duty, even at the request of one so high in station. Thus he kept a Christian woman from the Church for a sin which he and his Church fastened upon her. No wonder that her husband, in his official career, hurled indignant epithets at the Church, and died without its pale."

This justification of the intermarriage of the two races, dwelling upon the same soil, enjoying the same civil, and soon to enjoy the same political rights, ought not to shock American Christians; and it would not, had the deeply-rooted and wicked prejudice which slavery has fostered been plucked, root and branch, from our hearts. Many of the readers of these National Sermons, though unable to answer the preacher's cogent argumentation on this whole question of caste, will, nevertheless, insist that he has transcended that law of righteous expediency announced by St. Paul, “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient;" and by a greater than Paul, in these words, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." These persons would have us abstain from the proclamation of the whole truth till the dawn of the millennium—till sinful prejudice has died a natural death. But this denunciation of caste is just the truth which is most imperatively needed for hastening the glorious era of universal righteousness. Especially do the exigencies of the times in our own country, when we are laying anew our religious, social, and political foundations in a large portion of our republic, demand a full exhibition of the scriptural doctrine of the oneness of mankind in Adam and in Christ, and the enforcement of all the duties which are founded on this great truth. To wait till prejudice dies before applying the antidote, is to wait till the antidote is useless. But the prejudice of caste is a demon which must be cast out of the American heart by the repeated exhibition of its repugnance, not only to Christianity, but to our boasted principles of equality and popular sovereignty. It will never die-the euthanasia of nature; it must be slain by the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. One of the clear marks of the divine origin of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is its recognition of a law of progress in human society. It descries a glorious future of intelligence, liberty, and purity, and draws the race toward it. Unlike all pagan systems, its golden age is in the future and not in the past. Toward that age it teaches every

believer to look while he utters the prayer, "Thy kingdom come." The spirit of caste is in direct antagonism to this law of progress, repressing a portion of the race from rising to better conditions, keeping them as near as possible to the brute, whose instinct is distinguished from reason chiefly by its incapacity to improve. The caste feeling manifests itself in the disturbance of those divine adjustments of society which we call laws of political economy. It forbids the development of natural diversities of taste and genius, by denying the appropriate conditions, and by excluding from proper spheres. Ericsson's mechanical ingenuity, Peabody's mercantile sagacity, the eye of Raphael, the hand of Phidias, the imagination of Shakspeare, the tongue of Demosthenes, the generalship of Napoleon, and the statemanship and patriotism of Washington, if found within the proscribed circle of caste, must all be rudely crushed down into that menial occupation which the iron despotism of caste shall dictate. Says the sacred ordinance of Menu, "No collection of wealth must be made by a Sudra, even though he has the power, since a servile man who has amassed riches gives pain even to Brahmins. If a Sudra reads the Beids of the Shaster, or if he offers to give instruction to priests, let hot oil be poured into his mouth and ears." The House of Commons petitioned Richard II. "that villains might not, for the honor of freemen, be put to school, and so get on in the Church." Thus a stagnant state of society is produced, in which millions of minds vegetate without hope of ascending a single step; all invention is impossible, and new arts and new operations can have no place, because there can be no more minute division of labor corresponding to the multiplying wants of an advancing society, for unalterable castes and changeless occupations must go together. The mechanics' unions, the boards of trade, the professional schools and associations, all obey the ordinance of Menu, and oppose an insurmountable barrier to that law of human progress ordained by the Creator and reaffirmed by the Redeemer. The same spirit is repugnant alike to Christianity and to American principles, inasmuch as it is an insuperable obstacle to the administration of equal justice, the very purpose of human governments. Says John Stuart Mill, "In societies in which caste or class-distinctions are really strong a state so strange to us now, that we seldom FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXII.-13

realize it in its full force--it is a matter of daily experience that persons may show the strongest sense of moral accountability as regards their equals, who can make them accountable, and not the smallest vestige of a similar feeling toward their inferiors who cannot." "Never shall the King," says one of the ordinances of Menu, “slay a Brahmin, though convicted of all possible crimes; let him banish him from his realm, but with all his property secure, and his body unhurt." During the reign of Henry II. in England, in all cases of secret slaying, whether of English or Norman, the penalty was to be levied on the hundred, "unless there are plain indicia of the servile condition of the deceased." But we need not search the ordinances of Menu, nor the laws of the feudal ages, for proofs that caste ever wars on justice. The statute books of nearly every State of our country, and the records of every court of justice before which Africans and Caucasians have appeared, afford glaring evidence of injustice done to the race deemed the inferior. That caste violates the great law of love, the law by which men are to be judged, is too evident to need proof. "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye did it not unto me." It is not so evident, yet, nevertheless, is is true, that the existence of a strong class-feeling is a constant source of a fatal theological error-the denial of the unity of mankind. Wrong feeling is a standing menace to right thinking-to theological orthodoxy.

"Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,

And these reciprocally those again.

The mind and conduct mutually imprint

And stamp their image in each other's mint."

American Christianity, through the prevalence of caste-feeling, has advanced to a practical, and, in some instances, to a theoretical denial of the fundamental truth of the unity of the race, in the face of the plainest declarations of the Holy Scriptures, which have been made void by the ingenious sophistries of time-serving divines, and of science, falsely so-called. It is one of the brilliant revelations of modern philology that the whole cast-iron system of castes in India, which claims to be founded on their most ancient religious books, has grown up in opposition to the very letter and spirit of those books, by a series of, * Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, vol. ii, p. 289.

interpolations and corruptions made by the caste which has had their exclusive possession. The ordinances of Menu are a later invention than the Vedas, which are recognized by the Brahmins to be the most ancient and authoritative of their sacred books. Since the Vedas have come into the possession of occidental scholars, it is found that there is not a vestige of authority in them for the complicated system of castes, for the offensive assumptions on the part of the Brahmins, and for the degradation of the Sudras; and that there is no authority to prevent the social intermingling, and even the intermarriage, of the classes whose touch is now esteemed polluting; and the British government might to-day decree the annihilation of this entire scheme of oppression, appealing to their highest authorities to prove that it is no part of the religious system of the Hindus. The priestly caste, like the Jewish elders and papal corrupters, have made void the law through their traditions. To this error caste always tends. The only safeguard is to put away the abomination wherever Christianity holds sway.

But the philanthropy of these Sermons is very far removed from that pseudo love of man which prompts its professors to show their hostility to man's Divine Saviour by blasphemously baptizing their children in the name of the Universal Brotherhood, as some German infidels have done. In every Sermon Christ is exalted, not merely to give a Gospel flavor to a political harangue, but as the corner-stone of the temple of humanity. The oneness of man in the person and work of the God-man is, the burden of every Sermon. The cause of the slave before emancipation, the cause of the outcast since that event, is the cause for which He now intercedes. The African is the purchase of his blood, and the representative of the Man of Sorrows; and our treatment of him is the test of Christian character.

It was this large element of evangelical philanthropy in these National Sermons, and the intense religious earnestness of the preacher uttering the convictions of his moral nature, from a point of view infinitely above the partisan politician, which rendered them means of grace to the hearers, and promotive, and not obstructive, of revivals of religion, in the midst of which many of them were preached.

We cannot dismiss this topic without a criticism on the posi

tion of the preacher in his sermon entitled "World War," and in the extended note thereon in the appendix. We note that his intense philanthropy, bursting the limits of patriotism, has carried him into a wide divergence from the ideas and traditions of the best American statesmanship with respect to our foreign relations. Mr. Haven would have the United States abandon the Monroe doctrine, and intervene in every struggle for liberty throughout the world, not merely by her moral influence and expressed sympathy, but by casting her sword into the scales, and destroying that studied balance of power which is another name for the league of the world's crowned heads against the development of popular liberty. He says:

This doctrine (neutrality) has been a chief source of evil to ourselves, and to our cause at home and abroad. It was a departure from principle under the guise of selfish policy. It was the first temptation and the first fall of the American nation, and the prolific parent of all our woes. The sword has been found twoedged, and the stout British arm has made it cut deep into our vitals, as our youthful arm did into that of the more youthful French Republic.... That neutrality (at the outbreak of the French Revolution) destroyed our friends and multiplied our enemies. No less than six Republics, the fruit of our loins, have we sacrificed to this mistaken policy.

He gives a history of the rise of this doctrine-which he styles "the very gospel of selfishness"-in the second term of Washington's administration, originating with Hamilton against the protest of Jefferson, who had proclaimed "the gospel of humanity" in the Declaration of Independence. He characterizes the Farewell Address as "cold, and unworthy of the great soul that penned its sentences; and far below the highest statesmanship is this statement of the relation of great powers to each other."

To these strictures of our National Preacher on Washington's doctrine of neutrality we answer, that neither the Gospel of Christ nor the gospel of Republicanism can be promoted by invading armies of foreign soldiers. Each nation, like each individual, must work out its own salvation. Our own Republic would have been born, perhaps not quite so soon, without Lafayette as an accoucheur. There were also, in the case of our fathers, prudential reasons for neutrality toward the first French republic. They had just emerged from a long and