and can never cease to be such. How to deepen and strengthen the Missionary life and zeal, how to call forth more, ten-fold, a hundred-fold, more of effort, and contributions, and prayers,— this should engage the earnest inquiry of the Convention. There are scores of Parishes in the Church, which could, each, give more than is now given to both the Domestic and Foreign Board, without the slightest personal sacrifice. Our niggardly contributions, our careless indifference, are a shame and disgrace to us.

As to specific fields of labor, the whole country calls importunately, as never before, for the Gospel and the Church, in their simplicity and integrity. The whole South, South-West, West, and North-West, are open and calling for Missionary laborers. Let the Church determine at least to double, and at once, her contributions and the number of her Missionaries.

There is one field, which God's Providence has lately opened to the Church, not to be overlooked. We mean the freed-men of the South. Almost four millions of immortal beings are thrown at once upon our hands. Aside from their own claims, if Africa is to be Christianized and civilized, here at our very doors are the very agents requisite, waiting to be fitted for such a labor. Why will not some layman, to whom God has given wealth, and a heart to use it to His glory, establish, at once, a Training Missionary School, for the sons of Africa, who shall be Christ's Ministers to this people here, and in their native land? There are young men of that race, devout, promising, enough to fill a score of such schools. It only needs an appreciative interest, and a work can be accomplished, fruitful in the richest results.

There will be other matters before the Convention, to which we need not allude. We call attention to this Convention in these few brief words, as an expression of the deep and wide spread conviction of the solemnity and unspeakable importance of the circumstances under which it will assemble. Men of all denominations are looking forward to it with intense solicitude. Patriots, who know what is meant by the Organic Life of a Nation, and the necessity of that Life to a Nation's weal, are asking, as they never asked before, whether there is

one Denomination of Christians in this country, which can present to the Nation a type of National Unity, which can be relied on to kindle anew the old fires of fraternal love and mutual confidence. If there is not National Virtue enough in the Church for this, well may we despair of any power which can bind the Nation together, save the power of Military Force. In other words, the Republic is at an end. Anarchy, or a Military Despotism, is before us.

We believe these men will not look to the Church in vain. The old Church of Washington, and Madison, and Jay, and Hamilton, and King, and Marshall, and Rutledge, and the Pinckneys, and Monroe, and the Lees, and Nelson, and the Harrisons, the Randolphs, and Livingston, and Morris, and Duer, and Troup, and hosts of others,-that same Church will stand firm as the Rock on which she is planted. Against that Rock the angry waves of discord will beat and `rage in vain. "Jerusalem is built as a City that is at Unity in itself.” "Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces." Meanwhile, let that beautiful Prayer which the Church. hath appointed to be said during the sessions of the Convention, be offered in every Church, at every family altar, and in the closet of every private Christian throughout the length and breadth of our Zion.

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, Who, by Thy Holy Spirit

didst preside in the Councils of the blessed Apostles, and hast promised, through Thy Son Jesus Christ, to be with Thy Church to the end of the world; we beseech Thee to be present with the Council of Thy Church here assembled in Thy Name and Presence. Save them from all error, ignorance, pride, and prejudice; and of Thy great mercy vouchsafe, we beseech Thee, so to direct, sanctify, and govern us in our present work, by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost, that the comfortable Gospel of Christ may be truly preached, truly received, and truly followed, in all places, to the breaking down the kingdom of sin, Satan, and death; till at length the whole of Thy dispersed sheep, being gathered into one Fold, shall become partakers of everlasting life; through the merits and death of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

ART. VI.-THE DESIRE FOR UNITY, ITS MISTAKES AND ITS MEANS.

AT last, the Providences of GOD are manifesting themselves clearly as regards this nation, and the work that God has for it to do in this world. It is beginning to be seen by us, that we have a part to play in the progress of the Church of God in the world,-a part as important as was ever given to any nation upon earth. The part, it is, we think, of opening the way to Christian Unity in the Christian Church over the whole world; of abating and bringing to an end all that shower of woes which, since the era of Hildebrand and the PAPAL SUPREMACY, has fallen upon Christendom; and of opening up again to man the heaven of blessings which division and dissent have closed;— Love and Joy and Peace again, in the Gospel, instead of anathemas and hatred on pretence of Religion, fiendish rancor, devilish fury, savage and slaughterous crusading hosts, kings and inquisitors, with the sword and the gibbet, the rack and the stake.

We began in this country our national existence, with all the consequences of all these evils as fully predominant among us as ever among any people; with the self-will of Sect so rampant as to shut out the possibility of Public Worship and Common Prayer in tens of thousands of places; with the traditional hatreds of European religionism cherished as if they were precious hereditary jewels, heirlooms of unutterable price ; with the doctrinal and practical absurdities of European Christianity most fervently upheld among our population; and, worse than all this, the Predominant Sect among us hated toleration, was as much in favor of a conformity enforced by religious persecution in the shape of fine and imprisonment and death as Torquemada himself. The law and the practice of the Puritans are known to all men. The fact (to give one instance only among hundreds) is patent to all men that John Cotton wrote the "Bloody Tenet washed in the Blood of the Lamb," a treatise in favor of religious persecution against Roger Wil

liams of Rhode Island. In fact, a population better adapted to shew forth all the evil consequences of the European system of religious intolerance,-Romanist and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist, Monarchic, Aristocratic and Republican, (for religious persecution was the principle of all the nations of Europe, of all classes of European Christianity,)—there could not well be.

The settlers of America were a gathering from all the nations of Europe, sufferers from the paternal principle of compulsory religion in all its varying forms; and, consequently, their crop of hereditary hatreds, and fears, and jealousies in religion, and whimsical and ridiculous notions and practices, could not be surpassed, the wide world over. There are Sects among us, to this day, that "dance before the Lord." There is a Sect which believes our Government invalid, because it has not taken "the solemn League and Covenant." There is, in Pennsylvania, a large and wealthy Sect who will excommunicate a brother who has buttons to his coat, instead of the orthodox strings, who has a flower bed in his garden, or a porch to his house, or who in his bed chamber has the unholy self-indulgence of a wash stand, instead of piously and humbly bringing up a tin dish out of the kitchen; and all this, because three hundred years ago, in Holland, this was the discipline of a Roman Catholic priest turned Anabaptist. Many other strange fragments of the religious absurdities of Europe are, to this day, to be found floating here and there upon the surface of American Society.

But when, in the Providence of God, these States became independent, the root of all these traditional evils was cut away by the amendment which prescribes that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or preventing the free exercise thereof." The Union of Church and State, and its logical result, persecution for conscience' sake, is

* Roger Williams wrote with all his might in opposition to the Bloody Tenet of persecution, and published his book, in London, in 1644. In 1647, that book received an answer from a Puritan Minister, John Cotton. The presumptuous, not to say profane title of this answer was, "The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb." (Coit's Puritanism, p. 80.)

therefore completely prevented, and religious freedom to every one is absolutely secured and guaranteed; and, the result is, that the traditional and hereditary evils of Church-and-State have been abating in venom and vigor ever since. Having lost their root, they have been withering away.

And now, at length, (and for it, no praise be to man or his devices, but simply to the onward march of the Providence of God in history,) the unrestrained spirit of the Religion of our Blessed Lord is manifesting itself; budding forth, as it were, in this nation in a two-fold way; the first, internally; the second, in regard to the world outside our limits. This spirit shows itself in a wide spread uprising before the minds of all thoughtful Christian people of these two great questions. First: "Wherefore in this land should its Christian population be separated from one another, at so great a cost of means, and peace, and love, and holiness?" Secondly: "Wherefore, over the whole world, should this hateful and unchristian separation and schism exist among Christian nations?"

And, at the bottom of all this questioning, lies the intense conviction on the part of the inhabitants of this new land, that this country and this nation is to be an agent and instrument in carrying out this mighty work of the reunion of Christianity over the whole world.

God forbid that we should impede this work in any way. Still, at the same time, it may be wise, at this present time, to interpose a word or two of caution. In any great movement whatsoever, (and this is a great movement,) there are blind instincts toward the final result; stumbling onward with tottering and erring steps, on the right way. There are, also, timid and over-cautious emotions of prudence, which, in effect, would stop the movement altogether. And both these have, in themselves, a certain amount of real feeling and earnestness. And then, furthermore, there are the selfish-minded and cunning partisans; men who assume the position of leaders, in the one way or the other, that they may lead the movement wrong;-that they may serve their own private ends of popularity, of power, or of gain. If the movement be necessary, in the Providence of God, these last are tossed aside as weeds