tue.

We simply require it of all Christians to look for the truth, and the truth only. And if we require them to look beyond themselves and across their own boundaries, we see not that there is any thing specially frightful in this, if they look for nothing but the truth. Or if we prepare a previous conviction, in their minds, that there is somewhat of truth in all Christian bodies, does any one doubt that there is? And if it should happen that all these bodies look upon the truth on a side peculiar to themselves, what harm can it do us to pass round and look through their eyes? The method taken by the late Evangelical Alliance, at London, was truly a dangerous method and closely allied to licentiousness; for it chose out only common truths in which all the parties could agree, and consented to let all other truths pass into shade as of minor consequence. We recognize, contrary to this, the great principle that truth is a whole and is to be sought only as a whole-any where, every where and by all means. Let no one fear the debauching of his Christian integrity in so doing.

Others probably will look upon our labor, in this matter, as a useless expenditure of breath, and the hope we encourage as altogether visionary and romantic. It would be, if we held the expectation that the church of God is ever to become a political unity. Or if we proposed to the Christian sects to come together and work out a comprehensive unity, by any deliberative effort, in the manner of compromise and composition. Or if we looked for the realization of any such result as we speak of, by any given method, within any given space of time. Our object is simply to set before the Christian sects the comfortable truth that our antagonisms are, to a great degree, comprehensible-parts only or partialities, having each their complement in all

the others. Thus to beget a more fraternal feeling and soften the asperities and prejudices that hold us asunder. Thus to set all thinking minds on an endeavor after the broadest and most catholic views of truth, in the confident hope that God will thus enlarge their souls, draw them together, towards a more complete brotherhood, and finally into a full consent of worship. This, if we rightly understand, is what the Scriptures mean by seeing eye to eye. We now see shoulder to shoulder, but when we can look into the eye, every man of his brother, and see what he sees, we shall be one.

And if any one asks, when shall these things be? we may well enough refer him to the geologists for an answer. For if God required long ages of heaving and fiery commotion to settle the world's layers into peace and habitable order, we ought not utterly to despair, if the geologic era of the church covers a somewhat longer space of time, than we ourselves might prescribe. Enough for us that we show the laws of commotion and the methods of final pacification. Enough for us that the views we have advanced, if ac cepted and held by our fellow Christians, will be found to contain the philosophic causes of a better day, drawing us all into a closer assimilation and, as sure as causes must have their effects, into a final embrace in the truth. Confident of this, and leaving times and seasons to God, we do not seem to propose to the world unpractical schemes, or romantic expectations.

This discussion we have already protracted beyond our ordinary limits, but the magnitude of the subject must be our excuse. There is yet a whole branch of it remaining untouched, and one that would require a volume to give it a sufficient representation. It is this to exhibit the laws and conditions under which the comprehensive process we speak

of may be conducted to its results, with the greatest certainty and expedition. All we can do here, at present, is to offer a few suggestions.

And, first of all, there needs to be a more comprehensive character formed in individual Christians. We must have a piety not of "our church," or "our catechism," or "our baptism," or our "Christian democracy," but a piety measured by God himself. We must look upon the comprehensive character as a Christian attainment. Such was the character of Christ, and therefore we must be as sure that he will have it formed in us, as that he will bring us into his own image. God himself too, is a comprehensive being in His character, so that coming unto Him, in the closest and most intimate union of spirit, which is the very idea of Christian piety, we must endeavor to partake of that quality which most distinguishes Him. For it is not some better philosophy generated in our understanding, that can work out, by itself, the process of which we speak. We must have a better philosophy in our heart and spirit, and this we must draw from God. We shall attain to no true comprehensiveness, except as we find it in God; in the holier love which melts away our prejudices, subordinates our human passions, expands the narrowness of our fallen nature, and makes us partake of the divine nature. This will universalize, first, our heart and, through that, gradu. ally, our understanding. We shall have a single eye, when we have a simple, godly heart. A really comA really comprehensive spirit, one all devoted to truth, stretching itself to contain all truth, as seen by all Christian minds, must be a religious spirit. Clearing itself of all human trammels, it must go up unto God himself; for no where short of God do the lines of truth meet and come into harmony, so that a mind may comprehend them. In Him, too, as we certainly

know, all our sects and divisions melt into unity. He is not the God of our sect. We dare not say it or think it. We tacitly admit that He holds some broader view, which is also, and for that reason, juster than ours. We do not doubt that he looks upon us all as diminished atoms of intelligence, ranging in His infinite realm of truth, fixing here and there, upon our points of doctrine, and regarding each the field that lies within his narrow horizon as the whole field-repugnant therefore, as between ourselves, but still in radical harmony, as before Him. To such thoughts we are to accustom ourselves, to consecrate them in our prayers and nourish them before Him, by a more conscious and habitual exercise. And if our piety does not enlarge as in this manner, we are rather to repent of it than to bless ourselves in it. But if God be in us, enlarging us by His own measure and causing us to receive of His own greatness, then shall we cease to be straitened in ourselves, and be able to comprehend that length and breadth and depth and height, which it is the prerogative of His saints to do.

It will help us also to remember that, as men or human creatures, our tendency is to err by narrowness and partiality, never by completeness or comprehensiveness. We are not only finite, but we enter into life only as rudimental beings, here to be filled out into proper men. We are to study, reflect, observe, rectify errors, then to rectify rectifications, and thus to fill out the character of sons of God. Children, we observe, always go for extremes. They apprehend what they may, but in our sense of the word, comprehend nothing; and a very preponderant number of our race seem never to get beyond their childhood in this respect. Our very finiteness, struggling after rest in the infinite, is obliged to seize on single points, and these glimmering points we take

for suns, partly because they are our seeing and partly because they fill our vision. We are thus occupied, for the most part, with half-seeing. And having found some pole of truth or of duty, we go to war for that, as if our half truth were entitled to fill and occupy the universe. Then again our passions carry us away yet farther, like a very great sail upon some feathery skiff, which the gusts drive hither and thither, and force upon the shallows when they will. The pride which says this is my truth,' or 'our truth ;' opinions held more firmly by the will, because they are so dimly seen by the understanding; the lust of power, the fanatical idolatry of sect, all the venomous spirits that hover in the steam of our carnal hearts, conspire to narrow even our piety itself. Evil is a perpetual astringent in our souls, and we can get no breadth, save as we mortify and crucify ourselves. These are truths which every Christian man must regard more attentively, than has yet been done, in any former age. They must enter into our practical life. We must habitually suspect ourselves of limitation. We must find the sect spirit in our nature, keeping close company with our sins and coiling itself also, as a serpent, round the body of our piety. And when this latter grows exclusive and repugnant, walling itself up to heaven in its righteousness, we must have it for a maxim that we are narrowing ourselves by the measure of our sins.

Furthermore, it will be of great use, if we have some philosophic view of life and its appointments, that accords with God's design therein. He has put us down in this many-sided world, where all manner of contrary and controversial forces are pushing us hither and thither, that He may bring us into all possible views of truth and duty, eure our half-seeing, fill out our otherwise partial measure, and make

us as nearly complete, as it is possible for us to be. All that we see, hear, experience, in this multifarious world of struggle and debate, is undoubtedly meant to enlarge the comprehension of our mind, our principles, feelings, hopes, charities. Neither let any one shrink from such a thought, as one that is akin to laxity or licentiousness. There is a kind of liberalism, as we have said, which is but another name for indifference to the truth. With such a spirit the comprehensive soul has no feeling of sympathy. It is, in fact, the type of character most of all devoted to truth, regarding it as the brightest beam of divinity that shines into our world. Therefore it reverently seeks the truth in all minds irradiated by its light, sepa. rates it from the errors with which it is blended, sanctifies it as holy and dear to God. On the other hand, if we speak of the partisan classes or schools, sometimes called illiberal, they who gather about some pole of doctrine, stiff for their particular sect, impatient of the least departure from it, how manifest is it that these would rather die for half the truth, than for the whole. But the comprehensive spirit seeks to comprehend all repugnances, and lose, if possible, no shred of truth, wherever it may be found. Actuated by this lofty spirit, in which it resembles itself to God, it listens to all voices, searches out all forms of doctrine, proves all things and holds fast that which is good. Let no one fancy that he finds, in history, examples to deter us from the indulgence of such a spirit, as if it were the omen of a licentious age; for the history of man has never yet offered an example of the kind. There have been many attempts, in the Christian world, to bring about what is called, in the history, a comprehension of sects and parties. And the best men of the church have been forward in them. Baxter, Howe, Dr. Watts, Lord King, Til

lotson, Patrick, and others of the highest distinction in our English race, have conceived the idea of a composition of sects, and labored in their time to bring it to pass-labored of course in vain; for they conceived no other method of comprehension, than one that is to be real ized immediately, by an act of consent. Their effort was to settle the church by concession, compromise, and a moderation of extremes, not to prepare the souls of all disciples, by a gradual process of enlargement in the truth. Our Episcopal friends, too, sometimes delight to call their church "The Comprehensive Church," gravely showing how many varieties of faith may be quietly harbored, and have been, under its convenient ambiguities! We propose a method somewhat different from all these, and one, we think, which is as much more practicable, as it is less dangerous and farther removed from licentiousness.

At the same time, while we speak of it as a less dangerous method, we can not deny that it requires a much higher courage and firmness of spirit; for it lays upon every man, as an individual, to begin with himself and trust his opinions to a law or process, which is higher than the law of any sect or school. And it is scarcely possible that one who is accustomed to handle all the great subjects of religious inquiry, in this method, and to work his mind by the process it prescribes, should not become a generally suspicious character. But he must content himself with the verdict of the future, not doubting that a spirit so ingenuous will some time be as much approved by his fellow Christians, as it certainly is by God himself. Meantime, while resting himself in this manner on the truth of his own intentions, he will probably find also that he is delivered of an affliction which is the necessary torment of all mere partisans, dwelling in an element of composure which more

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than repays the distrusts of his sect. The sectarian or partisan is the man of a part, one who measures himself by the contents of his sect, and not in reality by the truth itself. And as every partial view must have its antagonist, he is doomed to undergo a perpetual anxiety for his position. For, regarding it as the very truth itself, the complete truth of God, when he sees it assaulted by some adversary, as it certainly will be, he is filled with distressful anxiety lest the very foundations of the Gospel should finally give way or be corrupted. be corrupted. But the comprehensive method assists one to look on the two adverse parties as halfseeing men, who, if they see the whole truth between them, have yet the disadvantage that they see nothing as a whole. It is as if one saw the centrifugal and the other the attractive force of astronomy. fears that the worlds will fly asunder beyond all fellowship, the other shudders lest they rush into a grand heap of ruins in the center. But the man who can comprehend both forces, in a scientific view, rests in comfort on the balanced order of the worlds, knowing that nothing can ever disturb the sweet influences of Pleiades, or burst the bands of Orion. In the same way it will ever be found that the men of a part or a sect are an uncomfortable and anxious race, living in perpetual panic, as if God's realm of truth were just about to dissolve, because their truth is threatened by another which, for some reason, will have advocates as earnest as they. But there is calmness, comfort, courage and rest for any comprehensive soul, knowing that if all together succeed, they will only suffice to fill out the measures of divine truth.

We have spoken already of language, as the fruitful source of contrary opinions and sects. If our schools of theology could, by three years of exercise, get into the minds of their pupils a right understanding

of this one single matter-the relation of a thought to a word-they would do more to quicken their intelligence and prepare them to a skillful resolution of the great questions pertaining to religion, than is often done by their whole course of discipline. This of itself would be the fruitful seed of a great and powerful theology. This only can open a true interpretation of Scripture, such as will suffice for a settlement of Christian doctrine. The Scriptures are the truth of God under the forms of language, and subject to its laws. No other book contains a system of truth so complete and comprehensive as the Bible, and for that very reason it combines all repugnant modes of statement. View ed in its forms of language, without descending into its interior meaning, it is the most contradictory of all books. It is the product of all ages, and represents all kinds of mental habit. It views every subject of truth and duty on every side, and sets it forth at every pole. It offers thus, to a perverse or insufficient interpretation, material for every sect. Logically treated and without any power of insight deeper than logic, sects are its legitimate products. We hear it said on every side, that there are no 'isms' in the Bible. Rather should we say, which is the real truth, that all manner of 'isms' are in it-comprehended there, finite in infinite, as we ourselves in God. Therefore only is it a complete and universal code of truth, worthy of its author. When the Christian scholars are able to distinguish between the forms of truth and truth itself, receiving the latter without being enslaved by the laws of logic enveloped in the former, the true catholic doctrine will be seen and the sects will disappear and die. Sooner they can not.

It is of the highest consequence also that we should understand the true import of the Christian history, and discover what duty it has pre

pared for us. We mourn over the controversies and contentions which, up to this time, have rent, as we say, the unity and peace of the church of God. Many minds have lately been occupied with a peculiar grief on this account. See, they say, into how many sects and schools the body of our Lord is riven! And, if we look at the evil passions and bit. ter strifes involved, it is truly a mournful sight. But controversies must needs arise; in our view controversies were needed, else the manifold extremes of truth could never appear. It was necessary for the great champions to gird on their armor and take the field. It was necessary to see behind us a long line of militant ages, smoking in the dust of controversy and causing the air to ring with the blows of their valiant encounter. So of the sects that have multiplied upon us in these last ages. All these are but the preliminary work, necessary to be done in the trying out of God's truth. In one view, there have never been too many controversies, and are not now too many sects; for taken together they are wanted, all, as a grand exhibit or practical display of the manifold extremes of truth. The first ages could not take up the comprehending of opposites, until the opposites were set forth; but they did what they could, they set them forth. And now, in these last times, the result is to appear.

What then is now to be done? What does God require of us? Controversy? No, it is generally agreed that we have worn out controversy. What then? Must we learn to hold opinions more loosely, to be patient with error, and content ourselves in it? No, persecution itself were a dignified compliment to God's truth, in comparison with any such inanity as that. Do we then want a grand world-wide Alliance, in which all Christians will agree to agree, or if they can not do that, to controvert harmoniously? So many