ural chiefs of industry, that is, to bank presidents, cashiers, and directors; to the presidents and directors of insurance offices, of railroads and other corporations; heavy manufacturers, and leading merchants; the master-workers, in Carlyle's terminology, the Plugsons of Undershot. Messrs. Plugsons of Undershot, you are a numerous and a powerful body. You are the chiefs of industry, and in some sort hold our lives in your pockets. You are a respectable body. We see you occupying the chief seats in the synagogues, consulted by secretaries of the treasury, constituting boards of trade, conventions of manufacturers, forming home leagues, presiding over lyceums, making speeches at meetings for the relief of the poor, and other charitable purposes. You are great; you are respectable; and you have a benevolent regard for all poor laborers. Suffer us, alas! a poor laborer enough, to do you homage, and render you the tribute of our gratitude. Think not that we mean to reproach you with the present state of industry and the working men. We have no reproaches to bring. But, ye are able to place our industry on its right basis, and we call upon you to do it; nay, we tell you that not we only, but a Higher than any of us, will hold you responsible for the future condition of the industrial classes. If you govern industry only with a view to your own profit, to the profit of master-workers, we tell you that the little you contribute to build work-houses, and to furnish bread and soup, will not be held as a final discharge. If God has given you capacities to lead, it has been that you might be a blessing to those who want that capacity. As he will hold the clergy responsible for the religious faith of the people, as he will hold the political chiefs responsible for the wise ordinance and administration of government, so, respected Masters, will he hold you responsible for the wise organization of industry and the just distribution of its fruits. Here, we dare speak, for here we are the interpreter of the law of God. Every pang the poor mother feels over her starving boy, is recorded in heaven against you, and goes to swell the account you are running up there, and which you, with all your financiering, may be unable to discharge. Do not believe that no books are kept but your own, nor that your method of book-keeping by double entry is the highest method, the most perfect. Look to it, then. What does it profit, though a man gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Ay, respected Masters, as little as ye think of the

matter, ye have souls, and souls that can be lost, too, if not lost already. In God's name, in humanity's name, nay, in the name of your own souls, which will not relish the fire that is never quenched, nor feel at ease under the gnawings of the worm that never dies, let us entreat you to lose no time in re-arranging industry, and preventing the recurrence of these evils, which with no malice we have roughly sketched for you to look upon. The matter, friends, is pressing, and delay may prove fatal. Remember, there is a God in heaven, who may say to you, "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you; your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten, your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. You have stored up to yourselves wrath against the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped your fields of which you have defrauded them, crieth out; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." This is not our denunciation; it is not the declamation of the agrarian seeking to arm the poor against the rich; but it is God himself speaking to you now in warning, what he will hereafter, unless you are wise, speak to you in retribution.

THE CHURCH QUESTION.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1844.]

I HAVE not introduced these Tracts, which have created so much excitement, and concerning which so much has been said and written during the last few years, for the purpose of going into a critical examination of their literary, or their theological merits; nor, indeed, for the purpose of entering far into the question of the claims of the Anglican church to catholicity, which they open up; but because they happen to furnish me with a convenient text for some rather desultory remarks on the very important religious movement of which they are one of the pregnant signs.

So far as they broach the claims of the church of England to be the catholic, or a catholic church, I probably should not altogether agree with their learned and pious authors. Regarded as a question of outward organization and canonical communion, the claims of the church of England to catholicity, on her own admitted principles, do not appear to me to stand on any better footing than those of the other Protestant communions. She holds, and rightfully, that the holy catholic apostolic church is supreme, under God, in all matters of faith and discipline. It is true, she adds, it is not lawful for the church to ordain any thing contrary to, or besides God's word written, to be believed for necessity of salvation; but this does in no wise impair her authority; because she is the keeper and interpreter of the word written, as well as of the word spoken; because it is she herself, by virtue of her authoritative interpretations of the word, that prescribes and interprets the limitations and extent of her own powers; and because she alone has the right to judge of their infraction, and also of the mode and measure of redress. She cannot suffer the individual member, or any number of individual members, as such, to judge her acts, or to plead the sacred text against her decisions; for this would be to authorize dissent and individualism against which she protests.

*Tracts for the Times. By Members of the University of Oxford. New York: 1839.

Now it is undeniable that from the sixth to the sixteenth century, to say the least, the church of England had no separate, independent existence. It was an integral portion, canonically considered, of the Catholic church, the acknowl edged head and centre of which were at Rome. This Catholic church, one and indivisible, including all national or local churches in communion with it, was, during the period I have named, supreme, and therefore competent to legislate on all matters of faith, discipline, and church organization for all its members. Whatever modifications in regard to faith or discipline, or to the constitution and administration, the distribution or concentration of power, she chose to introduce, she was competent to introduce; and they must override all ancient usages inconsistent with them, and be as obligatory on all the members as if they had existed from the beginning. Grant, if you will, that in some cases the modifications, or by whatever name you choose to call them, which were actually introduced, were injudicious, contrary to the principles of the Gospel, oppres sive even, although this is hardly admissible by a good churchman, redress could rightfully be sought only in and through the orderly and official action of the church herself, that is, in and through the body; not in and through the members acting on their own responsibility.

We must not forget the unity of the church. There is no reserve to be made in favor of national churches, as if the church existing in a given nation were an independent church, subsisting by itself and holding communion with the church existing in other nations, not as the necessary condition of its own vitality, but as a mere act of Christian and ministerial courtesy; for this would be to deny both the unity and catholicity of the church. It were a real rending of Christ's seamless garment. The church of Christ knows no geographical boundaries, no national limitations, no national distinctions. The member of Christ's church here in Boston is a member of it in every part of the world, and in communion with the whole body, wherever it is. If not, it is idle to talk of unity and catholicity. Assuming these principles, which the church of England does and must assume, as the foundation of her own claims to catholicity, I see not how she can justify herself in separating, as she did in the sixteenth century, and setting up a particular communion, without going the whole length of dissent, and abandoning entirely her own principles. On

the ground, then, that it is necessary to have maintained from the first the unity of the Lord's body unbroken, I think she not only fails to prove herself to be the catholic church, but to be, in the catholic sense, even a church at all.

But I do not wish to pursue the discussion. The question in this form is to me one of only secondary importance. I own that the church of England has never been able to convince me, on the ground she assumes, of the validity of her claims; but shall I therefore seek to unchurch her? God forbid! There is and can be but one catholic church. If she is that church, all not in communion with her are unchurched; and all who are not members of her communion are out of the pale of the church; therefore out of Christ; therefore, again, out of the way of salvation. Shall I say all this? Shall I say that all the members of the Roman Catholic church, of the Greek church, the Armenian church, the Lutheran, the Presbyterian, the Congregational, the Methodist, the Baptist are out of the way of salvation, and can be saved only by becoming members of the church of England? It were a terrible responsibility to say so. On the other hand, shall I say that all who have lived and died in the church of England since the time of Henry and Cranmer, have lived and died out of Christ? I dare not say so.

The fact is, those of us who believe in, and seek the unity of the Lord's body, must be careful how we lay down principles which unchurch all but our own particular com munion, or which would exclude from the church of Christ, in the sense necessary for salvation, and which is a higher sense too, than that of mere outward communion, any particular body of professing Christians which maintains the Christian principles and spirit in the lives of its members. The great question of the church should be looked at from a higher and broader point of view than that of particular communions. The outward form of the Lord's body has been broken into fragments; but it was an immortal body, and each particular fragment, however small, or however far the adversary may have cast it abroad in the earth, is still quick with its original life, and cannot die. Instead, then, of contending that this or that particular fragment is the whole body, and contains all the life, the real friends of the unity and catholicity of the church, imitating, as Milton says, the careful search of Isis after the scattered frag