that the place shall only be filled by a man who is a good Methodist, or by one who is "all right" on the immersion question? Would it have been wise to exclude Timothy Dwight from the Presidency of Yale College because in his notions of church government he was not quite a Congregationalist?

The simple truth is, that there is a narrowness and a littleness in managing the affairs of an Institution professedly consecrated to liberal learning, in such a spirit, which must expose our Colleges, and the denominations which control them, to the contempt of all liberal-minded men. This very cause is degrading our Colleges in all parts of our country, but more especially in the West and South. It is constantly tending to fill their chairs of instruction with men of very indifferent qualifications, who are placed there, not because they were ever believed to be the fittest men for the place, but because it was thought they might do, and they were of the right denominational stripe.

We affirm that such an order of things is the legitimate fruit of subjecting our Colleges to the control of the ecclesiastical powers of the several denominations. It is precisely the result which comes by a necessity of human nature, from such a system. And we predict that if this system becomes general in the West, as seems now to be threatened, and is persisted in, the long future of our Western Colleges will be as illiberal as it should be liberal, and as insignificant as it should be dignified and respectable.

But this is not the whole of the unfitness of ecclesiastical bodies to conduct the affairs of a College. They are the most unstable portion of American society, the most likely to be rent asunder by internal convulsions. This is not an accidental circumstance, but results from the very nature of the case. All our ecclesiastical systems in this country are attempts to maintain a government without any power of forcibly compelling obedience. And yet they are governments which are continually in contact with the deepest and most sacred convictions, the most energetic emotions, and the most stirring passions of the human heart. They are thus constantly awakening into life and energy, powers which they

are unable to control. They may and do legislate and command, but have no means whatever of compelling obedience. They may adjudicate, but they have no executive arm clothed with authority to compel submission to their sentence. They are precisely in the condition in which one of our State Governments would be, if, with its Legislature and Judiciary constituted as at present, it were deprived of the right forcibly to compel obedience to its laws, and submission to the decisions of its courts. It would not be long, in such a State, before rival legislatures, rival courts, and rival executive officers, would be exercising their functions on the same territory, and in presence of each other; and, in process of time, they would become as numerous as the separate ecclesiastical systems of our country; and they would be multiplied by exactly the same process.

This is the inevitable condition of all ecclesiastical governments, wherever liberty of conscience is fully recognized and established. We do not affirm that ecclesiastical governments so conditioned are bad; we do not affirm that they may not accomplish useful and important ends. But we do affirm that they cannot be stable. They must be constantly liable to the rise of minorities, whose views and feelings are in irreconcilable conflict with those of the ruling majority; and whenever this does happen, convulsion and disruption must and do ensue. To this liability all the great ecclesiastical systems of this country are constantly exposed.

Our Colleges, on the other hand, are, and of right ought to be, among the most permanent of our institutions, as permanent as our mountains,-as perpetual as the springs which gush out among our hills. Why, then, subject them to the management of bodies so unstable ?-unstable in their very nature, as all our ecclesiastical bodies must be.

If any one calls in question the soundness of these views, we appeal to indubitable facts in confirmation of them. Let such a doubter call to mind the earthquake which shook the great Presbyterian Church, from 1830 to 1838, and which finally divided that great body into two parts, each having the same constitution and the same name. Let him call to mind

the more recent agitations which have appeared in that portion of the divided Church known as the New School, on the slavery question, and carried still further the process of disruption. Let him predict, if he can, the results of the already widely extended agitations of the same body, in relation to denominational Home and Foreign Missions. Let him forecast the future of the Old School Presbyterian Church, amid the commotions with which slavery is rocking this great

nation.

The adherents of that ecclesiastical system, since the great convulsion of 1837-8, have perhaps flattered themselves that they have a ship strong and steady enough to outride the storm without rocking. So thought the projectors of the Great Eastern. But the first smart gale which she encountered had well nigh driven her upon the rocks, in spite of all her anchors and engines. Enough of tempest is looming up in the coming history of this country, to test the stability of Old School Presbyterianism. Let not her pilots be too sanguine.

In proof of the same instability of our ecclesiastical systems, let us also look at the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Mason and Dixon's Line, like some great backbone crossing the continent, long ago divided it towards the North and towards the South. And yet agitation ceases not: fragment after fragment is dissevered, and fresh convulsions are still rising up to view from the opening future. We repeat it, that we do not affirm that systems of which such things are true may not be good, but we can hardly suppose that their best friends are as well satisfied as they would desire to be, of their stability.

To all this, however, it may be objected, that these convulsions have not, as yet, produced any very disastrous consequences to the Colleges under the control of the ecclesiastical systems, in which they have occurred. So far as this is true, it is because this zeal for the denominational control of Colleges is more recent, than the most disastrous of these convulsions, and is a product of that intensity of the denominational spirit which they have occasioned. Had Beloit, Wabash, Illinois, and Marietta Colleges been placed under the

supervision of the Synods within which they are respectively located, previous to the great disruption of 1837-8, is it probable that they would have come off unharmed from that catastrophe? If Webster College, in the State of Missouri, had been placed, at its organization, under the direction of the New School Presbyterian Synod of that State, would it now find its ecclesiastical mother in good condition to afford it nourishment, protection, and guardianship?

The Church is indeed destined to perpetuity. It will be as lasting as the Mediatorial reign of Christ. But no wise man can discern any signs of permanency in our ecclesiastical systems. Those artificial arrangements which man has devised for centralizing a government over the Church, and marking the boundaries and perpetuating the divisions of rival Christian sects, sustain no vital relation to the life of the Church; they are confessedly man's work. Who will pretend for a moment that they are not? And, like all the other works of man, they are transient and perishable like their author. Even while they last, they are as changeable as the drifting sands of the desert.

Why, then, subject our seminaries of learning to the necessity of sharing their ever variable and uncertain fortunes? As our Colleges grow out of great permanent and distinct wants of society, why not allow them to stand on their own independent basis? Standing there, they encounter fewer popular passions, and are exposed to fewer causes of commotion and convulsion than any other portion of the body politic. They ought to be,—with wise management they may be,—the most permanent social structures on earth, the Christian Church only excepted. Why, then, should we insist on uniting the permanent with the transient? Why should we unite their destinies to the ever changeful and uncertain fortunes of political and ecclesiastical systems?

To Congregationalists there is another consideration, which ought to be perfectly decisive against all such arrangements. They are utterly at variance with the spirit and tendency of the Congregational system, and cannot be adopted in a Congregational community, without producing an ecclesiastical

revolution. We do not purpose to enlarge on this point; it cannot fail to be obvious to every thoughtful man who has studied Congregationalism. What would have been the condition of the Churches of Connecticut, and of Yale College, if, during the conflicts of the last forty years, the General Association of that State had possessed the power to reappoint, at stated intervals, the Trustees of that great seminary of learning; or even to fill the vacancies which might from time to time occur in their number? Such an arrangement must have immensely increased the violence of those agitations which have been experienced; it must have seriously endangered, if not utterly destroyed, the ecclesiastical unity of her Churches, and invested the General Association with a relative importance in her ecclesiastical system, at variance with its principles, and dangerous to the independency of the Churches. The College itself must have been exposed to agitations and rude shocks, most detrimental to its usefulness and dangerous to its permanency. In short, does any thoughtful man believe that Yale College could have been forty years ago placed under the guardianship of the General Association of Connecticut, without producing a revolution which would have been felt in the most disastrous consequences in every school district of the State?

But such an arrangement will work no better elsewhere in connection with that ecclesiastical polity than in Connecticut. It can work nothing but mischief anywhere. The Congregationalists of one Western Territory have already founded a College, giving the power of appointing its Trustees to the General Association; and in one new Western State there are serions questionings about doing the same thing. It is to be hoped these brethren will reconsider this matter, and abandon a principle likely to work much mischief if adhered to.

There is, however, little danger that this method of controlling literary institutions will be extensively adopted by Congregationalists. The logic of their system is too obviously against it. But a Northwestern Convention of Congregationalists, a few years ago, extemporized a plan for subjecting an institution of learning to the organic control of the Congrega