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church-there may be no call, save in argument in opposition to enemies —there may be no call for the produce and for the production of these rights, just because there might be no contest, and we are left to the individual exercise of every power which legitimately belongs to us.

It is thus that for centuries, nay, for a whole millennium, we can imagine a prosperous and specific union between the church on the one hand, and the state upon the other, a union most fruitful in blessing to both; the church rendering to the state that most precious of all services -the respect of a virtuous, and orderly, and loyal population; and the state giving ten-fold efficiency and extent to the labours of the church by multiplying and upholding its stations over all the land, and providing it in fact with approach to the door of every family. There is here no compromise of sacred principle on the part of the church; for it is not in drivelling submission to the authority of men-it is in devout submission to the high authority of heaven, that we tell our people to honour the king, to obey magistrates, to lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, and to meddle not with those who are given to change. Neither is there any compromise of sound policy on the part of the state: for the Christian education of a people is the high road to all the best objects of patriotism. In such an intercourse of benefits as this, there need not (we repeat) be so much as a taint of worldliness. We may retain entire our apostolic fervour, and apostolic simplicity notwithstanding as pure, as in the season of our most dark and trying ordeals: equally pure in the sunshine, and gladness, and cordiality, between a Christian church and an enlightened government.

I have only one remark more, and with that I shall conclude.

To take down the establishment, whether in England or in Scotland, would be to desolate the land of far the greatest amount of its Christian instruction. But there is another danger to which the cause of sound Christianity might be exposed from

rude and unpractised hands, when these are put forth in the work of reforming or remodelling our ecclesiastical institutions. The popular and prevailing cry at this moment is, for the exclusive application of all the revenues of the church to the support of our working clergy. This can have no effect in Scotland, for, unfortunately for us, by the ravenous and unprincipled spoliation of our church which took place at the Reformation from popery-and which, I pray GoD, may never be acted over again in any land-I say, by the ravenous and unprincipled spoliation of our church which took place at that period there has nothing been left in the shape of those higher endowments, which, however they may have provoked the hostile feelings of those who do not calculate on all the ends of a church, because not aware of them, are nevertheless indispensable-that leisure, and independence, and sufficiency, without which a thorough professional education can never be administered, and a thorough professional literature cannot be upholden. I say, the danger is, lest in the blind impetuosity-we had almost said the phrensy-of invasion, the church may be deprived of its best capabilities for the support of an order of men profoundly conversant in the credentials, and qualified, by their profound acquaintance both with Christian antiquities and the original languages of scripture, to expound and to vindicate their contents, and the substance of our faith. There is a risk in this age of demand for mere menial and personal labour, with a total insensibility to the prerogatives and the necessities of mental and intellectual labour-there is a risk in this age that the law of theology be altogether despised. Not that we look on a highly erudite scripture criticism to be indispensable as an instrument of discovery into the sense and meaning of the Bible; but we look on it to be indispensable as an instrument of defence and we feel quite assured that if the wealth which is still in reserve for the elements or the reward of an elevated scholarship be enervated, or even transferred to the support of the

church's homelier and humbler services-then will England cease to be that impregnable bulwark of orthodoxy which she has heretofore proved, in virtue of her many ecclesiastical champions, among the nations of Protestant Christendom. I speak of it, not as an instrument of discovery, but as an instrument of defence against the inroads of false doctrine. In the peaceful and ordinary seasons of the church, their services may not be needed; but when danger threatens, and when an attack is feared from heresy or false doctrine, then the church does with her critics and her philologists what the state does with her fleets that are lying in ordinary-she puts them into commission. And to these lettered and highly accomplished ecclesiastics, more than to any blind or hereditary veneration on the part of the people, does she owe it that both the Arian and the Socinian heresies have been kept from her borders.

And here I am reminded of one of the noblest passages in the whole recorded eloquence of Canning, who, in his speech to the corporation of Plymouth, adverting to the objection of a navy during peace, alluded to the mighty power which lay up in reserve in those enormous floating masses assembled at that port, forming one of the most glorious of our national spectacles. "Our present repose," he said, "is no more a proof of our inability to act, than a state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses that float in the waters about your town, is a proof that they have no strength, and are capable of being fitted for service. You well know," he continued, "how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on its shadow in perfect stillness, how soon, upon any call of patriotism and necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion-how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage,how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awaken its dormant thunder." Such is one of those magnificent machines, when spreading from inaction

into a display of its might. Such is England herself: while apparently passive and motionless, she silently concentrates the power to be put forth on an adequate occasion. And such, I would add, are the churches and colleges of England; in which,— though they have been termed the dormitories of literature-is fostered into maturity and strength, almost all the massive learning of our nation. In these venerable institutes there lies up, if not a force in action, at least a force in readiness. This is the age of hostility to endowments, and more especially so, when the alleged wealth and the alleged indulgence of our established dignitaries are looked to with an evil eye; but to the church and the universities of England the theological literature of our nation stands indebted for her best acquisitions: and we hold it a refreshing spectacle, at any time, to behold an armed champion come forth in full equipment, from some high and sheltered retreat of her noble hierarchy; nor can we grudge her the wealth, the alleged wealth, of all her endowments, when we think how well, under all her venerable auspices, the battles of orthodoxy have been fought,—that in this holy warfare they are her sons and scholars who are ever foremost in the land, ready at all times to face the threatening mischief, and, by the might of their ponderous erudition, to overbear it.

It is the general belief, that with the destruction of our church and our navy, there would be an end to the political greatness of England; and, believing, as I do, that with the destruction, or even serious mutilation, of her church and her colleges, there would be an end to her moral and literary greatness, let me conclude with the humble and honest prayer, that DO weapon formed against them shall ever prosper, but that purified, though not destroyed, they may ever remain the venerable fountains of the nation's learning and the nation's Christianity. May GoD bless what has been said.

Sermons by the REV. DR. CHALMERS will be found in Nos. 144, 145, and previous Volumes.

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AT THE NATIONAL SCOTCH CHURCH, REGENT'S SQUARE, MONDAY, JULY 15, 1833,

ON BEHALF OF THE INDIAN MISSIONS.

2 Corinthians, iv. 2.-" By manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."

Yet

THERE is nothing that is wont to be more frequently alleged by the enemies of missions than the utter hopelessness of the enterprise, and that for the want of those miraculous powers wherewith the first teachers of Christianity were invested. We can remember the day when able men associated the uttermost folly and fanaticism with the cause. believing as they did, on the strength of prophecy, that the knowledge of the Lord was some time to cover the earth as the waters cover the channels of the deep, they seemed themselves to have been actuated by an imagination, which all others held to be most fanatical, that the church was again to be visited with the supernatural endowments of another pentecost for the further extension of the gospel into the territories of heathen

VOL. VI.

ism. Meanwhile they seem to have rested in a sort of heedless domestic quietism; and while they denounce as enthusiasm the confidence of those who count on the miracles of grace, which may well be termed the miracles of every age, they will denounce it as a still weaker enthusiasm to look for the revival of those miracles which, non-extinct for many ages, have ceased to be any thing but matter of solid history, since the outset of the Christian dispensation.

For ourselves, we are sanguine as to the effect of missionary exertions, but not so confident as many that the gift of sensible miracles is again to be restored. We hold that, however essential such miracles may have been to the first establishment of Christianity, this system of faith contains an evidence within itself for its own

H

ample and indefinite diffusion even unto the uttermost limits of the habitable world. We reckon that in the very constitution and economy of the gospel there is provision made for its propagation, and that without any delegated virtue from on high to its messengers by which they may lay an arrest on the known laws and processes of visible nature. It short it is our opinion that, for the conversion of men to Christianity, whether at home or abroad, there is another power at work than that of achieving pretended miracles, and even another evidence than that which lies in the history of past miracles. We think there is an evidence, which is distinct from this, adverted to in the text; and a sermon on the text may contribute something, perhaps, towards its elucidation.

But, here again we are brought to the experience how inadequate the opportunity of a single and occasional sermon is for the full and thorough and radical exposition of any one topic in theology. At the best we can but undertake to offer a few slight touches, or on the whole a faint and incomplete outline in a sermon, of an argument, the inherent worth of which is not to be measured by the effect of any brief or hurried demonstration of ours. -A reason, however valid and invincible in itself, may suffer from the dense rapid statement we are compelled to make of it: in which case you may have presented at one view a good reason and yet a feeble and impaired reasoning. FIRST, Nevertheless, let us endeavour as we may to give SOME GENERAL ACCOUNT OF THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED IN THE PASSAGE BEFORE US --that is, the manifestation of the truth to the conscience.

SECONDLY, WE SHALL AT LEAST AS SERT, AND, AS FAR AS WE CAN, ESTABLISH

THE ASSERTION, that it is the great, if not the only, instrument of Christian missions, both in and out of Christendom.

And LASTLY, we shall consider THE

LIKELY PROSPECT IT HOLDS OUT OF SUCCESS IN OUR MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE

-a prospect confirmed, as we hope to show, by the actual and historical success which has already attended it. I. If by CONSCIENCE be understood the moral faculty, or that which takes cognizance of, or that makes distinction between the morally good and evil

this may safely be regarded as a universal and inward feeling in man to be met with throughout all the members of the human family, under all the varieties of life and observation: and, with allowance for every modification of sentiment, still there is a general sense of right and wrong, which is characteristic of our species —a feeling of approval and complacency associated with the former —a feeling of shame, dissatisfaction, and remorse, associated with the latter. This peculiarity of our nature obtains in all countries and among all conditions of humanity. Whatever the practice may be, there is a certain truth of perception as to the difference between good and evil every where; there is a law of rectitude, to which, in every nation how degraded soever a universal homage is yielded by the sensibilities of the heart, however little it may be yielded to by the practical habit of their lives. In a word, there is a morality recognised by all men, imprinting the deepest traces of itself on the vocabulary of every language, and marking the residence of a conscience in every bosom; insomuch that go to any outcast tribe of wanderers, and, however sunk in barbarism, if you tell them of right and wrong, they will meet your demonstration with responding

and intelligent sympathy. You do not speak to them in a language unknown; there is a common feeling, a common understanding betwixt you, one ground of fellowship, at least, on which the most enlightened missionary of Europe might converse with the rudest savages of the desert.

But again this conscience, this sense of morality does not exist alone in the breast; it is, more or less, followed up by a certain conception of some rightful sovereign who planted it there. The feeling of a judge within the heart is in no case altogether apart from the faith of a judge above, who sits as overseer upon the doings and as arbitrator of the destinies of men. The moral sense does not terminate or rest in the mere abstract relation of right and wrong, but is embodied in the belief of a substantive being who dispenses the rewards that are due to the one, and who inflicts the penalties which are felt to be due unto the other. It is this which gives rise to the theology of natural conscience, more quick and powerful far than the theology of academic demonstration; not so much an inference from the marks of design and harmony in external nature, as an instance suggested from what is personal and what is felt within the recesses of one's own bosom, because leading from one effectual step-from the felt supremacy of conscience within to the feared supremacy of a GOD, the author of conscience, and who knoweth all things.

It is a mistake to imagine that this theology is not universal, or that any decree, whether of ignorance or of corruption, can fully obliterate it. It was not stifled by the fables of Greece or Rome; neither was it extinct, as may be seen by their invocation to the great spirit, among the tribes of the American wilderness.

In short, wherever man is to be found, there is the impression at least of a reigning and righteous GOD. When utterance is made of such a being by a missionary, even in the darkest places of the earth, they are not startled as if by the sound of a thing unknown; there is a ready acquiescence with him; and as he speaks of GOD, and sin, and vengeance, there is a felt harmony, between the conscience of the savage, and the sermon of the missionary.

But further still, conscience, in the sense that we have hitherto used the term, is that faculty by which cognizance is taken of the good or evil desert of conduct in general; and conscience, by the use of language, has obtained a meaning more extended than this. It is implicated with the faculty of consciousness, and so is made to take a special cognizance of one's own character, of one's own conduct. One man is said to speak of the conscience of another when he speaks to the independent sense or knowledge which the other has of the state of his own heart, and his own history; and certain it is, that, never do we feel profounder veneration for any wisdom, than for that which searches and scrutinizes amidst the arcana of one's own nature, and comes to a right discernment thereupon. The man who can pronounce aright upon my character, and accurately read to you its inner tablet, the lineaments which I know to be graven there-the man who shows to me the picture of what I am, and I believe it to be at all points the faithful reflection of what I feel myself to be-the man whose voice from without is thus responded to by the echo of conscience or consciousness within the man who can awaken this inhabitant of my bosom from his slumbers, and make him all alive to

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