to escape them, that in essential 
genius, policy, and intent, the kingdom of our Lord, and 
those of this world, belong to entirely different circles of 
ideas ; that the one is the rule of visible authority and force, 
for the protection of material interests ; the other that of 
thought and affection, of truth and love, and in behoof of 
interests purely spiritual removed from all force or compul 
sion by the breadth of a universe, by a difference of being. 
The attempt to apply the order of one of these kingdoms to 
the other is a stupendous absurdity, and like all attempted 
violence on the essential properties and relations of things, 
cannot fail to breed "all monstrous, all perverse, abomina 
ble things," such as teem through the chaos of middle eccle 
siastical history, and find numerous antitypes in the present 
age. 

Let us beware of this error. Let us bear in mind that all 
government must take form and method from the end it 
aims at, and the means requisite to that end ; and that the 
great and proper aim of Christ s kingdom on earth, and, of 
course, of all church order, is TO SAVE SOULS to convert 
and sanctify them ; not by authority or compulsion, which 
in the nature of things have no relation to the end, but 
through ilia truth. The end is Salvation, the means Truth. 
An organization departing from this instrumentality, violates 
the essential genius of church order ; departing from this end, 
it ceases to be a church at all. It may be an Odeon, an 
Academy, a philosophic, aesthetic, moral, or social institute ; 
but it is no church. A church efficient for this end, is a 
strong church, hovever obscure and small ; one not thus effi 
cient is feeble, though with millions of men and money, and 
an organization embracing the intellect and splendor of 
realms. All interior adjustment, not harmonizing with this 



74 

instrumentality and conducing to this end, is alien to the 
true nature of church order ; and whatever power i may 
confer for other purposes, fails to make it strong as a church. 

For the proper aims of a church aims in their nature 
attainable only through the truth and the spirit that order 
is strongest which best secures the general knowledge and 
ascendency of the truth ; for in doing this, it furnishes to 
the spirit also its great instrument of influence, and presents 
moreover the means to that unity of belief, will, and affection, 
most favorable to the communion of the spirit. It thus tends 
to insure that avoidance of internal antagonisms, and that 
unity of practical testimony and moral impression, and that 
concert of action under the rule of the highest wisdom, that 
give a church power for the attainment of its end. It thus 
again establishes the only influences appropriately regulative 
and directive of spiritual liberty. For the unities of truth 
and the spirit are the great bands of genuine church-order, 
and these bands alone may be worn by perfect liberty. Thus 
in the kingdom of Christ, the mightiest order consists with 
the most perfect freedom yea, it requires such freedom. 

In establishment of this proposition let us inquire more par 
ticularly into the relations of order to liberty in the church. 
The office of order in relation to liberty in any polity is that 
of restrainer, regulator, inciter, director; and that with instru 
mentalities legitimate to the nature and aim of the organiza 
tion. In the kingdoms of this world, its means are com 
mand, laws, constitutions, and, in the final resort, force. But 
in the kingdom of Christ, a kingdom of truth the great in. 
strument is truth. In this kingdom order accomplishes its 
functions through the reason, affections, and free will ; by 
means of enlightenment, persuasion, influence, and the various 
appliances of truth to the human mind. Thus in the one 
kingdom order promulgates ordinances, in the other it dif 
fuses ideas. This distinction springs from their diversity of 
natures. It is also authenticated by Scripture precept and 
precedent. In the Scripture model of the church, human 



75 

authority and force are introduced only in the primal local 
organization, and there no further than is essential to the 
simplest form of association among men uniting on common 
principles and for a common end. Their scope was simply 
commensurate with the necessities of that end. Between 
churches, and through the church universal, and, in the pro- 
foundest view, in the church local, government was purely 
moral and intellectual ; its great agencies were the truth and 
the spirit ; and that order was strongest, which called into 
mightiest action those agencies. 

Nor do we find anything, in subsequent historic deve 
lopment, requiring a departure from the simplicity of the 
original model, or changing the requisite conditions and in 
strumentalities of true church power. Enterprises extend 
ing over large territories and times, requiring an extensive 
finance, and a wide concert and co-operation of Christian 
men, whether missionary, eleemosynary, or educational, 
though springing out of Christianity, are not necessarily 
matters of ecclesiastic order at all. The most effective, in 
deed, of such enterprises in our times are in no sense 
measures of church administration, though they are most 
powerfully carried forward by those churches whose order 
is freest, most purely that of truth and influence. These en 
terprises need not, therefore, expand our idea of a church or 
complicate the question before us. 

In the church, therefore, according to both its scriptural 
type and its essential idea, order has truth for its great agent 
and instrument. It regulates and directs liberty through the 
truth ; while again liberty is the discoverer and enthroner of 
truth, the means to its diffusion and power. Thus liberty 
and order in the Christian system are not antagonistic, but 
coincident and co-operative order is directive, rather than re 
strictive of liberty, regulative and promotive not destructive 
of it. For her to war on it, is suicidal. She sinks in the 
grave she prepares for her victim. The strongest church 
order, then, coheres with the largest liberty. 



76 

Even if a perfectly wise and beneficent despotism were 
the ideal of a strong order, in the first place, we know not 
where to look for the perfectly wise and beneficent despot 
below God s throne ; and his despotism is, we know, perfect 
freedom. In the second place, we know that despotism, in 
this world of ours, tends of its very nature to weakness by 
corrupting and enfeebling the hand that wields it, and by 
paralysing, stupifying, and emasculating the minds over 
which it is exerted. 

This principle holds even in kingdoms of this world ; 
order destructive to liberty, enfeebles. Absolutism and 
autocracy, which at first seem governments strongest of all, 
are found ultimately the feeblest. They mechanize, and 
finally kill the life of nations. Such an order is a coat of 
mail, so rigid, so stringent, so all-covering, that it forbids all 
growth, and finally all living breath. It stifles what it guards. 
It may be strong to prevent the excesses of liberty, but at 
the expense of life and of power. Slavery may cure the 
license of freedom. But slavery is not power. Death effec 
tually ends all spasm. But death is not power ; the man 
chained hand and foot ; shall commit no robbery, excite no 
mobs, jump off no precipice. Neither shall he build cities, 
subdue the wilderness, or fight the battles of his country. If 
you would have the power of life, it is an eternal law you 
must have its hazards. So it is with liberty, it brings 
life, but associated with peril. Would you have its blessings, 
you must accept them with their incidents. Devise never 
so cunningly, and you shall not escape this necessity, more 
than you can fly your shadow. God himself has not escaped 
it in the constitution of man ; nor may we expect to do it 
in the constitution of the church. Seek we for power ? we 
must have life. Seek we for order ? we must have truth. 
Seek we for life and truth ? we must have liberty. 

Such are the relations of order to liberty in the Christian 
system, and the relations of both to genuine church power. 
That polity, that exhibits an order reliant on the truth and 



77 

the spirit, and sacredly guards liberty as the medium 
through which the spirit and the truth are to operate, pre 
sents that perfect and harmonious combination and co-ope 
ration of order and liberty, that 1 have predicated as the ideal 
of the highest strength. That such a polity finds a counterpart 
in our own, if in any church organism, and that consequently 
liberty so complete in our system has the requisite bands of 
order, I will not stop further to argue. 

But I will subjoin, that such an order as that I have de 
scribed which I will term the order of liberty is the strongest 
of all, in that very interest where it is most feared and ac 
cused, viz. that of organic unity. Liberty is the great ela- 
borator of that unity ; for that unity arises from the unity of 
the truth manifested to different minds, bringing them under 
the control of common convictions, affections, and purposes. 
It is a reflection of the aspect of the same gospel, the same 
Saviour, the same God, in the mind of the brotherhood. 
The band of true unity is in oneness of vision and this no 
authority, or force, or dogmatism can produce any more than 
they can alter the laws of optics. It is by removing lets 
and hindrances to unobstructed sight (truth being one and 
the same), that we are most likely to see her as one and the 
same. Even this means may not immediately and perfectly 
secure the end ; for the visual organ in different men may 
differ in clearness and power- and there are endless varie 
ties of stand-points, producing endless varieties of aspect of 
that which is unchangeably the same. But unobstructed 
sight will secure unity of view, or it will not be secured at 
all. In order then to produce an organic unity, strong and 
vital with the truth and the spirit, I would say Away with all 
curtains and colored mediums. Place the millions not afar 
off, with veils of partition and ranks of hierophants between 
them and the outshining of the divine glory ; but let the 
way to the hoty of holies, wrought out by Christ, be open for 
the approach of all. In the open and direct vision of the 
same Bible, the same God and Saviour, and the same Holy 



78 

Spirit, they shall, with time, become one, even as prayed our 
Lord in their behalf. 

To many minds that prayer strangely starts a world-wide 
organism, with a vast array of governmental authority and 
machinery. They forget that the world has already made 
trial of that type of union in its most consummate and uni 
versal form. Hildebrand s idea was its logical and complete 
development. The result the world well remembers it was 
the union of prisoners denned up in the same dungeon, or of 
vipers writhing and hissing in the same knot. By its ter 
rible failure, the trial of authority, despotism, and vast organ 
ism to effect Christian union, has been fully determined. 
Freedom alone remains for experiment. She must be our 
architect of union, or we have none. 

On the basis, then, of perfect spiritual liberty alone, I be 
lieve, can arise a strong, vital, and durable church order. By 
liberty I mean individual responsibility, individual inquiry, 
judgment, and will ; individual duty, worship, and prayer. 
Such liberty brings the human soul immediately before God, 
surrounds it with the glory of his majesty, the awe and 
beauty of his truth, and the sweet bands of his love. It places 
it under the church order of the New Jerusalem, and makes 
it one with the brotherhood on earth, because it is one with 
God and the " general assembly of the church of the first 
born." Liberty, therefore, instead of being the antagonist of 
order, is its chief creator and conservator. Liberty is a means 
to truth, and truth is the strength of order. Thus in the 
kingdom of Christ, liberty, truth, and order appear a glori 
ous trinity in unity, joint elaborators to the church of the 
mightiest power for the attainment of its great end. 

To sum up this branch of our argument, then The great 
aim of a church being to save souls, the proper order of a 
church is that rule and arrangement of it best securing this 
end. And truth being the great instrument used by the 
spirit to that end, true church order is that which gives truth 
the greatest power. But the natural appliances and enforce- 



79 



ments of truth are all of influence, none of command or 
force. They are such as argument, instruction, persuasion, 
counsel, reproof, rebuke, example, inquiry, thought, prayer. 

The order therefore that gives these means and appliances 
the freest natural play, is strongest for the proposed end. 
But they have their free scope and full power only in the 
elements of individual freedom and responsibility, and of 
equality and fraternity. 

Now, various ecclesiastic systems may claim for themselves 
conformity to the above named conditions of the highest 
evangelizing power. Nor are we here this day to contest or 
disparage their claims. We wish simply to present our own 
system, and inquire into her duties and capacities for the 
western field. Does not her polity, judged by the principles 
we have endeavored to establish, give assurance of a peculiar 
power for diffusing, illustrating, and enforcing Christian truth 
in that forming world ? Does not her completeness of liberty 
her rule of authority limited to the primary local organiza 
tion, or to brief elective and responsible delegations, and 
blending with the unembarrassed play of intellectual and 
moral influences between individual disciples, churches, 
places, and times? Does not her vitality and strength of 
order ? order, all in furtherance and direction of liberty, not 
in infraction or destruction of it ? which is powerful with 
the immortal forces of reason, conscience, and the spirit of 
God ? which lives by vitalizing the Christian brotherhood, 
and grows mightier by making it freer ? whose absolutism 
is the breaking of all chains, whose bands are truth and love, 
whose architect is freedom, and which alone grows stronger 
in the light of that presence in which all other authority dis 
solves, more awful the more the soul comes under the con 
sciousness of the majesty of God ? Does not our ecclesias. 
tic system then exhibit that perfect blending of Order with 
Liberty, which I have predicated as the condition of the high 
est power ? And is not power duty ? Does it not create 
a mission ? 



80 

Our convictions of the power of our system as an evange- 
lizer of heterogeneous and morally chaotic societies, are 
confirmed by the fact, that it seems to us the one selected by 
the Divine spirit for a similar office in the primitive ages, 
and that in a field presenting in greater force the difficulties 
supposed now to exclude Congregationalism from the West, 
viz. that melange of nations and civilizations then consti 
tuting the Eoman as well as the Barbaric world. The polity 
which accompanied the gospel in its first spread through the 
diverse races from Hispaniato Ethiopia and the Indus, seems 
to us to have in the main accorded with ours. Below the 
Holy Spirit and its inspired organs, there was no central board 
or chain of authority. There was the same liberty and 
equality of each individual church and individual Chris 
tian as with us ; the same reliance for order, unity, and purity, 
on the word and the spirit, and on influence and intercourse 
personal or epistolary, eleemosynary and advisory. With 
no pontifical or provincial court for legislation or judica 
ture, no hierarchical succession or self-perpetuated orders, no 
class prerogatives of discipline, doctrine, and the sacraments, 
the trust of the church for conservative power was in an 
ever vitalizing gospel, a living Christian fidelity of argument, 
persuasion, instruction, and rebuke ; in the immortality of 
reason, conscience, and truth in a living holy spirit, pro 
mised to be with the church, not in the age of Apostles, 
martyrs, and reformers only, but always ; and in a living 
God that ever watched over his cause and over the human 
mind. 

The order of liberty and equality, established in the 
primitive Church, seems to have peculiar aptitudes for power 
in our own age. The Congregational polity, in its rule by 
the voice of the "many," and in its reliance on the silent 
inorganic forces of influence, reason, and truth, rather than 
on visible and formal authority, eminently harmonizes 
with not only our democratic genius and institutions, but 
with what is fast becoming the supreme order of modern 



81 

society rule of Public Opinion, or, in other words, of the 
thought and feeling of the millions. That authority is not 
strongest in our age which sits on thrones regal or pontific, 
or wears the livery of caste or rank, or utters its edicts 
through permanent judicatures of a class or a few, but that 
which invokes most promptly and wields most potently the 
opinion of the great brotherhood. Majorities sit sovereign 
everywhere. The genius of the age enthrones them. Fear 
ful dangers, I distinctly see pressing on their rule. Despot 
isms the most hideous and deadly, I am aware, may spring 
from the very bosom of democratic freedom. " I looked," 
says Bunyan, " and lo ! a way to hell opened by the very 
gate of heaven." These dangers we have to meet. They 
evidently lie in the future pathway of society. And we can 
meet them only with systems which shall enlighten and 
purify the masses. But I am not now discussing the expe 
diency or legitimacy of this monarchy of the future. I 
simply note the fact, that the rule of the majority is the evi 
dent destiny of modern society, and that church order, to be 
most effective, must accord with it. It must hold not of the 
one or the few above, but of the brotherhood below. An- 
tasus-like, to retain vigor, it must touch the common earth. 
It must spring from the great conscious bosom of humanity. 
It must be kept vital by the heart-beat of the million. The 
judgment of the Autocrat of all the Eussias would not in our 
times weigh against the verdict of a common, honest Anglo- 
Saxon jury. Power of long tenure holding from above, 
tends not only to corruption, but to decay of moral author 
ity also, because of its divorce from the common mind. 
The decision of a class, or order, or of any body of men not 
freely and freshly chosen by the brotherhood, on few ques 
tions will have more force, and on most, less than that of the 
same number of common men ; in almost all cases, far less 
than that voice of the " many 1 which Paul relied on to 
bring the obdurate and incestuous Corinthian to repentance. 
No rule can be strong in our age that does not arm itself 

6 



82 

with this voice of the " many" the prerogative of public 
opinion. But no government can wield that prerogative, in 
which there is not the freest play of intellectual and moral 
influence, and which is not immediately or with few media, 
representative of popular sentiment and will. Our church 
polity, as eminently corresponding to these requisites, must 
carry with it, in this age, in its internal discipline, and in its 
general action and influence on society, a peculiar moral 
power such power especially, as is now requisite to master 
the Western mind. 

Why then, it may be asked, with all these presumptions 
in her favor, from analyses of herself and of the West, from 
the example of inspired periods, the experience of the past, 
and the genius of the present why, in view of all these, 
shall Congregationalism be forbidden to extend herself like 
other denominations Westward ? Is experience at the West 
against her ? No denominations there have prospered more 
than those with principles and forms of polity corresponding 
in the main with hers ; the Baptist for instance, at this time 
with its various divisions the most numerous sect in the Missis 
sippi Valley. " But why," it may be urged, " has not Con 
gregationalism itself spread more rapidly there ?" The wonder 
is that, in the circumstances of its history, it has spread at 
all. Till within a few years since, her own policy for half a 
century had been not unreasonably regarded as a confession 
of judgment against herself a self-exclusion from that region. 
A sort of compromise seems to have been supposed to forbid 
the assertion of her distinctive individuality beyond certain 
lines of longitude. She became in consequence a mere local 
arrangement, a glebe polity, an accident of time, place, and 
a certain phase of civilization ; not a matter of essential and 
enduring principle at all. This relation of compromise or 
union with a body she justly loved and admired, but with 
organic principles widely variant, reacted on the churches 
and theological schools in the land already peculiarly her 
own. It neutralized her denominational spirit, took away 



83 

her self-appreciation, and silenced her pulpit and her lecture- 
room on the subject of church polity. Her seminaries were 
careful of offending against the "compromise," by teaching 
any distinctive ecclesiastical order ; her advocates were often 
pursued by herself with disfavor as pragmatical and narrow 
sectarists. Thus she became first silent, then indifferent, and 
gradually even ignorant, in regard to her own principles of 
polity. Her emigrant sons of course were taught nothing 
on the subject. And why should they be, since they were, 
as a fixed rule, to abandon her for another system imme 
diately on passing certain lines of longitude ? And with 
such preparation, knowing as little why they had been Con- 
gregationalists yesterday as why they were to be Presbyte 
rians to-morrow, they moved westward. Is it wonderful 
that Congregationalism did not thrive vigorously under the 
auspices of such a policy ? Does it not show great vitality 
in it, that it lived at all ? And if any of her emigrant child 
ren, from some remaining knowledge and preference of her 
system, wished to establish a church distinctively of her order 
in the wilderness, we well remember with how little favor 
such an enterprise was regarded, East or West. It became 
at once obnoxious to suspicion as factious, agitatory, disor 
ganizing, or as unsound, heretical, ultraist. " For why 
otherwise," it was urged, " should they disturb the peace of 
the churches ? Why intrude another denomination to divide 
the Christian body ? Why not do as their brethren have 
done, and enter into ecclesiastical systems prepared and open 
to secure them, unless fenced out by the consciousness of 
heresy or of an intolerance of healthful religious order ? " 
Their fellow emigrants from Congregational churches, con 
scious to themselves of no logical preference for the order 
they had left behind them, and of no difficulties of principle 
or of expediency in entering into another assuming to stand 
in its stead, having themselves yielded to the supposed ne 
cessity of their position, could not appreciate the preferences 
or principles of those not thus yielding. The course of such 



84 

seemed to them captious, aggressive, factious, and as imply- 
-Eg censure on themselves. It was thus not strange, nor 
evincive, perhaps, of conscious uncharitableness, but a natu 
ral consequence, that those from Congregational churches in 
the East became often severest in denunciation of the asser 
tion of a distinctive Congregationalism at the West It was 
the natural ultimate fruit of an ecclesiastical compromise, 
framed by great and good men, and with important resulting 
benefits, but which wrought evil because it overlooked 
essential diversities in principles of church order. Churches 
distinctively Congregational were, in consequence of the 
above-named causes, for the most part isolated and weak, with 
no press and no organ, girt round and overlaid by vast and 
powerful systems with well furnished appliances for self-ad 
vocacy and self-extension. Is it any wonder they were mis 
understood and misrepresented, first at the West, and then, 
of consequence, at the East ? that the ear of the mother land 
was pre-occupied, and her affections and confidence foreclosed 
against them ? And was it wonderful that such churches, 
feeling misconceived by their neighbors and excluded from 
the sympathies of their mother land because of adherence to 
her own principles, without kindly counsel or strengthening 
fellowship, should have often withered away? or surviving, 
should have had their life disastrously perturbed and en 
feebled by the sore trial through which they were passing? 
It certainly were not strange if, under such influences, they 
had actually fallen into the fanaticisms, ultraisms, and dis 
orders of which they were accused ; especially when it is 
borne in mind, that, in addition to the above trials, Congre 
gationalism, because of the very fact making strongly in its 
favor the fact of its being the most natural form of church 
order, the one most agreeable to man s instinctive sense of 
spiritual liberty and equality, and to the genius of our age and 
country was the system into which the wrecks and debris 
and insurgent elements of other systems would naturally 
full and thus she was compelled to bear the strain of explo- 



85 

sive forces she never bred, and the reproach of disorders for 
which she herself was in no wise responsible. Now add to all 
the other difficulties of these isolated churches, that they were 
in a land where everything is chaotic, and all that men re 
vere elsewhere is most irreverently tumbled into the general 
pell-mell, and all the four winds of thought and passion, 
political, ecclesiastical, sectional, national, philosophical, are 
battling for mastery on the great deep, and we shall hardly 
be surprised that Congregationalism has not spread faster or 
shone purer. Still with all the above trials of position and 
history, Congregationalism at the West needs no deprecatory 
plea. In intelligence, zeal, energy, and influence, in purity 
of doctrine and life, in charities and good works, and suc 
cess in saving men, the Congregational churches as a body, 
with all drawbacks and defects, need shrink from comparison 
with no other in the West. They have wrought there 
already a truly great and noble Christian work. The trial 
of Congregationalism there, even amid such discouragements, 
is a triumphant vindication of her claim as an evangelizing 
and organizing power. Slowness of spread would in the 
circumstances prove no unmeetness for the West. But 
recently, since the partial removal of some of the impedi 
ments above named, her extension has been signally rapid 
the most rapid of any denomination in the North West. 

Can we discover, then, brethren, any good reason why our 
church system should not, with others, extend itself West 
ward ? Why it should stop with the Hudson, the Allegha- 
nies, or the Mississippi? Anything in her constitution or 
that of the West ? Nothing. Anything in her history ? In 
her results in that land where she has wrought alone or pre 
eminently from the first that first pressed by the feet of the 
Pilgrims ? That land is its own witness and monument. Its 
testimony has gone far as the sun shines. It needs my argu 
ment no more than its Manadnock or Mount Washington. 
There it stands ; behold it ! 

But it is urged, " the West is not New England ; it is a 



86 

melange of nations." But is not New England also in that 
melange of nations? And may not her church at least 
follow her children ? But the West is so heterogeneous and 
chaotic, Congregationalism cannot work there. That is 
eminently a reason calling her to work there. She is a 
mighty fuser of diversities, a mighty worker of homoge- 
neousness. She is among the most powerful of educators, 
illuminators, and vitalizers of the millions. Heterogeneous- 
ness ! It is the very reason for distinct, independent, local 
organizations, capable of individual, local, and specific appli 
ance ; but rendering a vast one, with its inflexible and inapt 
rigor, impracticable or inoperative, unless through force. It 
was the manifold adaptiveness of a system like ours, that 
fitted it to work at first in the heterogeneous mass of the 
Roman Empire. 

But it is urged " other denominations are there before us." 
True. We are thankful in believing that the various mem 
bers of the Protestant sisterhood Baptist, Methodist, Pres 
byterian, and Episcopalian, &c. are doing an efficient work 
there in behalf of the great truths of the Gospel. God grant 
it may be manifold more abundant than it is. But that were 
no reason which should ostracize us from all that vast world, 
that stretches from the base of the New England Peninsula 
to the Pacific Seas. There is room and demand for us all. 
If they have been more prompt than we in responding to this 
demand, let their Christian earnestness stimulate our flagging 
zeal. If they think it duty to follow their children West 
ward, it were the more opprobrious we should abandon 
ours. But it is objected, " the field is preoccupied." Nay, 
the field is yet, in a great measure, to be created. The 
" West" is yet being born. The wilderness, the waste is 
that the field, or is the field rather the millions whose earth- 
shaking tramp hastens thither? Does the organization of a 
few feeble churches on the borders of the illimitable wild con 
vey a title ecclesiastical to all the nations that are swarming to 
its occupancy ? No. There is to us no quittance of duty, 



87 

but rather its more imperious urgency, through our past 
dilatoriness. Our mission unsatisfied, summons us more 
loudly to its fulfilment. 

Even should our organic extension be small we may ac 
complish vast benefits, by throwing our principles into the 
general circulation benefits even to churches not of our form 
or name. A church that truly holds up the Pilgrim banner, 
though it stands alone, shines afar. It stands as a constant 
representative and suggester of vast and potent truths. 
Could it simply deposit these truths in the germ of nascent 
communities and then die, it would be a mighty benefactor. 
It will have infused a leaven destined to work in coming 
times, through all the economy of the social and religious 
world. Much more will it be a power for good, if, as it mar 
be hoped, as a living light it shall pour its perpetual beams 
on all the future. 

"But," it is insisted, "Congregationalism is not strong 
enough for the West. It may answer well enough in old, 
organized, methodized, tranquil, and cultivated communities 
like New England ; but the West, with its turbulence and 
its barbarism, is a leviathan not thus tamed. It requires 
stronger systems." Now herein, it strikes us, is something 
passing strange. Congregationalism was strong enough for 
the turbulence, the heterogeneousness, the violent and the 
voluptuous sin, the ruffian and the courtly vice of the 
ancient world ; for Jew, Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond 
or free ; strong enough for dissolute Corinth, volatile Athens, 
for tumultuary Ephesus, for many-tongued Alexandria, and 
that vortex of nations, Home ; strong enough for churches 
gathered from fanatic Judaism and bestial heathenism ; 
strong enough for the sensual Cretan, the passionate Iberian, 
the versatile Ionian, the haughty Italian, the Syrian syba 
rite, the migratory borderers of the African and Arabian 
desert, and the motley millions that fermented around the 
world s centres of commerce, luxury, and empire strong 
enough for all these, and yet not strong enough for our 



88 

American West ! Surely our West is a historic marvel ! But 
again, Congregationalism urges her claims on the very ground 
of the peculiar strength and power of her system ; as being 
pre-eminently strong with the forces of liberty and truth, 
and a living order ? and with sympathy with the spirit of the 
Age and the genius of the West. Amid other fatal defects 
of hierarchical churches, is their feebleness for the true ends 
of a church. They are not strong enough for the West. 

It evidently then is the mission of Congregationalism 
i. e. its duty indicated by adaptation and power to follow 
fast and far as it can, with its institutions, that zone of new 
born empires that forms our constantly westering frontier, 
till in its movement it joins on the Sierra Nevada, another 
zone already rising from the Pacific. It is her mission to do 
this, not in a spirit of sectarian emulation, but as her own 
best adapted and most effective mode of laboring in fur 
therance of Christian truth and life. Polity is to be to her 
simply a means of advancing the kingdom of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, to be valued merely as subservient to that end, be 
jealously kept ever in subordination to it, and to be pursued 
in a spirit of Christian generosity, forbearance, and love. 
Pursued with measures violative of that spirit or that end, 
or in any manner destructive of the geniality or charity of 
Christian life and feeling, any architecture of church polity, 
though with art and logic never so perfect, even though im 
ported by the hands of angels from the ]STew Jerusalem, were 
a deformity and a curse a temple of Baal and not of Jeho 
vah. Thus perverted, the instrument of life brings death. 
It is another Nehushtan, the Brazen Serpent become an 
idol. Away with it ; dash it to pieces ; grind it to powder ; 
trample it under foot ; scatter it to the winds. I love 
liberty much, love her as the angel ot truth. I love truth, 
love her as the bringer of life. Liberty, truth, life they 
are a glorious sisterhood. But the beauty of life excelleth. 
She is ultimate and supreme of the three ; yet she may not 
ong abide alone, apart from the inferior twain. And they, 



89 

separate from her, like a body, a body without a soul, soon turn 
to foulness and corruption. While therefore we may never 
dream long to disjoin them, be life ever uppermost and ulti 
mate in our regard. Let polity be cherished ever solely as 
a means to life. In all questions that may rise, let it have that 
place only in our affection and effort, which such a relation 
to that end requires. Let it ever be contemplated and esti 
mated as before the cross, in the presence of Christ, and in 
the light of the judgment day. Study and labor for it 
simply as an instrumentality for converting lost men, and 
presenting them at last spotless before the Eternal Throne ; 
and to take rank among instrumentalities solely in degree as 
it is promotive of that supreme aim. Our denominational 
spirit should ever be like the wisdom that cometh from 
above, " first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be en 
treated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and 
without hypocrisy." It should be warm with fraternal sym 
pathy toward all who wear Christ s image, zealous to co-ope 
rate wherever it may with all good men and good works, 
showing forth the excellency of our system, and silencing 
evil tongues less by controversy than by life. Let it trust 
in the Lord and do good. And while it has no right to neglect 
great truths and principles, committed to it of the Lord, as 
we believe, for the glory of his kingdom, it should ever be 
jealous of itself, of the color and exaggeration of the selfish 
principle, lest ecclesiasticism should overtop Christianity. 
In fine, let it enter on the great moral battle-fields of the 
West, emblazoning on its banner not "union first and then 
liberty," nor " truth first and love afterward? but, " LIBERTY 
AND UNION, TRUTH WITH LOVE," ever of one essence and one 
life, blending in glorious unity the fourfold cherubim of 
God. 

ISTor is it the mission of Congregationalism at the West to 
enter upon a scheme of denominational propagandism in 
fields already occupied, i. e. already covered and worked by 
other evangelical sects. Such fields have already the vital 



90 

and saving truth, and whatever excellences may attach to 
our ecclesiastical system, its propagation in such districts by 
aggressive measures, and by movements from without, would 
probably be at such an expense of Christian charity as would 
hardly be compensated by the gain to Christian liberty. 
Moreover, if suddenly introduced by external influence and 
obtruded on those unwonted to it, it would be likely to be 
misapprehended and disastrously worked. If it is ever 
beneficently to enter such communities, it must be by de 
velopment and demand from within, wrought by the gradual 
and silent influence of great and diffusive principles that 
must ever go with our civilization and our Christianity in all 
its forms. Moreover the genius of our system recognises the 
prerogative of original action as residing in the brotherhood 
itself; and experience at the West abundantly testifies the 
manifold mischiefs of clerical intermeddling with the spon 
taneous action and natural rights of a people in adopting 
their own form of ecclesiastic self-government. 

Fields that are occupied, then, pass we by for the wastes. 
But by "occupied" I mean actually so, and in the present 
tense ; not prospectively or pretensively, merely in hope, 
design, ambition, or arrogation. I do not believe in the 
ecclesiastical tenure of vast territories, by mere prior church 
organization in some nook or angle of it; as the self-consti 
tuted lords of the world formerly assumed to parcel out and 
appropriate new continents, by hoisting a flag-staff on some 
lone headland or some desolate strand. I admit no such 
right of discovery applied to the ecclesiastic world, nor do I 
admit the binding authority of ordinances and arrangements 
decreed by some first sectarian colony claiming by a sort of 
squatter sovereignty to legislate for vast and vacant- regions 
and the nations that are to fill them, through all coming 
time. I do not believe in the right or the power of ecclesi 
astical compromises or arrangements to stipulate and trade 
off such territories and their future millions, to certain church 
polities. People in our day will not be likely to submit to 



91 

be thus negotiated and bargained over, but to feel that in 
the matter of their own church government, they belong to 
no masters. 

Nor can we acknowledge in any case the validity of any 
such exclusive preemption claims on our great commercial 
cities. They are cosmopolitan in civilization and popula 
tion, countries or continents condensed in miniature. Their 
relations of interest and influence too are national. They 
are the eye, the ear, and tongue of vast sections. They are 
also the gateways between the East and West, capable, as 
sad experience testifies, of being converted into the ivory 
portals of ancient fable, through which wicked and lying 
phantoms went forth to abuse mankind. Such cities be 
long to all denominations. Their ecclesiastical representa 
tion should be commensurate with that of their commerce 
and population. No principle of comity or fraternity re 
quires us to respect exclusive claims on such emporiums. 

Nor again does the subordination of polity to the interests 
of Christian life and charity demand that Congregationalists 
should renounce or veil or compromise their church princi 
ples on going Westward, even if co-operating for a time with 
Christians of a different polity. Nor does it forbid their 
forming a church of their own choice as soon as they are 
able to do it. A free, open, manly avowal of their principles, 
and of their ultimate purpose during the interim, would be 
best for all parties, and most conducive, in the end, to fra 
ternal union and mutual esteem. The West peculiarly 
honors frankness. The man who wears his soul in his face, 
if so be it is in any wise a decent soul, will be more respected 
and trusted than any trimmer, trim he never so adroitly. 
But if the Congregationalist shall not be permitted to co-ope 
rate with other denominations except on renunciation of his 
principles, it is clearly his duty to stand aloof. God is 
served with no falsehood. 

The Mission of Congregationalism to the West requires 
she should indoctrinate her churches in the East in her own 



92 

distinctive principles, and instruct her emigrant children to 
carry them with them in their migration "Westward, and in 
moderation and manliness be ever ready to avow and defend 
them. She should enjoin on them that they teach them to 
their children, and incorporate them with the primordial 
thought of new communities, and that, as far as practicable, 
they take with them her peculiar institutions, and that 
always they should bear with them her newspapers and 
periodicals that may keep up their acquaintance and sym 
pathy with their own denomination. N"or let them despair 
of fruit, though few, feeble, and isolated. Principles extend 
more widely than their visible organisms. They will pene 
trate into organisms not their own, and progressively, though 
silently, modify and shape them to their own spirit. No 
system, however sealed and despotic, not even Romanism it 
self, can entirely withstand the influence of free church prin 
ciples silently blending and conspiring with the democratic 
genius of American institutions and the American mind. 
Let the sons of Congregational churches therefore carry with 
them the church principles, so dear and costly to their 
fathers, to the forming world of the West, and cherish them 
as a beneficent formative element, which shall surely work 
into the religious and social life of that world ; and whether 
or not finding visible embodiment in their day, destined to 
work on for blessing, ages after they shall have gone to their 
reward. 

But while instructing her children against forgetfulness or 
abandonment of her principles, Congregationalism should 
equally guard them against impatience and aggression in 
their propagation. Eevolutions of principle are ever silent 
and slow. And not aggression but self-assertion, tranquil, 
intelligent, consistent, manly self-assertion, gentle though 
firm, frank though peaceful, is the true duty and policy of 
Congregationalism at the West. This, with the mainte 
nance of an earnest and self-sacrificing piety, a pure doctrine, 
a genial charity, and a genuine fraternity, are the essential 



93 

elements of a Congregational scheme of church extension at 
the West. "We need not be in haste or fear. The spirit of 
the age and the general instincts of humanity work with us ; 
as also especially the genius of American civilization and in 
stitutions. These all co-operate with us in furtherance of 
those principles it is our mission as a denomination to assert 
and diffuse. Above all, we believe we have co-operators in 
the letter and spirit of Christianity, and in the Holy Ghost. 
If these latter are for us we need not fear ; if not, we ought 
to rejoice in our failure. Self-manifestation and attraction, 
not attack, is our true wisdom as well as duty and happi 
ness. Our system is not adapted to sectarian aggression. I 
hope it never may be. It wants the centralization of power, 
the unity of policy and administration, requisite to it. Like 
our civil government it is feeble for offence, strong only by 
self-assertion and self-culture. It triumphs by fraternity 
Its policy is peace. 

This union I hail as a measure accordant with this policy, 
not as a consolidation or concentration of administrative or 
aggressive power. I hail it as a union ; as a means of widen 
ing the communion of saints ; of extending acquaintance, 
counsel, and succor among ourselves, and of enheartening 
with conscious fellowship those feeble and isolated, and girt 
round by vast and alien systems ; as a means of comparing 
the ideas and results of widely scattered and diversified ex 
periences, concerting Christian enterprises, and conferring 
together on the general interests of Christ s kingdom and 
their demands on us as a denomination. As a means to these 
ends, as well as keeping alive an earnest and intelligent in 
terest in the great and beneficent principles that unite us, I 
welcome this anniversary occasion. It is such an one as any 
extensive denomination is entitled to in this age of rapid and 
universal communion in all interests ; when thought over con 
tinents readily crystallizes into systematic and concerted 
action ; and when the press of vast organisms all around us, 
threatens to smother everything that has not a degree of, at 



94 

least, intellectual and moral centralization. In our wise 
avoidance of vast representative bodies with powers of legis 
lation and judicature, we have perhaps been too neglectful 
of the advantages of a wide communion of sympathies and 
ideas, and of intellectual and moral concert. A union for 
the above purposes seems conducive to our intelligent and 
co-operative efficiency, and to our increased beneficence as a 
denomination ; while at the same time it can infringe no 
church franchise, for it is in no wise an ecclesiastical organi 
zation. Such has been its aim and idea. To use it as a 
force of sectarian agitation or aggression were an abuse 
as alien from its design, as from the spirit of the system it 
represents. 

From this time and place, memory, running over some 
twenty years of residence in the "West, recurs to many scenes 
and facts of observation and experience, illustrative of the 
relations of Congregationalism to the West, and of the prin 
ciples regulative of its mission there ; and also of the need 
of that sense of fraternal sympathy and encouragement, which 
the very fact of your meeting and deliberation this day in 
recognition of the importance of your distinctive principles, 
is adapted to give. Yividly does there rise before me a little 
band, that some score of years since used to meet as a Con 
gregational church, in what was then the " far West," farther 
than California is now hardly a church of their name with 
in a hundred leagues of them, hardly half a dozen within a 
quarter s breadth of the continent ; and those as isolated 
from us as if planted in another hemisphere. It seemed as 
if that feeble and solitary little church must be smothered 
under the pressure of great organizations, that swathed it 
round and round with wide and numerous infoldings, and 
divided it fifteen degrees of longitude from the parent stock. 
Weak, single, misconceived, misreported, its own feeble 
utterance drowned in a tumult of rumors against Western 
Congregationalism, that through the correspondence and 
organs of other and vast ecclesiastic systems spread to the 



95 

Eastern Seas and pre-occupied the ears of our fathers the 
mother land, the while looking on it, if at all, with coldness 
and distrust, as indeed generally on all who, for the love 
they bore to her principles, dared assert them in institutions 
beyond certain lines of longitude. Oh, how did that little 
band long for power to lift its voice above those barriers ec 
clesiastical, that, higher than the Alleghanies, walled them in 
from the land of their fathers ! What longing was there for 
a word of sympathy and encouragement from the churches 
they loved so well ! a word assuring them that those 
churches, for whose order they were asserting the right of 
distinctive organization in the far West, did not for that act 
cast out their names as factionists and vexers of Israel. For 
a long time there was for them no such utterance ; there 
came to them no such voice except singly and in whispers. 
The ear and the press of the East seemed shut against them, 
and the little scion seemed cast upon a strange shore to die. 
But that little band, though feeble, was true. And now 
scarcely twenty years have elapsed, and though growing 
slowly and hardily and in the face of manifold discourage 
ments, amid which some of its founders passed to their rest 
without sight of results, still that little church has lived long 
enough to see its principles and their visible organisms 
spread a thousand miles to the Northwest, over magnificent 
empires many times larger than New England. It may be 
hold this, too, with the consciousness, that to that rich fruit 
age it has been to no small extent a seminal element. Nor 
do I believe that in any case a patient, persistent, practical 
assertion and manifestation of our principles, manly and in 
trepid though inoffensive and kindly, will be without ulti 
mate beneficent results. 

Thus have I spoken as I have been able, brethren, of the 
relations of Congregationalism to the West. I have aimed 
to do it as for the glory of Christ, and as in the presence of a 
higher and vaster congregation; and I am sure I have 
done it in a spirit of kindness to the entire Christian brother- 



96 

hood. Our theme presents us with duty and hope, trials to 
patience and faith, to our trust in principle and trust in 
God. In canvassing it, you must bear in mind, as requisite 
to its right apprehension, that Congregationalism at the 
"West is to a great extent still in the trials of its birth-period 
and immaturity a birth period and immaturity amid strug 
gle, irritation, and attack. You must remember that in rela 
tion to the previously fixed order of church policy there, the 
Congregational movement appears almost as a reform, and 
must encounter the trials of all reforms. Be not surprised if 
together with genuine and noble spirits, there should, in 
some instances, be gathered around it the insurgent, intem 
perate, and revolutionary elements that are prone to hang on 
the skirts of all change, however beneficent. Their presence 
need not much discourage or distress us. It is not indica 
tive of intrinsic tendency and ultimate consequence so 
much as of an infant period. It is incident to the best as 
well as the worst and wildest schemes of change, and we 
have to bear the crudities of liberty always if we hope to 
enjoy its mature and glorious fruitage. 

Of you, brethren, who dwell in the old land, the mission 
of Congregationalism at the West demands, that you follow 
your exiles there, with your interest and affections, your 
letters, your newspapers, your counsels, your prayers, and as 
far as practicable and requisite with material aid to those 
who are compelled at the same time to build the church, the 
school-house, and the cabin, in the wilderness ; certainly, 
not to withdraw trust and sympathy because fidelity to your 
principles of church order may have brought on them the 
strife of tongues. Believe not all rumors. Try them. Ke- 
spect your own principles and those who respect them ; 
teach them to your children, your churches, your theologi 
cal seminaries, and send them with your sons to the West 
Especially and this I say in reference to all classes and in 
terests, and not those ecclesiastical only cease lionizing rene 
gades, political, moral, or ecclesiastical. Cease worshipping 



97 

mere success, irrespective of the question of its mode of at 
tainment. Let New England have done for ever with 
wandering after all demagogues in church or state, that 
bring back to the old mother as trophies of success, what 
are only wages of shame, the bribes for which they have 
sold her principles. 

Use well and wisely, brethren, your influence of metro 
politan position. It is mighty, we feel your power the 
power of your thought, opinion, and affection. Strong still 
are the ties that bind us to you. Your exiled sons bear ever 
a lengthened chain. "We wear it by the pictured rocks of 
Superior, the distant falls of the Missouri, and to the Pacific 
Seas. We feel your heart beat across a continent. We are 
of you still, your land of rock and glen, of grim grey cliff and 
crystal lake, your melancholy pines and lofty solitudes, your 
glorious mountains and free old solemn sea, oh ! they come to 
us in our dreams! they come with the faces of rnemorjr, 
living brows on which still beats life s storm, and with the 
mighty spell of many graves the graves of honored 
fathers ; of brothers that have fallen in their strength, and 
gentle sisters who sleep in silent beauty on the distant 
hill-side, and mothers whose holy love still looks out on us, 
from the green mound in the shadows of the old church or 
in dells over which the awful mountains keep guard like 
angels of the resurrection. Oh ! from all that magnificent and 
boundless realm where your wandering brethren and child 
ren seek a home, from the mystic springs of the Mississippi 
and the tropical magnificence of the Southern Gulf to the 
Dalles of the Oregon and the Alps of Gold from lone prairie, 
and forest, and desert, and the roar of mighty streams, and 
from chambers in cities of the plague thick as beams of the 
setting sun, the West rays on you her thought; from hearts 
and homes past number, weaving the million-threaded web 
that binds still our lives together. Through these threads, as 
strings electric, we are acted on and react. 

The East, too, is our classic land. Here are our glorious 

7 



98 

memories of history. Here the shadows of the sainted, 
gifted, and heroic dead still linger and still walk. Here are 
Plymouth Eock, and Bunker s Hill, and the shades of Ver- 
non. The nation s soul conies here on constant pilgrimage. 

r o o 

From the solemn and gorgeous savannahs that stretch be 
yond the "outgoings of evening 7 and from the margin of 
seas that lave spicy Cathay, it ever wanders back to the 
" waves of the bay where the Mayflower lay" and the ocean 
that murmurs the requiem of heroes, and purpled of old 
under the battles of liberty to a richer stain than seas that 
flame with occidental pearl and gold. And who can tell 
"but he whose heart hath tried," how leaps that heart at 
looking again, after years of absence, on the stern old moun 
tain land with all its blazonry of histor} , and memory, and 
love, scutcheoned on each peak, and strand, and hillside ! As, 
on my return after such years of absence, I have pillowed 
my head in the thunder couch on its awful mountain pinna 
cles, where they pierce highest towards heaven, I could not 
sleep for that I felt the heart of the glorious old mother 
beating up all night through the granite. 

Brethren, the empire of the West a magnificent Titanic 
brood still grows within your shadow. Still the thunder of 
Faneuil Hall echoes to St. Peter s. Every surge of opinion 
that dashes upon your shores, rolls on till it winds through 
the sinuosities of the Nebraska and breaks on the out-flank 
ers of the Kocky Mountains. Yours is still the power of 
the mother laud ; use it well, use it promptly. We are fast 
growing out of your shadow. The new world is fast emerging 
into light, solemnly and almost as rapidly, as the mountains 
rose from the primal deep. The structures of that world, 
whether they are to be a Pandemonium rising like an exhala 
tion from hell-soil, or a foreshadow of the city of God whose 
beauty shall be seen in the latter day descending from God 
out of heaven, will soon claim the sky as their own. Be in 
stant, earnest, patient in using well the opportunity of the 
plastic era. But look not on us with coldness and distrust, 



99 

if we grow not exactly in your likeness, if our prairies pro 
duce not Adirondacks, or our Mississippis picture not again 
your Hudsons and Connecticut. Accord to us somewhat 
of the freedom of your own great founders. Kemember, 
though principles be the same, the mould of popular mind, 
the impress of environment, the plastic pressure of circum 
stance, and the ethnic material are not the same. Wonder 
not if forms vary, though principles be unchanged. 

But, if principles transplanted to other lands shall ever 
seem to partake somewhat of the softening influences of a 
more Ionian clime, be it yours to keep up the granite man 
hood of the old mountain stock. Above all, keep up the 
old metropolitan heart in strong, healthful, tonic heat. 
While your sons and brothers are wandering afar to build 
in new worlds, new empires and civilizations, do you of the 
homestead keep the ancient family hearthstones bright ; and 
let the wanderers, as they ever and anon look back from their 
battle with the wilderness and the waste let them ever be 
hold the old beacon-lights of the race, still blazing on and 
blazing on, clear, strong, and jubilant along the Eastern 
skies. 



THE VALIDITY OF NEW ENGLAND ORDINATIONS. 



ADDRESS, 



DELIVERED MAY 10, 1851, IN BROOKLYN, N. Y., BEFORE THE 



AMERICAN CONGREGATIONAL UNION, 



BY 

LEONARD BACON. 



PREFATORY NOTE, 



[TiiE substance of the following discourse was also delivered on the 17th of 
May, in the Chapel of Harvard College, as the Dudleian Lecture for 1854. 
The exordium of the lecture is here subjoined, as explaining the purpose of that 
foundation, and as describing an example of Christian liberality and fore 
thought worthy to be remembered, and not less worthy to be imitated.] 

More than a hundred years ago, a good man, whose hope was in Christ, 
and who was expecting to depart and be with Christ, desired, as every man 
with Christian sentiments and aspirations must needs desire, that his use 
fulness in this world might survive him. His spiritual sense, divinely 
quickened, had learned to recognise in the outward universe and in his own 
inward and higher nature, the manifestation of the eternal Power and God 
head. From his childhood he had known the Holy Scriptures; and in 
those immortal records, glowing from age to age with inextinguishable 
inspiration, he had found light, strength, and the consciousness of 
fellowship with God. Searching the Scriptures as the oracles of God, 
he loved their spiritual Gospel, their doctrine of one Mediator ; and his 
hereditary protest against the superstition and spiritual despotism with 
which Christianity has been overlaid in so large a portion of the nominally 
Christian world, became a deep and most religious conviction. Born and 
nurtured in that iconoclastic New England of other days, he loved the 
ecclesiastical system for which New England had been planted; and those 
churches, with the democratic equality of their brotherhood, with the rigor 
ous simplicity of their arrangements, and with the Puritan nakedness of 
their ritual, were to his filial affection the fairest portion of that catholic 
visible commonwealth in which Christ is King. With such views as these, 
desiring to do good to other ages, he made provision for a perpetual series 
of annual discourses here, revolving in a quadrennial cycle through these 
four topics : The revelation which God has made of himself to man in nature : 
The evidence that the same God has made himself known to men by a super 
natural revelation recorded in the Scriptures : The errors with which Roman 
tradition and usurpation have corrupted the knowledge and worship of God: 
and the vital connexion of the New England churches with that true Catho 
lic church of the living God, in which Christ is present always, even to the 
end of the world. According to the arrangements instituted by the will of 
that good man so long ago, I stand in this honored presence to-day "for 
the maintaining, explaining, and proving the validity of the ordination of 
ministers or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of the 
sacraments or ordinances of religion, as the same hath been practised in 
New England from the first beginning of it, and so continued at this day. 



THE VALIDITY OP NEW ENGLAND ORDINATIONS. 



ADDRESS. 



WE are now assembled in the annual meeting of the 
American Congregational Union. Those on whom it was 
incumbent to make arrangements for the succession of meet 
ings connected with the occasion have thought it proper to 
provide that this meeting shall be opened with a discourse 
from the presiding officer of the year. 

In the choice of a subject, I have been guided in part by 
considerations of personal convenience. By a special engage 
ment, which I need not explain, my thoughts have been di 
rected of late to an inquiry respecting the vital connexion 
between the Congregational or New England churches in the 
United States, and that true Catholic Church of the living 
God in which Christ is present always to the end of the 
world. Such a subject has seemed to me to be not unworthy of 
a serious and careful discussion at the first annual convention 
of a society which has for its object, in the most comprehen 
sive statement, "the promotion of evangelical knowledge and 
piety in connexion with Congregational principles of church 
government/ And conscious as I am that the discussion 
will lack the profound philosophic insight and the classical 
eloquence which so instructed and delighted us in one of the 
discourses yesterday, and the affluent beauty of thought and 
illustration which so charmed us in the other, it relieves me 
to find that the theme which I have chosen for discussion 
may be regarded as following in some sort of logical sequence 
the subjects which have occupied our thoughts in the pre 
ceding meetings of the present Convocation. 
, None will be offended at the synonym, when I speak of 



105 

f{ the New England or Congregational Churches." What is 
known as Congregationalism in the United States, is the 
system, religious and ecclesiastical, of the churches which were 
planted by the Puritan fathers of New England. It is dis 
tinguished from the various systems of hierarchical and sy nod 
ical or classical church-government, by its great principle 
that every local society of believers for communion in Chris 
tian ordinances is, under Christ, a complete and independent 
church. Precisely the same principle is held, with exempla 
ry tenacity and consistency, by the most numerous body of 
churches in the United States ; yet the Baptists are not call 
ed Congregationalists, and the only reason is that they insist 
upon immersion as the only mode of baptism, and do not 
recognise the children of believers as having a birthright in 
the kingdom of Christ. There are others " who profess and 
call themselves Christians," with various distinctive titles, 
and who hold as firmly as we do the independence and self- 
government of local churches, but who are not spoken of as 
Congregationalists, except with some additional word of ex 
planation ; inasmuch as Congregationalism, in the common 
use of the word, includes also the idea of that theology which 
has descended from the fathers of New England a theology 
freely and boldly argumentative, with no servile deference to 
any authority but that of the Bible, and yet essentially accor 
dant with the symbolical books of the Information and of the 
Puritan age. The New England Churches, in New England 
and out of it, are as much agreed in holding what is com 
monly called " the Evangelical system of theological doc 
trine, and in baptizing the infant children of believing pa 
rents, as they are in asserting their own independent com 
pleteness and self-government under Him who is head over 
all things to the church. 

The subject then of this discourse is sufficiently intelli 
gible. Taking for my text the words of an ancient thesis, I 
propose to examine " the validity of the ordination of minis 
ters or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of 



106 

the sacraments or ordinances of religion, as- the same hatli 
been practised in New England from the first beginning of it r 
and so continued at this day," 

" The ordination of ministers or pastors of the churches 
as the same hath been practised in New England from the first 
beginning of it," is " nothing else but the solemn putting a 
man into his place and office in the church being like the in 
stalling of a magistrate in the Commonwealth," It is perform 
ed by the laying on of hands and prayer, in the full assembly of 
the church, by whose choice, not without prayer and fasting,, 
the candidate has been called to office. It is accompanied 
with a formal charge given in the name of Christ, and as from 
the mouth of God ; andwith the symbolic right-hand of fellow - 
ship given and received as expressing the unity of the Chris 
tian Commonwealth, by expressing a recognition of the church 
and of its new pastor and overseer on the part of other church 
es present by their officers and representatives, to co-operate 
in the proceedings. Thousands can testify that " the ordina 
tion of ministers or pastors of the churches," with all this pri 
mitive simplicity of ritual, is, to an intelligent and religiously 
thoughtful mind, one of the most impressive of all ecclesias 
tical solemnities, beautiful in holiness 

"Beyond the pomp that charms the eye, 
And rites adorned with gold." 

"The administration of the sacraments or ordinances of 
religion" by pastors and ministers thus ordained, is equally 
void of liturgical pomp. With pure water only, not with 
profane salt or spittle, nor with any superstitious charm, 
these pastors baptize " into the name of the Father, and of 
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," following in their formula 
the letter of the New Testament record. At the table where 
Christ has appointed to meet his disciples, they preside in 
his name ; breaking the bread with blessing, and offering 
the cup with thanksgiving, in exactest imitation of the 
Master s own ceremonial as set down in the story of that 



107 

night in which he was betrayed. Yet the ministration of 
these ordinances, as touching in their simplicity as they are 
sublime in their significance, is not to them their highest 
function. If this were the chief thing in their ministry they 
might be mistaken for priests, and might mistake themselves 
accordingly. But this administration of sacraments is only 
one of the incidents of their office in the Church. Successors 
of the apostles, so far as any apostolic function could be 
perpetual, they have learned to say with the Chief of the 
Apostles, "Christ sent us not to baptize, but to preach the 
Gospel." Pastors and teachers, bishops or overseers of the 
flock of God, their office is prophetic rather than priestly, 
and their chief work is that of dealing directly with the 
moral and spiritual faculties of men by the ministration of the 
word of God publicly and from house to house. This is what 
gives to their office its highest dignity and sanctity, and its 
hold on the affections and reverence of a free and thoughtful 
people. The administration of sacraments is not their office, 
but only an incident of their office ; as in the State the func 
tion of administering oaths is incidental to the office of a 
judge. 

In regard to the ordination of these pastors there is raised 
the question of its validity ; involving as is supposed the va 
lidity of all their consequent administration, and in particular 
the validity of their administration of the sacraments or ordi 
nances of the religion instituted by Christ. What is meant by 
those who deny the validity of these ordinations and conse 
quent administrations, when they happen to know their own 
meaning, is, that the churches of New England, as we call 
them, are not churches at all are not a portion of the one visi 
ble catholic church of Christ, and have no share in that pro 
mise "Lo, lam with you alway, even to the end of the world." 
When they deny the validity of these ordinations, they either 
mean nothing, or they mean that the pastors thus ordained 
are not Christian pastors. When they deny the validity of 
the administration of sacrament by these pastors, they either 



108 

mean nothing, or they mean that baptism thus administered 
is not Christian baptism ; and that the table at which the 
Lord s Supper is thus administered is riot the table of the 

Lord. 

How then is such a question as this to be decided ? The 
question is, in effect, though not in form, whether these 
pastors are Christian ministers whether the flocks they 
guide and feed, are Christian churches whether the religion 
administered by them is the Christian religion whether 
Christ is with them whether the Holy Spirit is with them 

whether that word of the world s Kedeemer, "Where two 

or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in 
the midst of them," belongs to them. To what tribunal can 
a question of this nature, concerning so large a portion of 
those < who profess and call themselves Christians," be car 
ried for a decision ? Where is the arbiter ? What sort of 
evidence is pertinent ? What are the rules and principles by 
which we may come to a safe conclusion ? 

We must not forget that this question, in the view of those 
who hold the negative for it is from them that the question 
originally comes is by no means a question of mere specu 
lation, interesting only to theologians and to scholars curious 
in the abstrusities of ecclesiastical lore. On the contrary, it 
is with them, and from their point of view, an eminently 
practical question ; a question of intense personal interest to 
every man who desires to be a partaker in the grace and 
friendship of God. With them it is a question which touches 
Christianity at a most vital point. On a question like this, 
when we have to do with those who hold the negative, we 
cannot reason conclusively from the nature of Christianity ; 
for the fact that they have raised the question, and that it is 
in their view a question of such moment, is evidence that 
their conception of the nature of Christianity is too widely 
different from ours to afford the common premises from 
which we and they can reach a common conclusion. We 
cannot refer it to the arbitrament of pope or prelate, 



109 

living or dead, or of any council, ancient or modern, national 
or oecumenical ; for whatever veneration they may have for 
such authorities in relation to such a question, we have none. 
There is, however, a common arbiter whose authority is 
acknowledged by them and by us alike. There are common 
premises from which they and we can set forth in argument 
together. In the nature of the case, the question is one on 
which there is no appeal but to the authentic and original 
records of the Christian religion. 

Turning then to those records, we inquire what test they 
give by which we can determine the validity of ordination. 
In what circumstances, and under what conditions, does the 
induction of a pastor into his office in the church, the formal 
setting apart of a minister to his work, acquire the attribute 
of validity, and communicate that quality to his subsequent 
administrations ? If the question is so important now, it 
must have been equally important in the first century. How 
did the Apostles treat this question of vali dity? What 
principles did they announce what rules and cautions did 
they give, by which the churches under their personal care 
might be enabled, in their absence, and after they had gone 
from among the living, to distinguish validity of ordination 
from invalidity ? 

At first sight, it is somewhat suspicious in regard to the 
nature of the question we have taken in hand that the 
New Testament contains no such word as validity in connex 
ion with the ordination of ministers or the administration of 
sacraments no parallel word or phrase no hint to show 
that the idea which that word stands for in these later centu 
ries, had ever occurred to the apostles, or to those whom 
they personally instructed. But we will not at present 
insist on this strange silence of the Apostles and their seem 
ing ignorance. I advert to it here, not as giving us any direct 
argument for the validity of our ordinations, but only for 
the sake of showing that if we would carry this question to 
the tribunal of the New Testament, with any hope of ob- 



110 

taining a clear decision, we must get it translated, as it were, 
into some form in which the Apostles and Evangelists if 
we could summon them, as Saul at Endor summoned the 
prophet would be able to understand it. In other words 
we must take the question in that more generic form of 
it which has already been suggested ; and then we shall 
find the Scriptures ready to give us light. 

When the validity of our New England ordinations, and 
consequently the validity of the administration of sacraments 
in our churches, is denied, the denial means that the pastors 
thus ordained are not ministers of Christ, or of the Christian 
religion, but are mere pretenders to that ministry. Here then 
we have the question in a form in which we can bring it di 
rectly within the range of the light that shines from the pages 
of the New Testament. In the teaching of the Apostles, 
and of the Christ himself, it is made the duty not of 
apostles only, or of ministers; not of the learned onty, or 
of the wise and gifted ; not of synods only, and ecclesiastical 
assemblies, but of all Christians alike and individually ; nay 
of all men to whom Christianity is offered, to exercise their 
judgment in regard to those who profess to be the ministers 
of God. If we take the Christian Scriptures for our guide, 
we find that it is the duty of all Christians nay of all men 
to acknowledge Christ s true ministers, and to reject all 
mere pretenders. On this point at least, our friends who 
hold forth on every side the invalidity of our ordinations 
and our sacraments, are in agreement with the Scriptures. 
Averse as they are to the exercise of private judgment on 
other points, they are compelled to acknowledge the order 
liness and the necessity of those acts of private judgment by 
which the individual, unfortunately educated in the habit of 
reading the Scriptures for himself, is to arrive at the conclu 
sion that he has no right of private judgment on religious 
questions, but is to surrender his conscience to the keeping 
of the church and of its divinely instituted hierarchy. Their 
appeal, therefore, against what we regard as the administra- 



Ill 

tion 



of Christianity in our churches their argument to show 
that these pastors are not ministers of Christ, but only pre 
tenders and conscious or unconscious impostors is not a 
concio ad derum only, but a concio ad populum, level as they 
suppose to the meanest capacity. They expect that indivi 
dual hearers and readers the unlearned as well as the learn 
edmen, women, and children will understand the argu 
ment, and, in the exercise of their judgment on a matter 
which concerns their salvation, will acknowledge the true 
ministers of God and reject the pretenders. So far at least, 
they and the New Testament are agreed. Thus the Apostle 
John says, " Beloved, believe not every spirit ; but try the 
spirits whether they are of God ; for many false prophets 
are gone out into the world." Thus the Saviour himself 
had said before him, Beware of false prophets, who come 
to you in sheep s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening 
wolves." Thus the church at Ephesus is commended by Him 
who holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, " I know thy 
works" "thou hast tried them which say they -are apostles 
and are not, and hast found them liars." 

What rules then do Christ arid his Apostles give us what 
principles do they propound, by which we may safely try the 
Spirits when many false prophets are abroad? By what tests, 
within the reach and comprehension of ordinary Christians, 
may a true minister of the Christian religion be distinguished 
from a mere pretender? [By the same tests, undoubtedly, 
may the question be decided, whether great religious unions 
and organizations, bearing the Christian name, and making 
in some sort a Christian profession, and so calling them 
selves churches, are to be recognised as belonging to the one 
holy catholic church, and as having a right to the promise of 
Christ s perpetual presence.] The same tests, undoubtedly, 
by which an individual pretender is detected and exposed, 
may be applied to bodies of clergy national, provincial, or 
sectarian. If the pastors of the New England churches, 
taken as a body and in their succession and history from 



112 

the first settlement of New England to this time, are not 
Christian ministers which is implied in the alleged invalid 
ity of their ordination and if, therefore, all their ministra 
tions are spiritually worthless, and the great religious com 
monwealth in which they serve is without the pale of the 
true Christendom, the fact will certainly be made to appear by 
the application of the tests prescribed in the New Testament. 
What these tests are, it is not difficult for any reader of the 
Scriptures to see. 

Opening the New Testament at the passage already allud 
ed to, where the Apostle John [1 John iv. 1] warns his readers 
that many false prophets had gone out into the world "many 
antichrists," as he describes them elsewhere in a still more 
energetic phrase we see in what way he expects that the 
true minister of Christianity will be identified, and in what 
way the mere pretender will be detected. "Believe not 
every spirit" every pretender to spiritual gifts or spiritual 
authority "but try the spirits whether they are of God." 
But how can they venture to judge in so difficult a matter? 
He immediately proceeds to tell them, "Hereby know ye 
the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that 
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of 
God/ " They," he says [5] meaning the false prophets or 
the spiritual pretenders who are not of God "are of the 
world, therefore speak they of the world arid the world 
heareth them. AVe are of God ; he that knoweth God hear- 
eth us ; he that is not of God, heareth not us. Hereby know 
we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error." "What kind of 
a test is this, by which Christians are to distinguish the true 
spiritual gifts in the church from the spurious and deceitful? 
Manifestly, it is not the test of a dead dogmatic formula,, 
but the very different test at once mare rigorous and more 
liberal of spiritual sympathies and antipathies. The Apos 
tles and their churches were united in one great spiritual 
fellowship, by the bond of a common affectionate faith in a 



113 

personal and living Saviour. The distinctive and central 
fact of what they called the Gospel the great historic real 
ity on which their faith rested; which had moved the 
depths of their interior being; which had wakened their 
reverent, earnest, grateful affection; which had kindled 
within them a new sense of invisible and divine realities, and 
a new consciousness of spiritual life, was this, Jesus is the 
Christ come in human nature, the anointed Eedeemer, the 
Prince and Saviour, the Creative Word, the Eternal Life. I 
need not stop to explain the reach and grandeur of this fact, 
to trace out its relations, or to unfold its effects, in the con 
sciousness of the believer quickened by the Holy Spirit. It 
is enough to say that in this apostle s theory, Christian men 
whose religious faith and affections centre on the person of 
Jesus Christ, are competent to know what Christianity 
is when they hear it uttered from living lips ; and he 
bids them try the spirits by this test : Do they utter them 
selves as if they had any just notion of the great fact that 
Jesus is the Christ come in human nature ? The quality of 
the teacher is ascertained by the quality of his teaching 
the spirit is known by his utterance the prophet by his 
prophecy. John s test for the trial of the spirits is this : 
Look to the matter of their teaching. The teacher of true 
Christianity, whose utterances commend him as such to the 
conscience and to the Christian consciousness, is of God. 
And on the other hand, the pretender to whatever spiritual 
gifts or spiritual authority, who does not hold forth a 
living and loving Christianity, all radiant from the central 
fact that Jesus is the Messiah, come in human nature, is 
not of God. 

In the same way, the Apostle Peter defines " false 
teachers" (2 Pet. ii. 6) by their teaching; they "deny the 
Lord who redeemed them." He evidently knew no better 
way of showing that a man is not a Christian minister than 
by showing that what the man administers is not Chris 
tianity, So the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. xii. 3) refers to the 

8 



114 

same- test for the trial of spiritual gifts and pretensions 
Alluding to the ignorance and heathenism from which some 
of the Corinthian Christians had been converted, he says 7 
"I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the 
Spirit of Grod calleth Jesus accursed ; and that no man can 
say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." Due 
honor put upon Jesus as the Apostle and High Priest of our 
profession, and as the author and finisher of our faith, is the 
characteristic feature of all truly Christian ministrations. 

The first test then of a Christian minister, and of his 
ministrations, is the question whether that which he adminis 
ters is Christianity. The teacher of true Christianity of 
that Christianity which is not mere dogma and tradition, but 
life and love with Christ for its centre is a true Christian 
teacher. The minister whose administration in public wor 
ship and ordinances, and in the preaching of the word, is 
the administration of true and spiritual Christianity, is a 
Christian minister. And surely the test which, when ap 
plied to an individual minister, determines his character as 
Christian or unchristian, may be applied with equal confi 
dence to a body and succession of ministers. The Scriptures 
teach us that the question whether they are a body and suc 
cession of Christian ministers, is a question of fact, to be 
determined by inspection by observing and so ascertaining 
whether that which they administer is in reality the Chris 
tian religion. 

But there is another test or rather another form and 
application of the test. The Saviour himself, when he warns 
his disciples to beware of false prophets, who come with fair 
appearances and pretensions, but who are in reality destroy 
ers, says (Matt. vii. 15-20), " ye shall know them by their 
fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ?" 
The rich, ripe clusters, pendent from the vine, demonstrate 
that the living growth which produces them is a genuine 
vine. You need not ask who planted it. You need not 
ask whence came the seed or the cutting, from which that 



115 

growth began. You are not to doubt whether it is really a 
vine or only a thorn-bush uncommonly elongated and 
flourishing, till you have explored the records and traced its 
pedigree backward some four thousand years to the vine 
yard which Noah planted after the deluge. " By their fruits 
ye shall know them." This is substantially the same test 
with that proposed by the Apostles. The quality of the 
minister is to be determined by the quality of his adminis 
tration ; the quality of the teacher by the quality of 
his teaching; the quality of the prophet, by the quality 
of the message which he brings as from God. What kind 
of fruit does he bring forth? Try all prophets all 
religious teachers all who profess to administer the word 
and grace of God by the tendency and moral effects of 
their ministry. The genuineness of a ministry is known 
by its fruits. What better test can there be than this ? We 
know what is the moral tendency of true Christianity, and 
what are its legitimate effects on individual character and 
on society. It is the tree of life, whose leaves are for the 
healing of the nations. It is the stream which the prophet 
saw in his vision, when the waters of Siloe, bursting from 
their hidden channels ; swelled into a river ; and flowing 
along the dreary wady toward the sea of Sodom, they 
changed the desert into beauty, and its scorched barrenness 
into waving verdure. That which does not produce the 
effects of Christianity that which does not work the moral 
and spiritual changes in which Christianity manifests its 
nature and its power, is not Christianity ; and those who ad 
minister it are not Christian ministers. 

Briefly then, Christianity, according to its own authentic 
words, is something which can be identified by the instructed 
moral sense. If thine eye be single if the light that is in 
thee be not darkness you can know the legitimate fruit of 
Christian doctrine and Christian institutions, when you see 
it, as certainly as you know the difference between a thistle 
and a fig. No doubt there may be individual instances, in 



116 

which the application of the test is not absolutely conclusive, 
because the fruit is not sufficiently developed in the indivi 
dual. Here and there a convert may be better than the 
teaching under which he was converted; and even the 
teacher may not illustrate in his own character the moral, 
effect of his own doctrine. There may be a Judas among 
the Apostles ; and on the other hand, Satan himself may be 
transformed into an angel of light. But taken on the large 
scale, the effects and fruits of any religious system are an 
intelligible and indisputable demonstration of the nature and 
character of the system itself. That religious system which 
produces upon individuals and upon society, in a fair field 
and from age to age, the manifest effects of Christianity is 
Christianity, valid and true; and those who administer 
that system, in its doctrines and in its ritual, are Christian 
ministers. 

Such is the rule given us by the Apostles, and by Christ 
himself, for the decision of the question now before us. We 
are to ascertain who are Christian ministers, by ascertaining 
whether they are in reality ministers of Christ s Gospel ; and 
if there be a question whether the system which they ad 
minister is in reality the Christian religion, that question 
may be answered by ascertaining its results as they lie open 
to inspection, and as the moral sense, enlightened by the 
Scriptures, and quickened by the inward grace of God, pro 
nounces them good or evil. Another rule has been 
proposed, as we all well know a rule which is thought by 
some to be not only more convenient but far more safe for 
general use. Instead of judging the minister by the quality 
of his ministration, and the ministration by its tendencies as 
ascertained in its historical results, it is proposed to judge 
the ministration by the minister, and then to judge the 
minister by inquiring whether there are adequate external 
evidences to show that he is in the right line of succession 
from the Apostles. According to this method, the first 
question is, Who ordained him ? and the next, Who ordained 



117 

bis ordainers ? and, Can his outward vocation and commis 
sion to administer the Christian religion be thus traced back 
through a succession of ordinations to the original promul- 
gators of Christianity ? To such a theory of the matter, 
aside from its intrinsic preposterousness and the contradiction 
which it offers to the whole nature and genius of Chris 
tianity, there are these grave objections. 

1. Neither Christ nor any one of his Apostles has in any 
instance directed churches or individual Christians to inquire 
after any man s pedigree as a minister of the word of God 
and of Christian ordinances. Our Lord and his Apostles 
never tell us that we are to detect a false teacher by inquir 
ing where he got his ordination. No Apostle has ever told 
us, " ye shall know the false teacher by this, that we have 
not ordained him or made him a minister." He who is head 
over all things to the church, has never said, "ye shall know 
them by their ordination ; ye shall know them by their 
lineage." His rule is and it shall stand for ever "ye shall 
know them by their fruits." And as if for the purpose of 
guarding us against a notion so mischievous and so unchris 
tian, we have it distinctly upon record, that when his best 
beloved disciple said to him (Mark ix. 38), " Master, we saw 
one casting out devils in thy name, and he folio weth not us: 
and we forbade him because he folio weth not us," his 
answer was, " Forbid him not, for there is no man who shall 
do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me : 
for he that is not against us is on our part." That is to say 
Whomsoever you find doing my work in the world, or 
attempting to do it, you need not disclaim him you need 
not demand his commission or authority for daring to serve 
me; inquire only whether he is indeed my friend; see 
whether he speaks evil of me ; see whether he derogates 
from my authority before you derogate from his; "for he 
that is not against us," in our great conflict with the world s 
wickedness and with the powers of darkness, " is for us." 
Paul too, warning the churches of Gralatia (Gal. i. 7, 8) against 



118 

those irregular itinerants of the concision those, sectarian 
and uricatholic teachers who troubled them, and would 
pervert the Gospel of Christ, says ; not that those teachers 
have not been properly ordained, nor that they are out of 
the right line of succession (the very imputation, by the way, 
which they made against him, and which he did not stoop 
to deny), but he says, with all the emphasis of his great and 
earnest soul, " though we, or an angel from heaven preach 
any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached 
unto you, let him be anathema." 

2. But it is another objection to this theory of the subject, 
that the New Testament does not contain at all that doctrine 
of ordination on which the theory rests, and which it as 
sumes as a first prineiple. The doctrine of ordination as it 
underlies the theory in question, is that a man can be author 
ized to administer the Gospel, and especially its symbolical 
ordinances, only by a certain form to which the imposition 
of the hands of a certain properly qualified functionary is 
essential ; and that in this particular way by this precise 
manipulation there is effected a transmission of powers 
which were originally given by Christ in that way to the 
Apostles, and which have thus been handed down from the 
Apostles to certain functionaries at this day. This doctrine 
of ordination our fathers renounced, and " prayed to be de 
livered from the snare thereof." We too renounce it, bless 
ing God for our liberty from that "covenant of works," and 
resolving not to be entangled again with that yoke of bond 
age. We find indeed in the New Testament a custom, a 
habit, an institute if you please, of the ordination of minis 
ters, whether missionaries or officers in churches, by the 
Wipe!* of the brotherhood and the %etpo6e<r{* of the elders ; 
and we accept that institute with all readiness as our fathers 
did, because it is an authorized as well as a devout and de 
corous method of inauguration. But the idea that the being 
of Christianity the stability, nay, the existence of that 
church against which the gates of Hades shall never prevail 



119 

is suspended on the attenuated thread of a tactual succes 
sion stretching backwards over vast chasms of darkness to 
the fingers of Peter still more that our faith in the con 
tinued grace of God must fail unless we can trace that thread 
is an idea of which the New Testament gives us not even 
the faintest intimation. 

Do we then admit that the churches of New England, and 
of the same faith and order elsewhere ; stand in no vital suc 
cession from the Apostles and the churches of the primitive 
age ? Do we admit that our churches, with their adminis 
tration of Christianity, are not historically identified with 
that universal church which Jesus of Nazareth began to 
build upon a rock, taking Simon whose surname was Peter 
for the first stone in the building ? Do we hold, as even, 
some Protestants charge us with holding that Christ s 
original church failed, and that the gates of hell prevailed 
against it through the middle ages, till our fathers founded 
it again at the Reformation ? God forbid ! We hold that 
Christianity has existed in the world without interruption of 
its historic continuity, ever since its glorious author came to 
seek and to save the lost. We hold that it has existed not 
merely in written documents, nor merely as a philosophy or 
system of propositions, but as a living force in living human 
hearts a force propagating itself by vital influences from 
heart to heart, and from age to age. We hold that it has 
existed not as a mere sentiment, or feeling of the Divine, in 
here and there a gifted and meditative mind, nor as a thing 
unknown and hidden from the search of history, but as a 
grand historic reality a subduing, creative, organizing 
power a principle of association and fellowship among men 
as well as of communion between God and human souls. 
We hold that the history of Christianity in the woild is the 
history of an organizing force and of its effects, and is there 
fore the historjr of the church in the true meaning of that 
word ; and that the history of the world from the era of 
Christ s coming derives its highest significance from its rela- 



120 

tion and real subordination to the history of the church. 
At the Keformation there commenced indeed what we call 
a new epoch. There was collision and conflict of forces, 
there was expansion and development, there was a partial 
separation of mutually repellent elements; but there was 
not a new church, nor was there any break of historic suc 
cession in the administration of the Gospel. As there was 
a living Christianity before the Keformation, identical in its 
being with the living Christianity which followed ; so there 
was before the Keformation a true ministry, with which the 
ministry that followed was connected in a natural succession. 
Luther and Zuingle, those twin stars of the Beformation, 
were members of Christ s visible and true Catholic church, 
and ministers of the word and of Christ s ordinances 
known and widely honored as such, before God put them to 
the work of reforming; nor did they forfeit, by their obedience 
to his high vocation, their title to be thus known and honored. 
The Eeformation did not make the reformers members of 
the church Catholic or ministers of Christ, but they began 
the work, and led in it, because they were already Christ s 
consecrated -ministers, and because the performance of their 
ministry, while it gave them continually clearer and larger 
views of the Gospel which they preached, brought them 
into conflict with superstition, and false doctrine, and spiri 
tual oppression. 

So when Christianity was planted on these New England 
shores, it came hither to strike its roots into the virgin soil, 
not as a new thing just created and sent down from God, 
but as the old imperishable Christianity of the Apostles and 
of Christ himself a branch or offshoot of the vine which in 
the old world had already had the growth of sixteen centu 
ries. Often have our hearts swelled as we have been made 
to think how much of the future what a freight of destiny 
was in the Mayflower, when laden with human households 
and human loves and hopes and griefs, and resonant with 
prayer and psalm, she slowly floated on her wintry voyage. 



121 

But there is equal sublimity in the thought of all the fore 
going history that was living in the Christian life of the Pil 
grim church, when the brethren in that narrow and crowded 
cabin formed their political compact " in the name of God." 
The mingled life of all the Christian centuries was in those 
lowly and believing hearts. There was the result not only 
of their personal experiences from the day when first they 
covenanted with each other that they would walk together 
as a church in conformity with the principles of the New 
Testament, " whatever it might cost them" not only of the 
studies and teaching, the faith, the devotion, the affection of 
their beloved and honored pastor not only of the intellec 
tual and spiritual culture which he and they had received 
from their own Christian fellowship in the word and the 
instituted worship and service of God but of all in the past 
that had concurred to make them what they were in their 
religious life and aspirations. The conflicts of the Keforma- 
tion, the scholastic theology of the middle ages, all the 
great labors and agonies by which Christianity had lived 
amid its perils, all the life and growth of the universal 
church, had contributed to shape their intellectual and spiri 
tual being; and the conjoined effect of all was incorporated 
with their life as a Christian brotherhood. The sternness of 
Calvin, the homely heroism of Latimer, the audacity of 
Luther, the rugged vigor of Wycliffe, had to do with the 
thinking, the feeling, the praying, the acting, the being of 
that Pilgrim church; and of each of them, as of a spiritual 
ancestor, it might be said that something of his life was 
there. Others of earlier centuries, Anselm, Beda, Augustin, 
Athanasius, were there. The struggles of great souls from 
age to age, longing for light and freedom the unfailing 
prayer of all the saints, " thy kingdom come " the groans 
of martyrs whose ashes had been cast upon the winds, 
all were there, incorporated with the life and beating in 
the pulses of those living hearts, so humble, so heroic, so full 
of devotion and of love. The Apostles were there, and those 



122 

who died for Christ in Nero s gardens and in the Roman 
amphitheatre. And more than all, and in a far sublimer 
sense, Christ was there. His presence was with them as 
truly as with the disciples of old when he came to them 
walking on the waves of Galilee. His life that lives in his 
Church through all the ages of its progress, was in their life. 
Who will tell us that the one holy Catholic church in 1620 
did not include the church of the Mayflower ? Who will 
tell us that Christ was at that moment with James of Eng 
land and with Buckingham, because Laud was with them, 
and that Christ was not with Carver, Bradford, and Brews- 
ter, and their company, because there was no mitred head 
among them ? 

The Christianity, then, which planted itself here in the 
form of Congregational churches, was in a vital connexion 
with the Christianity of England, and through that with the 
Christianity of Europe and of all foregoing ages. Or, to put 
the fact into the simplest statement of it, the first pastors and 
teachers of our New England churches the Wilson and 
Cotton of Massachusetts, the Hooker and Davenport of Con 
necticut had been, before their coming hither, able and faith 
ful ministers of the word of God in England. That they had 
exercised their ministry in the national church-establishment, 
and had been canonically ordained by English prelates, is a 
small matter to insist on here or anywhere. What is more 
to the point, is, that they were in a historic succession from 
ministers who went before them, and who had taught and 
trained them, and had led them to the ministry ; that the 
things which they had heard among many witnesses, the 
same committed they by special training and instruction to 
faithful men who were able to teach others also ; and that 
thus the churches of New England, taken as one great reli 
gious community, have enjoyed for more than two centuries 
and let us hope in God shall still enjoy through untold 
ages a true administration of Christ s word and ordi 
nances. 



123 

It is not, however, from any outward succession that we 
deduce our confidence in the validity and genuineness of the 
administration of Christianity in our churches. On the con 
trary, from the validity of the administration of the 6! ospel 
in our churches, we infer with assurance the reality of the 
inward and vital connexion between our own New England 
church history, and the history of the universal church of 
Christ. To vindicate the validity of these administrations, 
we appeal not to musty records or doubtful traditions of 
prelatical consecrations; but to those unquestionable phe 
nomena in which vital and spiritual forces make themselves 
visible. That these churches are Christian congregations 
that the ministers ordained in them, by the lifting up of the 
hands of the brotherhood, and by the laying on of the hands 
of the elders, do really administer the Christian religion, is 
not a matter of doubtful disputation to the intelligence or 
to the moral sense of men enlightened by the word and 
spirit of God. " Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus is 
the Messiah come in human nature, is of God." " He that 
abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father 
and the Son." " No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, 
but by the Holy Spirit." Where, this side of heaven, is 
Jesus the Anointed known and honored as the " Son of God, 
the Saviour of the world," if not in the Congregational 
churches of New England, and in the ministration at their 
altars ? Where, if not in these churches, do sermon and 
prayer, song and sacrament, continually hold forth, that to 
the Christ crucified " God hath given a name which is above 
every name ; that in the name of Jesus every knee shonld 
bow of those in heaven, and those in earth, and those under 
the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus 
the Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father ?" Where, 
if not in these churches, does spiritual worship utter itself 
in devout accordance with the doxology of the Apocalypse, 
" Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him 



124 

that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and 
ever." And if our church history shows here and there an 
instance of defection from the Christian truth, let the accu 
sers of our churches tell us, if they can, where Christianity 
has more effectually demonstrated its own recuperative power, 
than under our free system, and under what outward form 
it is more manifest that the church, the body of Christ, 

" Vital in every part, 
Cannot but by annihilating die." 

" By their fruits ye shall know them." If that religion 
which has been administered in the churches of New Eng 
land, " from the first beginning of it, " is not a genuine and 
valid Christianity, then may men gather grapes of thorns 
and figs of thistles. "Where, upon earth where, in all the 
history of the universal church of Christ, are the legitimate 
effects of Christianity to be found, if not in the religious 
history and the present aspect of New England ? You may 
circumnavigate the globe to find a field which the Lord hath 
blessed above all other lands a land where the grace of 
a redeeming God is at this moment exhibiting most impres 
sively its power to renew the face of the earth and you 
shall find it not where the apostles toiled and suffered in 
the ages long ago, but here, among those monumental hills, 
those smiling villages, those frequent spires, those domes 
tic sanctuaries of love and purity and of Christian faith 
and worship, those graves the ancient and the recent 
made in immortal hope. If we look back along the line of 
buried generations, how attractive are the examples of holi 
ness that shine upon us ! the seraphic Edwards, the saintly 
Brainard, the apostolic Eliot how many are the treasured 
names of those who have walked with God, and have follow 
ed their Saviour into the unseen glory ! Are they to be ex 
cluded from the pale of the church catholic in the name 
of catholicity ? The institutions of Congregational New 



125 

England its schools and various arrangements for the uni 
versal distribution of knowledge its seats of science and of 
theological learning its provision for the relief of every form 
of human affliction, so that the deaf hear, the dumb man 
speaks, the blind see and read, and the unbalanced reason 
finds its equipoise under the skilful touch of Christ-like gen 
tlenessis there no Christianity in these? The theology 
which our New England divines are ever hammering into a 
more rigorous shape of orthodoxy impute to it what eccen 
tricities and provincialisms you please the distinctive theo 
logy of New England, with its strenuous and unyielding 
grasp on the Gospel as the revelation of God in Christ re 
conciling the world to himself is there no Christianity in 
this? The developed moral sense of New England, with its 
abhorrence of oppression and injustice, its impatience of 
whatever degrades humanity, and its constant aspiration and 
struggle towards the complete reformation of society is 
there in this, whatever of occasional error or excess you 
may ascribe to it, no yearning and working of a Christian 
sentiment? The religious sensibility of New England, with 
its cheerful yet tranquil and holy Sabbaths, with its still 
reverence in the house of God, with its movements of paro 
chial sympathy its awakenings and conversions its expe 
riences so often vindicated as the work of God, by a holy 
living and a victorious death is there no Christianity in 
this? The evangelism of New England, with the grandeur 
of its enterprises and the affluence of its free contributions 
from rich and poor, with its pioneers fixing the centres of 
illumination on the prairies of the Mississippi, and where the 
mountains slope to the Pacific, with its hallowed graves on 
many a distant shore, and its living messengers under every 
temperate or torrid sky, and with its glorious trophies in Asia 
and the isles is there no Christianity in this ? In the dark, 
faint hour, when heart and flesh are failing, give me, rather 
than any formal absolution spoken by priestly lips, or any 



126 

viaticum administered by priestly hands, the living faith in 
Christ that burned in the Pilgrim exiles struggling with 
want, and winter, and disease, and dying to lie down in 
hidden graves, and that burns to-day with kindred flame in 
the Pilgrim missionary, dying amid his swarthy converts 
under the tropical sunlight, on some lonely isle where the 
billows break in murmuring music on the coral shore. 



PEOCEEDINGS AT THE ANNIVEKSAKY. 



THE first anniversary of the American Congregational Union was held at 
the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, on Wednesday and Thursday, May 
10th and llth, 1854. On the morning of Wednesday, the Union was 
addressed by Rev. E. A. Park, D.D., of Andover Theological Seminary ; and 
on the afternoon of the same day by Rev. T. M. Post, DJX, of St. Louis, 
Missouri. On Thursday afternoon the annual meeting for business was 
held. After an address from Rev. L. Bacon, D.D., the President, the 
reports of the Secretary and Treasurer were read and adopted. The fol 
lowing persons were elected officers of the Union for the ensuing year. 

OFFICERS. 

President : REV. LEONARD BACON, D.D., of New Haven. 
Vice Presidents : HON. BRADFORD R. WOOD, Albany, N. Y. ; REV. GEORGE 
SHEPPARD, D.D., Bangor, Me. ; EEV. MARK HOPKINS, D.D., Williametowu, 
Mass. ; HON. EMORY WASHBURN, Worcester, Mass. ; REV. CHARLES WALKER, 
D.D., Pittsford, Vt; HON. ARISTARCIIUS CHAMPION, Rochester, N. Y. ; REV. H. 
D. KITCHELL, Detroit, Michigan; REV. T. M. POST, St. Louis, Mo.; EEV, 
EDWARDS A. PARK, D.D., Andover, Mass.; HON. A. M. COLLINS, Hartford, 
Conn. ; REV. 0. E. DAGGETT, D.D., Canandaigua, N. Y. ; REV. JONA. LEAVITT, 
D.D., Providence, R. I. ; REV. J. M. STURTEVANT, D.D., Jacksonville, 111. ; REV. 
WILLIAM PATTON, D.D., New York ; REV. J. H. LINSLEY, D.D., Greenwich, 
Conn. ; HON. H. B. SPELLMAN, Cleaveland, Ohio ; REV. SAMUEL C. BARTLETT, 
Manchester, N. H. ; S. B. GOOKINS, ESQ., Terre Haute, Ind. ; REV. T. DWIGHT 
HUNT, San Francisco, Cal. ; REV. THOMAS WICKES, Marietta, Ohio ; EDWARD D. 
HOLTON, EsQ.,Milwaukie, Wis. ; REV. JULIUS A. REED, Davenport, Iowa; REV. 
CHARLES BEECHER, Newark, N. J. 

Trustees : REV. T. ATKINSON, REV. H. W. BEECHER, MR. H. C. BOWEN, REV. 
G. B. CHEEVER, D.D., MR. S. B. CHITTENDEN, MR. JAMES FREELAND, MR. W. C. 
GILMAN, MR. W. A. HALL, MR. ISRAEL MINOR, REV. R. S. STORRS, JR., REV. J. P. 
THOMPSON, MR. GEORGE WALKER, MR. 0. E. WOOD. 

Secretary : REV. T. ATKINSON. 

Treasurer : MR. ISRAEL MINOR. 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Union be tendered to Rev. Drs. PARK, 
POST, and BACON, for the addresses delivered by them severally before the 
Union at this its first annual gathering, and that copies of the same be 
requested with a view to their publication under the direction of the Board 
of Trustees. [In accordance with this resolution the present volume is 
issued.] 



128 

Rev. R. S. Storrs, Jr., in behalf of the Trustees, submitted the following 
plan for the establishment of Pastoral Libraries. 

That the TRUSTEES of this Union be instructed to make immediate effort 
to raise a fund of at least TWELVE THOUSAND DOLLARS ($12,000), to aid 
Congregational Churches, especially those which are comparatively feeble, 
to form Pastoral Libraries; said Fund to be administered in accordance 
with the following rules : 

I. The interest of it may be annually distributed in promotion of this 
object ; and to this interest may be added, at the discretion of the Trustees, 
such other sums as shall be annually contributed by churches or indivi 
duals, for the same special purpose ; but no portion of the original Fund of 
Twelve Thousand Dollars shall be ever expended, the same being always 
retained as a basis of operations. 

II. Appropriations under this plan may be made to any Congregational 
Church, evangelical in its faith, within the United States ; but the Trustees 
shall always have the right to select, from the applications made to them, 
such as seem to them at once most needy and most promising. 

III. No sum exceeding FIFTY DOLLARS ($50), shall be appropriated to 
any one church in one year. 

IV. No sum shall be appropriated to any church until at least an equal 
amount has been raised by the church itself, to be expended at the same 
time, for the same purpose. 

V. The appropriation made by the Trustees may be paid by them in 
money, or, at their discretion, in standard biblical, theological, and historical 
works, to be purchased by them at wholesale and distributed at cost; and 
they shall always have power, in making an appropriation, to require that 
the total list of works to be purchased be submitted to them> and approved 
or amended by them. 

VI. Every congregation receiving such an appropriation shall enter into 
covenant with the Trustees that the Library thus founded shall remain in 
perpetuity a " Pastoral Library," for the special use of the minister or 
ministers of that church ; that no division of it shall be made among the 
members of said church, but that it shall be kept by itself, in a secure 
place, insured against loss by fire ; and that, in the event of the extinction 
or dissolution of the church, it shall revert to the disposal of the Trustees. 

VII. No moneys accruing from this fund shall be applied to any other 
use than the formation of Pastoral Libraries, as specified above. 

VIII. These Rules for the administration of the Fund shall not be 
altered, except by a majority of two-thirds of those present and voting at an 
annual meeting of this Union. 

In the course of some remarks, setting forth the need of this scheme, 
Mr. Storrs said that he knew of one Congregational clergyman whose 
whole library had consisted of two volumes of Barnes Notes. He also 
stated that, by an arrangement with booksellers, the Trustees would be 
able to purchase works for these libraries at cost, thus securing to the 
churches a larger supply of books than they could otherwise procure for 
the same investment. 

The Trustees were authorized to take immediate measures to carry out 
the foregoing plan. 



129 

THE COLLATION. 

On Thursday evening the members of the Union, with a large company 
of ladies and gentlemen, assembled in the dining-hall of the Mansion 
House, Brooklyn, to partake of an elegant collation, provided under the 
direction of the Committee of Arrangements. As there was no reporter 
present on behalf of the Trustees, we are dependent upon the brief reports 
of the newspapers and our own recollections, for a sketch of the speeches 
on this occasion. It will be noticed that several of the " sentiments" were 
drawn directly or indirectly from the address of Prof. Park, which gave 
them a point not at first obvious to the general reader. The following 
brief outline may serve to convey the spirit of the occasion to those not 
present, and to revive its interest in the minds of those who were. 

CHANDLER STARR, Esq., of Brooklyn, was called to the chair, and ac 
knowledged the honor in a few appropriate remarks. 

Rev. Lyman Beecher, D.D., asked a blessing upon the feast. 

After the company had partaken of the viands prepared, Rev. R. S. Storrs, 
Jr., said it was his purpose simply to welcome his brethren from other 
parts of the country to Brooklyn, of which he felt warranted to say, in the 
language of the apostle, that his " was no mean city." It was a city of 
residences, not of stores. If they wanted to find traffic, they would have 
to go to the noisy and dirty suburb on the other side of the water. Brook 
lyn was a moral city. It had many churches, but no theatres. In New 
York they had many churches, also, but many theatres and other places of 
temptation. The East and the West were now met together on the 
Brooklyn Heights, in cordial fellowship; and we could feel the pulses of 
the two beating harmoniously. Congregationalism had left its sea of 
Galilee, New England, and gone out on its Mediterranean, the great belt 
of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

He closed by a brief statement of the plan for promoting the establish 
ment of Pastoral Libraries, and said he was authorized to announce that a 
member of the Church of the Pilgrims had pledged the sum of FIVE THOU 
SAND DOLLARS towards the proposed permanent fund of Twelve thousand 
dollars, provided the remainder be made up by the 1st of January next. 

The chairman then commenced giving out the sentiments that had been 
prepared by the committee, calling for a response to each from some gen 
tleman present. 

1. Fraternity the Bond of our Union. 

Rev. Mr. Budington, of Charlestown, Mass., after expressing his warm 
acknowledgments for the kind reception extended to the ministers of the 
East by their Brooklyn brethren, and promising a hearty return in old 
Faneuil Hall at Boston, feelingly referred to the history of Congregation 
alism, and the services it had rendered in the old and new world to the 
cause of constitutional liberty. This speech was one of rare eloquence and 
beauty illustrating the strength, the purity, and the charity of the early 
Congregationalists of New England. 

2. The Fathers of New England" the old men who are always old" 
The chairman called upon his venerable friend, Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, 

to respond to the sentiment, which was a quotation from Dr. Park s address 

9 



130 

On presenting his venerable form, he was received with rapturous applause. 
He objected to the sentiment which called him out " The Fathers of New 
England." When he got old he could speak with more experience, per 
haps, than now. He indulged in a strain of humorous remark, which kept 
the company in a high state of exhilaration. He followed this with a brief 
outline of his earlier career as a preacher, which he cut suddenly short, 
promising to finish it on some future occasion of the same nature, if he 
should become an old man. 

3. The Memory of the New Haven Colony. 

Rev. Mr. Button, of New Haven, in referring to the earliest days of the 
old colony, would suggest three pictures for an artist. The first of these 
would represent the first Sabbath after the landing of the original colo 
nists, their ship anchored near the shore, their company gathered around 
and under an old oak tree, listening to the words of John Davenport, 
The second, the New Haven colonists assembled some fourteen months 
afterwards in Mr. Carleton s barn, to prepare for the organization of the 
first church. The third, a cave of huge, rough stones, and standing at its 
entrance, two men of marked features men who had pronounced the doom 
of royal traitors in England; children in the distance, bringing them food. 
Mr. Button alluded, with much pertinence and force, to the refusal of the 
New Haven colonists to surrender these illustrious " fugitives," and to the 
preaching of Davenport against such surrendering. " Hide the outcast ; 
bewray not him that wandereth." Modesty forbade him to speak of the 
person who now occupied the pulpit of the younger Edwards, but he was 
free to say that the man who now stands in the pulpit of John Davenport 
[Rev. Dr. Bacon] can be depended on to sustain his principles of the love 
of liberty, civil and religious. 

4. Greetings to Down East. 

Rev. Dr. Tappan, of Augusta, was called up, and gave a very interesting 
account of the growth of Congregationalism throughout that section of the 
United States, and spoke with enthusiastic hope of the great future yet 
reserved for his denomination in New England. He also spoke of the 
highly beneficial effects of the Maine Law, which was in no small degree 
the fruit of Congregationalism. 

5. Tlie Far West, the farthest outpost of freedom, order, union, and truth 
on the banks of the Mississippi, linked by golden bands to our metropolitan 
heart and granite history. 

Rev. Dr. Post, of St. Louis, said he did not come from the " far West" 
at all, but from the " centre." The last they saw of the " far West" was 
a glimpse of his garments as he flitted across the Rocky Mountains, and 
they had heard of him as sojourning for a time on the shores of the 
Pacific. He did not even occupy the outposts of Congregationalism, for 
there were many churches beyond him, although he was willing to be 
considered an " out-Post," as he stood alone in St. Louis, and was himself 
both pastor and association, conference, and general association, in his 
own person. He compared the condition of the churches in the West ten 
years ago, with their flourishing condition now, and concluded his remarks 
by some very eloquent allusions to the unity and harmony of the Congre- 



131 

gational body in America. " Wo arc and shall be one," he said, " one in 
Christ our Lord, and, as the shadows fall upon these faces, young and old, 
around me, and they pass into the night and arc known on earth, in life, 
no more, the good deeds done in their generation shall have built a glo 
rious church over the land where their ashes will repose. From old 
Faneuil Hall, the voice of the truth, stronger even than of yore, shall have 
crossed the great waters, and aroused in the distant parent-land the spirit 
of other years, and a new pilgrim emigration shall again unfurl the tat 
tered banner of the Mayflower to the breeze, and bear it westward to 
the slopes of Nebraska, and hang it on the summits of Oregon, where 
the mountain airs will play through its folds as gallantly and freshly as 
they did when it waved in peace over the bay, whose billows rocked the ear 
liest keels that bore our Pilgrim Fathers to the wild shores of New 
England." 

6. The Fraternity of our Denominational Organizations. 
Rev. Dr. Bacon said he had been called up, as he supposed, by virtue of 
his office as president of the Congregational Union. After stating very 
briefly the design of the organization, and of the kindred society at Boston, 
he said his principal purpose was to introduce the distinguished President 
of the Congregational Library Association [Rev. Dr. W. T. Dwight] ; and 
preparatory to this, he would relate an anecdote of the parentage of his 
friend. He then told the story of a very black man who came to New 
Haven from North Carolina, to obtain money for the redemption of his family. 
He had excellent credentials, and he got his money. Dr. B. found, on 
conversing with him, that he was quite intelligent, using better language 
and more correct grammar than half the members of Congress who support 
the Nebraska bill. He also learned that he was a preacher of the gospel, 
and that he could read pretty well, and that he had not only read the 
Bible, but another book which he owned, and which contained, he said, the 
life of a man that used to live in New Haven. By further questioning, it 
came out that this preaching slave owned Dwight s Theology, complete in 
five volumes ; and it was by his diligent study of this noble and standard 
specimen of Congregational literature, that his soul had been comforted 
and his mind expanded and cultivated. 

Rev. Wm. T. Dwight, D.D., of Portland, followed; and after respond 
ing to the fraternal sentiments of the occasion, spoke with enthusiasm of 
the meeting in Brooklyn, and of the satisfaction enjoyed by the " old folks" 
in coming here from New England " to look after the boys." He thought 
they appeared " well to do in the world," and able to take care of them 
selves," and if they should require an occasional admonition from " home," 
it would do them good. He said they of New England were not easily 
discouraged. Nebraska bills and dough-faces could not frighten them. 
He hoped " the boys" of New York would prove equally unfaltering ; but 
they must not set up to teach their fathers. He invited the Union to 
exchange salutations with the Library Association at Faneuil Hall. 

Mr. Simeon B. Chittenden made a few remarks in this connexion on the 
importance of having the Congregational Union effectively sustained by 
ministers and churches in all parts of the country ; that it should not be 



132 

left to the support of those in New York and Brooklyn. It would not live- 
in this way, as a national institution. 

7. The man who " means weli," and is " about right ;" the people must have 
his strong pamphlet. 

This was another sentiment drawn from Prof. Park s address, and he was 
called up to respond to it. He made many palpable hits. Those who are 
familiar with Professor Park only as a writer on theological subjects, 
were both surprised and delighted by the playfulness of his wit and the 
fluency and force of his extemporaneous speech. 

Alluding to the commercial strength and energy of New York, and to 
the animation of the scene around him, he said that Andover had little to 
contribute to such an occasion. "We," said he, "are all made of 
theology. It was said of one of our students as his recommendation to ft 
parish, that he could look half an hour at the edge of a razor without wink 
ing. Professor Stuart was once asked by a lady concerning the qualifica 
tions of a young man who had sought the hand of her daughter. That 
man, said he, why he reads German like that? snapping his fingers. 
Sometimes we have theological spectres; Pelagianism, and $emi-Pelagi- 
anism a ghost that comes flitting up the Connecticut, across Massachu 
setts, and down the Merrimac, where it hovers around Andover. We dis 
cuss such questions as, whether men are sinners at birth, or before birth, 
or were sinners in Adam six thousand years ago, which is the true " Con 
flict of Ages." Prof. P. insisted in eloquent terms upon the unity of 
Congregationalists. 

8. Andover Theological Seminary. 

Prof. Stowe responded, earnestly pledging the seminary to as firm a 
course in support of freedom, as it had held of old in favor of sound 
theology and of missions. He spoke with particular reference to firm and 
decided action on the part of the Congregational churches, in the tremen 
dous struggle before us. The days of Compromise, he said, were past ; 
the time for determined resistance to the advance of absolutism, in all its 
forms, had come ! No more cowardice, corruption, and compromise ! He 
said, by the help of God, no slavery, mental or physical, should ever pol 
lute the soil of New England. 

9. Congregationalism in the Capital of New York. 

This was responded to by Hon. Bradford R. Wood, of Albany, who 
said he came from a place which used to be described in Morse s Geogra 
phy as having such a number of houses, and such a number of inhabitants, 
" all standing with their gable-ends to the street." He made a hit at Gov. 
Seymour s veto of the Maine Law, and closed with some remarks upon the 
conflicting elements of society war reigning in Europe ; slavery seeking 
to rule in America. He denounced Senator Douglas, for his course with 
reference to Nebraska ; and called upon his Congregational brethren to be 
faithful to their mission, on which so much depended of progress and hap 
piness to the nations. He terminated his remarks by denouncing any fur 
ther fellowship with political men who are coquetting with absolutism. 

10. " Young men, who are always young, young by nature, and more young 
by practice" 



133 

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was called for, and came forward amid loud 
cheers, but declined to speak, assigning as a reason that he had been taught 
when a boy, in New England, to go to bed at nine o clock, and it was now 
almost eleven. 

1 1 . The bishops of Commerce, who sell goods to further their principles : 
may the church have ten thousand more. 

This was responded to at some length by Mr. Bowen, of the firm of 
Bowen, McNamee & Co., in a very sensible address, urging the pastors of 
churches and others, who were in search of funds for the purposes of the 
denomination, to appeal to the laymen, and leave the clergymen undisturbed. 
Thus their object would be best attained : and he felt confident that the 
laymen would be found willing at all times. He added a number of plain 
and faithful suggestions as to what laymen had a right to expect of their 
pastors, as he said it was not often that he got an opportunity to preach to 
so many clergymen. 

A humorous response to Mr. Bowen, by Rev. H. W. Beecher (his pas 
tor), followed. 

An announcement that the Horticultural Society of Brooklyn had 
extended an invitation to the gentlemen of the Congregational Union, to 
visit their superb collection of flowers, concluded this extremely agreeable 
and satisfactory entertainment.