62

PRELACY AND MONARCHY.

there, for their mutual advantage, on the principles I have mentioned?

1. As a fact, doctor, I am happy to aver that the dream of such a consummation, in the United States, is utterly forlorn and impracticable. The common sense of our citizens of all parties, both political and religious, and their experience too, render it impossible. Even churchmen, that are "fond of power," form no exception; at least they always declare against establishments; and well they may, since, were one dominant in America, the majority must rule; and, whatever other denomination might be preferred, themselves must be dissenters. The Church of England is not the Church of America, and never will be! They are not popular; not german or homogeneous to our republican institutions. They are eminently aristocratic and royal in their predilections and their tendencies. No bishop, no king, said that apostate King of Scotland, when he became also the English king, James; and we may say, with Whitgift, in kindred response, No king, no bishop. Prelacy and monarchy are in good accord and natural league, as all the world knows, and so are presbytery and popular government. Kings and bishops, and their divine rights, are all factitious and traditionary creations. In our Revolutionary agony, the Presbyterians were cordially, and naturally, and quite incomparably, the friends of Washington, liberty, and independence. They acted, prayed, and stood, with distinguished unanimity and cordial decision, for the vernacular cause—as, indeed, their principles impelled them. But many a statesman among us is so little of a philosopher, or so bad a historian, as not to see the connection between their principles and their actions; and some understand neither the one nor the other.

Your own learned and heroic, as well as honorable and eminent WITHERSPOON, of happy memory-yours by nativity, was one of our exemplary patriarchs-ours by adoption. He was one of the renowned and now time-honored

THE ENGLISH CHURCH.

63

patriots, who shall never cease to figure with praise in history as the signers of our immortal DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE; a distinguished and useful member of Congress; a most influential writer; and every way a leader, whose example was revered and followed by all the true-hearted lovers of liberty in the country.

2. Well, personally, could you see much objection to my views on the subject of establishments? Cæsar feeds us; we benefit him; we earn more than he pays us; we could do without him quite as well, on the whole, or better, possibly, than he without us; and we govern ourselves-denying him all headship and government in the Church.

1. Your theory strikes me as exceptionable and perilous, and the practice as worse than the theory. If Cæsar feeds, he will rule you, indirectly, if not directly, as surely as that the rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender, Prov. 22: 7. You become his abjects, as well as his subjects. Look South: the British Cæsar is their ecclesiastical HEAD, male or female-their governor and master. The government of the Church of England is completely secularized. It is identified quite with the British Parliament, the British ministry, and the British monarchy. Their spiritual convocation exists functionless, and only in abeyance of law. Their autonomy is gone; and as for their catholicity, they would not, at this moment, in their ironbound organization, brook even Dr. Chalmers, or Merle d'Aubigné, or any other Presbyterian, nor even the Apostle Paul, I opine, in one of their pulpits. And what becomes of their apostolicity is it genuine? entire ? scriptural? real? No! When Henry the Eighth deposed the pope, and abominably usurped his place in England, as HEAD of the Church there himself, he committed an anomalous and monstrous scandal, which lasts there to this day, incorrigible; and we must always respect the example, and sympathize with the scruple, * With Romanists, heretics, infidels, and Quakers in it-if not Jews!

64

TEMPERANCE-MISSIONS.

of the learned and honest friend of Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, to whom that anomaly was so astounding and so impious, that, papist as he was by education, and patriot on principle, and unfeignedly brave, rather than acknowledge Henry, his sovereign, a layman, a persecutor, a pedant, and a royal brute-though God overruled, as well as used, his agency for his own most beneficent purposes, as Head of the Church, he nobly yielded his own head, by order of the despotic and persecuting murderer, on Tower Hill. And see your own General Assembly of Scotland, opened first by the Moderator, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then by the Royal Commissioner, seated over and behind him, throned there in state, with two liveried pages, opening the Assembly with Cæsar's sublime sanction, and in the name of "the monarch of these realms!" This, my dear doctor, or the like of it, would never do in America; and I hope to see the time when, in Europe, or Great Britain, it will owe its advocacy no more to the example and the eloquence of Chalmers! America disclaims it.

2. Well, you are a gallant people, and in all good things we are willing you should instruct the world. In two respects, you are, at present, exciting great attention; to say nothing of the stability and the solidity evinced of your fabric of government, as against the fears and the prognosis of all our European croakers. You deserve applause for your recent achievements in the field of foreign missions, and your more recent reformation in respect to temperance. There is great moral grandeur in all this.

1. I am happy that you seem to appreciate us there, especially in the matter of temperance. In Scotland, I think, with all your excellences and your eminences, which we all acknowledge and admire, you have drinking habits, and drinking faults, that call loudly for reform-very loudly, my dear sir!

2. Too true! but it is still a question with the Scots wheth

ABSTINENCE-THE PRINCIPLE.

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er they will, or can, or should, follow you in your ultraism of the principle of total abstinence.

1. And how many more thousands of your sons—and shall I say, your daughters, are to be insidiously murdered by alcohol, in body and in soul, for time and for eternity, murdered by fashionable compliance, on the principle of " prudent use;" the only initiating principle on which drunkards are manufactured, or can ordinarily be made; before you Scots, in your Baconian philosophy and your Presbyterian wisdom, can be persuaded to adopt, to your own infinite advantage, the only principle in the world that makes your safety certain, that renders your ruin impossible? Yes, dear sir, the only principle.

2. It is unquestionably a grand and a unique reformation that has begun among you, and certainly the world needs it. Great Britain needs it, and especially North Britain. We must also own that America is here our leader and our teacher; young as she is, she has the honor to be the mother country of the Temperance Reformation. And still, we fear, the Scots can hardly brook the principle of total abstinence.

1. Perhaps not-as long as the learned clergy, with Chalmers at their head, neither brook it themselves, nor recommend it to others, nor join the reformation in its initial crisis. It seems to me a little like Erasmus approving of Luther; but never joining the Reformation, and at last dying a papist! The curse of Meroz was for a similar delinquency, a negative offense; they came not. Drunkenness at home is, at least relatively, a greater evil than slavery abroad. Judges 6 23. Matt. 73-5. It is slavery and vile subjection to the

devil.

Yes, the worst kind of SLAVERY!

2. They object, however, to your sweeping principle of total abstinence, as extravagant, unnecessary, and, some think, adverse to the wisdom of the Scriptures. I do not give this, however, as my opinion; and yet I have not adopted the principle. Let the experiment be fully tried, by its genuine and its permanent fruits.

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THE CAUSE VINDICATED.

1. In the principle I see no fanaticism, properly no extra vagance. As a beverage, when in health, we drink nothing that can intoxicate; nothing for which we have no need; nothing that may injure, but can not benefit us; nothing for the sake of the mere bibacious and guzzling pleasure; nothing for Bacchanalian honor, or the godless laws of the fashionable symposium; nothing to disturb the sobrieties of nature, or precipitate the motions of life's pendulum within our bosoms, or induce the morbid necessities of the initiated drinker. And is it not lawful, innocent, salubrious, as well as safe, to abstain? On the other hand, if I am weak, or sick, and actually need it, I can use it, outwardly or inwardly, as a medicament; just as I would use any other element of pharmacy, any other poison, as arsenic, bella donna, or prussic acid, or even execrable tobacco, as a means of cure. And here, if drunkenness is a most insidious and destructive evil; if souls and bodies, and families, and churches and nations, the young and the old, ladies and gentlemen, are more deceived and destroyed by it, incomparably more, than by the Asiatic cholera, that scares the world so terribly, and yet that can not harm the soul at all; and if the remedy of our principle is both therapeutic and prophylactic, as well as cheap, easy, universal, infallible, and without all pretense, or fallacy, or deceit; and if those who have tried it, delight in it, recommend it, and abhor the deleterious alternative that foregoes the principle, I leave it to such a judge as Dr. Chalmers, whether you ought not to become the eldest-daughter country, if we are the mother country, in so great, and so excellent, and so necessary a reformation.

2. I admire the stand you take, and am not quite sure that ours is the right, in our refusal to stand with you.

1. Who ought to take a stand, if not the ministers of God? and in a cause of such purely moral, spiritual, and practical, as well as personal nature? We should find and follow good examples; or, like the blessed Paul, set, and let others find them in us. Phil. 3 17-19.