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in delightful union; so that these elements can as little be separated from it, "as the light of the fire from its warmth." The character of a true disciple, like that of his Lord, can be very imperfectly understood, if we regard it as consisting wholly either in morality or in piety: it lies rather in the symmetrical combination of the two-in holiness, a life from, and in, and for God. This is that creative and ennobling power Christ brought to earth; not a mere abstract theory of the invisible world, but a redeeming influence, which awakens in its subjects a capacity for union with God, and causes them to radiate with the genial effulgence of charity all around.

All true religion is essentially communion of man with his Maker, in which there is but one Mediator; it is that which stands between God and man, and which in Christ blends both in one. Such being the relation between the reason as well as heart of man and its Author, every act of rational devotion must not be an artificial ceremony, but a living reality, the mutual operation of spirits finite and infinite. God must stoop to communicate himself to the worshipper; and he by simultaneous act must raise himself to God, and have a consciousness of his presence, not in idea alone, but in spirit, power, and love. But priestcraft most effectually destroys this central point and chief glory of Christianity, by degrading what in it is life, reality, and moral energy, to an unsatisfactory speculation or hollow form. Hence the importance of our keeping before us constantly and only Christ, the whole Christ, as he was possessed by the apostles and primitive Christians, who invites us to stand before him independent of all self-constituted rabbis, to receive light for our understanding, joy for our heart, guidance and support for a temporal and eternal career.

Life can proceed only from life. The priest contrasts man and God because he wishes to make himself important as a messenger to a race whom he represents as superlatively degraded; but Christ came to render every man his own priest, by inviting all to himself in whom the human and divine are one, and teach us to rise to heaven by developing heavenly

graces in ourselves. Thus at the outset the Messiah demonstrated that his mission was not to confuse and oppress, but to teach and save. He would vanquish all obstacles to our emancipation from sin and perpetual progress in holiness, raising feverish and fainting spirits above the skies, where Jehovah breathes eternal blessedness on the sincere, the loving, and the free. Seeing man, the image of God, trampled in the dust by priestcraft, that God himself, in their estimation, may be fitly honored, the pitying Redeemer comes to our rescue, and imparts religious instruction so simple and yet potent, that the least educated need not err as to its import, nor the most sinful fail by its efficacy to be saved. The dead blank of our spiritual night he does not make still more dubious by the twinkling of a few artificial lights, but unveiled to every vision he hangs blazing on high the great luminary that smiles through every petty storm and eclipse, the king of our spiritual planetary system, the God of an ultimately cloudless and eternal day.

Every person has a vital interest in this question. In order that morality may be free, faith must be free also. If one is compelled to believe, he is also compelled to act. It is impossible to conceive a being endowed with moral liberty, who does not also possess religious freedom; which is merely saying, that a being is really free only when he is free in the whole of his being. Christianity, to attain pristine beauty and power again, must perfect itself; not by modifying its essence, which has been completely divine from the beginning, but by disengaging itself from earthly clogs, by emancipating itself from the entanglements of priestcraft, which envelop, obscure, and degrade it. Perfection in religious teaching is attained when that which constitutes its soul fulmines through its body, manifests itself to the gaze of all with a sublime brilliancy, like the throne of God. This is its nature and only design. Its two weapons of warfare are light and love. From generation to generation, its invitation, resounding to the Nathaniels of every land, is, Come and see! Starting in the lowest vale

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of life, the ocean of Mercy would roll its flood-tide abroad over the earth, to renew the energies of a fallen race, and bear them upward on its billows as they swell to be immersed anew in their divine source. But priestcraft is afraid of so much benevolence here below. It is as incapable of appreciating its worth as of measuring its proportions; therefore it goes on stupidly exacting impossible duties, denouncing impossible sins, confounding honest minds with conflicting dogmas, and to the utmost extent keeping Christianity in leading-strings. Condor cet said truly, "Kings persecute persons, priests opinion. Without kings, men must be safe; and without priests, minds must be free."

Christianity was strikingly characterized by its Author as leaven. This is destined to put the whole mass of mankind into a state of fermentation, that it may work itself clear of all heterogeneous grossness, purge itself of every form of error, absurdity, and delusion; until, by this natural process, it shall have refined and clarified our race with pure and profound views of truth. Our eyes, so delicately organized, and guarded with so much care, were not made to be closed and bandaged from the cradle to the grave, but to gaze freely on the beauties and sublimities of earth, sea, and sky. The soul of man, of all men, pants to contemplate brighter and broader glories than the natural vision can perceive; and is there a fiend more worthy of hell than he who would darken heaven from human view? Our business as Christians is to throw wide open to all mankind the temple gates of Truth. Her influence, when once it roots itself in the human heart, never dies: it lives, grows, multiplies itself, and becomes indestructible. The laws which guaranty this may be but dimly discerned, but their operation is constant, potent, and universal. Nothing is beneficial without this. "All the great advances made by society are spontaneous movements. The positive benefits which have flowed to man out of the fount of civil authority and law are few and comparatively trivial. Civilization owes far less to political instructions than they to civilization. Science has flourished

without the aid of law. Morality has purged itself of gross admixtures, and manners have passed through many revolutions, and refinement has reached its present pitch, and literature has spread abroad its blessings, not by means, but often in spite, of legislative interposition. And why not religion? Is it not, when once fairly planted in the human heart, the most powerful of all impulses? Does it not incessantly yearn to multiply itself? Are not all its tendencies to increase, to reproduction, to universality? Can it exist and be silent? Can it shake hands with indifference, or take home to its bosom a careless negligence of others' welfare? Die! It was not born to die. It is immortal. Nominalism may die-hypocrisy may give up the ghost. Priestly pretences, wearing the guise of Christianity, may want the factitious support derived from state enactments. But an enlightened apprehension and a cordial love of revealed truth will, up to the measure of its own existence, not only continue to live, but to work. Safely may it be left to its own noble impulses. It can neither dwindle nor decay. And if, at times, it disappears from the surface, it is only, like streams working their way through a subterraneous passage, to emerge again from obscurity in greater clearness, in larger breadth, in yet augmented power."

Of all the contemptible efforts of modern priestcraft, none can exceed in absurdity that which complacently eradicates from man the diviner half of his nature, and then proceeds to coerce the other half into the reception of its own husky dogmas, as the only food on which an immortal creature should feed. Reason and free will are strangled or denied, that a despotic system may be substituted in their place. The soul is killed to save the body. Truth, God's own word, as a great, earnest, awful reality, is kept out of sight, and the miserable victim is dwarfed into the pigmy proportions of the puny creed in which his cramped faculties are bound.

Bigotry is not the vice of a peculiar sect, but of every ruling party. Luther and his confederates imitated the powers. of Rome in intolerance, as soon as they possessed the means.

Says D'Aubigné, "It was Luther, that great man of God, who, in this, as in every thing else, advanced at the head of his church. When, in 1527, the Reformed pleaded for brotherly love and Christian concord, he answered, 'Be such charity and unity cursed, even to the bottomless depths of hell.' He himself relates to one of his friends that, at the conference convoked at Marburg by the landgrave of Hesse, to unite the Lutherans and the Reformed, Zwingle, moved to tears, approached him, saying, 'There are no men on earth with whom I so much desire to be united as with the Wittembergers.' And Luther repulsed the Zurich reformer, answering, ‘Your spirit is not our spirit,' and refused to acknowledge Zwingie and the Swiss as his brethren.

"Since that day, a sectarian spirit has always pervaded Lutheranism. When, in 1553, the unhappy Reformed were driven from London by the unfeeling order of bloody Mary, they were cruelly repulsed, in the midst of winter, by the advice of the Lutheran theologians, from the walls of Copenhagen, of Rostock, of Lübeck, and of Hamburg, where they asked for shelter. 'Better Papists than Calvinists,' said they; 'better Mohammedans than Reformed.'

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Viewed as a whole, we hold Luther's influence in high esteem; but some portions of his creed and conduct have doubtless entailed much wrong on mankind. When Erasmus defended the existence and obligations of free will, the prophet of Wittemberg exclaimed, “No; in that which concerns God, in that which relates either to salvation or damnation, man has no freedom. He is subjugated to the will of God, or that of Satan; he is chained and a slave." (Subjectus et servus est vel voluntatis Dei, vel voluntatis Satana.) This is bad enough belief, surely. His worse conduct, perhaps, is portrayed in the following extract from the works of W. J. Fox, now of the British parliament:—

"He had published an eloquent tract on Christian liberty. This work found its way, as such tenets, when once broached, will ever do, into other quarters than those for which it was

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