ed and gave his deliverance on the quality of another's work; in the other, he was the workinan himself: and while as the philosopher, he could discern, and discern truly, between the sterling and the counterfeit, in Christianity, still it was as the humble and devoted pastor that Christianity was made, or Christianity was multiplied, in his hands.

Now, conceive these two faculties, which were exemplified in such rare and happy combination, in the person of Edwards, to be separated, the one from the other, and given respectively to two individuals. One of these would then be so gifted, as that he could apply the dis criminating tests, by which to judge of Christianity; and the other of them would be so gifted as that, instrumentally speaking, he could make Christians. One of them could do what Edwards did from the pulpit another of them could do what Edwards did from the press. Without such judges and overseers as the former, the faith of the Christian world might be occasionally disfigured by the excesses of fanaticism; but without such agents as the latter, faith might cease to be formed, and the abuses be got rid of only by getting rid of the whole stock upon which such abuses are occasionally grafted. It is here that churches, under the domination of a worldly and unsanctified priesthood, are apt to go astray. They confide the cause wherewith they are intrusted to the merely intellectual class of labourers, and they have overlooked, or rather have violently and impetuously resisted, the operative class of labourers. They conceive that all is to be done by regulation, and that nothing, but what is mischievous, is to be done by impulse. Their measures are generally all of a sedative, and few or none of them of a stimulating tendency. Their chief concern is to repress the pruriencies of religious zeal, and not to excite or foster the zeal itself. By this process they may deliver their establishment of all extravagancies, so as that we shall no longer behold, within its limits any laughable or offensive caricature of Christianity. But who does not see that, by this process, they may also deliver the establishment of Christianity altogether; and that all our exhibitions of genuine godliness may be made to disappear, under the same withering influence which deadens the excrescencies that Occasionally spring from it. It is quite a possible thing for the same church to have a proud complacency in the lore, and argument, and professional science, of certain of its ministers; and, along with this, to have a proud contempt for the pious earnestness, and pious activity of certain other of its ministers. In other words, it may applaud the talent by which Christianity is estimated, but discourage the talent by which Christianity is made. And thus while it continues to be graced by the literature and accomplishment of its members, may it come to be reduced into a kind of barren and useless inefficiency as to the great practical purposes for which it was ordained.

To judge of an impression requires one species of talent, to make an impression requires another. They both may exist, in very high perfection, with the same individual, as in the case already quoted. But they may also exist apart; and often, in particular, may the latter of the two be found, in great efficiency and vigour, when the former

of the two may be utterly wanting. The right way for a church is to encourage both these talents to the uttermost; and not to prevent the evils of a bad currency, by laying such an arrest on the exercise of the latter talent, as that we shall have no currency at all. It must be produced, ere it can be assayed; and it is possible so to chill and to discourage the productive faculties in our church, as that its assaying faculty shall have no samples on which to sit in judgment. This will universally be the result in every church where a high-toned contempt for what it holds to be fanaticism is the alone principle by which it is actuated; and where a freezing negative is said to come forth on all those activities which serve to disturb the attitude of quiescence, into which it has sunk and settled. The leading measures of such a church are all founded on the imagination that the religious tendencies of our nature are so exuberant, as that they need to be kept in check, instead of being, in fact, so dormant as that they need work, and watchfulness, and all that is strenuous, and painstaking, in the office of an evangelist, for the purpose of being kept alive. The true Christian policy of a church is to avail itself of all the zeal, and all the energy, which are to be found both among its ecclesiastics and its laymen, for the production of a positive effect among our population; and then should folly or fanaticism come forward along with it, fearlessly to confide the chastening of all this exuberance to the sense, and the scholarship, and the sound intellectual Christianity, for the sound diffusion of which over the face of our establishment, the establishment itself has made such ample provision. Such is our impression of nature's lethargy, and deadness, and unconcern, that we are glad when any thing comes forward,-that we are pleased to behold any symptom of spiritual life and vegetation at all,-and so far from being alarmed by the rumour of a stir, and a sensation, and an enthusiasm, in any quarter of the land, we are ready to hail it as we would the promise of some coming regeneration. A policy the direct opposite of this is often the reigning policy of a church; and under its blasting operation, spurious and genuine Christianity are alike obliterated; and the work of pulling up the tares is carried on so furiously, that the wheat is pulled up along with it,-the vineyard is rifled of its goodliest blossoms, as well as of its noxious and pestilential weeds and thus the upshot of the process for extirpating fanaticism may be to turn the fruitful field into a wilderness, and to spread desolation and apathy over all its borders.

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A church so actuated does nothing but check the excrescencies of spiritual growth, and may do it so effectually as to reduce to a naked trunk what else might have sent forth its clustering branches, and yielded, in goodly abundance, the fruits of piety and righteousness. There is no positive strength put forth by it, on the side of vegetation, but all on the side of repressing its hated overgrowth. It makes use only of one instrument, and that is the pruninghook; as if, by its operation alone, all the purposes of husbandry could be served. Its treatment of humanity proceeds on such an excessive fertility of religion, in the human heart, that all the toil and strenuousness of ecclesiastics must be given to the object of keeping it down, and so con

fining it within the limits of moderation; instead of such a natural barrenness that this toil and this strenuousness should rather be given to the various and ever-plying activities of an evangelist, who is instant in season and out of season. It is thus that the outfield of sectarianism may exhibit a totally different aspect from the enclosed and well kept garden of an establishment. In the former, there may be a positive and desirable crop, along with the weeds and ranknesses which have been suffered to grow up unchastened; in the latter, there may be nothing that offendeth, save the one deadly offence of a vineyard so cleaned, and purified, and thwarted in all its vegetative tendencies, as to offer, from one end to the other of it, an unvaried expanse of earthliness.

We, therefore, do wrong in laying such a weight of discouragement on the labourers who produce, and throwing the mantle of our protection and kindness only over the labourers who prune. And what, it may be asked, are the ingredients of mightiest effect, in the character and talent of a productive labourer? They are not his scholarship, and not his critical sagacity of discernment into the obscurities of Scripture, and not his searching and satirical insight among the mysteries of the human constitution. With these he may be helped to estimate the Christianity that has been formed, and to lop off its unseemly excrescencies; but with these alone we never shall positively rear, on the foundation of nature, the edifice itself. This requires another set of qualifications which may or may not exist along with that artificial learning to which, we trust, an adequate homage has been already rendered by us, and qualifications which, whether they are found among endowed or unendowed men, ought to be enlisted on the side of Christianity. They may exist apart from science, and they may most usefully and productively be exerted apart from science. The possessors of them are abundantly to be found in the private or humble walks of society, and may be the powerful instruments of propagating their own moral and spiritual likeness among their respective vicinities. We are aware of the jealousy and disdain in which they are regarded by many a churchman-that, held to be empirics, who invade the province of the regular faculty, there is, it is thought, the same mischief done by them, in theology, which is done by quacks in medicine-that the diseases of the soul are liable to the same sort of injurious mismanagement, in the hands of the one, as the diseases of the body are, in the hands of the other; and this is very much the feeling of the great majority of our ecclesiastics, whether they look to the efforts of unlettered methodism, in England, or to the Sabbath teaching, and the lay itinerancies, and the gratuitous zeal of the unofficial and unordained of our own country.

Now, this parallel between physic and theology does not hold; nor is the power of working a given effect on the corporeal system arrived at by the same steps, with the power of working a given effect on the moral or spiritual system To be a healing operator upon the body, one must be acquainted with the manifold variety of effects which the agents and applications innumerable of matter, have upon

the maladies equally innumerable, to which the body is exposed. To be a healing operator upon the soul, there is one great application revealed to us in Scripture, which, in every instance where it does take effect, acts as an unfailing specific for all its moral disorders. In the former profession, every addition of knowledge is an addition of power; and the best guarantees for an effectual exercise of the art medical, are the science, and study, and experience, of a finished education. In the latter profession, these are useful too, for estimating the effect that has been made upon the character, but not indispensable for working that effect. That mighty truth, the belief of which is the power of God, and the wisdom of God, unto salvation, may be deposited, by one man, in the heart of another, without the aid of any scholastic art, or scholastic preparation. It is too simple to be illustrated by human talent, and the mode of its conveyance from one bosom to another depends on certain influences which are as much beyond the reach of a philosopher as of a peasant, and as much within the reach of a peasant as of a philosopher. Grant that the one has just as much of personal Christianity, and as much of devotedness, in the cause of human souls, and as much of the spirit of believing intercession with God, in behalf of those among whom he is labouringand then he is in possession of just as powerful instruments as the other for bringing them under the dominion of the truth, as it is in Jesus. So that it is not with bodily, as it is with spiritual inoculation. To work the one aright, there must be the contact of a right matter with the material subject to which it is applied; and one must study the properties of that which is without them, ere they are qualified to make the application. To work the other aright, there must be the contact of a right mind with the moral subject to which it is applied; and the possessor of such a mind has simply to put its desires and its tendencies into movement, that the wished for effect may follow; has to act on the impulse of its affections for others; and to pour forth its Christian regards for their welfare; and to gain them over by the exhibition of its worth, and kindness, and piety; and to hold out that word of life, in which there is nothing dark, but to those who love darkness; and to vent itself in prayer for the saving illumination of those whom it never ceases, so long as hope and prudence warrant the exertion, to ply, with its most unwearied activities. To work a moral effect, such as love, on the heart of another, one cannot fail to perceive that mere science, even though it should be the science of our own nature, were utterly unavailing; and that the man who bears this affection in his own heart, would do more to call out a return of it, from the heart of his neighbour, than he who, without love himself, has, at the same time, a most intelligent discernment into the law of its operation. And it is the same with a Christian effect. He who can best work it on another's mind, is a Christian himself. It is the sympathy of his kindred feelings-it is the observation of his actual faith, and of its bright and beautiful influences upon his own character-it is the winning representation of a doctrine that may be read a thousand times over, without effect, in the written epistles of the New Testament, but which is armed with a new power to engage and

soften the heart of an inquirer, when he sees it exemplified in the person of that believer who is a living epistle of Christ Jesus-it is the melting tenderness by which he presses home the overtures of the Gospel on his fellow-sinners, and, above all, the efficacy of his prayers for grace to turn, and grace to enlighten them; these are what may accomplish a man who is unlettered in all but his Bible, to be a far more efficient Christianizer than the most profound or elaborate theologian; these are what essentially constituted that leaven by which, either with or without philosophy, a fomenting process for the growth and the diffusion of Christianity is made to spread far and wide among our population.

This is the reason why, though ecclesiastics should be accomplished in the whole lore and scholarship of their profession, they should not discourage the effort and activity of lay operatives in the cause. They may inspect their work, but they should not put a stop to it. When they discover a union of intelligence and piety in an individual, even of humble life, they should patronize his attempts to spread around him the moral and spiritual resemblance of himself; they else may freeze into utter dormancy the best capabilities that are within their reach of Christian usefulness: and thus it is possible for a clergyman, by the weight of his authority, to lay an interdict on a whole host of Christian agency, whom he should have summoned into action, and of whom it is possible that each may be far beneath him in literature of Christianity, and yet each far before him in the instrumental power of making Christians.

(To be continued.)

Entelligence.

ENGLAND.-ANNIVERSARIES IN LONDON.

By our London publication for July, we have received interesting accounts of the meetings held in that metropolis, in the month of May last. The success which has marked their operations, during the past year, is highly cheering to the Christian and philanthropist. We shall be able to present but a very summary view of the doings of "the Missionary Week."

CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY.

ON Monday evening, April 29, the Annual Sermon for the benefit of this Institution was preached, by the Rev. Marmaduke Thompson, M. A. Chaplain of the Hon. E. I. Company on the Madras Establishment; and the following day, at Noon, was held, at Freemasons' Hall, the Twenty-second Anniversary of the Institution, the Right Hon. Lord Gambier in the Chair. His Lordship opened the Meeting by remarking that every year afforded additional cause for gratitude and gratulation. The cause of Missions was an increasing cause, and gained daily accession of strength. It was a matter for congratulation that the efforts of the Church Missionary Society were considerably aided by the Missionaries belonging to other similar institutions; and