have been able distinctly to trace its effects to their real causes. With such a character for its founder, with such length of time and varied situation, the experiment must be convincing to every impartial mind. But of which of the various sects among Christians can this be said? Perhaps however it will be asked, if the principle in question be allowed of one doctrine, why not of all others. Because we do allow it to be theoretically true, but in practice fallacious. If it were possible to ascertain in all cases the full influence of opinions on their professors, there would be no objection to the principle. But that this is far from being possible, will be seen, when we consider the following sources of error. Opinions are often professed without being believed; they are often believed in the abstract, without being followed, as a rule of action; and, moreover, the causes of human conduct are so various, that even granting certain tenets to be in some measure efficacious in practice, we cannot say with certainty that they alone have been in operation so that it is next to impossible for us to determine of a single individual, whether his opinions on a particular subject have been the sole reason for his conduct. It remains for us to remark on the very common opinion, that the principles here stated contradict the authority of Scripture. What, then, is this authority? and what sanction does it give to the common notion? In answer to these questions, it will not be denied that a saving power is attributed to faith in Christ; but it will be our object to ascertain the true meaning of the terms here used. Faith in its simplest and strictest sense seems to imply nothing more than belief. In the New Testament it evidently extends farther, including the effect of belief on the heart and life; and sometimes by that frequent form of metonymy, the cause being put for the effect, faith seems to be put for the moral conduct that it produces. Again, faith probably often refers in the New Testament to that serious, candid, and unbiassed disposition, with which all should undertake religious inquiry. The duties enjoined upon us in the Christian revelation are, as we all know, many of them, opposed to those feelings which the majority of mankind are so much disposed to indulge, to our wordly interests and pleasures. To resist these last, and strive to keep ourselves from prejudice, is sometimes called in the Christian Scriptures, faith; and this by a very natural change of speech, since it is the true course of preparation for a sound and well established faith. This is a voluntary act, attended oftentimes with much difficulty; and hence its merit, though differing perhaps in degree, is the same in kind with that arising from any other discharge of duty, and equally efficient in preparing us for future happiness. The revelation which God has been pleased to bestow on man, is a gift we can never prize too highly. It has opened to us new views of duty, it has set before us new motives of action, it has given us, in short, light, and hope, and consolation. Belief in Christian truth may, therefore, be well called saving, since it gives us such inestimable advantages for escaping the dominion of sin. But it does not appear to us to be implied in the New Testament, that all who do not use these opportunities are worthy of moral censure. For to some the word has never been preached; and others who have heard it, have not had sufficient means for inquiring into its truth. A third class indeed deserve our reproof, who will not look into its merits, because they fear lest they should be obliged to give up many of their past gratifications; but let us be careful to ascertain why they are blameworthy; not, strictly speaking, because they have rejected Christianity, but because they have refused to open their mind to a fair examination of its doctrines. In so far, then, as unbelief proceeds from moral obliquity, we agree in pronouncing it criminal, and are countenanced in our opinion by Scriptural authority. In those instances (few indeed, but not altogether wanting) in which it springs from other and unavoidable causes, it may be lamented as unfortunate, but ought not to be accounted worthy of censure. Our subject is a most extensive one, and we have, therefore, only attempted here to glance at its most prominent divisions. Yet if we shall seem to any to have said too much, we can only give Cicero's excuse: "Si longior fuerit oratio, cum magnitudine utilitatis comparetur: ita fortassis etiam brevior videbitur." * * De Officiis, II. 6. ART. V.-A. Discourses, Reviews, and Miscellanies. By WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. Boston. Carter & Hendee. 1830. 8vo. pp. 603. 2. Discourses. By WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. Boston. Charles Bowen. 1832. 12mo. pp. 280. man It is striking to observe what a change preaching has passed through among us, even since the time of Buckminster; we mean, practical preaching. Then it was a preaching of the obvious truths and principles of morality and piety. And of these, there was never, perhaps, an exhibition in the pulpit, more faultless, more perfect in the balance of its parts, more dignified at once, and more graceful, more thorough, and at the same time more beautiful, than in the discourses of that admirable preacher, that young eloquent," whose moulded periods and thrilling tones still sound, in the ears of many, as a strain, and a requiem too, of rich and solemn music. We do not undertake to decide whether Buckminster was a man of the very highest powers of eloquence or of thought; but there is something in his writings we scarcely know what that assemblage and proportion, perhaps it is, of the parts that make up the perfect whole - which has always made us rise up from one of his discourses, more in despair about writing sermons, than from any others we have ever read. We do not assert his preeminence over all other distinguished preachers in their particular walk, nor his equality with some of them, in the points of their greatest strength. But, after all, we have felt that, as an effort of mental labor, we had rather attempt the elegant, but frigid style of Blair and Alison, or the pithy sense, and polished and sometimes scarcely grave irony of South, or the swelling and richly laden sentences of Barrow and Jeremy Taylor, or the studiously wrought paragraphs of Massillon, Bossuet, and Bourdaloue, and even the oftentimes commanding majesty of their periods, - that we had rather, we say, attempt any of these, than to bring together, and blend, and harmonize, so many of these traits, as appear in the discourses of Buckminster. Indeed, if we may venture to express our thought, though it be a bold one, we cannot regard the preachers of the old French or English school, as the models that they are - often represented to be. There is always something about the French preachers a great deal too artificial for us; a sort of jesuitical policy about truth, if we may speak so; a disposition, that is to say, to make the most of every argument, and something more; to push every consideration, whether bearing upon doctrine or duty, whether addressing fear or hope, to extravagance. There is too much of the art of the rhetorician in their sermons, and the vaunted unction of the French pulpit, though oftentimes touching, seems to us to lack something of sound, strong, and sterling sensibility. Of the high intellectual merit of the old English pulpit, and especially of the splendor of that constellation of divines, which rose in the seventeenth century, consisting of Barrow and Jeremy Taylor, Owen and Baxter, Tillotson and Bishop Burnet, Sherlock and South, and like to which nothing has since shone on England, of these lights that beam upon us from the past, we do not want, as we think, any measure of just admiration. There is a hale, strong, "large, sound, round-about sense," in the English sermons of one and two centuries ago, there is an expansive and generous view of things, a wise and liberal philosophy of life, and of providence, and of revelation, and of religion, natural as well as revealed, that makes us turn to them with delight and refreshment from the metaphysical divines of our own country. And yet the names of Davies and Strong, of Bellamy and Hopkins, and the Wests, and, above all, of Edwards, must not suffer us to forget, that very powerful and acute minds have been employed in the pulpit of our own country. Indeed, intellect has not been wanting in the pulpit, on either side of the water. Barrow's wonderful amplitude * * Dr. Stephen West of Stockbridge, whose writings are well known, and Dr. Samuel West, of New Bedford (formerly Dartmouth), whose writings have drawn less attention, though perhaps equally deserving of it. He published two treatises against Edwards on the Will; and had his talents as a writer been equal to his powers as a thinker, had he possessed skill in unfolding his thoughts, equal to the strength and originality of his mind, he would have compelled, what he certainly deserved, the attention of the great New-England necessitarian. Dr. West of Stockbridge the writer of this article knew, and he cannot help adding, that although his contemplations of religion were shaped by the dry and hard metaphysics of the Hopkinsian school, there were, in his conversation and manners, a dignity and amenity, a courtly grace and sweetness, which it is impossible ever to forget. " in and minuteness of discussion, "the exhaustive process the last place where we could expect it, in the pulpit, and Taylor's learning, his profound and varied observation of life, and the play of his most luxuriant fancy, have always been, and always must continue to be, the delight of scholars and men of reading. Still, their discourses do not satisfy us, as sermons. They are too unwieldy; they are too various and profuse in their topics; they want unity and point; they do not strike home. They do not, to make our objection more specific, enter into a sufficiently close grapple with the mind of the hearer; they do not come into a sufficiently near contact and intimacy with the heart, speaking to its wants, eliciting its tenderness, and awakening to life the slumbering images of power and beauty that lie within. Leighton and Bishop Butler seem to us to go deeper. But still our feeling is, after all that the fathers of the English pulpit have taught us, that there are yet unsearched depths of the human heart, which it is the very province of the preacher to explore, that there are chords to be struck, whose vibration, strong as ever eloquence awakened, will be, not passionate emotion, but grave and deep-toned sensibility, that there are feelings of the soul to be approached, feelings intimate, secret, and unworn by ordinary pulpit exhortation, to be approached by avenues not yet found out, and to be addressed with appeals of yet unknown power. Human nature is the very being addressed in the pulpit; and human nature is the very subject about which he is mainly addressed, and yet how little is known of this nature! The simple philosophy of a good heart, followed out through all the mazes and mysteries of human experience; the philosophy, too, that is to explain a bad heart; the terrible conflict of good and evil, not only in the virtuous, but in the vicious; the tremendous loss, as well as suffering, incurred by sin; the cruel wrong which it does to human nature; the mournfulness, as well as indignation, with which it should be contemplated; the quick and tender sympathy for all that is human, even like the compassion of Jesus; the consciousness of the glorious capacities of the soul; the sense of its original and intrinsic dignity; how beautiful and blessed is its natural accordance with rectitude, though it is sadly fallen from it; how dear and precious is the first breathing of virtuous emotion even in the most debased mind; how majestic and enrapturing is the prospect which, - |