the shedding of blood there was remission. The connexion testifies that this was the intended purport of his language.

It may not be improper, here, to institute some brief inquiry respecting the character of forgiveness from God toward men. Does it imply that all the threatened and consequent penalties of transgression shall be withholden? No. For manifestly, such is not the fact. God did not, in this sense, forgive Adam; nor Moses; nor David; nor Solomon. What God specifically threatens the sinner, will come upon him. No repentance ever averts it. The transgressor must eat the fruit of his evil way. The connection between the offence and its punishment is as indissoluble, as the link that binds cause and consequence together. But God forgives the sinner by accepting him when penitent and converted to righteousness. He treats him as being just what he is; contrite, reformed, obedient. The righteous Lord loveth the righteous. Reformed transgressors are a description of righteous persons. "God is with you so long as ye be with Him." God's having pleasure in a person implies condescension, benignity, forgiveness, but not the cancelling of all the penalties of iniquity. The providence of God furnishes irrefragable evidences that He maintains His moral government. It admits no vicarious atonements. They would mar and debilitate, not aid and perfect it. God certainly approves every good thing in frail, wicked man. And the Divine approval, secured by habitual reformation, amounts to forgiveness. It is a blessing. For God's favor is life; His loving kindness, better than life.

One word respecting the Jewish dress, worn by Christianity in the epistolary part of the New Testament. How is it to be accounted for? It is not a problem of dubious solution. The religious views of a Jew were so enveloped in the forms of the Mosaical Institute, that without them he could have no clear conception of any true religion. Hence Christianity is invested with them. It has its altar, its atonement, its priest, its sacrifices, its sanctum sanctorum, &c. But the Christian altar, atonement, propitiatory, sacrifices, and priest, are things very different from the Jewish. All these are to be understood in an accommodation-sense. Nor is this sense, in its several different applications, hard to be understood. Guided by the plain truths, and obvious spirit, of the Christian law, we need not fall into any important mistake.

F.

THE FUTURE LIFE.

W.C. Bryant

How shall I know thee in the sphere which keeps
The disembodied spirits of the dead,
When all of thee that time could wither sleeps
And perishes among the dust we tread?

For I shall feel the sting of ceaseless pain
If there I meet thy gentle presence not;
Nor hear the voice I love, nor read again
In thy serenest eyes the tender thought.

Will not thy own meek heart demand me there?
That heart whose fondest throbs to me were given?
My name on earth was ever in thy prayer,

Shall it be banished from thy tongue in heaven?

In meadows fanned by heaven's life-breathing wind,
In the resplendence of that glorious sphere,
And larger movements of the unfettered mind,
Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here?

The love that lived through all the stormy past,
And meekly with my harsher nature bore,
And deeper grew, and tenderer to the last,
Shall it expire with life, and be no more?

A happier lot than mine, and larger light,
Await thee there; for thou hast bowed thy will
In cheerful homage to the rule of right,

And lovest all, and renderest good for ill.

For me the sordid cares, in which I dwell,

Shrink and consume the heart, as heat the scroll;
And wrath hath left its scar that fire of hell
Has left its frightful scar upon my soul.

Yet, though thou wear'st the glory of the sky,
Wilt thou not keep the same beloved name,
The same fair thoughtful brow, and gentle eye,
Lovlier in heaven's sweet climate, yet the same?

Shalt thou not teach me, in that calmer home,
The wisdom that I learned so ill in this
The wisdom which is love - - till I become
Thy fit companion in that land of bliss ?

THE PILGRIM FATHERS:

A Poem recited in the Church of the Disciples, Boston, on the Festival of the Pilgrims, Dec. 22d, 1842.

THAT ancient church which understood the way
So well, upon the human heart to play,

And so sagaciously the means could find

Which, from without, might influence the mind,
Adapted all its solemn Liturgy

To sense, imagination, memory;
And to each day a sacred meaning lent,
By patron saint or memorable event;

Thus walking with her sons the year around,
And treading every day on hallowed ground.
When our severer faith shall comprehend
To use Imagination as its friend,

And, while appealing to the inmost soul,
And urging upon Conscience its control,
Shall try all means by which the heart is won,
While doing this, not leaving that undone;
Then solemn epochs shall again appear,
Circling the earth with each revolving year;
And none be named in loftier speech or song,
Than this, which to the Pilgrims must belong.

Ask you what kind of persons or events
Should, in our calendar, find monuments?
In all great movements we'd find something good,
Trace in all sects some cause for gratitude.
One day to Rome herself we'd consecrate;
Her martyrs, heroes, poverty, and state,
Jesuits, who plant the cross in far Cathay,
And rule a continent in Paraguay ;

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21

To Rome, who trampled on the neck of kings,
To Rome, from out whose fruitful bosom springs
Such wondrous monuments of thought and art,
A Dante's solemn song, a Raphael's tender heart;
Inspired by whom, rude nations lifted high
Cathedral spires against a Northern sky;
Whose awful sacraments and solemn forms

Awed the fierce noble, calmed the common's storms;
Yet not for these that ancient church we'd bless
As for one specimen of holiness,

To honor him one day might well be given,
Not sainted here, but sure a saint in Heaven;
The birth-day of Rome's loftiest, lowliest son;
Her choicest fruit, her lovely Fenelon.

Our second festival might choose the date
When Luther fixed to the Cathedral gate
His ninety daring Theses, and began
A second era for the mind of man.

Devote that day to Freedom on that morn
Freedom of mind, freedom of act was born;
Born to be nursed with tears, baptized with blood;
Fountain of evil, source of mighty good.

Two other festivals might follow then,
Sacred to Wesley and to William Penn,
All these we'd honor, all their feasts revere,
Yet more than all, the Pilgrim day be dear.

The PILGRIM FATHERS-by that name alone
They, in each clime, through every land are known;
And yet how different their hope and aim
From those who bore of old the Pilgrim name.
No voyage to ancient Palestine they planned,

Beyond the ocean lay their Holy Land.

Never could they have joined the enterprise
Which made all Europe as one man arise;
Princes and peasants, boors and chivalry,
Following the bare-foot friar's piercing cry -
"Come! see the tomb wherein the Lord hath lain,'
To faint and perish on the Syrian plain.
By deeper feelings were these Pilgrims led,
Not on the brink of empty graves to tread,
Where Jesus' body hung on Calvary ;
But where they hoped his spirit was to be.
Not to the aged East, his place of rest,
But to the yet unknown, untravelled West.
Not where their faith within its cradle lay,
Nor where it tottered on its infant way,
But where they longed, in dignity and strength,
Its perfect manly form to see at length.
Not to the Past, in meditation slow,

And solemn musing did their footsteps go,
Pilgrims of hope, the fire within them burned,
With faces wholly to the Future turned.

Oh golden Future! mid their iron toil,
Above, cold skies, beneath, a frozen soil;

With thy sweet daughter Hope thou didst beguile
Rude labor, in thy light the deserts smile;
In fair Ideal beauty visions rise,

Purpling the blackness of the woods and skies;

The rough prosaic Puritan began

To turn a Poet in the inner man;

He penned no stanzas to his mistress' locks,
But wrote his poetry on granite rocks;
Stamped his ideas on a stormy shore,

His music savage yells and ocean's roar;

Free schools, log churches, filled this poet's dream,

A Christian Commonwealth his noble theme.