save a vague love of liberty and a feverish interest in the immortal life, to encourage the Liberal Christian. Atheism, scepticism, even the grossest theories of social anarchy, still find ample space in its unfenced wilderness: indeed the outward and more public movement called Spiritualism is not generally in the hands of its purest or ablest disciples; but there is a decided tendency from that direction towards the reception of the broadest views of the religion of Jesus. Christ.

All these movements are tending towards an efficient organization of a Liberal Christianity, as characteristic of the West as Unitarianism and Universalism of the more advanced NewEngland States. At present they are separated by barriers of social, literary, and theological culture; even more by the personal ambitions of leading men; and all effort at premature union will result in mortifying failure. Indeed they all, including Unitarianism, need at present a denominational organism to concentrate and develop the actual working force among themselves. A quarter of a century of enlarged work for education, missions, and church organization among them, will establish several bodies of progressive churches which will not be for ever apart, but all the while be approaching each other.

Towards this whole body of professedly Liberal Christian churches it becomes our Unitarian congregations to maintain the most friendly attitude. They cannot unite in ecclesiastical relations with us, without violating every tradition of their own past, and their familiar polity; but there may be unaf fected unity of the spirit amid all this diversity of operation. They are always more willing to acknowledge the Unitarian superiority in theological and literary culture than we are to recognize their merits of social efficiency and consecration to Christ. Every large Unitarian congregation may thus generally find a companionship in its own neighborhood, quite as profitable, and often more hearty, than the formal and frozen union of our churches in their strongholds of power.

We believe far more can be done by improving this fellowship than by attempting to force an unreal companionship

with the atheistic and anarchical elements of the West. The one is a region of religious aspiration and progress; while the other is the realm of endless agitation, running down towards spiritual death. The extremest of our men on the tip of the "left wing," even the stray feather that floats off from the tip, meandering after the millennium, has no more vital hold upon the violent materialistic atheism that rages through our great Western cities than high Calvinism itself. It is a sort of moral rabies, that froths at the mouth at the suspicion of a God, and raves at the suggestion of a spiritual nature in man. It runs down into the realms of moral darkness and death. Though nominally in the party of freedom, it is always as intolerant in its license as Catholicism with its despotism. Outside of a few dozen men and women of respectable scientific attainments and political notoriety, whose real faith it misrepresents, it is simply the deification of the senses and the lower regions of life. Unitarianism can never permanently affiliate with it, save on peril of destruction; while all the churches of native Western Liberal Christianity are the natural feeders of our congregations, our legitimate allies to be despised and shunned only by an affront to Christian charity and Christian policy.

So much for the Liberal Christianity outside the organized religion of the West. When we look for Liberal Christianity within the ranks of the Catholic and Protestant-Evangelical churches, we are surprised to learn the extent to which these organizations are permeated by advanced ideas on religion. In all these bodies is found a growing class who do not hesitate to confess their sympathy with the spirit of our faith.

One is surprised to learn how many of the American converts to the Catholic Church have been driven into its arms by their fear and hatred of the Calvinistic theology, -as children, flying from a runaway upon the street, rush in at the open door of the first house that offers shelter. Thousands of these persons, now fixed in the Catholic Church, are Unitarians at heart; and, twenty years ago, would have joyfully attached themselves to churches like those of Eliot, Osgood, and Hale: but, shut up in communities to which

Liberal Christianity had never penetrated, they found in Catholicism a theological latitude to which Presbyterianism has never attained, and an ecclesiastical despotism at least disguised by the graces of art, and hallowed by the memories of antiquity.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the West is filled with people who find it the most respectable refuge from the rough theological weather and volcanic revivalism that desolate the outward world. A considerable portion of the Episcopal clergy are growing into sympathy with the Broad Church movement in England. A larger number have that yearning affection for "miserable sinners" of the respectable type which compels them to omit the sin of heresy from the catalogue of their numerous offences. It is now well understood in the West, that the Episcopal Church seeks out, as by instinct, those from other Evangelical churches who are suspected of disaffection with the creeds, and offers them theological neutrality on condition of enlistment in the ranks of the "true church." The end of this is not yet. The time is approaching when Western Episcopacy, tired of its servility to fashion, and shamed out of its sympathy with spiritual and political despotism, will rise up, in the might of a holy purpose, and, by the aid of the Liberal Christianity within itself, become a valuable leader of the more cultivated Western life.

Notwithstanding the boast of Dr. Baird, that the Presbyterian Church of the United States has never tolerated within its stern inclosure one minister of doubtful faith, it is yet true that the New-school Presbyterian Church, and especially the irregular bodies of that faith, have been invaded with "heresy." We lately heard one of the most eminent public men of Southern Ohio deliver himself, in the presence of a company of Evangelical clergymen, on the subject of creeds, in a manner more calculated to awaken surprise than provoke reply. The interminable theological disputations and ecclesiastical wranglings of this grievously tormented church are filling thousands of its noblest lay adherents with a grief bordering on disgust. The patriotic men and women who

have sent their sons into the field, and given freely of all that was left at home for the sacred cause of liberty and union, during the past five years, have not failed to notice that the most inveterate clerical sticklers for the Westminster Catechism have either been the vilest "copperheads;" or, at least, determined that the political differences of the saints on earth should not mar the harmony of their mutual rejoicings over the damnation of heretics in heaven. Grievous days are in store for this section of the Presbyterian ministering brethren in the West. Their faces are already turning towards the equator, and their migration will every year be more rapid towards those realms where they may be spared a little longer to their beloved occupation of swearing fidelity to the Catechism, and chanting doleful psalms over the dissolving body of Negro slavery. Purified by such deliverance, it is not improbable that Western Presbyterianism may yet expand, till, in America, it glows once more with the divine flame of liberty which kindled the mountains of Scotland, and flashed a blinding terror in the eyes of emperor and pope in the days when Holland was the foremost nation of the earth.

This spirit of Liberal Christianity prevails yet more extensively in the Orthodox-Congregational and Baptist churches of the West. Almost every large Western town and city now supports a young Congregational or Baptist preacher of the sort nicknamed by old Dr. Bethune," Beecher's apes;" but otherwise known as the most useful, wide-awake, eloquent Christian minister in that community. These two denominations are rapidly increasing through this region of country. There is nothing in their 'ecclesiastical polity or organization to prevent their passage over to Liberal Christianity, as their fathers crossed the flood half a century ago in New England. Indeed, since that memorable exodus, the waters have never quite closed behind. At low tide, there is always a foot-path over which an active young parson can pick his way; and posted at intervals along the road, rise the stalwart forms of Bushnell, Park, and Beecher, like tall light-houses flashing a lurid defiance into the face of the wild

est storm. A quarter of a century of theological progress will bring the Baptist and Congregational churches of the West into a working sympathy with Liberal Christianity.

But perhaps the Methodist Church in its various branches has witnessed more powerful demonstrations of the liberal Christian spirit than any of the great organized religious bodies. The working theology of the Methodist Church centres in the free grace of God and the moral ability of man; and to its powerful preaching of these inspiring truths, it chiefly owes its hold upon the affections of the people. Its stringent ecclesiasticism is yearly giving way before the rising intelligence and independence of its leading laity. During the present season, a convention of several hundred dissenting Methodist churches at Cincinnati organized a new Methodist denomination, with a generous polity and a genial Evangelical creed. Lay representation must inevitably come to the Methodist Episcopal Church, and greatly change it. Meanwhile there is no body of Christians in the West so ready to extend the hand of Christian sympathy to Liberal Christians as this. The ranks of our clergy are perpetually recruited by able men from its communion. Their ministers eagerly receive our publications; and Unitarian literature is now more carefully read in the West in Methodist, than in professedly Unitarian families. During the last few years, more than two hundred Methodist clergymen have cheerfully received libraries of Unitarian books, donated by Professor Huidekoper, as trustee of the Meadville fund for the distribution of books, to ministers of every denomination. We have received more invitations to appear before Methodist congregations during a three years' ministry in Cincinnati than from all the Unitarian churches of Boston during an eight years' ministry to one of the leading Universalist churches in Massachusetts. The future of Methodism is full of hope for a Liberal Christianity in the West.

However indisposed the leading clergy of these great organizations may be to acknowledge these facts, they are well known to our clergy by various significant manifestations. The ominous absence of able men from the Sunday