who hath stretched the line upon it?" and the multitude again answers, "Glory be to God who has first given such power to men, in our own days."

The great and all-emboldening confidence of our time is, that the multitude - historically and naturally incapable of estimating human nature as it is, or suspecting their own latent powers, and therefore absolutely dependent on the delivering mercy and energy of the providentially awakened and inspired portion of the race-has now got beyond this syncope and self-oblivion, beyond its dependence on any powers but God's direct inspirations through that same human nature, aided by all recorded revelations, which, to this time, he has kept in pupilage to indirect human instrumentalities. The multitude now elects its own teachers, judges of its own wants, chooses its own creed, rejects and accepts, on its own judgment, the propositions of the learned, the philosophical, and the exalted. Of course, it makes great mistakes, does very rash and injurious things, and gives skepticism and aristocracy abundant superficial arguments for their despairing creed. But what are all the mistakes it makes, compared with the astounding fact of an attempted self-government, an attempted self-education, an attempted self-reliance, on the part of the people? When, in 1858, we heard that a single sign had flashed across the Atlantic, what cared we for the stuttering and stammering of the instruments? The great thing was done; the miracle was wrought: and, had the cable parted the next moment instead of a month later, the bemispheres would not have moved an inch from the close moorings effected by that single fact. And so no wretched local rulers, no inefficient police, no insecurity of life and limb, no mistaken outbreaks of self-protection, no exceptional blots and blotches in the fabric of our prosperous, safe, and successful life of freedom, shall introduce one ray of despondency or doubt into the patriotic conviction, that-measured by positive, not by negative standards; measured by the sum of intellectual, moral, and physical activity; by the amount of happiness, intelligence, and virtue; by openness to improvement, by tendencies to truth, by humane sympathies, by religious aspi

rations—the multitudes were never, in human history, so little an object of compassion, so much an object of hope, confidence, and joy, as here and now.

If our hearts swell with pride and gratitude at the contemplation of this truth, let us not conceal, let us not fail to blazon the fact, that it is God's power manifested in man that has brought about this result; let us not forget how entirely it is the Divine wisdom that has planned the great drama of human history, and which is now permitting us to see the beauty and benevolence of the plot, and the bliss of the consummation. Let us not forget that, because it is God who is working in us to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is all the more our bounden and grateful duty to work with him, to work indeed with a new kind of fear and trembling because of the greatness of the inspiration and the enormous importance of the task; to work, in short, as the high-hearted projector, the original supporters, the scientific operators, the officers and sailors, of the Atlantic Telegraph Company worked, when, after repeated failures and terrible difficulties, they at last laid in silence and amid prayers, but with herculean toil and almost deadly anxieties, God's bond between the nations, God's bow under the sea; not dissolving and inconstant like the first which was over it, but a steadfast sign from heaven to our generation, that no deluge of ignorance, barbarism, and despair shall ever again cover the hopes, the interests, and the destiny of a United Globe and an inseparable Human Family.

ART. VII. · ALLEGED NARROWNESS OF CHRISTIAN

FAITH.

It is important to understand, and frankly meet, a modern frame of mind which makes the gospel of Christ, and all distinct profession of it, distasteful to some enlightened and religiously inclined persons. This frame of mind utters

itself in a complaint of narrowness against the whole idea of revelation, miracles, personal authority, and binding example,—against rites and forms of any kind, however simply administered or interpreted. Christianity, it is now asserted, has too strait a gate and too narrow a way for the breadth of modern intelligence and the width of recent spiritual and scientific discoveries.

Is

In short, it is complained of Christianity that it is not as broad as Natural Religion, in that it mingles historical facts, personal experiences, local geography, external authority, miraculous evidences, and outward forms with those general principles, absolute ideas, and universal experiences which natural theology gives us in her own great abstract and sublime way, and so narrows and particularizes religion. Of what importance is it, it is asked in this spirit of superior breadth, where truth comes from, if it only be truth; or goodness, if it is only real goodness? Why are virtue, justice, charity, piety, any better for being Christian than for being Buddhish or Mahometan or Judaic or wholly Natural? the golden rule any more binding, or any more beautiful, for being taught by Christ than if it had been (as indeed it is claimed that it was) taught by Confucius and Menu? And what advantage is there, the objector continues, in going to God by the way of Christ, if we can, more conveniently to ourselves, get to Him by any other way? People that never heard of Christ must find God by some other road, if they find him at all; and surely it is very narrow to affirm, or even to think, that none have attained the knowledge of God without the knowledge of a Saviour who came from heaven only eighteen hundred and sixty-six years ago, and the world is now at least six thousand years old. Besides, some of the Jews did know God without Christ; and we ourselves improve even our Christian faith by reading David's psalms and Isaiah's holy prophecies. If the knowledge of God, and the love, adoration, and obedience which the study of his character nourishes in man, be the sole object of religious quest, then certainly the help of Jesus Christ may gratefully be accepted in making this search; and the

most unqualified naturalist in religion would not deny the value and importance of Christ's life and teachings as a means of knowing God. But what they would complain of is that any insistence should be put upon the use of this special means as in any way indispensable, imperative, or authoritative. They would have Christianity put into the market with other religions, and with other means of religious growth and culture. If it is a better article, it will command a better sale. If it is more serviceable, people will find it out and use it. But, if anybody prefers Judaism to it, or Mahometanism or Buddhism or Platonism or pure theism, why should Christians take offence or make any stir about it? All things do not suit all people. Some most readily find religious and worshipful thoughts, they tell us, in looking at the works of nature. The stars, the forest, the ocean, speak for them a language more divine than any book. Others discover in theories of intuitive morals, or in Mr. Emerson's essays or Mr. Carlyle's hero-worship, a finer moral and religious inspiration than the New Testament affords. Still another set find, in the study of color and form, their completest revelations of a divine beauty, and choose to let their worship flow on the Sunday from the point of a pencil or a paint-brush, rather than from a hymn-book or in acts of common prayer. Still another variety find the microscope and the scalpel more religious than the font and the communion table. They see God in the infinitely small, and discover the hidings of his power by untwisting the fibres of the plant or the tissues of the human body. Another class declare that they find a ramble in the fields, a play with their children, and a pleasant time with their comrades quite as religious as a seat in a Christian church, or the prayers and praises of a demure and unsmiling congregation. Beyond all these, a growing class of minds and hearts, claiming still more breadth and intelligence, are now beginning to doubt whether religion in any form is not a narrowing thing, whether what is called natural religion is not merely a little less narrow and superstitious than what is called revealed religion. Some not immoral people of our day, and not ignorant and uneducated persons

either, think that the Christian Church and so-called religious folk have squandered the attention that should have been given to improving the world and their own condition in it, upon the cultivation of an artificial relationship to an imaginary Providence called the Christian God, or, what is almost as bad, the God of the theists. Their notion is that if there be any such person, we shall find it out quite time enough when we come naturally to it; that if there be any future or immortal state we shall find that out too when we arrive at it: but that here and now there is pressing business to be done, and urgent happiness to be enjoyed, happiness and business wholly peculiar to this time and place, and that we misdirect our energies when we allow any thing else, no matter how sacred its name and pretensions, to divert our thoughts and efforts from this present world and its natural immediate work.

But this is not the most illuminated class yet. There is in Germany and France still another set of philosophers, — not without disciples in this country, who go much further than this, and insist, not only that religious speculations and interests, whether called natural or revealed, narrow the mind and heart and impoverish the life, but that moral questions have a similar narrowing tendency; that the world is ridden to death by an artificial conscience; and that all this solicitude about right and wrong is a waste of precious energy and time and feelings. Wrong, they insist, has just as good rights as any thing else. What we call moral evil is quite as necessary, and in accordance with our nature, as moral good. The bad is the counterpart of the good, and as necessary to it as the night to the day. Criminals are such by a necessity of their constitutions; and crime is merely a conventional offence against a conventional code which the majority of social beings have set up for their own protection. The selfcomplacency, or feeling of moral superiority, which the righteous and pious indulge in the presence of the vicious and impious, is as unreasonable as a dove's complacency in her freedom from the serpent's sting, or a lamb's in his exemption from wearing the tiger's claws and teeth.