and the desired assimilation will be well nigh complete. Gone for ever will be the barrier that once so divided Methodist from Presbyterian, that they could neither pray nor exhort together with comfort, nor make the hymnings of one communion to be much better than howlings in the ear of the other.

We add still another to our list of efficient causes in the service of Organic Unity. It is the agency of interdenominational intercourse. The word of prophecy touching the pre-millennial days is this: "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." We know what an annihilating foe travel has already become to provincialism. How thoroughly it has assimilated us as a people, making us, but for the inrolling floods of migration, a people virtually of one language and lineage. As it is, our constant intercommunication leaves us, from Maine to California, no such dialectic differences as you will find in crossing from one English county or French department to another. We are a nation of travelers, as is no other on the globe; and it is this, in the face of our rapidly enlarging domain, which is our salvation. States, widely separated territorially, are neighbors sympathetically and socially. And this political intercommunication is to the unity of the state what our denominational intercommunication will be to the unity of the church. Its effect is two-fold. It makes the various sects know the good that is in one another, and makes the good that is known still better. Each denomination has its special excellencies, and in the process of mutual acquaintance these become appreciated and appropriated. No one can help seeing how active this interchange is becoming, and how fruitful already in its results. What church is not already largely the gainer? Have not the Presbyterians learned of the Methodists how to sing with more spirit, and the Methodists of the Presbyterians how to pray with more understanding? The Baptist brethren have been in too open fraternity and fellowship with their neighbors not to have it take evident effect on their close communion. The Episcopalians are finding out how to do pioneer work-witness their recent achievements in the new fields beyond the Rocky Mountains; and the nonEpiscopalians are ascertaining that it is not necessary to be more timid than Calvin and Knox of liturgical effects. High

Church exclusiveness has been wonderfully helped to abate from its lofty bearing, since statistical figures have given it an inkling of the swift movements of the non-prelatical sects. There was a moral reason why it should be recorded of the Pentecostal ingathering, that the number of the men was about five thousand. There is a power in the pertinent use of numbers when they run up into the thousands, and, in our day, the hundred thousands and millions. Such accessions, to the membership, area, and resources of the sects make them respect one another. We study one another's methods to learn the secret of such progress, and end by appropriating the lesson to our own use.

Thirty years more of this acquaintance and interchange will work marvels of assimilation not now dreamed of. As a generation ago no one could have foreseen the unity of spirit, of method, and result, in the Sunday-school work, as it is now carried forward in all the churches, even to the reciting of the same lesson, the adopting the same style of lesson paper, Sunday-school journal, Scripture commentary, the singing of the same hymns to the same tunes, with the result, that when the teachers who have grown up in these schools meet in conference and assembly at Chautauqua, Cazenovia, and Sea Grove, they all seem to have been trained by one teacher: so no one can too enthusiastically forecast the vision of what shall be in the next thirty years in all other departments of church. work and Christian worship. The image of Christ in one denomination will be his likeness in all; and their continued absorption in the great work he will be still laying upon all hearts and hands will keep the image ever bright and yet brighter.

The cheering fact is, we are nearer to the grand practical realization of Christ's prayer for a perfect unity than most believers for their sins dare credit. The situation is better than our unbelief deserves. But it is not better than the merits of Christ's prayer, and of the atoning sacrifice that followed, and in respect to which it is charged upon us, that if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

Art. VI. THE GREAT AWAKENING OF 1740.*

By LYMAN H. ATWATER.

THE great revival of 1740 in this country, in which WHITEFIELD, EDWARDS, and the TENNENTS were the most conspicuous human instruments, had for its efficient cause what will be assumed throughout this and the following article as the efficient cause of all genuine revivals, the sovereignly imparted and efficaciously transforming operation of the Spirit of God upon all who were the subjects of it. But, viewed from its human side, it had its upspring, mode of development, distinguishing features of truth and error, and results alike of immensely preponderating good, and incidental, but by no means insignificant evil, in a protest and reaction in behalf of experimental religion against the formalism which had so largely supplanted it. This formalism had arisen from an abuse or perversion of the scriptural doctrine of infant church membership, the relation of baptized children to the church, and the proper conditions of their admission to the Lord's Supper. The true doctrine on this subject, which more or less distinctly and intelligently had been accepted as the basis of membership in the Congregational and Presbyterian, or in general, the Calvinistic churches of this country, is: I. That the visible church consists of those who profess the true religion and their children. 2. That these children were therefore proper subjects of baptism, and if properly taught and trained in the Christian religion, may be expected, through the inworking of the Spirit, blending with and rendering effectual this Christian nurture, to experience and manifest the saving and transforming power of the truths so taught and symbolized in their baptism: that is they will commonly be prepared, on reaching the years of discretion, adolescence or maturity, to "recognize their baptismal obligations," and come to the Lord's table upon an

*Thoughts on the Revival of 1740. By Jonathan Edwards, the elder, President of Princeton College.

The Great Awakening. History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield. By Joseph Tracy. 1842.

4.

intelligent, conscientious, and credible profession of their faith ; that this is the normal order, and contrary cases abnormal and exceptional. 3. That the only proper internal qualification for the communion is repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, wrought by the Holy Spirit in regeneration; and the only, but indispensable, external requisite is, what the church ought, in the judgment of charity, to regard and treat as a credible profession of the same. That these qualifications might exist in the case of many, especially those baptized and brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, when it is impossible for the possessor of them to give any account of the particular time or conscious exercises of the beginnings of this Christian experience; who can only say, I know not the time when I did not fear God: or "whereas I was blind, now I see:" and that the church or its officers, while glad to hear such historical accounts of the first uprising and progress of conversion, yet cannot rightfully make such a narration a test of fitness for communion, on the part of those who now, in the judgment of charity, appear to believe in and obey the Lord Jesus Christ. 5. That therefore such cannot be properly excluded from the communion of the church.

We suppose that none of these principles are now questioned, either theoretically or practically in the Presbyterian or other Calvinistic communions. But it is easy to see that great perversions of them might arise from a too exclusive respect to some portions, and neglect of other portions of them-the usual effect of one-sided views, and half truths, often resulting in the worst form of error.

The generic error which in various forms grew out of the perversion of this system, was a practical reliance on these externals of baptism, baptismal church membership, christian parental teaching and training, regular attendance on public worship, and a good moral life, to insure salvation. They did not, indeed, theoretically hold, and few if any ministers taught, that these things of themselves constituted religion, or superseded the necessity of a true evangelical experience in the soul, wrought by the supernatural agency of the Spirit. But multitudes were strong in the faith, that living thus they made sure that God would in his own time and way work in them whatever experience was

necessary to salvation; that they were in reality safe, and in no danger of final perdition. It was but a step further, a step into which, in the absence of clear, earnest, and constant warnings fitted to dispel the delusion, many were sure to glide, that a moral life, and regular attendance upon divine ordinances, are the sole requisites for adult church membership, admission to the Lord's Supper, and a full title to heaven. Multitudes came to live and die in this delusive hope, which, if not directly sanctioned, was very inadequately undermined by a large body of the preachers and pastors of the time. In New England special theories and platforms were devised to modify the Congregational doctrine, that the only legitimate, organic, and visible church consists, as to matter, of regenerate believers, and, as to form, of a confederated local congregation of them, into accordance with this way of church life and procedure. Stoddard, the predecessor at Northampton, and maternal grandfather of Edwards, one of the greatest of New England's early divines, propounded, and published a treatise advocating, the doctrine that the Lord's Supper is properly a converting ordinance; and hence, no credible profession of religion or evidence of regeneration are necessary to admission to it, while such coming to it affords every promise of subsequent conversion. Another practice more widely prevalent was the famous "half-way covenant," which, upon an assent of the parties to it, usually recently married persons, wherein they avowed their acceptance of the fundamental articles of Christianity, and promised for substance both to seek due preparation for coming to the Lord's table and to come to it when thus prepared, also to teach and train their children in a Christian way, entitled them to have their children baptized. The genesis of this whole system was due in part, not only to the causes we have specified, but to that early ecclesiastico-political system in New England, by which the church and town were so identified, that membership in the former was essential to the right of suffrage in the latter. We can only indicate this, without explaining or pursuing it further. In all such cases more than one cause is apt to be concerned in effecting the result. But the result, however caused, was simply this, that ways were devised, almost avowedly, to substitute the form for the power of godli