in the form of a servant by the voluntary humiliation of his sufferings and death, shown forth as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world, and by the might of that divine love set forth by such numiliation, touching the heart of man as no ideal thought could touch it, and, by inspiring a faith working by love, re-create the soul and bring it into the real likeness of God. And here, too, he might have found that revelation from God of which he once uttered a conjectural hope, which could have given a religious basis of the morality which he taught, and furnished a sufficient motive through a living faith for its realization in a righteous life. And lastly, such a faith standing in the power of God would have been discovered as adequate to the calling and salvation-not as the wisdom of philosophy, of the intellectual elite of the race, the wise men after the flesh, the mighty, the noble, but of the foolish as well; and yet more, and the weak, and the base, and the despised—a saving faith for all mankind.

This discussion of the moral and religious thoughts of one of the most eminent of the writers of antiquity, yields us as one lesson an insight into the ultimate end of those classical studies which enter so largely into all our higher education. Not alone to form a basis for mental discipline and culture, by furnishing models of consummate excellence in thought and expression are those studies designed. The true and ultimate end is a moral and religious one-the knowledge gained by a deeper and maturer study of classical antiquity, of the place and function of all ancient philosophy, letters, art, life, in the providential order of the world, in preparing the way for the entrance of Christianity into human life and history. All that rich and fruitful culture was only human, and wrought out, I may say, from below; but it was to form a human basis for a richer and far more fruitful culture, when once there should descend a divine power from above, to regenerate the soul of man and pour a divine life into the bosom of a sinful world. Such a renewing, life-giving influence the wisdom of cultivated Greece-not even of Plato's philosophy, the fairest and finest bloom of all that culture-could reach even in adequate idea; it could only haply feel after it, and dimly prophesy its coming by revealing the spiritual wants of man, as severed from God and needing restoration. The prodigal race, wanderers from the Father's house, were to be brought back as penitent sinners, only by the anticipating and forerunning compassion of the Father himself. Here is the lesson to be won from our discussion, and to be wrought into all our thought and faith and life. Consider Plato's rich gifts and attainments, his power of speculative thought, his soaring imagination, his beautiful and eloquent speech; but even that intellect was blind, that tongue

was dumb, to that greatest of all human questions, "How shall man be just with God?"-be delivered from sin, and set forward on a new career of endless knowledge, holiness and happiness. On these matters. of supreme moment, that exalted intelligence might sit as a learner at the feet of the humblest Christian disciple, made wise unto salvation through the faith that is in Christ Jesus. He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And yet, let us not, as Christians, exalt ourselves overmuch above the pagan philosopher. What we have that he had not is not ours, or of us, but only God's; and ours only by the condescending grace of Christ. When I study Plato and Plato's life, and think of our advanced position in respect to spiritual and saving knowledge, I am prone to recall the apostle's words, "Who maketh thee to differ from another, and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?" Nay, let me at least point to one lesson which may be learned by us Christians from Plato's example. We have seen with what a truly religious earnestness he sought for moral and religious truth, and wrought it, so far as he could find it, into his own life and action. This truth he first learned. to love and seek from only a human teacher, whom, however, he revered as the best and wisest of all men known to the ancient pagan world. That truth he prized above all earthly good, and its pursuit he counted as the one work worth doing under the sun. And the truth which he gained and lived by himself he inculcated with the same earnestness upon others; he taught it, he preached it for forty years, by word and by deed, by living voice and written speech, against sophists who opposed it in theory, and the world who opposed it in practice, and strove to convince them, and to win them to see and receive and adopt it for themselves. Be it ours, as disciples of the divine Teacher and Saviour, to receive ourselves, and make known to others, that revealed and only saving truth of the gospel-the truth as it is in Jesus, which has been freely given us— with a religious earnestness of like quality and of a greater intensity in proportion to the immeasurably superior greatness of the gift. Let it be for us not a meagre and pale thing of tradition, of custom, of inheritance; but in us, through the Word and Spirit of Christ, a living and life-giving truth. So may it for us, and for those whom we may bless by our labors, become the power of God and the wisdom. of God unto salvation. So may they and we be entered as fellowcitizens, not into an ideal republic—the fair creation of a philosopher's imagination—but into a real kingdom, the pattern of which is in reality laid up in heaven, the City of God.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND.

JOHN L. LINCOLN.

OUR MISSION AS BAPTISTS.

N

́EHEMIAH and Ezra were charged with the restoration of the Jewish commonwealth after the second captivity. Nehemiah, acting as governor under the king of Persia, supervised the material work of repairing the wall and building the temple. Ezra, the scribe, acted as the reformer of the laws and manners of his countrymen, and supervisor of the sacred books which, in their present form in the Old Testament canon, were probably arranged by him. It was a work attended with great difficulty; but a work of the last importance, as it was the immediate preparation of the city and Temple for the advent of Him whose coming to that Temple was to make it more glorious than the first.

I. We have selected this mission of Nehemiah and Ezra as symbolic of our work, because in this country at least our history has had a twofold aspect: first, the building of the wall of religious freedom, and then the maintenance of the primitive order of the church and ordinances of the New Testament.

1. As to the first, history has made the following record: Roger Williams and his associates in Rhode Island, more than two centuries. ago, were the first advocates on this continent, and probably in modern Christendom, of that religious liberty which is the cornerstone of all liberty. They were driven out of Massachusetts for these principles. They founded the commonwealth of Rhode Island on

these principles, the right of each and all to worship God according to their own consciences, without any control in such matters by the state. It was essentially different from and far in advance of that religious toleration which was granted about the same time by the Catholic colony of Maryland. Religious liberty is the recognition of each and all on a footing of perfect equality; religious toleration (as the etymology of the word shows) is the mere sufferance on the part of the dominant party of the minority who are in a condition of implied inferiority. Bancroft, in his history of the United States, writes of Roger Williams: "He was the first man in modern Christendom to assert in its plenitude the doctrine of religious freedom."1

The statue of Williams, which now stands in the capitol, is a fitting monument of a principle which is one of the surest foundations of our American independence. For there is little doubt that religious liberty is the real basis and support of civil and political liberty. These principles, illustrated in Rhode Island and Virginia, leavened the whole continent until the independence of the United States was an accomplished fact. Such is one chapter of the history of the separation of church and state, and of equal rights, civil and religious before the law, which is now embodied in the constitution of the land.

So much for this country. We may add it is more than probable that this was the position of many of those sects which, in the middle ages, were scattered throughout Europe, a testimony in the same line as to the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and the exclusion of the magistrate from the domain of faith. This doubtless was one cause of the persecution which Baptists and those who held substantially the same views, have all along endured at the hands of their opposers. In building the wall of religious liberty, they were unconsciously building the wall of political liberty. And as inevitably as Nehemiah in his work came in conflict with Sanballat and the Arabians, these witnesses for conscience and truth, brought down upon themselves the wrath of all the despotisms, civil and ecclesiastical.

2. But this has been an indirect influence. Our main work, like that of Ezra, has been and is the re-establishment of the original order and institutions of the church

(1.) The theory and constitution of the Church. In most of the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity we are one with our brethren of the evangelical denominations. In the formula of faith on which the Evangelical Alliance is based, there is hardly an article to which our churches would not subscribe. But as to the constitution of a visible Christian church we differ not only from the Catholics, but from all 1 Vol. I, p. 375.

Protestant communions. In all of these-Catholic and Protestantthe theory of the church implies a mixed membership of believers and unbelievers. Baptism, the initiatory ordinance of the church, being administered by all in infancy irrespective of personal faith, leads necessarily to this mixed membership of the regenerate and unregenerate the church and the world. In the prayer-book of the Episcopal Church the formula for baptism reads: "Seeing now, dearly beloved, that this child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's church, let us give thanks for these benefits." It is true that the recent movement led by Bishop Cummins and others for the establishment of a Reformed Episcopal Church, repudiates this error of baptismal regeneration. But as long as they retain the practice itself, they have not even the apology of the imagination for it—they are at evident disadvantage in this controversy with the High Church party in retaining the sign, without even the shadow of the thing signified. How much better, we respecfully suggest, in a struggle like this with error, to come at once into the fulness of the liberty of Christ, to take the stand which Father Grassi, the aged and learned canon of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, at Rome, has just taken, when on the occasion of his recent baptism by the Rev. Mr. Wall, of the English Baptist Mission, he gave his reasons, in an admirable address, for renouncing all the errors of Rome, and uniting with what he terms the ancient apostolic church. In opposition, then, to every theory of mixed membership, the Scriptural plan of a visible church is a congregation of believers baptized on a personal profession of their faith. This is our theory. In maintaining it, we make no claim to infallibity; we may not be able to show a purer membership than others. But the difference is this-the admission to membership of unworthy members with us is not the result of our theory, but of our ignorance in its application; while in other churches it is the legitimate working of the system itself. We do not exclude children who are old enough to understand the first principles of the gospel. But we take the position of the Christian father, Tertullian, who lived as near the apostles as the latter part of the second century, and who, in opposing what he plainly regarded a departure from the apostolic rule, uses this language: "Let them first learn to feel their need of salvation." So we say of children in connection with baptism, let them first learn-let them ask for themselves.

A spiritual, converted membership. And what other membership is worth anything? Let a church have wealth and fashion, and every element of worldly prestige-let it arrange its terms of communion

1 Neander, Church History, vol. I, p. 312.