legitimate consequences. Now, this is miserable folly and poltroonery. Either your principle is sound, or it is not. If it is sound, you have no right to stop short of its legitimate consequences; you have no right to say to us, "Thus far, but no further." If it is unsound, you have no right to act on it at all. But be it one or the other, you need not flatter yourselves that you can restrain the mass who adopt it within your prescribed limits. Logic is invincible; and, in spite of all your wise saws about extremes, all your preaching of moderation, and the imprudence of pushing matters too far, they will carry out the principle, and go to the very extreme it demands. There is no such thing as pushing a sound principle too far. If your principle will not bear pushing to its extreme, you may know that it is false, and that the error is, not in pushing it too far, but in adopting it at all.

But, in our folly and timidity, we deny this. The good people of the country, the practical people, the worshippers of common sense, the via-media folks, who believe the panacea for all ills is compounded of equal doses of truth and falsehood, courage and cowardice, wisdom and folly, consistency and inconsistency, will admit nothing of all this. They will permit us to condemn results, when we must not touch causes; the consequences, when we must respect the principle. When the principle goes a little further than the mass are prepared to go, but still in the direction they are going, we may condemn the extreme, but not it. We may declaim against Come-outerism, we may denounce or ridicule the Come-outers, show up their follies and extravagances, and the great multitude will applaud; but let us trace Come-outerism to its principle, let us condemn that principle, and set forth and defend, in opposition to it, the only principle on which we can logically or consistently combat Come-outerism, and forthwith we ourselves are condemned. The very multitude, who applauded us to the echo, turn upon us and say, "Why, friend, we did not mean that. This is carrying the matter to extremes, and all extremes are dangerous, and your extreme seems to us no less so than the one you are opposing."

Nor is this all. It is impossible to make up the true issue before the public. If you take the conservative side of the question, and resolutely resist the radical tendency of the day, you are instantly declared to be an enemy of the people, an enemy of reform, the enemy of progress, the advocate

of the stand-still policy, the friend of old and superannuated institutions, of crying abuses, of iniquitous privileges,-one, in fact, who would war against the laws of God, resist the whole tendency of the universe, and stay the mighty tide of improvement. You are overwhelmed with obloquy; you are driven from the field by the hoots and hisses of a whole army of popular declaimers. He who speaks for law and order, he who demands submission to authority, and forbids impatient zeal, impatient benevolence to move, till it has received a commission from authority, can bring no echo to his words. The heart of the multitude does not thrill at the sound of his voice, or respond to his eloquence. In consequence of this, through fear of being misapprehended, of being placed in a false position, of being accused of opposing that for which their hearts are burning, and, through a natural diffidence, a distrust of their own judg ments which is produced by their very principles, many who see the evil, keep silent, shrink from the task of interposing themselves before the multitude, and of doing their best to arrest what they see and feel to be a ruinous tend

ency.

On the other hand, he who takes the radical tendency,provided he does not leap too far at a single bound,-who calls out for liberty, for reform, for progress; who speaks out for man, for humanity; declaims against tyrants and oppressors; paints in the glowing tints of a fervid eloquence the wrongs and outrages of which man is both the cause and the victim; denounces the state, defies authority, sneers at the church and its pretensions, at fat and lazy monks and priests, with their doctrines of submission, and mulish lessons of patience and resignation, touches a chord that vibrates through the universal heart. He has at his cominand all the materials of the most effective eloquence. The young, the ingenuous, the ardent, the enthusiastic are kindled. Mass after mass ignites, and the whole nation flames out in a universal conflagration. In a country like ours, he can enlist all passions, good as well as bad, and render himself irresistible. All the inducements are, therefore, on the side of radicalism; whoever would coöperate with his countrymen, whoever would lead the multitude or use them for good purposes or evil, must espouse it, and support it with all his energy. We have but to proclaim the supremacy of man, to call out for freedom, and demand the institution of the worship of humanity, and thousands

hang breathless on our words and respond to our tones. Change our ground, take the conservative side, and he, who yesterday was the master spirit of his age and country, speaks only to listless ears; his power is gone; there is no eloquence in his voice, no magic in his words. The few who may applaud, who may hope to use him for their own purposes, half despise him, and he sinks into insignificance. Hence, all conspires to push on radicalism to its legitimate results. Christianity gives place to socialism, and the everblessed Son of God, to your Owens, Fouriers, or SaintSimons.

Now, here we are; the great mass of us, unwilling to accept, to accept fully and unconditionally, the conservative method, countenancing the radical method in its principle, and opposing it only in its results; while all the active and energetic tendencies of the country conspire to swell its force and consolidate its dominion. What is to be done? What is our resource? Where is our safety? One or the other of the two principles must predominate, must become supreme; and the advantage is now all on the side of the radical tendency, however much it may be decried in colleges and saloons; and not only with us, but throughout Christendom. The great active causes in Europe are working in harmony with it, and even the conservative press of England is beginning to be affected by the socialist tendency, and the young Catholics of France and Germany are, in but too many instances, carried away by it. Is it not time to pause, and make up our minds to accept bravely one tendency or the other? Peace between the two is out of the question. The human race aspires to unity, and society cannot, and will not, consent to be torn forever by this destructive dualism.

For ourselves, we have made our choice. We began our career with the radical tendency. We accepted it in good faith, and followed it till we saw where it must necessarily lead. We recoiled from its consequences, and sought, by an impotent eclecticism, to reconcile the two principles, to harmonize authority and the independence of the subject, till we found our speech confounded, and saw the attempt was as idle as that of the builders in the Plain of Shinar, who would build a tower that should connect earth with heaven. Nothing remained but to take our stand on the conservative side, and submit ourselves to authority, and take the ground that reforms are never to be attempted in

opposition to established authorities; that is, on individual responsibility alone. We abandon no love of progress, we give up no hope of improvement, but hold that improvement is to come from high to low, not from low to high. It is God that decends to man, the Word that becomes flesh; not man that ascends to God, not humanity that becomes Divinity.

The question is, no doubt, a grave one; it has, no doubt, two sides, and men may honestly differ in their decisions. But to one decision or the other they must come, and that right early, or it may be too late. We have wished to state the question, and show that this Come-outerism, which so many condemn, and, in our judgment, so justly condemn, is in reality only the legitimate logical result of the great political doctrine, that government derives its just powers from the assent of the governed, and the kindred doctrine of the supremacy of the individual reason in matters of faith. The right of private interpretation and government by consent of the governed once granted, no logical mind can stop short of Come-outerism; and if you add the Quaker doctrine of individual inspiration, of the "light within," you not only legitimate Come-outerism, but establish it on a divine foundation, and clothe it with divine authority.

But, after all, we will not suffer ourselves to despair either of the country or of humanity. We do, in the profound darkness which envelopes the land and the age, behold a gleam of light. One ray, at least, breaks through the gloom, and reveals to us the glorious truth, that there lies a bright heaven beyond, in which rides in his majesty the Sun of Righteousness. The reaction, we have elsewhere pointed out, in favor of religion and the church, the deep and absorbing interest which many are beginning to feel on the great question of the church, unsteady and uncertain as all may be as yet, is a favorable indication that we may possibly have reached the lowest deep, and that the upward tendency is commencing; that Providence has not wholly abandoned us, nor given us up to a reprobate mind; and that the great and conservative spirit of the Gospel is still powerful, and will ultimately overcome the world, and subdue all things to the Lord and his Christ. We call upon the religious-minded, the lovers of the Lord, and the true friends of humanity, to hope and work, to pray without ceasing, and continue in well-doing. Let our trust be not in man, nor on an arm of flesh, but in God; let us submit our

selves to him, lay aside human vanity and human pride, and walk in the way he has ordained, and the evil will be arrested, and the good retained.

SPARKS ON EPISCOPACY.*

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

OUR own general estimate of the Protestant Episcopal church, when reviewed in relation to unity and catholicity, may be easily collected from a foregoing article. We are compelled to regard it as a Protestant communion; and we are unable to find any ground on which Protestantism, taken as a separation in doctrine or communion from the Holy See, can be defended, without rejecting all notions of the church as an organic body. We know not what new light may break in upon our minds, but, so far as at present informed, we are compelled, by what seems to us to be the force of truth, to look upon the separation of the reformers from the Roman communion, in the sixteenth century, as irregular, unnecessary, and, we must add, as a serious calamity to Christendom. We deny not that there was a necessity for a thorough reform of manners; but we cannot but think and believe, that, if the reformers had confined themselves to such reforms, and to such modes of effecting them, as were authorized or permitted by the canons of the church, they would have much more successfully corrected the real abuses of which they complained, and done infinitely more service to the cause of religion and social progress. Their separation, if not a terrible sin, was at best a terrible mistake, which all sincere lovers of the Lord and his Spouse should deeply lament, and over which no one should permit himself to exult.

*Letters on the Ministry. Ritual, and Doctrines of the Protestant Episcopal Church, addressed to Rev. Wm. E. Wyatt, D. D., Associate Minister of St. Paul's Parish, Baltimore, and Professor of Theology in the University of Maryland, in Reply to a Sermon exhibiting some of the principal Doc trines of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. By JARED SPARKS, formerly Minister of the First Independent Church of Baltimore. Second Edition. Boston: 1844.