surpass all other American churches, except the Methodists, including, as they do, not merely many of the humbler classes in the Northern States, but also a large proportion of the negroes in the South. One interesting feature in their history deserves to be recorded. Many are accustomed in these latter days in England to speak as if the chief mode by which religion is propagated must be the importance attached to sacramental forms. It is worth while for us to contemplate this vast American Church which, more than the corresponding community in England, lays stress on its retention of what is undoubtedly the primitive, apostolical, and was till the thirteenth century, the universal mode of baptism in Christendom, which is still retained throughout the Eastern Churches, and which is still in our own Church as positively enjoined in theory as it is universally neglected in practice, namely, the oriental, strange, inconvenient, and, to us, almost barbarous practice of immersion. The Baptist Churches, although they have used our own Authorised Version, and will, we trust, accept our new revision, yet in their own translation of the Bible have substituted "immersion" for the more ambiguous term, "baptism." The attraction which this ceremony of total ablution, in the burning heats of the Southern States, offers to uneducated minds, is said to be one of the most powerful motives which have induced the negroes to adopt the Baptist communion. A measure of the want of education amongst these primitive converts may be given in the story told of the triumphant tones in which a negro teacher of the Baptist Church addressed a member of the chief rival communion. "You profess to go to the Bible, and yet in the Bible you find constant mention of John the Baptist,' John the Immerser. Where do you ever find any mention of 'John the Methodist?"" (4.) This leads us to that other communion whose progress through the United States alone exceeds that of the Baptists. John Wesley and George Whitefield alone, or almost alone, of eminent English teachers were drawn beyond the limits of their own country to propagate the Gospel, or their own view of it, in the Transatlantic regions. John Wesley's career in Georgia, although not the most attractive of his fields of labour, is yet deeply interesting from his close connection with one of the noblest of all the religious founders of the American States, General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia. "In the heart of the evergreen forest, in the deep solitude of St. Simon's Island, is the great oak with its hanging moss, which they still call Wesley's Oak,' underneath which he preached to the colony in the wilderness." George Whitefield produced by his preaching the same extraordinary effect which he had produced in England, of which the crowning example is the impression he left on the hard, homely, philosophic mind of Benjamin Franklin; and, thorough Englishman as he was, he terminated his marvelous career, not in England, but in America, and his bones still remain to be visited like the relics of a medieval saint in the church of Newburyport in Massachusetts. It would seem as if three elements conduced to the remarkable position of the American Methodists. First, for the more educated classes the Arminianism of Wesley, to which in their uncultured way the Transatlantic Methodists still adhered, furnished some kind of escape from the stern Calvinism of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists of New England; and it may be that out of this tendency sprang that. remarkable off-set from Congregationalism of which I have already spoken, the Universalists. Secondly, the Episcopal organization of this community, which, although differing from the more regular forms under which it is preserved in the Roman, English, and Lutheran Churches, has yet justified Wesley's adoption of it by the coherence which it has given to a system otherwise so diffusive. 1 Coke, the first Methodist, the first Protestant Bishop2 of America, has a life and death not unworthy of the vast Church of which he was the virtual founder. He was the right hand of Wesley-inferior, no doubt, but still his chief supporter. "I want," he said, on his last visit to America, "the wings of an eagle and the voice of a prophet, to proclaim the Gospel east and west, and north and south." He was consecrated Bishop by Wesley with the full approval of the most saintly and one of the most churchmanlike of Wesley's followers, Fletcher of Madeley. He crossed the Atlantic eighteen times. He traversed for forty years the British Isles, the United States, and the West Indies. He found his grave in the Indian Ocean on his way to the wide sphere of Missionary labour in the East Indies. Thirdly, the hymns, originating in the first instance from the pens of John Wesley and his brother Charles, and multiplied by the fertility of American fancy, have an attraction for the coloured population corresponding to that ceremonial charm which I have already described as furnished to them by the Baptists through the rite of immersion. (5.) We now come to the latest, but not the least important developments of American Christianity. Out of the Calvinism of the New England Churches, much in the same way as out of the Calvinism of Geneva itself, under the influence of the general wave of critical and philosophical inquiry which swept over the whole of Europe in the eighteenth century, there arose in the famous city, which by its rare culture and social charms may claim to be the Geneva of America, that form of Congregationalism, which, for want of a better name, has been called partly by its enemies and partly by its friends, Unitarian 1 For the futile attempts of Coke to procure Episcopal ordination for the Methodist clergy from the Church of England and the Episcopal American Church, see Stevens' History of Methodism, iii. 129, 130. Coke wrote to Lord Liverpool and also to William Wilberforce to offer himself as the first Bishop of India. (Ibid. iii. 329. Tyerman's Life and Times of Wesley, iii. 434). 2 The name of Bishop, as applied to an Episcopal office created by a Presbyter, may, in the ordinary parlance of modern Europe, be regarded as a solecism. But in the rude organization of primitive times, such a use of the word was a necessity. All the Bishops of the second century must have been created by Presbyters of the first century, and this usage continued in Alexandria down to the fourth century.-See Bishop Lightfoot's exhaustive treatise on the Christian Ministry in his work on the Epistle to the Philippians, p. 228, 229. ism. Not great in numbers,1 except in Boston and its neighbourhood, but including within itself almost all the cultivated authorship of America in the beginning of this century, the Unitarian Church at that period was unquestionably at the summit of the civilised Christianity of the Western continent. Its chief representative was one of the few names which, like Jonathan Edwards, has acquired not only an American but a European splendour, Dr. Channing. The stiff and stately style of his works will hardly maintain its ground under the altered tastes of our generation. But it is believed that his sermons may still from time to time be heard from English pulpits where we should least expect to find them. And both in England and America there still remains the strong personal impression which he left on those who knew him. Those who can remember him describe the dignified courtesy and gracious humility which gave even to his outward appearance the likeness of an ancient English dignitary; and with this was combined, in the later period of his life, a courageous zeal rarely united with a cautious and shrinking temperament like his, in behalf of the cause of Abolition, then, in his native State and amongst his own peculiar circles, branded with unpopularity amounting almost to odium. "When he read a prayer, it left upon those who listened the impression that it was the best prayer that they had ever heard, or when he gave out a hymn, that it was the best hymn they had ever read." To some one who was complaining of the strenuous denunciations in the Gospel Discourses, he opened the New Testament and read the passages aloud. As soon as he had finished, his hearer said, "Oh, if that was the tone in which they were spoken, it alters the case.' When he came to this country he visited the poet Wordsworth, and years afterwards the poet would point to the chair in which he had sat, and say, "There sat Dr. Channing." Coleridge, after his interview, said of him, "Dr. Channing is a philosopher in both possible senses of the word. He has the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love."3 he died he was borne to his grave in the cemetery at Mount Auburn amidst the mourning of all Boston; and the bells of the Roman Catholic chapel joined with those of Protestant church and chapel and meeting-house in muffled peals for the loss of one who, as his gravestone records, was "honoured," not only "by the Christian society of which for nearly forty years he was pastor," but "throughout Christendom."4 When The neighbourhood of Newport was the scene of his early life.5 "No spot on earth," he said, "helped to form me like that beach." He was a complete Bostonian, yet he had a keen sense of the social supe 1 One-fifth of the population in Boston. Lyell's Second Visit, i. 172. II. 219, Compare Wordsworth's account, ii. 218. 4 L. 136. I. 100, riority of the Virginians. 1 He was a thorough American, but in the Napoleonic war his love of England was as strong as if he had been born in Britain. 2 One or two characteristic anecdotes may be given of his general culture. Speaking of Cervantes, whom he could not forgive for his satire on Don Quixote, he said "I love the Don too much to enjoy his history." The following passage in substance singularly coincides with the celebrated but long subsequent passage of Cardinal Newman on the religious aspect of music. "I am conscious of a power in music which I want words to describe. Nothing in my experience is more inexplicable. An instinct has always led me to transfer the religious sentiment to music; and I suspect that the Christian world under its power has often attained to a singular consciousness of immortality. Facts of this nature make us feel what an infinite mystery our nature is, and how little our books of science reveal it to us.' We may add various passages, which give a just estimate of the catholicity of his theological sentiments. "Read to me," he said to his friends in his last hours, "the Sermon on the Mount." And when they closed the Lord's Prayer, "I take comfort," he said, "and the profoundest comfort, from these words. They are full of the divinest spirit of our religion." "I value Unitarianism," he remarked, "not as a perfect system, but as freed from many errors of the older systems, as encouraging freedom of thought, as raising us above the despotism of the Church, and as breathing a mild and tolerant spirit into the members of the Christian body. I am little of a Unitarian; I have little sympathy with Priestley or Belsham, and stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer light, who look for a purer and more effectual manifestation of Christian faith."3 "I do not speak as a Unitarian, but as an independent Christian. I have little or no interest in Unitarians as a sect.' "Until a new thirst for truth, such, I fear, as is not now felt, takes possession of some gifted minds, we shall make little progress. "The true Reformation, I apprehend, is yet to come.' "What I feel is that Christianity, as expounded by all our sects, is accomplishing its divine purpose very imperfectly, and that we want a Reformation worthy of the name; that, instead of enslaving ourselves to any existing sect, we should seek, by a new cleansing of our hearts, and more earnestness of prayer, brighter, purer, more quickening views of Christianity." "We have reason to suppose, from what has been experienced, that great changes will take place in the present state of Christianity; and the time is, perhaps, coming when all our present sects will live only in history." 3 See his candid estimate of English Theology, ii. 148–151, and of all Churches, i. 352. See also i. 344, 387, 406; ii. 38, 400. "God is a spirit, and His spiritual offspring carry the primary revelation of Him in their own nature. The God-like within us is the primary revelation of God. The moral nature is man's great tie to divinity. There is but one mode of approach to God. It is by faithfulness to the inward, everlasting law. The pure in heart see God, Here is the true way to God." "Could I see before I die but a small gathering of men penetrated with reverence for humanity, with the spirit of freedom, and with faith in a more Christian constitution of society, I should be content." "Strive to seize the true idea of Christ's character; to trace in His history the working of His soul; to comprehend the divinity of His spirit. Strive to rise above what was local, temporary, partial in Christ's teaching, to His universal, all-comprehending truth." It is said that there was in the warmth of Unitarian preachers at that time something quite unlike the coldness frequently ascribed to it. One fervent spirit at least, though divided from it in later days, sprang from the Unitarian Church, Theodore Parker. He also, though not so extensively, was one of the few American theologians known beyond his own country; and with all the objections which may be made against his rough and untimely modes of thought and expression, he must be regarded as the first pioneer, on the Transatlantic continent, of those larger views of critical inquiry and religious philosophy which have so deeply influenced all the Churches of the old world. (6.) We now come to what is in one sense the earliest, in another, the latest born of the American Churches. Before the arrival of the Mayflower in the Bay of Plymouth there had already entered into the James River that adventurous colony, headed by the most marvellous of all the explorers of the Western world in those days, the representative of Raleigh, Captain John Smith. In him and in his settlement were the first parents of the Church of England in America. The first clergyman was Robert Hunt, vicar of Reculver in Kent, who was the chaplain of the unruly crew, and who celebrated in Virginia the first English Communion of the New World on Sunday, the 21st of June, 1607. We hear little of the early pastors; but any church might be proud to trace back its foundation to so noble a character as the devout sailor-hero John Smith. "In all his proceedings he made justice his first guide and experience his second, combating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers. He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him-into no danger would he send them where he could not lead them himself. He never would see us want what he either had or could by any means get us. He would rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay. He loved action more than words, and feared covetousness more than death. His ad 1 Lyell, Second Visit, i. 176. |