rule their own judgment and conscience; a liberty claimed, and a liberty allowed, to every man and to every congregation of men; a liberty which none can deny, with which none can interfere, without infringing upon the great charter granted by the Almighty to all his people, and without, at the same time, impiously usurping the prerogatives of Heaven.

Is this a system of superstition, of bigotry, of persecution, of intolerance? The farthest from it possible. The discoverers of this simple but sublime system of religious rights, were-more than the Newtons-the benefactors of the world. Like the great laws of nature, this law is beautiful in its simplicity, and awful in its grandeur. Its first discoverers might not have comprehended, at once, all its length and breadth: they may, in particular instances, have greatly erred from its precepts; but the principle remains. It will continue to shed abroad its richer benefits the more it is understood, and the better it is obeyed. It will gradually purge away the mists and defilements of error. The present entire equality of all sects of worshippers, which characterizes our American Institutions, was as sure to result from these principles, as the sun is to break through the shadows of a misty morning.

But from the opposite, the prelatical principle, what can come ? It cannot allow men freedom to worship God. It trusts not its own children, but seeks to bind them by the authority of Canons, and to fence them in by Liturgies and prescribed ceremonies; and then talks about the misery of the poor people left with the Bible and their own conscience alone, without the benefit of such authoritative fences and canons! What can come from this system? What has come of it? Too well have we seen, as we have traced its course in the history of hundreds of years.

Leave the soul of man and the mind of man free. Let him be responsible for his faith only to God. Persecution is at an end. Bigotry expires. If religious principle, and a regard to his eternal interests, cannot keep him to the truth, it is in vain to keep him in-like a being to whom reason and conscience are both an incumbrance-by prelatical prerogatives, fences, liturgies, and ceremonial forms.

That the Puritanic principle is the principle of reason and of the Word of God, we entertain no shadow of doubt; and therefore we trust, in entire confidence, that as the advancing kingdom of Christ brings the souls of men to a clearer perception of their responsibities and rights, the Puritan principle is destined to prevail. That the despotism of the Greek and Roman Hierarchies over so large a portion of Christendom, is destined to decline, what Protestant can doubt, who believes that the light and freedom of the Gospel are one day to fill the world? As little ought it to be doubted, that the very root of these despotisms, the su

perstition of a Christian Priesthood, and of authority derived from Apostolical succession, and all the powers claimed by a hierarchy to frame rites, and ceremonies, and canons, and to impose the same upon God's people, are destined to vanish away. That Prelacy may live and flourish for a time, no one ought to doubt, who looks at the causes that contribute to its support. The religion of priestly interventions, of ceremonies and forms, of grace conferred by rituals, is the religion of human nature. People who want the benefits of religion on terms requiring little heartwork and little self-denial; who wish for nothing that presses heavily on the conscience, or that forbids a good degree of conformity to the world, will always exhibit a tendency to fall in with a religion essentially of the Prelatic cast. Such a religion will of course be the religion of the fashionable and the gay, the worldly, and the ambitious. Even the absurdities, the superstitions, and the abominations of Popery, do not prevent its holding an almost unbroken sway, over a large portion of the cultivated intellect of the earth. Archbishop Whately has a work characterized by his usual vigor and discrimination, entitled, "The errors of Romanism traced to their source in human nature;" in which he shows that monstrous scheme to be the result, not so much of the imposture of a designing priesthood, as of a sinloving, God-hating, human nature; its dislike of a spiritual religion, and its natural tendency to resort to priestly offices, as an easier mode of salvation; less troublesome to the conscience, less irksome to a heart that loves the indulgence of sin, than the spiritual religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is but natural, that wherever the absurdities of Popery are seen to be too monstrous, the same corrupt human nature should seek a religion of the same species, but a religion more decent in some of its details. Such is the system of Puseyism, and the system of High Church Prelacy; and he who reads the work of Archbishop Whately, will be at no loss to account for the rapidity with which Puseyism has swept over so large a portion of the Episcopal Church. The same causes will doubtless continue to swell the ranks of the votaries of that system. Argument and light have little intrinsic power, where men by nature love darkness rather than light. The Evangelical party have the Gospel on their side; Puseyism has human nature and the offices of the Church. While human nature remains corrupt, its instinctive tendencies are either wholly to reject the Gospel, or to deny its eternal retributions, or to contrive a religion of forms and priestly interventions; and he will find himself mistaken, who thinks that because this last scheme is based on palpable error, it will not, therefore, long contrive to have its votaries. So long as men continue careless, such a religion will be popular; but when the

Spirit of God descends in his might, to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come, then men will flee from these refuges of lies, and earnestly inquire what they shall do to be saved. The religion of salvation by priestly interventions is destined finally to vanish away; and light, and liberty, and salvation, to fill the earth.

To the advancement of pure religious truth, as well as of just principles of freedom, the labors of the Puritans have, next to the Reformation, contributed more than anything else since the labors of the Apostles. Their labors are destined to form one of the great eras in the history of man.

CONCLUSION.

And now our work is done. We have seen our fathers in their conflicts; we have visited them in their prisons; we have traced them in their wanderings, and come with them to their first rude dwellings in the wilderness. We have looked at the foundations rising under their hands. In two hundred years, the wilderness is converted into a fair and fruitful field. In all time, the sun never before shone on a people so free, and blessed so abundantly with all the elements of human happiness. Save for the principles which our Puritan fathers maintained at every hazard and every sacrifice, all these fair fruits of freedom and of religion would never have been.

We have shown these principles of the Puritans to be based on fundamental truths-truths which are eternal in their nature, and which can never cease to be of unspeakable importance to the best interests of mankind.

These were the principles of men who feared God: the principles of sober, intelligent, and steadfast men: and by successive generations of such men, and such alone, are these principles to be perpetuated in the world. The time is coming when the principles and institutions of our Puritan fathers will be appreciated in this land, and when their influence will be felt all over the globe. We are quite willing to point to their results in New England, and to ask whether it would be'any loss to mankind, should such principles and institutions be extended throughout the world.

We owe something to these principles. We owe everlasting thanks to God, that he has made us the descendants of such ancestors, and allowed us to enter into their labors. May it never be said that we forsook the principles of our fathers, or our fathers' God. They would be the first of all to rise up and condemn us, if, pretending to prize their principles, we should fail in that which was the main end and crown of all their in

stitutions-piety to God, and a living, fruitful, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

The conflict of human opinions and human principles will soon be over. All human institutions, and all human tabernacles of worship, are soon to vanish away. If our privileges and institutions contribute to our salvation, and to make us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light, this is the fruit most of all to be desired. May God make them such to us, and preserve them to our children and to our children's children, to the end of time.

APPENDIX.

"PURITANISM, BY T. W. COIT."

Just before this work was ready for the press, there appeared a work entitled "PURITANISM, OR, A CHURCHMAN'S DEFENCE AGAINST ITS ASPERSIONS. BY THOMAS W. COIT, D.D., Rector of Trinity Church, New Rochelle, N. Y., and a member of the New York Historical Society."

As in duty bound, I hastened to procure the work, that I might avail myself of whatever additional light it might throw upon the subject.

The honorary titles appended to the name of the author of the work ("D.D., Member of the New York Historical Society") led me to expect something. I turned to its (what shall I call it?) Ante-Preface; in which, in a quotation from Mather, the author anticipates the "furious tempest,—a tempest of rain, hail, and horrid thunder-claps," which his work is about to raise. Well, thought I, the good man expects, at the least, to make a noise in the world.

ORIGIN OF THE WORK.

I turned to the Preface, in which I found that the work was prepared at the special call of "several of the Bishops, and a large number of the Clergy," and that this was "not the first, nor the twentieth time, that he had been approached on the subject." It seems that the author had tried his hand at the same sort of labor, ten years before, in a series of letters in the Churchman: but the recollection of the "rain, hail, and horrid thunder-claps," which had been "poured upon him," " determined him never to resume, on his individual responsibility." "Several of the Bishops, and a large number of the clergy," now approached him, " willing to share with him the responsibility," "by giving their signatures ;" and under this high authority, he girds himself for the work. "But another work, which," says he, "the Church was pleased to ask of me, interfered (the editing of a Standard Prayer-Book)." Accordingly, as soon as the Prayer-Book is published, in obedience to this new call of the Church, he takes the Puritans in hand. I confess, that after all this note of preparation, I did expect something,—that a decent edifice, at least, should follow so notable a porch.