We admit that the conduct which the limited charities prescribe, must sometimes give way for that demanded by the general good. But who is to be the judge when they seem to conflict? Must we act in all cases regardless of their dictates? Certainly not. The law of God has settled that question, and left no room for us to judge in the case, by imposing obligations on us to respect the limited charities. General benevolence can never be developed but through the medium of the limited affections. Our author takes a fearful leap when he requires as the very foundation of moral obligation, as the element of virtue, that we will good to God and to the universe.

God's law requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Love to others flows from their fountain. As the child learns to distinguish objects around it, its parents, kindred, friends, acquaintances become the objects of the same sort of regard it cherishes for itself. As it forms the desire to do good to some, it learns to extend that desire to all. Such is the order of God's constitution. The confined charities form too important a part in the general system, to be on this account rejected as not being, on the whole, safe guides. The neglect of them, and of the obligations growing out of them, as must indubitably be the case, if we are to be determined in our estimate of moral obligation, by the greatest good of the universe would render human life a matter of mere calculation, and often of very erroneous calculation. The principle, if carried out, would utterly destroy society. The barbarities and butcheries of the French Revolution might all be justified upon this principle, as it certainly contributed no little to suggest and sanction them. Every attempt to make the highest good of the universe the paramount object of pursuit, conceding to human reason a right of judgment in the case, and its dictates supreme in the human breast, is to counteract the essential laws of our nature, and drive the ploughshare of ruin over all the bland, benignant charities of social life, and the obligations arising out of the more limited virtues. We should dread the diffusion and prevalence of such principles and philosophy, as we would the pestilential vapor or the scalding flood. And we think that some practical tendencies of this sort have, of late years, begun to manifest themselves precisely in the wake of this metaphysical morality. What means this ceaseless tendency to revolution in churches? This special hostility to the organization of those that are Presbyterian? This war proclaimed in certain quarters against all who oppose the views of our author, deemed by himself and others so essential to the greatest good? Whence this sundering of relations, and contempt of social obligations, and the avowed purpose to divide and scatter and destroy the churches which stand in the way of its progress? Whoso is wise may understand these things; and the prudent may observe them.

We think we descry the elements of revolution at work, and fear that the morality and theology of our author may be exerting, without his meaning it, a fearful and fatal influence toward the ultimate subversion, in many churches, of the great cardinal doctrines of the Gospel.

ARTICLE III.

ROMANISM AND BARBARISM.

BY REV. HENRY P. TAPPAN, D.D., New York.

Barbarism the First Danger; a Discourse for Home Missions. By HORACE BUSHNELL, Pastor of the North Church, Hartford, Conn.

THE destiny of our country is a great problem, and one in which every Christian and philanthropist must be interested. The extent of territory, the rapidly increasing population, the extensive and important commercial relations, the vast accumulation of wealth, the political and religious institutions, form a power for good or evil, whose effects cannot be limited to this continent, if they do not extend to the whole human race. Those are poor philosophers, and, certainly not good Christians, who compute national destinies in the spirit of narrow, national competitions; and who cannot see that the well-being of each separate nation is connected with the well-being of all nations; that if France did not lie on the other side of the Channel, the entire history and condition of England would he changed, and that the extinction of America would deprive her of the noblest field for the spread of her race, her literature, her laws and her religion. If an ambitious Pleiad would blot out one of its sisters, the light and influence of the lost star will be withdrawn from the spheres of all the others, and the ambitious Pleiad will be no brighter, or more powerful, because there is a vacant spot in the heavens.

The destiny of our country! Why should we attempt to solve this problem?

Our aim is to see the point to which we are tending, that if the destiny a head, under the action of present elements, be not such

as we would desire, or one which does not meet the hopes of humanity struggling for a pure life and a true freedom, we may bring in some other element by which whatever is inauspicious may be overcome, and the great good of humanity be achieved. We would solve the problem on the present data, that we may bring in other data, if necessary, to change the aspects of the future. For we may not forget, that we who live now, not merely solve, but make the problem. How shall we solve the problem as it now stands? By looking at the elements which have made us what we are; and by looking at the elements which are now at work. The past is an illustration; the future is a deep calculation in the light of the past, upon data now before us.

Dr. Bushnell, in his very able and interesting discourse in behalf of Home Missions, has calculated the force and bearings of one element which has hitherto been at work, and is at work now on a still grander scale-an element of evil; and in connection with this he has calculated the force and bearings of an antagonistic element of good which has been, and is now, resisting the element of evil with a sublime might that gives no faint promises of ultimate success. There are other elements of evil, and other elements of good, which, in a subordinate manner, he brings into the discussion; but these are more or less involved in the two great antagonistic forces. The element of evil is a tendency to decline, and barbarism involved in emigration, or a new settlement of the social state. The causes and process of this decline, Dr. Bushnell discusses as follows:

First of all, the society transplanted in a case of emigration, cannot carry its roots with it; for society is a vital creature, having roots of antiquity, which inhere in the very soil-in the spot consecrated by valor, by genius, and by religion, Transplanted to a new field, the emigrant race lose, of necessity, a considerable portion of that vital force which is the organific and conserving power of society. All the old roots of local love and historic feeling-the joints and bands that minister nourishment-are left behind; and nothing remains to organize a living growth, but the two unimportant incidents, proximity and a common interest.

Education must, for a long time, be imperfect in degree and partial in extent. There is no literary atmosphere breathing through the forests or across the prairies. The colleges, if any they have, are only rudimental beginnings, and the youth a raw company of woodsmen. Hurried into life, at the bar, or in the pulpit, when as yet they are only half educated, their performances are crude in the matter and rough in the form. No matter how cultivated the professional men of the first age, those of the second, third, and fourth will mix up extravagance and cant in all their demonstrations, and will be acceptable to the people partly for that reason. For the immense labors and rough hardships necessary to be encountered, in the way of providing the means of living, will ordinarily create in them a rough and partially wild habit.

Then, as their tastes grow wild, their resentments will grow violent and their enjoyments coarse. The salutary restraints of society being, to a great extent, removed, they will think it no degradation to do before the woods and wild animals, what, in the presence of a cultivated social state, they would blush to perpetrate. They are likely even to look upon the indulgence of low vices and brutal pleasures, as the necessary garnish of their life of adventure.

In religion, their views will, of course, be narrow and crude, and their animosi

ties bitter. Sometimes the very life of religion will seem about to die, as it actually would, save that some occasional outburst of over-wrought feeling or fanatical zeal kindles a temporary fire. Probably it will be found that low superstitions begin to creep in, a regarding of dreams, a faith in the presentation of Scripture texts, in apparitions and visions, perhaps also in necromancy.

Meantime, if we speak of civil order, it will probably be found that the old common law of the race is not transplanted as a vital power, but only as a recollection that refuses to live, because of the newness of the soil, and he varied circumstances which, in so many ways, render it inapplicable. It asks for loyalty where there is no demesne, offers a jury before there is a court, and sanctifies a magna charta where no plain of Runnymede is ever to be known. Hence the need of much new legislation, consequently much of confusion and a considerable lapse of time, before the new body of law, with its tribunals and uses, can erect its trunk and grow up into life from a native root. Meantime it is well, if the social wildness and the violent resentments of the people do not break over all the barriers of legal restraint, and dissolve the very bonds of order.

If now, besides all the causes here enumerated, the emigrants are much involved in war to maintain their possessions, or if they are gathered from many nations having different languages, laws, manners and religions, the tendency to social decline is, of course, greatly aggravated. Indeed, where all the forms of habit, prejudice, and opinion are found to impinge upon each other, and every recollection of the past, every peculiar trait of national feeling and personal character requires to be obliterated, before it is possible for the new elements to coalesce, what can save a people, we are tempted to ask, from being precipitated downward even below society itself?"

Dr. Bushnell next gives a series of historical illustrations which he portrays with great vigor and vividness. This series embraces in the ancient times, the emigration of Lot, Ishmael, and Esau from the parent stock; the migratory life of the sons of Jacob, and their declension from the pure virgin character of a great and primitive manhood, exhibited in the time of Abraham; the emigration of Israel into the promised land where the wellordered discipline of Moses and Joshua declines into the semibarism of the times of the Judges, extending to the time of Samuel..

It will not be inappropriate to remark here that the history of man begins with a history of civilization. The causes of deterioration before the deluge were peculiar, and cannot be now considered. The arts of civilization, however, prevailed down to the time of the deluge, and were transmitted to the post-diluvians. The earliest nation founded after this event, in the region, or immediately adjacent to the region where the ark rested, were civilized from the beginning; and barbarism appeared, subsequently, among those tribes who, by distant emigration, broke off from the vital, organic connexion with the parent stock. The illustrations which might be drawn from this source, as well as the Egyptian, Grecian, Carthagenian, and Roman colonies, at a later period, are passed over. The limits of a discourse would not admit of such an extensive range. Dr. Bushnell next descends, in the order of time, to the Mexican and South American colonies: "that they have actually lost ground, since the emigration; that they have been descending steadily towards barbarism, in the loss of the old Castilian dignity, in the decay of

society and manners, and in the general prostration of order, is well understood." He next proceeds to the North American settlements, and particularly to those of New England, where the effects of emigration are no less evident, although by no

means so extreme:

"Probably never before did any emigrant people resist with so great promptitude and effect, the inherent causes of decline involved in a new state of society. Nor can it be said that the issue was ever doubtful. Indeed I am not sure that, if we consider the rough amount of character in the whole community, any real diminu tion was ever suffered. For if much was lost in the complete finish of the higher class, something was also gained in the sharpness, vigor, and capacity of the lower. And if there was even a decay of virtue and good manners in all classes, there was yet a gain in all, as regards spirit, self-reliance, physical endurance, and other like traits, which are essential as the staple of a perfect manhood. **** This decline was most evident in the higher class, and in the cultivated manners and tastes, brought over by the emigrant families. The leading spirits of the first age were truly great and cultivated men-cedars of Lebanon, nay, the topmost branches of the cedars, that God had brought over to plant by the waters of the new world.

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They were many of them scholars, who had received at English universities the highest advantages of culture furnished in that age. Their minds were matured and polished by severe study. They knew society. Some of them were persons who had travelled in foreign countries, who had figured in civil stations, and were not unskilled even as courtiers. They were fellow disciples and compatriots with such men as Owen, Howe, Milton, John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell, and the other great spirits, who were struggling in that age for the civil and religious emancipation of their country. But they came into the wilderness, as it were, to be tempted of the devil, throwing themselves and their families, for a whole century to come, upon the severest struggles of toil and warfare, to provide and fortify their new home. For a long time, they had no market. In their modes of dress, their residences, and their furniture, they were many of them restricted to supplies that were coarse and rude. Their means of education for the youth were defective in that which is necessary to a finished and really accomplished character, though sufficient to give a good degree of rudimental force. And, more than all, society, that indefinable but powerful something which gives a tone of refinement to literary tastes, and without which, feeling cannot rise to its highest dignity—this was a want, which no industry or care could supply. The trials and exposures were rough, the great world was far away, petty strifes and bickerings-always enveloped in the illnature of the race, but restrained among a great people under the established forms of cultivated life-broke out and raged in their little communities. A painful subsidence of manners soon began so appear. In many families a certain flavor of refinement passed, by tradition, and in fact was never wholly spent. Still, it was evident, after the first race was gone, and the second and third had come into their places, that character had fallen to a lower type. The educated men were, in comparison, a rude, or, at least, partially cultivated race. Their English style is loose. Elegance, well chastened thought, dignity of feeling, do not appear. The spelling is even more irregular and capricious than it had been. And the public proceedings of courts and churches, if the records are referred to, exhibit a certain rawness, that is quite characteristic. We feel, in short, that we have descended to an inferior It is somewhat as if a nest of eagles had been filled with a brood of owls."

race.

But New England has emerged from this declension. She has gained the victory over the adverse elements:

"For as our history now begins to live on its own root, and to send up a vitalizing power into the social body; as wealth is unfolded; as schools and colleges are perfecting their standards of learning; as literature and art advance to maturity, we are rising steadily into noon, as a people socially complete."

THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. 2.

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