DISCOURSE XVIII.

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D.D.

In one of the less pretentious church edifices in the city of New York, situated upon a thoroughfare by no means remarkable for its breadth or the elegance of its structures, may be seen assembled, of a Sabbath morning, an audience not large in numbers, but uniformly embracing some of the first literary talent of the city and State, and often distinguished characters from abroad. Sitting, in the pulpit is a plain-looking man, of middle size and age-pale, thin, contemplative, intellectual— who constitutes the sole attraction of the place. The preliminary services attended to, he rises to dispense the sacred word. The text is announced almost in a whisper; the hands grasp the ends of the cushion where lies the open Bible, or are lifted, ever and anon, as the warmth increases; the head is bowed toward the neatly-written manuscript; and thus, with a quiet ease, in a low and feeble voice, the discourse goes forward, in one unbroken thread of golden thought, to its close. The place is the meeting-house of the Amity-street Baptist church; and the preacher the subject of this sketch.

Dr. Williams was born in New York city, on the 14th of October, 1804, the son of the Rev. John Williams, who was for twenty-seven years pastor of the Oliverstreet Baptist church, until his death, in May, 1825. He was a native of Wales, emigrating to this country in 1795; and a man of fervent piety and native vigor of mind. Said the Rev. Dr. Wayland, referring to this eminent servant of Christ, at the ordination of his son: "Many years have elapsed since I waited upon the instructions of that venerable man. Since then, I have seen many meek, many holy, many humble, many able, many peace-making ministers of the New Testament; but I have seen yet no one who has reminded me of JOHN WILLIAMS."

After the usual academic studies, young Mr. Williams entered Columbia College, where he graduated, with the highest honors of his class, in 1823. John L. Stephens, the distinguished traveler, was a member of the same class, and held a high rank in scholarship, though not the highest, as was erroneously stated, not long since, by a writer in one of our leading magazines.* Subsequent to this he studied law, and for a time practiced it. He studied in the office of the late Peter Augustus Jay, Esq., the elder son of the eminent John Jay. In the year 1829 or 1830, he made a public profession of religion, by uniting with the Oliver-street church, of which the Rev. Dr. Spencer H. Cone was the pastor. The means blessed to this result were a religious education and sanctified afflictions. He was ordained December 17th, 1832, at the constitution of the Amity-street church, of which he has been the only pastor. Various efforts have been made to induce him to leave his

* Putnam's Monthly.

See, as proof, catalogue for 1823, and reports of commencement.

beloved charge, and accept professorships in colleges or seminaries, but he has steadfastly refused all proffers of every kind.

The leading characteristics of Dr. Williams, are, fervor and depth of piety; a liberal and catholic spirit; unaffected modesty and humility; simplicity and meekness, coupled with inflexibility of principle; studious and retiring habits; profound and extensive erudition; uncommon powers of analysis, concentration, and mental abstraction; and the uniform and complete command of his intellectual resources, and a general harmony and consistency of character. He is not much seen in public gatherings, but no man's opinions have greater weight with his denomination. His LIBRARY is his home. This is very extensive, and embraces a great variety of works in all the principal languages, most of which he reads with ease. The number of volumes is about nine thousand, many of which are exceedingly rare and valuable. Dr. Williams, while yet practicing law, published in the "American Baptist Magazine" a biographical notice of his venerated father, which arrested the attention of careful readers by the purity and grace of its style. Wider attention was subsequently awakened by an occasional printed discourse. A most elaborate address on the "Conservative Principle in our Literature," placed him distinctively in the field of religious authorship. Later still he has consented to the publication of a volume of "Miscellanies," one on "Religious Progress," and a series of "Lectures on the Lord's Prayer," with various occasional sermons and addresses; which, taken together, have given him an undisputed rank among the first preachers and religious writers of the age. We have seen it stated, that a distinguished divine of the Presbyterian Church, in New York, on being asked by an individual from abroad, as to who deserved to be placed foremost among the eminent ministers in that city, replied, "If piety, humility, comprehensive scholarship, wide acquaintanceship with history, unusual attainments in literature, together with a refined taste and rare genius as a writer, constitute a great man, then William R. Williams, of the Baptist Church, is the man for whom you inquire."

The writings of Dr. Williams are peculiar for their spirituality and devotion; aflluence of illustration, especially historical illustration; and a vigorous, racy, figurative style, tinged with the antique, and remarkable for breadth, variety, and power. Some of their marked features are thus stated by an able critic: "They display everywhere an intellect equally active and vigorous; a mind that makes its own observations, that draws its own conclusions, and uses its large stores of information, not as substitutes, but materials for thought. His mind never rests upon the surface of his facts, but pierces below to the principle which they embody; and it is in illustration of that principle that they marshal themselves on his page. But along with a large fund of knowledge and power of thinking of a high order, Dr. Williams's writings evince an uncommonly brilliant and fervid imagination. This fuses and blends into harmony all his powers and acquisitions, imparts to his pages ever fresh life and interest, and causes them to teem with the most striking and beautiful imagery. Indeed, Dr. Williams thinks in metaphor; his figures are not after-thoughts superinduced upon his style for illustration or embellishment; they are wrought into the very texture of his thought; they are the form, the body, which it naturally and almost necessarily assumes."

The discourse which is subjoined is now for the first time published, and will enhance the author's already distinguished reputation. It was originally delivered, as one of a course of lectures for the American and Foreign Christian Union, in the house of worship of the Amity-street church, on Sabbath evening, 4th March, 1855.

THE RELATIONS OF POPERY AND INFIDELITY.

"For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written."-Rom., ii. 24.

To whom held the Apostle Paul this startling language? Would he ascribe thus Gentile unbelief, and the coarse, fierce impiety of the Pagan world—in part at least to the fault of his own brethren? He says, in effect, Through You Skepticism is provoked and hardened into a more defiant attitude; and in You Blasphemy finds new missiles, and gathers the material for more stinging reproaches and more envenomed scoffings against your God. To his own people, the Jews-the elected nation, as they deemed themselves-does the Apostle of the Gentiles, though himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews, hold up this stern-this inspired impeachment. And could he have forgotten, or did he dispute the fact, that their Scriptures had been given them by Jehovah himself; that theirs were the prophets-men like Elijah, and Isaiah, and Daniel; that theirs were the fathers, David, and Moses, and Abraham, the Friend of God; and that theirs, as concerning the flesh, was that Messiah upon whom hung the world's salvation? Bearers of God's own oracles, and kinsmen of God's own Incarnate Son, are they to be charged as giving occasion of scandal to the Gentiles, when, by their testimony and their Scriptures, many of those very Gentiles had been proselyted to truth and heaven? Had they not won many such trophies from IIeathenism, from the days of Rahab, of Ruth the Moabitess, and of Naaman the Syrian, down to the times of Cornelius the Roman centurion?

Paul neither denied nor overlooked any of these facts. But, spite of them all, it remained an accusation fearfully significant, and thoroughly true, that the Judaism of his times, although based on the memory of pious forefathers, and although quoting the oracles of a divine revelation, and although built upon an original foundation of divine institution-though a Moses, by God's direction, ordered its rites, and though a Solomon, by God's command, had reared its temple-was yet become, in spirit and in practice, because of its human accretions attaching themselves to divine testimonies, and because of its unwarranted perversions of the primitive truth that it had retained, a system of infectious error. It not only harmed its recipients, but it periled its rejectors. The adherents of that cotemporary and accredited Judaism, are here by the Holy Ghost charged as guilty of shedding a malign and disastrous influence upon the mass of Pagan mind, which heard but received not the Hebrew revelation. Judaism, as they had made it, was in deadly antag onism with that gospel which Paul was commissioned of heaven to proclaim. A river, that had gathered soil from every region which it had traversed, its waters were not only liscolored but poisoned by the

alluvium which it had collected and dissolved. A bark, in its first launching, shaped and rigged by divine warrant, it had become bored by the worm, and clogged with the barnacles of every sea that it had sailed, and now lay water-logged. What they added and what they dropped, vitiated what of original truth they kept. From Chaldean astrology, which they had learned as far back as the days of the great Captivity, from the vaunted Greek philosophy of their later Gentile conquerors, and from the traditions and Sanhedrims of their revered rabbinical fathers, they had gathered in, and attached upon the original web of Scripture, a thick embroidery, and had set upon the primitive tissue of God-given revelation, motley and gorgeous insertions of human error, until the robe no longer showed the loom and pattern of heaven. But did they repudiate, as a people, the doctrine of a coming Messiah, David's son, who was to conquer and rule the world? Not they! It was their crowning hope, and their perpetual vaunt. But, out of human traditions they had devised A MESSIAH, carnal and unreal, the phantom of their own schools, in whose name they refused, and they murdered THE MESSIAH, God's TRUE and ONLY SON. The Judaism of the synagogues and of the Sanhedrim, as Paul encountered it, was ever to be distinguished from the genuine Judaism of the Old Testament Scriptures. That last was the bud of the gospel, when as yet not fully unfolded; was a germinant and undeveloped Christianity. The first, as a Caiaphas or an Elymas would present it, was a full-blown and developed Antichristianism.

Now, a cotemporary of the first writer, and of the first readers of our text, might, in the spirit of modern Liberalism, have said, "What is the virtual difference between Paul and his old masters, the Pharisees? They hold to a Messiah COMING; he asserts and insists on adoring THE Messiah ALREADY COME. Why" [such a speculator in the union of discordant creeds might say] "contend about this? The difference between you is but that of the definite and the indefinite article. You hold to the truth, vaguely and generally, A CHRIST. He individualizes and embodies it, in a personage already come, and dead, and risen again, and throned on high-THE Christ. Quarrel not, in preciseness and bigotry, about so tiny a particle of speech as an article; made definite by the one party in the Nazarene, and by the other party kept indefinite, and open for some possible successor who shall supplant the Nazarene.”

Was the difference really so inconsiderable? Let us, my beloved hearers, implore together the influences, enlightenment, and impulses of that Spirit, Divine, and Infallible, and Gracious, who alone shows justly the truth, and implants deeply the love of the truth. So helped, let us inquire, how far Paul's example and language, in this present Scripture, bear upon the religious questions of our own time, and upon the principles that divide our churches from Rome.

In a train of discourses upon these questions, commenced already and

hereafter to be continued, by esteemed brethren of other evangelical denominations, the speaker has been asked to take part; and the theme assigned to him is that of the relations of Romanism to Infidelity.* By the latter term we mean to describe the denial of the truth of all revelation, such denial being made by those to whom the true revelation has been proffered. Our forefathers used the word in a wider sense, to embrace those Mohammedans and heathens to whom the gospel was not formally preached, and called them infidels. Such is not the modern application of the phrase. The Turk and the Pagan admit the possibility of a revelation, but give credit to a forged and false one. They are misbelievers, therefore, rather than infidels. Infidelity is the denial, under the light of the gospel, that there is any real, or, if real, that there is any sufficient revelation in that gospel, or in the Old Testament, the germ and precursor of the gospel. It is an explicit protest against the genuineness of God's proffered communication in his own word of Scripture. Our topic, too vast to be adequately discussed in the bounds of one lecture, is the tendency of Romanism to foster such infidelity.

The Rabbinism of Paul's times, in its effects on the Hebrew character and destiny, provoked in the pagan mind an enmity and scorn which vented itself in skeptical taunts against the Name, Faith, and Laws of the One, True God, who had truly manifested himself to the Jew. The old Latin satirists-who knew the Jews of Rome as being, many of them, a vagrant, mendicant, and unscrupulous class, that carried about the proud capital their baskets crammed with hay, and told surreptitiously, for paltry sums, the fortunes of credulous applicants-confounded the Jews of this grade, often probably with those Chaldean astrologers whom these recreant Hebrews imitated. The Romans, because of the practices and condition of such degraded and itinerant soothsayers, blackened the Sabbaths and rites and miracles of the True and Holy Jehovah, worshiped by the wiser and more righteous forefathers of these itinerant deceivers. Through the fault of the vicious Jew, the real message of the holy patriarchs and prophets whose blood he inherited, and whose pages he quoted, was discredited. The circumcision given to Abraham, the Sabbath, old as creation, and the miracles that showed the world's Maker and Master, all furnished but new food for the profane jester of the imperial metropolis, when he confounded the true faith with its modern adulterations, and with these its degraded and apostate representatives. A Roman scholar, who, a few years after Paul's time, should pass under the Arch of Titus, when but freshly built, would little appreciate the divine authorship and the sacred meaning of the trumpets, and the table of shew-bread, and the seven-branched candlestick of the Hebrew temple, sculptured in relief on that triumphal arch; and would very naturally jeer at those emblems, if, but a few squares behind, he had passed some crafty and unscrupulous Hebrew, vending philters and tell