They offered themselves as this self-denying, yet ever-living corn; God selected, God prepared them, and by his providence and grace induced and perfected the self-offering. They were that corn that fell into the ground and died forgotten, uncared for, unpraised, cast out and derided, of the whole world. They were that corn, that handful of corn, as on the tops of the mountains, and from it sprang the fruit, shaking like Lebanon, that now fills this country, and is fast filling the world.

But these discoveries all lay involved in the knowledge and development of the true idea of the Church. That was to be disentangled from the lies of the god of this world, from the despotism and mistakes of men; it was to be disinterred from the mighty fabric of wood, hay, and stubble, in worldly ceremonies and hierarchies, under which it had been buried for centuries. The Church, rightly conceived, contains the destinies. of the world wrapped up in it; the Church is the germ of the world's true life, and only as that germ grows, the world's true life grows. The Church, or rather, the Spirit through the Church, is to govern the world's form, will conquer it, will control it, will shape it for God. When the world's form is such as springs from the development of life in the Church, or grows by an indissoluble connexion with it, then, it is true, it is indestructible, it is imperishable. The Church is the soul of the world, containing the law of the world's permanent happiness, from which the world's forms are to be organized and developed, just as the germ of a seed in the earth contains folded up within it the law and form of the future plant in its perfection. If the world's forms grow awry, despotic, infernal, by and for themselves, they are mere excrescences, and will have to be changed or cut away. Everything shall grow from and for the immortal germ, the Life of Christ, hidden in the Church, to expand and subdue the world to itself. The conquest is to be perfected, and in it the glory of the Lord is to be revealed, and all flesh is to see it together.

The kingdom of God is as leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. The world is as raw and unprepared for God's glory, until the Life of Christ in the Church interpenetrates and governs it, as a measure of meal unleavened, unformed, uncooked, unfit for nourishment, without bond or principle of unity or continuity, ready to be blown away by the wind, ready to scatter like dust. Until the true principles, the indestructible, eternal principles, on which God would raise his Church, were discovered, nothing of permanence was discovered, nothing of lasting interest, nothing of importance, nothing that could give peace. The world rocked to and fro, like a ship in a storm, without helm, without anchor

age, and so, till Christ rules, it must continue to rock, beneath God's great announcement, I will overturn, overturn, overturn.

The ecclesiastical discoveries of the Puritans were discoveries at the centre, discoveries of the way in which God works, not man. They were discoveries of divine law. They were not speculations like an Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, theorizings of ingenious sophistry in support of power, grand scaffoldings to build a system that was to be thrown down. They were neither the inflations nor the sweepings of the house of philosophy. They were not forms of external law and organization presupposed, or copied from the man of sin and son of perdition, and impressed upon the world to make everything bend to them, beneath the power of a machinery of despotism, brought to bear upon crude, ignorant, barbarous, unprepared material. They were discoveries of the principles of Christian liberty and law, working from within, not from without; not things that could be laid down and demonstrated in eight books, but things which God only could demonstrate, by showing them in actual life, free life, spontaneous life, life from inward principle, not from law laid down, and organization prescribed in a human directory. They were discoveries of the leaven of bread, and not of a machinery, or the laws of a machinery, by which bread could be made without leaven. They were discoveries in regard to the principle of gravitation in the spiritual universe, and not speculations in regard to the crust of our globe, or conclusions of despotism from the vestiges of creation, how to make, develope, and govern a globe like ours.

Some of these discoveries were things that almost seem to us at the present time to be truisms, we have seen them so long, we have lived by them, we are so accustomed to them from our infancy. But Hooker well said, that many talk of the truth, who know not the depth from whence it springeth; and eminently true is this of the principles of simple liberty, which, at such incalculable cost, by such intense discipline of suffering, the Puritans were made God's instruments in working out. They were then unknown to the whole world. They were principles hated of the world, and guards were set over them, and proclamations issued against them as the world's enemies, and rewards offered for their extermination. They were regarded as monstrosities, as forms of evil and malignity, worse than ever issued from the fabled caves of demons sealed up by Solomon. And they are still so regarded by a large part of the world, the blindness having been removed only from a few kingdoms, and only in part from them.

The spiritual discoveries so precious and familiar to us, are almost as strange and monstrous to multitudes, as the brute gods of old Egypt seem now to a Christian mind, as the true system of

the universe to a devotee of Vishnu, as the motion of the earth round the sun to the Inquisitors of Rome, who imprisoned Galileo. And so far as we can see, these simple principles of truth would not have been discovered and wrought out at all, except for the instrumentality of the Puritans. God's only laboratory for a long time, seemed to be his church in America. His divine agency he deemed fit to display especially there in the demonstration of these truths, these discoveries. There were glimpses of them at times elsewhere, but they came to nothing or stopped short of the idea of true Christian liberty, the idea, in fact, of Christ's Free Church. The Free Church has since been scourged and beaten into existence elsewhere; but probably even in Scotland not for ages later might this great work have been accomplished, but for the previous discoveries, demonstrations, and examples of the Puritans in this country.

For there is a vast difference between the announcement of such principles, or a glimpse of them by some individual emancipated understandings, and God's demonstration of them in actual successful experiment. Cromwell was a Puritan in Old England, who understood them as well, perhaps, as any man living in his day in New England. "What most distinguishes Cromwell above all great men," says D'Aubigné, "and especially above all statesmen, is the predominance in him, not only in his person, but also in his government, of the evangelical and Christian element. He thought that the political and national greatness of Britain could not be established in a firm manner, unless the pure gospel was communicated to the people, and unless a truly Christian life flowed through the veins of the nation." It was Cromwell's belief that England as a State was blessed and would be, only "by reason of that immortal seed, which hath been and is among them; those regenerated ones in the land, of several judgments, who are all the flock of Christ and lambs of Christ; his, though perhaps under many unruly passions and troubles of spirit, whereby they give disquiet to themselves and others. Yet they are not so to God, since to us he is a God of other patience, and he will own the least of truth in the hearts of his people. And the people being the blessing of God, they will not be so angry but they will prefer their safety to their passions, and their real security to forms. Had they not well been acquainted with this principle, they had never seen this day of gospel liberty."

"These men," continued Cromwell, "that live upon their mumpsimus and sumpsimus, their masses and service-books, their dead and carnal worship, no marvel if they be strangers to God, and to the works of God, and to spiritual dispensations. The worldly-minded man knows nothing of this, but is a stranger to it, and thence his atheisms and murmurings at instruments,

yea, repinings at God himself. Give me leave to tell you, those that are called to this work, it will not depend for them upon formalities, nor notions, nor speeches. I do not look the work should be done by these. No, but by men of honest hearts, engaged to God, strengthened by Providence, enlightened in his words, to know his word, to which he hath set his seal, sealed with the blood of his Son, with the blood of his servants. That is such a spirit as will carry on this work."

That is such a spirit as must discover, draw forth and demonstrate, truth against power, truth overlaid by power, truth belied and perverted by power, truth driven out of the world by power. It was such men as these, who were required to reestablish truths that to us are plain as the daylight, but to the world then wore the guise almost of fiends. They were truths, put by their opposers, as the wise and godly Halyburton once said of certain caricatured doctrines of the gospel, under the guise of gross misrepresentations, mistaken notions, and strained consequences; and having thus put them in beasts' skins, as the primitive persecutors did the Christians, they set their dogs on them to worry them. The very strangeness of those truths made men hostile to them, as if they were enemies; and, indeed, for their defence no common decision or mere friendship would answer; it needed a mind to be grounded deep in them, to be persuaded of them as the truth of God, to have a conviction in them, which came from God's spirit, and was the fire of individual experience, and carried all things in the soul before it. Unless a man were of this adamantine resolution, and at the same time intense earnestness, he would be, in the pursuit of truth against which the whole array of State and Church launched their anathemas, like those hesitating doubtful men of whom Milton speaks, "who coming in the course of these affairs to have their share in great actions above the power of law or custom, at least to give their voice and approbation, begin to swerve and almost shiver at the majesty and grandeur of some noble deed, as if they were newly entered into a great sin."

The Puritans were impelled, as well as taught, of God's Spirit; burned onward, as it were, by God's fire; forced, as well as guided, by God's Providence-shut up to measures of liberty, and driven on to the discovery of truths, from which, in mere human strength or impulse, they would have retreated. They carried by assault impregnable citadels, before which generations might have passed away in the action of an ordinary siege. The children of Israel, if time had been given them, would have crossed the Red Sea in ships of their own construction, nor ever would have stirred a step into the hazard of a miracle, in obedience to God's voice to go forward. But the celestial fire of spirit in our depraved nature, that which whirls a man on for God in face of

an opposing world, is a greater miracle itself than the cleaving of the whole ocean.

We speak of the great principles established by the Puritans, or rather wrought out and brought from concealment into clear day by the Divine Providence, Word, and Spirit through them, as all springing from, and returning to, the true idea of the Church. They were a body of men, a band of believers, in whom, by the Divine demonstrations through them, may be seen an illustration in this world of a passage of scripture concerning the Church, the action of which throws us mainly into the next world: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God. The true nature of the Church-the freedom of the Church-the unity of the Church-the rule of the Church-the mission of the Church-the life and dependence of the Church;-all these are questions, the solution and application of which are stirring up the world from its foundations. All these are questions developed and demonstrated by God's Providence and Grace in the history of our fathers, about as clearly and fully as we can expect truth to be demonstrated through the medium of humanity.

First, the true nature of the Church. The idea very widely prevalent, long after the commencement of the Reformation, in regard to the Church, was that of a national ecclesiastical society, of which men became members by baptism. The Puritans soon learned, partly by experience, and partly by the Word of God, that the Church is composed only of persons born of the Holy Spirit, and that a Church is any number of such believers whatever, who," as the Lord's free people, join themselves, by a covenant of the Lord into a Church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel." This idea, in distinction from that of a national Church, "combined together of all in the land promiscuously," under government of the hierarchy, must necessarily be developed, if the Church of Christ would have purity and power. It was equally necessary for the freedom of the Church. In the development of this truth, and in the establishment both of the independence and the pure discipline belonging to the Church of Christ, the Puritans were carried further onward in the providence of God, and were made more perfect, than any other body of Christians since the days of the Apostles. The prevalence of deep and true piety in New England is greatly owing, under God, to the vigorous, uncorrupted scriptural sense of the nature of the Church of Christ, taught of God to our Puritan fathers, and transmitted by them to their descendants.

The Church in their view was an existence solely of God's creation, not man's. It is made up only of those who are born again by the Holy Spirit; it is a company, the company, of new