manifested in the fortunes and prospects of the religion of Jesus. Before Christ, God communicated truth by little and little, as men were able to bear; since the Redeemer's advent, he has propagated by little and little the truth then made complete and perfect. Christianity, as it came from the Divine mind, and was incarnate in its Author, was too pure and heavenly to be at once embraced and diffused in its simplicity and fulness. In the apprehension and lives of its disciples, it has been subject to the same gradual process of development and growth, which up to the date of its birth we may trace to the history of revealed religion. We might take, for the exponent of the past and a key to the future fortunes of the Christian church, Christ's own words, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." We can trace a series of successive seed-times and harvest-seasons, with intervening periods of apparent desolation and death, while the seed is germinating and fructifying.

Christ himself was the first seed of his gospel; his death the seed-time. His religion was embodied in him. It consisted of those maxims of holy conduct, that sublime faith, that perfect love, which were exemplified in his character. He thus held in his own hands the seed of the word; and there human wisdom would probably have left it. But what were the results, while he retained it? Few and small. Twelve apostles and seventy other disciples were nearly all the converts made by his personal efforts; (for the five hundred brethren once mentioned were probably converted to his faith after his resurrection.) He "fell into the ground and died," and, in thus doing, he sowed the seed of the kingdom. When he was lost to sight, his sayings and doings became the subject of rehearsal and history. His death sealed up the volume of his gospel, put a finished testimony in the mouths of his apostles, and enabled them to clothe his religion in form more

complete and definite. And then, instead of coming to him as the sole fountain head of his doctrine, men could have access to scores of faithful witnesses, who stood in Christ's stead, but who could not have thus stood, had he still lived. He thus, in dying, multiplied himself by sending abroad to every city and land men, who should fully represent in preaching, and in living too, so far as human infirmity would permit, his own spotless character, and who should thus be his instruments

in renewing human souls after his own image. The first fruits of the harvest thus prepared for were reaped on the day of Pentecost, when, by the preaching of the cross, more souls were regenerated in one day, than had been during the whole of Christ's ministry. And from that time the gospel had free course, and was glorified, numbering daily among its proselytes multitudes of such as should be saved.

But with this rich harvest of pure and pious souls commenced a second seed-time. The seed of the gospel was now sown broad cast, and by sowers of every class and kind; "some," as St. Paul says, "preaching Christ of contention and strife, others of good will." "Yet, in every way Christ was preached;" into every form of words some little of his spirit was infused; in every professedly Christian discourse some knowledge of him was conveyed. But the truth embodied and diffused by the propagators of the faith was soon too vague and too much alloyed with error, to serve the purpose of individual regeneration. We must regard our religion therefore as then sown, not in Christian principles, but in Christian institutions. The latter were diligently founded; the former were almost universally forgotten. The pure seed of spiritual doctrine fell into the rough ground of formalism and sensualism, and died. To human appearance it was utterly extinct, Christians being hardly more spiritual in their habits of mind and life than the surrounding heathen. Yet, because it died, it brought forth much fruit. Pure Christianity, as it distilled from the Savior's lips and breathed in his life, could not have been generally diffused in that unrefined and corrupt age; but Christian institutions could be. It was practicable and easy to spread far and wide the outward forms and symbols of the new faith; and by means of these was the name of Christ transmitted, and the bounds of his empire enlarged. It would have been impossible to have made pure Christianity the religion of the Roman empire, or to have communicated it to the ferocious hordes that overran the empire, or to have imbued with it the sensual and profligate nations of Asia. But Christian institutions, decked as they were with the spoils of paganism, were universally popular, inviting and fascinating; and they soon became the property of every nation in Europe and its confines. These institutions were indeed embraced as inane and dead forms; yet proved themselves far otherwise. The spirit of their founder overshadowed

them; his accents of love breathed through them; they wrought gradually, imperceptibly, yet surely, upon the genius of the people who embraced them, softening their manners, refining their feelings, purging their civil and international codes from much that was oppressive and sanguinary, elevating the social rank of woman, and little by little developing the germs of pure and sound morality and piety. The age, while this process was going on, is commonly termed dark; but it is dark only to a superficial reader of its history; to one, who looks beneath the surface, it is the bright and hopeful interval between a propitious seed-time and a joyful harvest. The fields were all the while ripening. There was throughout Christendom a growing spirituality, — a gradual transition of Christianity from a mere outward form to a life-giving principle. Of this harvest, Wiclif, Huss, Jerome, and the rest of the van-guard of the Reformation may be regarded as the first fruits; Luther and his compeers as its ripened sheaves; the faithful of later times as its rich gleanings.

But the harvest of the Reformation was one of faith and truth, not of liberty and love. Its chief result was the fixing of a personal, vital, operative faith as the great essential of the Christian character. It left the throne of bigotry unshaken. It undermined the seat of one pope; but in synods and presbyteries it erected hundreds of hydra-headed popes, each no less arrogant, potent, and intolerant than he, whom they all anathematized.

With this harvest of faith, however, commenced the seedtime of religious liberty. There were some few, like Melancthon, who, at the very outset of the Reformation, cherished and diffused just views of man's fallibility and his accountableness to God alone. And the number of the friends of freedom, though till recently small, has been continually increasing. They have diligently sowed the seed of independence and toleration; and some of them have been indiscreet and over-zealous sowers, letting their liberty degenerate into licentiousness. But the seed has, through their industry, fallen into the bosom of every church in Christendom, not excepting even the venerable mother church of Rome, which numbers among the assertors of the right of free inquiry and private judgment, not only many individuals of eminence and worth, but the whole body ecclesiastical of France. The seed has fallen into the ground and died; and this is the reason why

the present age seems dark, and portents of ill omen cloud the firmament. The present is indeed a troubled epoch, because of the fermentation of the elements destined to cherish the germination of this precious seed, and to bring it to an abundant harvest. There is abroad in our land, and in every land, a wild self-will, an impatience of restraint, a spurning at the bonds of antiquity and prescription, which often leads to deplorable results and sad forebodings, but which may yet be hailed as a token, that the individual mind is just beginning to recognise and seize its birth-right of mental freedom. The first moment of possession is too frequently a moment of delirium; it too often drives the phrensied soul into lawlessness, skepticism, or infidelity; the gift must needs be abused, before men can learn to use it. May we not rejoice that they have it to abuse, and are thus in a sure way of attaining to its just use? May we not rejoice that the earth is violently upheaving, since it teems with so glorious a harvest? This, we are well convinced, is the case. Old ecclesiastical foundations are breaking up. Antiquated opinions are set aside. The sway of man over faith and conscience is subverted. Existing religious institutions, which have been used as prisons for the free-born mind, have their walls thrown down by the very warcry of liberty. But we trust that old things are passing away, only to prepare for the descent of the "new Jerusalem from God out of heaven." The power of a titular priesthood is undermined; but it is to hasten the day, when every man shall be a king and a priest unto God. The thrones are cast down; but it is only that "the Ancient of days may sit, and the kingdom, and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom may be given into his hands." Then will the harvest of liberty be fully reaped.

But the work will not then be done. Men will not at first move in their several orbits without clashing. They will not understand the divine chemistry, whereby liberty and love are to be combined. Though no one will dare to interfere with his neighbor's faith, or to fulminate wrathful anathemas against dissenters, the unity of the spirit will not be complete, nor the bond of peace perfect. But love will then have its seed-time, and its benign and self-sacrificing sowers. Its seed will fall into the ground, and die. It may lie for ages, extinct except to faith's keen vision, beneath the cold, rough soil of an unsympathetic church. But it will germinate under the sun of

God's love and the still small rain of his spirit. It will work its way little by little into the institutions, lives, and hearts of Christians, until at length a golden harvest waves over a regenerated world. And that will be the last great harvest of nations, when the remnant both of Jews and Gentiles shall be gathered into the fold; for it is the lack of love alone that retards the conversion of the world. When this principle pervades and triumphs, nations will be born in a day. Nay, that "mighty angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people," is no other than the spirit of love.

Thus in the whole history of the church, we have four successive seed-times and corresponding harvest-seasons. First, the Savior sowed his own body in the grave, and the harvest was a visible and rapidly increasing church. Then the seeds of spiritual faith were sown all the world over, in the outward forms and institutions of Christianity; the harvest ripened not till the Reformation. Then the seed of religious liberty was sown; and "the fields are white already to harvest." Lastly, in the general seed-time of love, our near posterity will be the weeping sowers; their descendants of little faith will mourn over the teeming soil as desolate and barren; distant generations will shout the glad harvest-home.

A. P. P.

NOTICES AND INTELLIGENCE.

Historical Causes and Effects from the Fall of the Roman Empire, 476, to the Reformation, 1517. By WILLIAM SULLIVAN, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, &c. Boston James B. Dow. 1838. 12mo. pp. 615. - We have seen several abstracts of history, and yet do not remember to have met with one, embracing a period of equal length, and taking in the whole world, so satisfactory and so interesting as this. The title of the volume might lead one to suppose, that it contained a philosophical discussion of history, rather than a condensation of historical facts; but it is what we have termed it, an abstract of the world's history for the space of a thousand years, illuminated by such remarks, naturally interspersed, and