showing that the "Pilgrims" were not all "Puritans,” as the speech on the ship Talbott and the letter from on board the Arabella have already indicated;) but it was not until 1743, one hundred and fourteen years after, that St. Peter's in Salem was allowed to have an organ, and not even then, until the question had been submitted to the vote of a tumultuous town-meeting! Episcopalians knew too, that it was now one hundred and twenty years since Dr. Murray had been appointed Bishop of Virginia,—an appointment that had been defeated by the Puritans; that every subsequent effort for the same end had been in the same manner frustrated; that it was openly avowed in the Eastern States, as one motive for the Revolution, that it would prevent the introduction of Episcopacy; and when Episcopalians remembered that, while as yet under the protection of the crown itself, they had paid in Plymouth (glorious old Rock!) ten shillings a head for each absence from Puritan worship, and as lately as 1731 had been petitioning in Massachusetts for the right of suf rage, and that, fifty years after death by fire had been for ever abolished in England, it was still known in Boston; when they recollected too, the irruption of the Puritans into Maryland, and the floggings that even there they inflicted on men's consciences, we cannot certainly affect surprise if some of them felt some little misgiving about the consequences of a revolution. Franklin did something to pacify these fears, by declaring the opinion, in his "Cool Thoughts" published before the Revolution, that "this event [the introduction of a Bishop] will happen neither sooner nor later, for our being, or not being, under a royal government." In spite of all this, there were Churchmen who felt the wrongs done to the colonies, and the greater wrongs done to themselves, by a government that had allowed the Episcopal settlements of the south, with all their intelligence and opulence, to be deprived of the Episcopacy and their essential apostolic

character, for now a hundred and fifty years. And if the North furnished for that Revolution the iron, the South contributed the tow and the fire; and while Washington, nursed at the Church's breasts, kindled in the camp the fires on his country's altar, the Venerable White, chaplain to the first Congress and afterward Bishop of Pennsylvania, kindled in the same cause, the fires on the altars of his country's God.

CHAPTER XIX.

LIBERTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT.

THERE is, as I have shown in a former place, a species of liberty, so called, which Presbyterianism originally had no intention to encourage, but to which, in her downward tendencies, she inevitably conducts; and against which, as Antichristian, Episcopacy irreconcilably protests. She protests against levelling down the sublime mysteries of religion to. the intellectual grasp of every sewing girl; every text of Scripture to the exegesis of the washerwoman; the Church of God to the dignity of a temperance society; the Priesthood to an office made and unmade by the hands of men; Government to a social compact that parties may dispense with at their will; Sacraments to a place beneath the mystery and power of masonic symbols; the ancient severities of repentance to a spasmodic agitation, lasting sometimes not an hour; the majesty of divine worship to a weekly off-hand prayer: and a thousand like things, that strive to leap the intellectual space between finite and Infinite, strike at the crown of Jesus, and sink the redeeming God into a feeble man. Saint Peter and Saint Jude, in concert, warn us against "dreamers," that should come "in the last time," or under the last dispensation, who, having "denied the Lord that bought them," shall "despise government, and shall not be afraid to speak evil of dignities;" who, "with feigned words

make merchandise of men," 99.66 waves of the sea, wells without water, clouds carried about by the winds, wandering stars," “speaking great swelling words of vanity," "murmurers, complainers, promising men liberty."*"Religious liberty," as the phrase is, and as some men count liberty, is not the liberty of religion, but the liberty of irreligion, to assert itself, and obtrude itself into all places and companies with its whole execrable brood of profane and licentious fancies. The moment you call it to order on the score of reverence, or of common decency, you are considered as impertinently interfering with religious liberty; so that, in portions of our land, in companies where the reverence and deference of Catholicity are out of the question, in the stage-coach, at the hotel, at the dinner-table, in the ship at sea, one can scarcely, in mixed companies, get through the day without submitting to undue and ill-mannered flings at the dearest object of his faith and hope. One has said, that "if you wish to think a little, you may be an Episcopalian; if you wish to think a little more, you may be a Presbyterian; if you wish to think a little more, you should be a Congregationalist; and if you wish to think as much as you please, you must be a Unitarian." Now this chain itself indicates the power of thinking; and yet, poor man! if he would but "think a little more," he will see, that of this stuff the infidel, pantheist, atheist, may each one weld and add his potent link to this portentous chain! "Having heard that it is a vastly silly thing to believe every thing, some persons get the idea that it is a vastly wise thing to believe nothing."

Reason is the mind's eye or telescope, for the perception of truth; nor is it any more necessary that the mind should comprehend the truth perceived, than that the mountains or the stars should be compressed into the lenses of the eye or of the telescope. The medium through which reason discov

See Jude and 2 Pet. ii.

ers truth, is light-the light of nature, and the light of revelation; but reason can no more create these lights, than the eye or the telescope can create the light of day. In the truths that reason arrives at by the light of nature, we travel from link to link along the chain, until we come into individual contact with the conclusion: in the truths that we perceive by revelation, we skip the chain; we bound across the intervening gulf; we see the bright object in the heavens; we admire; we adore; we have no means of reaching it. The Christian religion descends upon the earth. It finds reason on the throne, and demands her allegiance. Produce your credentials, replies the haughty mistress. If I do not works, none other ever did; if I speak not words, none other ever spake; if I live not a life, none other ever lived; if I die not the death, none other ever died; if I rise not again as none other ever rose; if I ascend not to heaven to show that from heaven I came; believe me not: is the answer. Reason until your heads shall burst, to prove that I am to be believed at all; then yield me up the right to say for you, what you are to believe and what you are to do. Let the child reason its little self to death, to know whether this is the mother that bare him; although a mother's voice and hovering love will, in the very dark, strike conviction to its heart: but once having satisfied itself that she is its mother, let it honor her with faith and obedience to the death. Reason, if you will, till a thousand suns go down, whether the heavenly Jerusalem, "the Lamb's wife," "the Mother of us all," is the "Faithful and True Witness" left by Jesus upon earth to "fill up that which is behind" of His teachings and His sufferings: then follow Her, to the prison and the cross. Reason if you please, till the lamps of night expire, that it is safer to believe what the universal church of God believes, than to imagine that your own unaided reason can decide where all the individual reasons round you differ and have differed