can have. Our ideas of church independency preclude its possibility. A kind of traditional confession we undoubtedly have; but, as with the English constitution, individuals differ in their understanding of it. Single churches have published their confessions; associations of churches have done the same. It was done by seven Baptist churches in London, in 1643; by an association of delegates from one hundred Baptist churches, in 1689; and afterwards by the Philadelphia Baptist Association in this country. But neither of these is now entitled, if, indeed, it ever was, to be called the symbol of the Baptist denomination. No complete collection of its articles could now be made that would secure unanimous assent. A compilation that could command a majority in one half of our country would not be received in the other. And yet no denomination in this country is more united in its faith.* Our union, moreover, has been attributed directly to the absence of a denominational standard. Not a very satisfactory explanation, surely. The truth, rather, is, that with all our church independency, our doctrinal purity has been preserved by a double influence; partly by our inflexible adherence to the principles of "baptism and church membership only on profession of personal faith in Christ," and partly by an incidental protection from the symbols of our neighbors, the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists, who, taking organic form at about the same time with ourselves, have more steadily than we kept their confessions prominently in sight, as authoritative standards. Though we have rejected infant baptism, infant church membership, and presbytery, we yet in other respects have tacitly and substantially adopted the Westminster confession.

In New-England, the Cambridge Platform, which was only a slight modification of the Westminster Confession, has, through the Congregationalists, affected materially the faith of the Baptists. As the New-England Congregationalists have stepped off their Platform, in various squads, under the guid

* "How do we (the Presbyterian church) get along with our extended confession? We could not hold together a week if we made the adoption of all its propositions a condition of ministerial communion." Dr. Hodge, in the Princeton Review. July, 1858.

ance of Hopkins, and Emmons, and the younger Edwards, so Baptists have furnished their quota of adherents to the several parties. In New-England, a large proportion of our churches. and pastors have gradually adopted the New-England theology, while in the Middle and Southern States, the great majority have harmonized, in all principal points, with the Old School Presbyterians, or with the Westminster Confession. Having no one authoritative standard of our own, we have too often listened to the magisterial tones of those who have.

Our want of an authorative standard is often seen in our councils for ordination. We apply our traditional tests, and too often questions are propounded by individuals, quite as much for the purpose of finding out the opinions of the council, as of the candidate. We have seen candidates utterly bewildered by a curiosity that cared but very little for their individual opinions. A concise, complete, orthodox symbol, would be both a guide and a shield to the candidate, as well as a test in the hands of the council. We advocate the introduction of no binding, compulsory instrument; the thought of one would be idle and absurd. We would exercise in the use of the best that could be drawn up, a license larger, even, than Luther gave, when, in the preface of his smaller catechism, he enjoined on the clergy a rigid adherence to its forms in popular ministrations, but bids them use their liberty when speaking among the doctors. (Alia autem ratio est, si in turba doctorum hominum evangelium doceas.) We would advocate no such broad distinction as Presbyterians make, between the doctrinal qual ifications of candidates for the ministry, and those of candidates for church membership. In requisites for the church, we regard them as dangerously lax; in requisites for the ministry, as injuriously rigid. Their only qualification for communion is sincerity of discipleship-a qualification that could be successfully pleaded by every heresiarch in Christendom. And requisites for the ministry which shut out of the pulpit, but not from the church-which distinguish between a communion of the clergy, and a communion of the laity, we hold to be unscriptural, and injurious. That was a spectacle for men to wonder at, and long remember, when the Old School assembly

of the Presbyterian Church, whose clergy shrink not from breaking bread to Pelagian and Papist, Episcopalian and Puritan, Socinian, Arian, Universalist, Spiritualist, so they be, "in the judgment of charity, the sincere disciples of Christ,"* deliberately declined an invitation to communion, from their brethren of the New School assembly, who hold and teach the same confession and catechism with themselves.† As Baptists, we distinguish in degree, between what is requisite in the candidate for baptism, and what in the candidate for ordination ;‡ but we do not regard as fit for the first, the man who is heretically disqualified for the second. When we eject from the To hold in the bosom of

pulpit, we exclude from the church. the church a heretic who is too dangerous to be allowed to speak his sentiments in public, is inconsistent and dangerous. It only conceals the poison, it does not eradicate it.

Never was there an age when sharply defined doctrines in the pulpit were more needed than now. They never were more needed, because they were never more rarely heard. We may lull ourselves into quiet, and doctrinal laxity, under the impression that the revivals now current, those indubitable phenomena and signs of a great religious revolution, are the legitimate fruits of latitudinarianism; but it will require no lengthened period to show us, that without careful indoctrination of Christian men and women, without creeds sharply defined, and rigidly interpreted, our Christian churches will become an easy prey to the clear-headed dogmatists of the physical and metaphysical schools of scepticism.

* See declaration of the General Assembly, in 1839, the year following the great division.

† This actually took place, in Philadelphia, when the Old and New School Assemblies happened to meet there at the same time.

A distinction between norma credendorum, and norma docendorum, is wellfounded, and ancient, but it is a distinction in degree, not in kind. The deliverances of the General Assembly on things allowable in their members, are instructive; they "must be subject to the discipline of the church," "not Universalists," "not Sabbath mail-stage proprietors," nor "postmasters that officiate on Sunday." Infant baptism may be omitted, or intoxicating drinks used, as the session "shall decide, in view of all the attendant circumstances." See Assembly's Digest; Baird's Collection, pp. 32-33.

ARTICLE II.-PLATO.

He who stands on the Acropolis of Athens, sees, at the distance of nearly a mile and a half to the northwest, an extensive grove of olives stretching across the plain. Near the border of this grove rises a small hill, from whose summit gleams the white shaft of a marble monument. This hill is the site of the ancient Colonus, the birth place of the poet Sophocles. The marble structure which surmounts it is the tomb of Karl Ottfried Mueller, who, a few years ago, was sun-struck while making excavations at Delphi, and lies fittingly buried amidst the scenes to whose illustration he brought the genius, taste, and erudition of the accomplished scholar. Scarcely more than a hundred yards distant from this hill is a spot which, from as early as the fifth century. before Christ, through all the fluctuations of succeeding time, has borne the name of Academia or Academy. It was anciently enclosed by a wall, laid out in shaded walks and gardens, planted with olive and plane trees, and adorned with altars, temples, and statues. All these have been swept away. Garden and walk have disappeared; temple and statue have. crumbled or been removed; and some scattered marble fragments are the only relics of its architectural and sculptured beauties. But the limpid Cephisus still pours through it its half-moaning waters; the olive groves still shed over it their luxuriant and fadeless green; and the nightingale, the Attic bird, still

"Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long,"

as sweetly as when they blended with those strains of divine philosophy which flowed from the lips of the great master of the academy. That master was Plato. We are treading the precincts of that celebrated school which, under successive transformations, continued until terminated by Justinian in

the sixth century of our era, but whose doctrines still hold, as they held anciently, divided empire in the realm of philosophy. Of its illustrious founder we propose to sketch, in brief outline, the life, literary character, and philosophical opinions; after which we shall endeavor to follow those opinions as they have entered into the philosophical and theological thinking of the world.

Plato was born in Athens (according to some in Ægina), in May (7 Thargelion), 430 years B. C., just at the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war; and died at the advanced age of eighty-two, in 348, ten years after Philip had ascended the throne of Macedon, and just, therefore, when the conscious close grapple was commencing between the rising genius of Macedon, and the waning, but still splendid fortunes of the Athenian Republic. His birth coincides with the moment when the Athenian Empire had reached its climax, and Athens was in the full flush of her political supremacy. His ripened youth witnessed the temporary complete prostration of Athens at the feet of her great rival, Sparta. His manhood saw the vigorous and successful struggles by which Athens retrieved her disastrous fortunes, and partially reasserted her former dominion; and his old age beheld-whether with prophetic foreboding we know not the gathering of those elements of danger on Greece's northern frontier, which, though held in check for a time by the eloquence and statesmanship of Demosthenes, burst forth at length in a resistless storm of conquest and subjugation, on the plains of Chæronea.

But, though Plato had "fallen on evil days" with respect to the political greatness of Athens, it was otherwise with her intellectual. Her military supremacy was convulsive and short lived; but she held her intellectual state with the calm majesty of a legitimate title and conscious power. Her material greatness culminated with the age of Pericles; but her intellectual glory went on deepening and broadening through succeeding generations, and threw its most brilliant lustre. over the twilight of her political decline. In the days of Plato Athens still stood fresh and beautiful as when she emerged from the hands of Phidias and his fellow artists; her stage