However great the variety in forms and mere externals between the first converts, there was a perfect unity of spirit. It was quite enough, in order to mutual affection and communion, that they should be Christians. And not only is the scene which the church then presents to us beautiful to contemplate; it is also most instructive. The church increased rapidly. No contempt, no persecution, no death, could stop its ascendency over the hearts of men. And would it not be the same still if Christians were Christians still? The blows which Popery on the one hand, and Infidelity on the other, are dealing right and left on the churches of the Reformation, are they not just what our schisms deserve and justify? And, unless we repent and return to our first love, were it not a righteous thing in God to take the vineyard from us, and give it unto others who will bring forth the fruits thereof?

It is vain to imagine that mere intellect will ever make out, to the satisfaction of all good men, that any one form of ecclesiastical polity is exclusively divine. And to take this high ground in the present state of the argument, is either to display ignorance of the state of the question, or to act the schismatic. But, on the other hand, let each take a fair view of the arguments which influence good men who differ from him, and is there not reason to believe that there would soon result such a good understanding among all, that our mutual differences would continually decrease until there would ultimately result over all a rich uniformity, built up of all the particulars which each admired and found in the Bible? A polemical spirit will never bring men together. It is a thing altogether human. But calmness and candour, conjoined with Christian forbearance and sustained by union prayer meetings, would do more in a few years than almost any would now be willing to believe. Help from the upper sanctuary might be confidingly expected.

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH.

But the blessed spirit which animated the primitive church did not long continue. The miraculous attestations of Christianity, its reasonableness and internal moral beauty, soon attracted many persons who were more remarkable for their philosophical pretensions than for their pious dispositions. These embraced it. But as their minds were generally too much made up already to be open to experience the transforming power of the truth, they very naturally began to transform that truth into a more close agreement with the philosophical systems which prepossessed themselves. Faith was thus attenuated into philosophical belief; and the doctrines of the gospel were involved in all the uncertainty of academic speculation. Schisms and heresies were therefore to be expected at this time; and in fact they began to prevail. But these were not the only diseases which now broke out in the Christian community.

The churches, as they continued to gather, were composed in a great measure of Pharisees on the one hand, who were possessed of an irradicable love of sacerdotal importance, and of converted heathens on the other, who were still, more or less, under the influence of their heathen education. But that was all in favour of a worship consisting mainly in rites and ceremonies designed to affect the imagination, and of a mysterious deference to the priest, as a being in some respects supernatural. The mystery of spiritual despotism, therefore, did already work; and, instead of the simple and spiritual worship of the primitive church, we have plainly to expect, in the coming age, a ritual unbefittingly symbolical and materialist. To produce the latter effect, indeed, other circumstances conspired with the heathen education of many of the conIn fact, it is only in a rural state of society, such

verts.

as that of the Patriarchs, when the human race is distributed in individual families, and all nature around seems to breathe of God, and invites to contemplation of Him, or else in that advanced state of civilization when the intellect is very fully developed, that the mass of worshippers will remain long contented with a mode of worship altogether pure and spiritual, and divested of all material symbolism. In the crowded city, indeed, from which nature and its sacredness are excluded, and where contemplation is more difficult and less congenial than in the country, and where the engrossment of the sensibilities in a play of social emotions, leaves less for the exalted feelings of religion, it is to be feared that people, in all ordinary states of society, whether intellectual or not, and whatever their religion, will ever tend to introduce much that is merely formal and material into their acts of worship, in order to open the pleasing sphere of the imagination when they enter the church, that they may enjoy there what they cannot enjoy in the street.

It was only to be expected, therefore, that, subsequently to the apostolic age, the simplicity of the worship of the primitive church should undergo a degradation, and become more and more formal, materialist, and symbolical; that it should return, in short, to what worship was before the Incarnation. And are we to expect that the ministers of religion will resist this tendency, in order to sustain the spirituality and liberty of the Christian people? or, are we not rather to expect, that, in the circumstances which we have mentioned, they will encourage it, in order to facilitate their own ascendency? The desire of such ascendency is natural to man. But the more rites and ceremonies in worship, the more indispensable the priest; and, consequently, the more easy his ascent into supreme influence and power. Doubtless, there will be good and bad amongst the priesthood, as in all other classes of the com

munity. Certain it is, however, in point of fact, that a sacerdotal spirit, aiming at an unchristian ascendency, very soon made its appearance in the Christian Church; had, emanating from it, there soon appeared also a materialist ritual, accompanied by multifarious positive precepts, of which we find no traces in the primitive worship, and which nothing could have induced a Christian ministry to introduce, but the consciousness that the people had a demand for it, or possibly such a consideration as this, that the people needed it in order to awake and sustain their devotion. Not that this would be the only excuse of the ecclesiastics. They might build on the doctrine of ordination, under which they might maintain that they were warranted to enact as they thought right. They might build on the Mosaic dispensation, of which the proceedings of the priesthood, and positive institutions, formed so conspicuous a part. They might build on the reproaches brought by the heathen against them which were made their excuse for persecuting them, namely, that they had neither altars, nor sacrifices, nor priests, nor temples, and were consequently atheists,reproaches these, which, of course, could no longer be made when all these things were introduced into the church. They might have many excuses (excuses which, no doubt, would satisfy the consciences of many), that, in reverting to a symbolic worship, they were acting rightly, while yet, in point of fact, they were only ministering to the original taste which the religious sensibilities of fallen man ever have for symbolism and a rubric, rather than for true and spiritual worship. But whatever the causes, certain it is, that, after the primitive era, we see the sacerdotal spirit in the clergy, and materialism in worship gaining ground, century after century.

That many advantages resulted by and by, both from the ascendency which the spiritual power had attained,

and from the palpable forms in which it had clothed Christian worship as the times increased in barbarism, cannot be denied. But this can only be granted when we compare the influence of the church with the absence of a church altogether. It were easy to maintain that far greater advantages would have resulted had the church been animated during this epoch by the true spirit and genius of Christianity. And, in point of fact, if certain advantages resulted from the too despotical episcopacy already established, great evils resulted also. Thus, already, in the third century, we find many bishops directing almost all their zeal towards matters of mere external embellishment and mere ecclesiastical police. And, as might be expected, we find, along with this frame of mind, a demand in the same quarters for universal uniformity, and consequently a display of that rigourism by which alone such an attempt can be made with any hopes of success. Thus, in these days, the Bishop of Rome excommunicates first the Asiatic churches, and then the African, because they would not agree to his views about the baptism of heretics,-views to which we find nothing analogous in the New Testament, and which were nothing better than technical difficulties created by the ecclesiastical spirit of the times.

Still we should have had great cause of rejoicing, had the Church never degenerated farther than it had done as yet. But the time is now come when Christianity has, for the first time, to meet the full sunshine of prosperity; and this has in every case been found the greatest of all trials to piety and virtue. The time is past, at least for a season, when the gospel is to be preached by martyrdom. A change has come over the spirit of the times. The martyrs, by opposing their heroic spirit to the heroic spirit of the Romans, have won the victory. They have made a mighty display of that spirit which alone a Ro