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will do so; they are doing so, and are disposed to interpret for themselves. They will not adopt all the sectarian dogmas; they will even question the piety of many of the straitest of the sects. They will decide that either these sects can find no warrant for many of their doings and doctrines in the New Testament, or that it can be no revelation from God. The independent readers of the evangelists will bow neither to Romish tradition nor to Protestant interpretation. They can read Christ for themselves, and the more they read, the more they will wonder how many who call themselves Christians can for a moment pretend to be followers of the meek and lowly Jesus, whose whole ministry was among the poor and the erring, and whose strongest rebukes were reserved for the proud, the rich, and the sanctimonious.

Christ went from village to village, healing the sick and personally solacing the cares of the poor: Protestants fulfil their charities, not personally, but by delegation, or by machinery;

they visit the sick, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked by joint-stock associations, or by the hands of public functionaries. The Romanists trust in the church; the Protestants trust in theology. The former thinks to save himself by confessions, masses, and priestly absolution; the other by preaching, by prayermeetings, and lectures. The one holds to the accumulated errors of ages, and shuts out Christ for the sake of the church; the otherall right in theology-clings to a skeleton in triumph, rejecting flesh and blood and spirit. Both Romanist and Protestant hold up as a Saviour, and proclaim his personal sufferings, his cross, his crucifixion, his atonement, his ascension, but they omit his life of toil among the poor, and, above all, they neither preach nor practise what he taught. person of Christ has long disappeared from the earth, his earthly sufferings are long since over, his personal mission has long since ended, his atonement has long since been accomplished, but his precepts are handed down

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to us unimpaired in sublimity, beauty, and strength of obligation by the lapse of ages. These constitute overpowering evidence that He who delivered them "spake as never man spake," and that his mission must have been divine, which breathed so much love, so much compassion, so much that is beyond and above what any human teacher ever imagined or expressed. All this, we have now; and this is what is not fairly incorporated into the religious systems of either Protestant or Catholic. The former substitutes his peculiar hobby of theology; his catechism, prayer-book, creed, confession, articles, or other frames of doctrine are carefully and assiduously taught to old and young, while the teachings of Christ are comparatively neglected. The Romanist rejects the New Testament itself, as of no more authority than a papal bull, and Christ as being no wiser than the pope, both being infallible. But the world is now reading this rejected book, and the readers will compare Christians with

190 THIS WORLD ABUSED BUT PROTECTED.

Christianity. This ordeal has begun: the motto of an advancing army of reformers is the "Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man." What arms can Christians oppose to such invaders? That policy may no longer suffice which has hitherto prevailed, of declaiming against the love of the world, and yet falling with savage severity upon him who offers to disturb a single brick in the grand structure of that society which constitutes this present world. There are no greater friends of political liberty than Protestants, but it is that liberty which lets every man take care of himself, and ruin seize the hindmost; it is that liberty which stimulates, all to run, but permits the heat of competition to rise so high that none can stoop to pick up the multitudes who fall exhausted by the way.

191

GRADUAL DECLENSION OF CHRISTIANITY, UNTIL IT LOSES THE IMAGE OF ITS ORIGIN.

HUMILIATING will be the effort of him who, with a clear perception of the sublime and simple instructions of Christ, betakes himself to the task of searching the history of the last eighteen centuries for any extended or national exemplification of these pure lessons. He may experience all the admiration which the struggle of Christianity with heathenism, during a few centuries of its infancy, is calculated to excite: he may be struck with the vigour it infuses, the confidence it inspires, the unfailing courage and fortitude it sustains; but he must suffer the deep mortification of beholding that which could triumph over a world of enemies succumbing to the treachery of professed friends. Christianity was no sooner established than its perversion commenced: crafty, covetous,

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