Church. On the contrary, we maintain that the people are the Church. So it was in the beginning. Look into the earliest records of Christianity, and you will find that the very word which is now used to prop up the pretensions of the Prelatical clergy, this word, Church — signified originally the congregation, the mass of assembled worshippers, the body of Christian believers. It is so now. The lay brethren are the Church, as much as the clergy. And if driven by the assumptions of the prelatical order to separate the two, and to adjudicate on their respective claims, then we do not hesitate to say that the people alone, by themselves, irrespective of the clergy, and independent of the clergy, are the Church. The clergy, according to our view, are but certain "faithful men, able to teach," coming out from among the brethren, and having no rightful power or authority over them, except what the brethren themselves have seen fit to delegate and confer. The distinguishing feature of Congregationalism is, that it is selfcontained, bearing within itself all the elements of its organization, efficiency, and perpetuity. According to the theory of the Prelatists, the people can have "no church without a bishop;" and if, by any providence, they should be separated from their spiritual guides, they can have none of the peculiar privileges and ordinances of Christianity. Were a ship's company, for instance, with its hundred passengers, thrown upon a desolate island, they must be forever debarred the rites of the Church, unless they happened to have on board a priest who had been episcopally ordained. Their children must remain unbaptized, and they themselves deprived of the benefit and comfort of the holy Communion. They might, it is true, perform these solemn services themselves; but without the sanction of episcopal authority, they would have no validity, no efficacy nor worth whatever. And even if they were fortunate as to have a minister among them, properly qualified to administer these ordinances, yet unless he were a bishop, he could ordain no successor, and at his death they would be left without the sacramental means of grace.

SO

Now I ask, is such a theory as this reasonable, probable, equitable, or conformable to just views of God's character and government?

Suppose, again, the clergy of some isolated place like

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Japan-cut off from all intercourse with the rest of the world were by some fatality, some pestilence, entirely swept away, bishops and all. According to the theory we are considering, their place could never be supplied. The clerical order would be extinct. The succession once lost, could never be restored. Once gone, it is gone forever, irrecoverably gone; and that whole nation would present the lamentable spectacle of a church without an officer competent to administer its solemn rites.

Thank Heaven, we hold to no such unreasonable and extravagant doctrine. As on the death of the queen-bee in the hive, the members of that little monarchy can make a new one from among themselves, so we hold that a Christian church can make a bishop out of their own number, a real, veritable bishop, without calling in the aid of other bishops. We maintain that as the people can make a king or a president to oversee the State, so they can make a bishop to oversee the Church.

I know not but this may sound to some ears latitudinarian, and radical. But just look at what would be the consequence, of what has been the consequence, of denying this doctrine, that the people, the Christian laity, are the Church, and the source of ecclesiastical authority and power. You put the people entirely at the mercy of the clergy. The bishop's hand is upon the head of his inferior clergy; but his foot is upon the neck of a prostrate people. The opposite doctrine establishes the aristocracy of the Church of England, and the monarchy of the Church of Rome. The prelate lifts his mitred head in courts and parliaments; and the power that is wielded by the bishop who is enthroned upon the seven hills, is mightier than that of any monarch in Christendom. The latter may have the power of life and death over his subjects; the former extends his power further, beyond this world. He holds the keys, by which to open or shut the gates of heaven, the power of eternal life and death-the power of absolution, to bind or loose, to forgive or retain sin, and to exclude from the bliss of paradise all who are refractory or disobedient to the edicts of the Church. And this is not a mere theory. The power has been exercised. The Church of Rome has wielded it, and still wields it, and rules with a rod of iron. The Church of England holds the same theory, and, as far as it can or dares, enforces it.

For one, I do not understand, how a man, who is imbued with the spirit of Christian humility and is conscious of his own frailty, can aspire, or consent even, to hold this official preeminence over his ministerial brethren, or presume to look down upon them as his subordinates. Nor can I conceive how a person, who has a proper self-respect and the spirit of a man or a Christian, can submit to this usurpation, and consent to be thus enrolled by a prelate among his underlings, his inferior clergy. Inferior? In what respect? Look at them both, in all ages and in all countries, in the pages of history and in the stations which they fill. In what particulars have the working clergy in prelatical churches, been inferior to their overseers? Certainly not in talent, in learning, in moral worth, or in piety. Have the prelates always been the most distinguished lights in the Church in their day? Have they in modern times been the prominent advocates and defenders of the Christian faith? Have they been preeminently the ones who by their writings have done most to enforce the truths, and by their characters and lives to recommend the graces and virtues, of our common Christianity? Far be it from me to disparage the talents or the virtues of any who have worn the mitre. I am not unmindful of the services which some of them have rendered to Christian truth, nor would I deprive them of the least merit which rightfully belongs to them. I revere the names of Barrow, and Butler, and Taylor, and Fenelon. But I remember, too, that there were such men as Baxter and Lardner, Cudworth and Paley, Whitby and Priestley, some of them belonging to the same Church with those just named, yet never exalted to its highest honors, though not a whit behind them in intellectual and moral worth. Did any bishop that ever sat upon his throne in England, do better service to the common cause of Christianity than the modest Lardner, who in his learned and ponderous volumes has built up an impregnable bulwark around the records of our common faith? Did any prelate of the Establishment ever shed a clearer or fuller flood of light upon the evidences of natural and revealed religion, than the clear-sighted and judicious Paley? Yet one of these was a Dissenter from the Church of England, and the other one of its inferior clergy.

Then look at our own country. What have the prelates

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here done for Christian truth and righteousness? They may have done something, I admit, for their own sect, and written ingenious treatises to convince the clergy and laity of their divine right to rule over them. But what have they done, on a large scale and in a generous spirit, for Christian theology, compared with their inferior clergy, or with the clergy of other denominations? What great work of an American bishop can be named? What work, for metaphysical acuteness and profound analysis, to be put on a level with the great work of Edwards upon the Will? For argumentative power and intellectual vigor, what production of theirs can be compared with the writings of their great antagonist, Mayhew, who silenced the Archbishop of Canterbury, and postponed for twenty years the introduction of their order into this country? Who among them can be mentioned by the side of Channing for largeness of views, eloquence of utterance, and extent of influence? And what sermons of theirs, for grace, and finish, and melting persuasion, can stand a comparison with those of Buckminster?

Once more. We feel an attachment to Congregationalism, from a consideration of the circumstances under which our forefathers planted it here. They came over and settled down, as one of them said, "upon bare creation." They began the world anew, and remodelled the Church and the State, to suit their own views of truth and right. They brought over with them none of the institutions of the mother country, except the trial by jury and the system of popular representation. They left behind them the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the hierarchy, all parts of one system. They had no special reason for retaining or liking them, since through their agency they had been driven from their pleasant fields, the homes of their childhood, the churches of their affections, and the graves of their fathers. "What numbers of faithful and freeborn Englishmen, and good Christians," says Milton, "have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean, and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops." Our fathers were Nonconformists, dissatisfied with the existing ceremonies of the Church Puritans, sighing for a simpler and purer worship. VOL. XLI. -4TH. S. VOL. VI. NO I.

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Prelacy did not emigrate. She staid at home, reclining in her palaces, scated upon her throne in the cathedrals. It was Puritanism that came over to plant the wilderness. Nor was it the nobility that emigrated; though some sprigs of the peerage, like Lord Leigh, son and heir of the Earl of Marlborough, came and looked at the nakedness of the land, and speedily returned, having seen enough of it. It was the people that emigrated the Commons of England, - with whom have always resided the moral worth and the sterling virtues of that noble land; not the scum of the nation, not the offscouring and refuse of her population, not the sweepings of her jails and almshouses, which were the seed of other colonies; but the substantial gentry and yeomanry of England; among them old families of good estates, ample fortunes and established character,such men as John Winthrop, leaving his ancestral mansion at Groton, in Suffolk, which for more than two hundred years had been the seat of his family, and Isaac Johnson, the founder of Boston, who married a daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, and who named as one of his executors his friend, the great John Hampden, who died for liberty on Chalgrove field.

These were the men that emigrated. And when they arrived here, what would you have them do? What could you expect them to do? Rebuild in the New World the obnoxious, unequal institutions of the Old?-revive the pomp of prelacy, and establish an hereditary aristocracy, and a hierarchy? No. They could do no such thing. They did no such thing. They went back to first principles, to the natural rights of man, both in politics and religion, in civil government and church affairs. They carried the same principle into both; and, what is better, they carried it out, fully and unflinchingly, to its legitimate, ultimate results; they established democracy in both. In their view all men were equal before the magistrate; much more were all men equal before God.

And let it be observed, that in all this, they were not radicals or anarchists. They went for government and authority, for law and order, both in Church and State. They brought over with them, it is true, no statute-book; but they brought, as their birth-right, the common law of England, the gathered wisdom of her jurists, embodied in oral decisions, and by tradition handed down, - always