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as if it were a divine institution. The time was when good people would have been shocked if a minister had gone into the pulpit with pantaloons on. They would have thought he was certainly going to ruin the Church with his innovations. I have been told that some years ago, in New England, a certain elderly gentleman was so opposed to the new ministers wearing pantaloons, that he would, on no account, allow them in his pulpit. A young man was going to preach for him, who had no small clothes, and the old minister would not let him officiate in pantaloons. Why,' said he, my people would think I had brought a fop into the pulpit, to see a man there with pantaloons on; and it would produce an excitement among them: and so, finally, the young man was obliged to borrow a pair of the old gentleman's clothes, and they were too short for him, and he made a rediculous figure enough. But anything was better than such a terrible innovation as preaching in pantaloons."

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II. Things as they are.

Laymen." But now all these things are gone by, in most places, and laymen can pray and preach without the least objection. The evils that were feared from the labours of laymen have not been realised; and many ministers are glad to induce laymen to exercise their gifts in doing good."

Dress." Even now, in some places, a minister would not dare to be seen in the pulpit in a cravat or stock. The people would feel as if they had no clergyman if he had no bands. A minister in this city asked another but a few days since, if it would do to wear a black stock in

the pulpit. He wore one in his ordinary intercourse with his people, but doubted whether it would do to wear it in the pulpit."

Effects of Theological Seminaries. "I do not call that a thorough education which they receive in our col

leges and seminaries; it does not fit them for their work. I appeal to all experience whether our young men in seminaries are thoroughly educated for the purpose of winning souls: Do they do it? Every body knows they do not."

P. 159. There is evidently a great defect in the present mode of educating ministers. This is a SOLEMN FACT, to which the attention of the whole church should be distinctly called, that the great mass of young ministers who are educated accomplish very little. An elder of a church in a neighbouring city, informed me recently of a case in point.

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A young man, before he went to the assembly, had laboured as a layman with them, conducted their prayermeetings, and had been exceedingly useful among them. After he had been to the seminary they sent for him and desired his help, but O how changed! he was so completely transformed that he made no impression; the church soon began to com-plain that they should die under his influences; and he left, because he was not prepared for the work. It is common for those ministers who have been to the seminaries and are now useful, to affirm that their course of studies there did them little or no good, and that they had to unlearn what they had there learned before they could effect much. I do not say this censoriously, but it is a solemn fact, and I must say it in love."

Support of Ministers by the Congregations. P. 202. "A minister should be provided for by the church, and his support guaranteed irrespectively of the ungodly. Otherwise, he may be obliged either to starve his family or to keep back a part of the truth, so as not to offend sinners. once expostulated with a minister whom I found was afraid to come out fully with the truth, I told him I was surprised he did not bear down on certain points. He told me he was so situated that he must please certain

I

men who would be touched there. It was the ungodly that chiefly supported him, and that made him dependent and temporizing."

State of Preaching." I heard a remark made by a leading layman in the centre of this state, in regard to the preaching of a certain minister. He said it was the first preaching he had heard that he understood, and the first minister he ever heard that spoke as if he believed his own doctrine, or meant what he said. And when first he heard him preach, as if he was saying something that he meant, he - thought he was crazy. But eventually, he was made to see that it was all true, and he submitted to the truth as the power of God to the salvation of his soul."

III. Things as they should be. "If the whole Church, as a body, had gone to work ten years ago, and continued it as a few individuals, whom I could name, have done, there would not now have been an impenitent sinner in the land. The millennium would have fully come into the United States before this day. Instead of standing still, and writing letters from Berkshire, let ministers who think we are going wrong just buckle on the harness, and go forward and show us a more excellent way. Let them teach us, by their example, how to do better. I do not deny that we have made mistakes and committed errors. I do not deny that there are many things that are wrong done in revivals. is that the way to correct them, brethren ? So did not Paul. He corrected his brethren by telling them kindly that he would show them a more excellent way. Let our brethren take hold and go forward, &c. &c. Only let them go on, and let us have the United States converted to God, and let all union questions cease.

But

If not,

and if revivals do cease in this land, the ministers and Churches will be guilty of all the blood of all the souls that shall go to hell in consequence of it.

There is no need that the work should cease. If the Church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years. What do politicians do? They get up meetings, circulate handbills and pamphlets, blaze away in the newspapers, &c. &c. all to gain attention to their cause, and elect their candidate. All these are their "measures," and for their end they are wisely calculated.... I do not mean to say that they are pious or right, but only that they are wise in the sense that they are the appropriate application of means to the end. The object of the ministry is to get all the people to feel that the devil has no right to rule the world; but that they ought all to give themselves to God, and vote in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor of the Universe."

Such are a few striking extracts from this popular work. We do not profess to give them as a specimen of the book, but to furnish subjects for thought.

The extracts under the first head develope a state of formalism, characterised by a degree of attachment to the heresy of a human priesthood such as we had scarcely imagined to exist in the land of "equal rights." This state is now passing away, and like a sheet of arctic ice heaving with the swell of a coming tempest of issues, and portentous disruption of the old frigid state of things is everywhere visible. Many very interesting anecdotes are given respecting the "revivals' " in the American charches, which have attended and greatly accelerated the progress of this change; but what are we to think, when we find this zealous advocate of revivals uttering this gloomy presentiment (p. 259). “The scale is on a poise,-if we do not go forward we must go back. Things cannot remain as they are. If the church do not come up, if we do not have a more powerful revival than we have had, very soon we shall have none at all. We have had such a

great revival, that now small revivals do not interest the public mind. Who but God knows what will be the state of these churches, if things go on another year without a great and general revival of religion?" We confess we cannot but reiterate this question with much solicitude, because if we could for a moment suppose that the prosperity of the churches of God in any quarter of the globe were dependent on the uncertain breath of popular applause-the interest of the "public mind," and the trickery of everchanging novelties to attract and fix the inconstant crowd, we must indeed tremble for the result. That which appears to us the most portentous feature in the aspect of the future for the American churches, is the tendency to lean upon an arm of flesh, which can most distinctly be traced not only in some of the extracts we have given, but we fear as a widespreading evil in the churches of the United States. There is an earnest zeal, a spirit of self-renunciation, and of candour and honesty in the writer from whom we quote, which induce the earnest desire that he should be taught the truth more perfectly; but what shall we say of the love of filial dependence and reverent submission to the Sovereignty of the All-wise Jehovah, in the mind which could indite, or the readers who can approve a work containing such sentiments as the following, p. 236.

"The revival will cease whenever Christians get the idea that the work will go on without their aid. The church are co-workers with God in promoting a revival, and the work can be carried on just as far as the church will carry it on and no further. God has been for one thousand eight hundred years trying to get the Church into the work. He has been calling and urging to get them to take hold, he has stood all this while ready to make bare his arm to carry on the work with them; but the Church have been unwilling to do their part. They

seem determined to leave it to God alone to convert the world and say, If he want the world converted let him do it.' They ought to know this is impossible; so far as we know, neither God nor man convert the world without the co-operation of the Church," &c. &c.

We had thought the Church inherited the blessing of "the man who trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is," but it seems we have to learn a new lesson from the new world, that the trust of the Church is in man, and that she consequently dreads the curse, She "shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not know when good cometh: but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land, and not inhabited." Which evil may the Father of mercies avert from our Transatlantic brethren for Jesus' sake!

LOUIS PHILIP AND THE QUEEN OF TAHITI.

"THE French frigate Venus, commanded by Commodore du Petit Thoire, has been giving the poor half-civilised Tahitians the same sort of lesson which was lately put in practice by the French in Mexico.

“ In satisfaction of an insult, alleged to have been offered to the French flag, M. du Petite Thoire demanded--

"That Her Majesty should pay

down 2000 dollars.

"2. That the French flag should be hoisted on the island, and a salute fired under it of twenty-one guns.

"That the Queen should write a humble apology to King Louis Philip.

"The Venus was cleared for action, and the town of Matavai, the infant metropolis of Tahiti, threatened with destruction in case of a refusal."

Extraordinary Proceedings at Tahiti.

"We have now before us a letter from a respectable resident at Tahiti,

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"It may be remembered, that some two years ago, Pomare, the young Queen of Tahiti, refused permission to two French priests, from the Roman Catholic missionary establishment on Gambier's Island, to settle in her dominions, being very judiciously averse to countenance anything likely to stir up the flames of religious discord among her still semi-barbarous subjects. The priests, however, disregarding her injunction, landed on the south-western side of the island, and finally made their way to headquarters, where they were taken under the protecting wing of the American consul, Mr. J. A. Moerenhout, a Belgian by birth, and a Roman Catholic by profession. Naturally incensed at her orders being set at nought in her own dominions, Queen Pomare immediately gave notice to the priests, through the American consul, that she would on no account permit them to remain on the island, beyond the time specified for the sailing of the vessel in which they arrived. To this notice Mr. Moerenhout returned a highly impertinent answer, intimating his intention to keep the priests on the island, in defiance of Her Majesty's orders; the only excuse offered for such marked disrespect being, that he was inclined to believe that the queen had been induced to issue these orders by the advice of Mr. Pritchard, then a missionary, but now the British consul at Tahiti. When the time for the vessel's sailing arrived, and no signs of an intention to comply with Her Majesty's commands were manifested by the priests, one of the district's judges, accompanied by a posse comitatus of Tahitian consta

bles, was despatched by order of Queen Pomare to enforce obedience to the laws. Being refused admission to the house, the constable, by direction of the judge, removed the roof, and having effected an entrance from the outside, requested the priests to proceed immediately on board the vessel, which was then about to sail. One of the two, apparently endowed with a little more common sense than his companion, quietly complied with the mandate of the queen; the other, offering some resistance, was taken by force and placed in the canoe which was to convey them to the vessel. Even then, so anxious was he for the honours of martyrdom, he threw himself overboard, and received a good ducking for his pains.

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This, then, was the head and front of poor Queen Pomare's offending. Moerenhout and his Popish colleagues despatched, by the first opportunity, to His Most Christian Majesty, the Citizen King, a flaming detail of the indignities alleged to have been perpetrated on the French ecclesiastics, the result of which representation was, an order to Commodore Du Petit Thoire, of the French frigate Venus, then on the South American station, to proceed immediately on Tahiti to demand reparation for the wounded honour of La Belle France. On the arrival of the frigate at Tahiti, M. du Petit Thoire, after a lengthened consultation with Mr. Moerenhout (who had been dismissed from his American consulship, and rewarded with the French consulship, for the share he had taken in the transaction), despatched a letter to Queen Pomare, requiring, in the name of His Majesty the King of the French, immediate compliance with the following demands, in satisfaction of the insult alleged to have been offered to the French flag:

"1st. To pay down 2000 dollars.

"2nd. To hoist the French flag on the island, and fire under it a salute of twenty-one guns.

*" 3rd. Queen Pomare to write a humble apology to King Louis Philip.

"In significant intimation that his demands were in earnest, M. du Petit Thoire proceeded, immediately on despatching his letter, to clear the decks for action, intending, in the event of a refusal, to batter down the town of Matavai, the metropolis of Tahiti, overturn the Government, and place an inferior chief, of M. Moerenhout's selection, on the throne. For the feeble state of Tahiti to have refused compliance with the demand, unjust and outrageous as it was, would have been worse than madness; but, unfortunately, the whole national treasury did not contain a tithe of the sum demanded. In this dilemma, the British Consul, Mr. Pritchard, Dr. Vaughan, a British settler, and Mr. Bicknell, the son of one of the missionaries, generously came forward to Pomare's assistance, and furnished her with the means of satisfying the French king's demand.

"We have thus put our readers in possession of the details of this extraordinary affair; we shall now proceed to offer some remarks on the whole. We presume that Queen Pomare, who is at least a more legitimate sovereign than Louis Philip, has as much right as the latter to see that the laws of her kingdom are enforced. Now, it is well known to the residents in this colony, that one of the first laws of the Tahitian code prohibits foreigners of any description from residing on the island without the express permission of the queen. But even if no such law existed, Queen Pomare exercised nothing more than a sound policy in excluding the priests from her dominions; for their avowed object was to stir up religious discord among her subjects. We say nothing of the share Mr. Pritchard had in the transaction, for whether Pomare acted as she did by his advice or by the advice of Mr. Moerenhout himself, the act was equally the act of the Queen. It is a principle recognized

and acted upon among all nations, that every foreigner must comply with the laws of the country in which he for the time resides, however opposed those laws may be to the laws in force in his native land; the priests had no reason to complain, therefore, when they were civillly told that the Queen would not permit them to remain on the island; nor has the French nation any reason to complain that compliance with the laws of the land were in this instance enforced. As well might the British traveller, without a passport, in France, complain that the detentions to which he is exposed are direct infringements on the liberty of the subject, and the British Government espouse his cause as a fit subject for a national quarrel.

"Holding, then, that Queen Pomare has in no way offended against the law of nations; that, in short, in excluding the two French priests from her dominions, she did no more than she had a perfect right to do; we are at a loss for a term sufficiently strong to express our opinion relative to the conduct of the French Government in this matter. We should hesitate to apply the term piratical to any action, emanating from a nation so distinguished for gallantry as the French; yet the proceeding resembles nothing we have ever heard or read of, but the buccaneering practices of by-gone times. Call it by what name we may, nothing is more certain than that such an unwarranted aggression on an unoffending and defenceless people, will leave an indelible stain on the reputation of France."

It is scarcely possible to read the narrative of this outrage without feelings of the deepest sorrow. The law of nations has been grossly violated, and the French Government has, by mere exercise of superior force, trampled on the prerogative of an independent sovereign. How revolting and odious a view does it open to us of Popery! These noxious

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