teries of existence; yet believing, and enriched, and ennobled, by the faith. The one asserts the right of private judgment, to the extent of rejecting all creeds and contemning institutions and ordinances, thus repudiating the wisdom of the past and stripping the novice to begin the elements of religious knowledge in the puris naturalibus of barbarism; the other receives the wisdom of the past, and thankfully accepts the helps of its creeds, its systems, and its institutions. The one claims a mental independence which fructifies in a perennial crop of crudity and self-conceit; and, in questioning old truths, mistakes vanity for originality, bravado for courage, and haste for progress; the other, looking to God's Word and Spirit for light, is content with fewer discoveries but more truth, with less novelty but more wisdom.

(2) In the sphere of social life, the one develops the outward activity, the other the inward resources. The one stimulates grasping and self-aggrandizement; the other, the spiritual life. The one is concerned with what a man gets; the other, with what he is. The one is adequate to make man develop a continent; the other, to develop himself and the continent. Hence the spirit of self-assertion, while it stimulates to indomitable activity, quickens inventions, and multiplies the instruments of action and the means of enjoyment, leaves the inan restless and unsatisfied: it builds the house, but cannot create a home; it fills the house with "all the modern improvements," but not with domestic bliss; it multiplies facilities for business, and makes the man a Sysiphus in conducting it. Let me present Paul and Napoleon as examples of these two types of development. Look at them in their years of imprisonment; when, thrown wholly on themselves, they disclosed what they really were. Napoleon was querulous and morose, unhappy and weak. Deprived of the objects of his ambition, his soul could not stand alone, but sunk like a rank weed, which, when its support is removed, falls and trails in the dirt. Paul's imprisonment interrupted plans of action as vast as Napoleon's and as earnestly prosecuted; it was longer than the emperor's, and incomparably more severe. Immured within a prison, en

during the discomforts of a sea-voyage, in a crowded ship; or, in Rome, with one hand chained, day and night, to a soldier; how self-poised and firm, how full of grandeur and dignity, how serene, and often triumphant! who can read his letters and not see the grandeur of his soul?

(3) In the sphere of political life, the one insists on freedom, the other on justice, mercy, and reverence for God.

The love of personal freedom is a natural feeling, consistent with selfishness. It is stronger in the savage than in the civilized man. A political system built on this is a system of pure self-assertion. It is consistent with it that those who boast their own love of liberty should hold slaves, or that the government should be an oligarchy of the few tyrannizing over the many. But Christianity lays at the foundation of the political system the sentiment of justice. The former, in the spirit of self-assertion, teaches me to insist on my personal freedom; the latter, in the spirit of self-renunciation, on duty and right. The former gives us the shallow and dangerous watchword of the French Revolution, “liberty, equality, fraternity;" the latter gives us the maxim of inspiration, "justice, mercy, and humility, or reverence before God." The former understands "the rights of

"to mean my rights and your duties; the latter recog nizes the doctrine as equally including your rights and my duties.

Hence two opposite theories of human rights, both equally opposed to the divine right of kings, a theory which, though it may, as in the British Constitution, secure the liberty of the subject, yet recognizes every right as a privilege granted by the sovereign, and thus asserts his absolute supremacy, yet both as much opposed to each other. The Christian doctrine of human rights agrees with the British Constitution in recognizing the rights of the citizen as privileges, but privileges not granted to a few or to a class by the sovereign, but granted and guaranteed to all men by God, to be exercised in reverent allegiance to him, and in submission to the government which he has ordained. This foundation of human rights is explicitly stated in the Amer

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ican Declaration of Independence. The theory of the French Revolution, on the contrary, does not recognize human rights as grants from any superior, but as inherent in the individual in his natural liberty or wildness, and having neither authority nor guaranty above the man himself. Some of these rights are surrendered to the government in the fiction of the social contract, and this is the sole foundation of governmental authority. Thus absolutely the highest source of law and authority is the will of the people. Liberty thus founded is necessarily atheistic in principle and ungodly in practice. It engenders fever rather than growth, revolutions and convulsions, rather than the steady uplifting of the people by their actual improvement in intelligence, character and capacity. It produces convulsive alternations between despotism and anarchy, instead of real progress. By teaching that the supreme authority of government is the consent of the governed, and that the will of the people is the highest law, it first engenders a defiant recklessness of God, and then undermines the authority of government itself; beginning with making human law higher than God's, and ending in making it subject to the caprice of the mob, and suspending its enforcement on the varying breath of public sentiment. It extinguishes reverence, and causes the very idea of loyalty to disappear from the mind. It begets disobedience to parents, insubordination to law, and contempt towards superiors in age, wisdom, or goodness. It begets a hard, defiant, swaggering character, and makes the very boys exhibit the irreverence of a Mephistopheles, though without his culture and refinement, the recklessness of a Hotspur, though without his chivalrousness.

Thus contrasting the results, we see that only the Christian doctrine of self-renunciation is efficient to secure the healthy development either of the individual or the race.

Brethren of the Society of Inquiry, I have shown you the grounds, the principle, and the practical efficacy of the Christian law of self-renunciation. Have your souls faltered before the mysterious fact that under the government

of God it costs sorrow and sacrifice to do good? To explain it we now feel no need of resorting to the hypothesis that no God governs the world; or if any, the God of the iron foot, who crushes living souls beneath his bloody tread as recklessly as he splits the oaks with his thunderbolts, or scatters the rose leaves with his winds. No. Our doctrine discloses a more profound philosophy. God exercises his children in self-denial, that they may become strong in Christlike love; he is educating them by sacrificial toil to possess a Christ-like character and glory, to be capable of Christ-like achievements of mercy.

The law which calls you to self-sacrifice is severe, not exempting life, if its sacrifice is needed; it is inexorable, but it is not arbitrary. Only in it can the essential character of Christianity find expression; only by it can you realize the highest possibilities of your being. Do you complain of the hard requirement? But were it abated, it would only be so much abated from the divine excellence of Christianity, so much abated from the God-like character to which you are called, so much detracted from the divine beauty and power of love. It would unsettle the two great commandments, stain the great words of revelation, "God is Love," eviscerate redemption of its significance, change the character of Christ's kingdom, dim the glory of heaven, and let in night on the eternal day.

Go forth, then, serene but earnest, to your Master's work, rejoicing that he has counted you faithful, putting you into the ministry, thankful if you are counted worthy to suffer for his name.

ARTICLE V.

REVIEW OF PALFREY'S HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND.1

BY REV. RALPH EMERSON, D. D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, ANDOVER, MASS.

MANY will unite with us in the belief that any good history of New England is better for the great purposes of Christian education than any other uninspired literature. By Christian education we mean, not simply the acquisition of knowledge, however diversified and important, nor simply the right training of the intellect, but also and chiefly the right training of the heart and the shaping of the grand principles and purposes of life; in a word, it is such a training as is best fitted to form immortal minds for all the purposes for which God has made them. If one is to form himself for splendid military achievements, let him adopt, like Charles XII. of Sweden, the life of Alexander as his favorite book. But if he is to aim at a crown that will never fade, a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let him first of all select the only book of infallible instruction on the nature of that kingdom and the way to secure it, and next, the book which gives the best account of the most earnest, protracted, successful attempts ever made to emulate, not an Alexander or a Caesar, but those higher characters whose names are enrolled in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, who out of weakness were made strong, subdued kingdoms, turned to flight the armies. of the aliens, counted not their lives dear unto themselves; of whom the world was not worthy.

And where, among uninspired annals, shall we find this best book for the purpose? Where, but in the history of

1 History of New England. By John Gorham Palfrey. Vols. I. and II., pp. 636 and 642. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.