the exercises of individual experience on the other, that come after all to no steady union in the way of spiritual life. The mystical, sacramental interest in religion, is practically undervalued, or we may say, rather to a great extent subverted altogether, in order to make room more effectually for what are conceived to be the far higher claims of piety under a different form.

It is easy enough to feel this want of congruity between Sartorius and his translator throughout; but it comes to its most glaring exposure, where the subject of the sacraments is brought forward. In the nature of the case, this could not be left out of sight in the original work. No christology, no scheme of christianity, can be Lutheran, which leads not to the idea of sacramental grace, the mystery of Christ's presence in the sacraments, as an essential, inseparable element of the gospel. Sartorius accordingly devotes a whole lecture mainly to this subject—a rich, instructive and edifying discourse, for any one whose mind is prepared at all to sympathize with the ancient faith of the Church. But what now becomes of this most unbaptistic chapter of the work, in the hands of Mr. Stearns? The whole of it is quietly suppressed, with only the following explanation, in the way of a short note, at the beginning of the next lecture: "The previous chapter discusses the Lutheran view of baptism and the Lord's Supper, but is omitted in the translation as inapplicable to the ideas upon that subject held by christians generally on this side of the water."

Let us now look for a moment to the lecture in question, that we may understand how much is involved in the summary renunciation, thus made in behalf, not only of the Baptist body, but of the American churches in general.

The means of grace, according to Sartorius, have their force only in the Church, constituted by the Holy Ghost, to hold them in charge and administer them as organs for men's salvation. They are, first, the word, in the two-fold form of law and gospel; then the two holy sacraments, baptism and the Lord's supper. These are not properly our works, but acts of grace performed towards us by Christ, through the Church, which we are required to accept believingly in this character. Baptism is the seal of our ingrafting into Christ. We are born under the curse of original sin; but grace interposes, through Christ, to bring us

out of that state, extending to us, even in infancy, the visible pledge of such deliverence in this holy mystery. "Hence it is called the laver of regeneration, Tit. iii. 5; because by it the child, though at first still unconscious, passes out of the kingdom of the world and its spirit into the kingdom of God and his Spirit, and from a child of the flesh becomes a child of grace, on whom is impressed anew the seal of his original destination to the image of God and the inheritance of eternal life, while in the Church of Christ, of which he is a member, all means and helps are furnished for reaching this end." The objective value of it is not affected, in the case of infants, by the consideration that they cannot at once appropriate it by faith. It remains always at hand, as a divine fact, notwithstanding, for their use and appropriation through the whole of their lives. Does a man become truly and properly the child of his natural parents, only when he wakes first to the clear sense of what is comprised in such relation? Baptism, in this case, comes to its completion of right in confirmation. Again, as the christian life begins in this first sacrament, so it is fed and supported by the second, the holy supper. Here Christ imparts to us his flesh and blood, that is, the power of his own divine-human life; for he is, in truth, the living bread, of which all must partake or perish. There is, indeed, no change of the bread and wine into the substance of Christ, as the Roman Church teaches; but still there is a real union between them, above sense, according to his own word. "We will not envy those," says Sartorius, "who see in this meal only an outward figurative memorial of an absent Christ, which makes nothing more of him to be present, than what they may think along with it out of their own minds. Such, verily, would do better to contemplate a crucifix, or an ecce homo, or some other image of Jesus, than to eat a piece of bread and drink a sip of wine, destroying thus the recollection sign in the very act of its reception."

All this, of course, is at full variance with the system of Mr. Stearns. He allows no such efficacy to baptism, and dreams of no such mystery in the Lord's Supper. It is easy thus to see and understand, why he should be disposed to set aside the whole chapter as out of date. What, however, must we think of the honesty of such conduct? Be the merits of the suppressed lec ture what they may, it is certain that for Sartorius himself, it has

been of indispensable account in the discussion of his general subject. It goes necessarily, with him, to make out the completeness and integrity of the book; he would not be willing at all, as a good Lutheran, to stand charged before the world, with a christological theory, from which, by any possibility, the idea of sacramental grace could be divorced in such wholesale style. The probability is, that he would prefer decidedly the suppres sion of the whole work, to any mutilation so terrible as this must appear to be in his eyes. What right then, we may well ask, has any translator, standing in a wholly different system of religious thought, to mutilate the book in this way, and still publish it in Sartorius' name? It may be proper, in certain cases, to abridge another man's work, for more general popular use; though, even then, to be at all honest, the abridgement must be published as such, and is bound besides to be true to the sum and substance of the full work. It is, however, quite another thing, to change or expunge a single passage or even a single word, by which the true sense and spirit of the original is expressed at any point, in such a way as to bring in another sense quite foreign from the author's mind. This is spiritual forgery, which deserves to be abhorred of all good men. No small noise was made a few years since, about certain liberties of this sort, taken with D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation, by the American Tract Society. But that wrong, generally condemned, we believe, was small indeed as compared with the highhanded violence here perpetrated on Sartorius; and it must be regarded as a sign of the general obtuseness of the American Church to the claims of the high interest here concerned, that so glaring a wrong should be able to proclaim itself, with so little danger of shocking the common sense of christian propriety. Let the case be put into a new shape. Suppose a Baptist tract, gutted of its baptistic peculiarities, or some good Puritan work catholicized, for the use of the Roman Church, by the careful obliteration of a whole section on justification by faith, and we should not soon hear the last of the stealthy-footed, cowl-mantled stratagem. Can it be less jesuitic to play the same game, under a Protestant evangelical guise? We think not.

But this is not all. The case reveals a radically wrong conception of the entire theological system represented by Sartorius,

and of its relation to the theory of religion, in whose service he is here enlisted. It is quite common, we know, for all evangelical sects, as the Church now stands, not excepting Baptists of every hue and name, to claim inward affinity with Luther as the father of the Reformation, and to glory in his doctrine as only carried out to its purest form in their own faith and practice. His prejudices about the sacraments, and some other things, they, of course, have consigned to the tomb of the Capulets, (with due indulgence to the dormitancies of so great a Homer,) but only to stick the faster to the true life and marrow of his divinity, as found in the doctrine of justification by faith. But only see the contradiction which all this carries upon its very face. “Saul among the prophets!" was not, surely, a greater incongruity than the idea of Luther quietly seated among these various sects ("die himmlische Propheten") and consenting to be taught "the way of God more perfectly," at their feet. What a compliment, moreover, to the cause of the Reformation, to conceive of its great leaders generally, and most of all, the very Moses of its glorious exodus, as having no power to discriminate between the essential and the accidental, in so clear a case as this of the sacraments is now taken to be; but actually filling all Europe with their noise about it, as though it belonged in some way to the very core of christianity, when any child may now see that they were driving at a shadow from first to last. The whole conception is absurd. The sacramental doctrine of Luther, so far as the substance of it is concerned, was no outward fungus upon his system. It lies imbedded in its inmost life. To part with it, is to give up the cause of the Reformation itself, as it stood in his mind, and to turn his whole theology into a new and different shape. To think of the Baptistic theory of religion as one and the same with the evangelical Lutheran, only divested of his sacramental doctrine-as though this were an old cocked hat, to be kept on or laid off at pleasure-can only show the shallow character of the whole theology, for which any such thought is possible. So in the case before us, to drop the chapter on the sacraments, and yet pretend to be satisfied with the rest of the book as sound and good, must be taken as a gross inconsistency. Any christology that can admit the idea of a Church with no divine powers, no grace in its sacraments, no room in its bosom

for infants, no mystical presence of Christ's life in the Lord's supper-be its claims to respect in any other view what they may-must be counted utterly foreign from the entire mind of Sartorius, and cannot possibly be the same that is presented to us in this little book. However it may be with others, his view of Christ's person, (like that of Luther,) necessarily involves such a conception of the christian salvation, as brings along with it in the end all that the sacramental interest includes. His scheme of religion thus, in the nature of the case, is materially different througout from that into whose service he is here forcibly translated by Mr. Stearns.

Still farther. The Lutheranism of Dr. Sartorius, as presented in this work, is by no means of the rigid extreme sort; so that in the case before us, it might seem to be set aside in favor simply of the old Reformed or Calvinistic doctrine of the sacraments, as this stood in the sixteenth century. Even in that case, the wrong would, of course, still merit sharp rebuke. But the opposition here, is not between the two forms of the original Protestant doctrine. There are a few sentences, perhaps, in Sartorius, to which a true follower of Calvin might demur; but the body of his doctrine, beyond all doubt, is the same that is most distinctly taught in the writings of Calvin, and embodied in all the classic confessions of the Reformed Church. There was a difference between the two creeds, of course; but such as it was, it lies away beyond the Baptistic horizon, with which we are here concerned. Both sides of the old Protestantism intended to hold fast to the substance of the ancient sacramental doctrine, as it had stood in the catholic Church from the beginning. Both held the sacraments to be mysteries, regarded them as organs of grace, looked through them by faith to the presence of Christ's life, as objectively and truly comprehended in their solemn transaction. All this grew too out of a corresponding christology, by which room was made for the idea of a concrete Church, with divine resources and capabilities, commensurate, in all respects, with the entire extent of our human fall, and fitted in this way to cover the case of infants no less than that of adults. All this, however, and nothing more than this, is just the conception which Mr. Stearns, true to his Baptist feeling, undertakes to expunge from the doctrine of Christ's Person and Work, "as inapplicable