tianity be a supernatural life, the life which begins in supernatural faith and contemplates a supernatural destiny, it is now clear that Protestants cannot and never could claim to be truly within the pale of the Christian family, but do reject and always have virtually rejected the Christian religion itself.

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This being so, it becomes necessary now either to deny the supernatural character of the Christian life, and therefore the necessity of divine or supernatural faith, or to give up Protestantism as having no claim to be called Christian. This is becoming a general conviction among Protestants themselves, and therefore the tendency to reject Christianity, as a supernatural religion, is manifesting itself all over the Protestant world. Even Bishop Butler, the great Anglican light of the last century, declares the Gospel to be only “a republication of the law of nature;" and we have rarely met with a Protestant, whatever might be his unintelligible jargon about the New Birth, that did not hold, substantially, that the Christian life is merely the continuation and development of our natural life. The old modes of speech, adopted when Christianity was held to be a supernatural religion, are, we admit, in some instances, retained and insisted upon; but they have lost their former significance. Supernatural is defined to be supersensuous, as if spiritual existences could not be natural as well as material existences. It is thus Coleridge defines supernatural; it is thus, also, the supernaturalists of Germany, of the school of Schleiermacher and De Wette, understand it, while the rationalists deny it in name as well as in reality. In no higher sense do we find the word recognized by the mass of Swiss and French Protestants. "What did Almighty God make us for?" said we, the other day, to a worthy Protestant preacher, not without note in this community and the councils of his country. "To develop and perfect our spiritual natures," was the ready reply; that is, to finish the work which Almighty God began, but left incomplete; and this is the reply which, in substance, is almost universally given by those Protestants who plume themselves on having pure and ennobling spiritual views of religion. Thus it is, men everywhere lose sight of their supernatural destiny, and then deny the necessity of a supernatural life, and then the necessity of grace. Thus, in substance, if not in name they reject the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the miraculous conception and birth of our Saviour, original sin, the Atonement, remission of sins, the plenary in

spiration of the Scriptures, and, finally, all that is incompatible with the principle of man's sufficiency for himself, as so many reminiscences of Popery, or traditions of the Dark Ages, and as interposing between the human soul and its 'Creator, and hindering its freedom and growth. It is idle to deny, that all over the Protestant world the tendency to this result is strong and irresistible, and that it is already reached by the more thinking and enlightened portion of Protestants. The true and proper issue, then, cannot be really any longer evaded. Protestants must meet the simple questions of naturalism or supernaturalism, of transcendentalism or Catholicity, of man or God.

No doubt, a certain class of Protestant doctors do, and will, for some little time to come, struggle to stave off this issue, but in vain. Matters have proceeded too far. It is too late. The internal developments of Protestantism are too far completed, the spirit at work in the Protestant ranks is too powerful, to prevent the direct issue from being made. Transcendentalism, under one form or another, has struck its roots so deep, has spread out its branches so far, and finds so rich a soil, that it must ere long cause all the other forms of Protestantism, as the underbrush in a thick forest, to die out and disappear. The spirit of inquiry which Protestantism boasts of having quickened, the disposition to bring every question, the most intricate and the most sacred, to the test of private judgment, which she fosters, and which it would be suicidal in her to discountenance, will compel these doctors themselves either to give up their vocations, or to fall into the current and suffer themselves to be borne on to its termination. Resistance is madness. The movement party advances with a steady step, and will drive all before it. Whatever Evangelical doctor throws himself in its path to stay its onward march is a dead man and ground to powder. There is no alternative; you must follow Schlegel, Hurter, Newman, Faber, back into the bosom of Catholic unity, or go on with Emerson, Parker, and Carlyle. Not to-day only have we seen this. Think you that we, who, according to your own story, have tried every form of Protestantism, and disputed every inch of Protestant ground, would ever have left the ranks of Protestantism in which we were born, and under whose banner we had fought so long and suffered so much, if there had been any other alternative for us?

The "No Popery" cry which our Evangelicals are raising, and which rings in our ears from every quarter, does not in

the least discompose us. In this very cry we hear an additional proof of what we are maintaining. We understand the full significance of this cry. The Protestant masses are escaping from their leaders. The sectarian ministers, especially of the species Evangelical, are losing their hold on their flocks, and finding that their old petrified forms, retained from Luther, or Calvin, or Knox, will no longer satisfy them,-have no longer vitality for them. Their craft is in danger; their power and influence are departing, and Ichabod is beginning to be written on their foreheads. They see the handwriting on the wall, and feel that something must be done to avert the terrible doom that awaits them. Fearfulness and trembling seize them, and, like the drowning man, they catch at the first straw, and hope, and yet with the mere hope of despair, that it will prove a plank of safety. They have no resource in their old, dried-up, dead forms. They must look abroad, call in some extrinsic aid, and, by means of some foreign power, delay the execution of the judgment they feel in their hearts has already been pronounced against them. They must get up some excitement which will captivate the people and blind their reason. No excitement seems to them more likely to answer their purpose than a "No Popery" excitement, which they fancy will find a firm support in the hereditary passions and prejndices of their flocks. Here is the significance of this "NoPopery" excitement.

But this excitement will prove suicidal. Times have changed, and matters do not stand as they did in the days of Luther, and Zwingli, and Henry, and Calvin, and Knox. The temper of men's minds is different, and there is a new order of questions up for solution. The old watchwords no longer answer the purpose. What avails it to prove the pope to be antichrist, to populations that do not even believe in Christ? What avails it to thunder at Catholicity with texts which are no longer believed to have a divine authority? Protestantism must now fall back on her own principles, and fight her battles with her own weapons. She must throw out her own banner to the breeze, and call upon men. to gather and arm and fight for progress, for liberty, for the unrestricted right of private judgment, or she will not rally a corporal's guard against Catholicity. But the moment she does this, she is, as the French say, enfoncée; for she has subsisted and can subsist only by professing one thing and doing another. Let our Evangelical doctors, in their

madness, rally, in the name of progress, of liberty, of private judgment, an army to put down the pope, and the matter will not end there. Their forces, furnished with arms against Catholicity, will turn upon themselves, and in a hoarse voice, and if need be, from brazen throats and tongues of flame, exclaim, "No more sham, gentlemen. We go for principle. We do not unpope the pope to find a new pope in each petty presbyter, and a spy and informer in each brother or sister communicant. You are nothing to us. Freedom, gentlemen; doff your gowns, abrogate all your creeds and confessions, break up all your religious organizations, abolish all forms of worship except such as each individual may choose and exercise for himself, and acknowledge in fact, as well as in name, that every man is free to worship one God or twenty Gods, or no God at all, as seems to him good, unlicensed, unquestioned, or take the consequences. We will no more submit to your authority than you will to that of the pope."

De

This is the tone and these the terms in which these "No Popery" doctors will find, one of these days, their flocks addressing them; for we have only given words to what they know as well as we is the predominant feeling of the great majority of the Protestant people. The very means, in the present temper of the Protestant public, they must use to insure their success, cannot fail to prove their ruin. They will only hasten the issue they would evade. prived, as they now are, for the most part, of all direct aid from the civil power, the force of things is against them, and it matters little whether they attempt to move or sit still. They were mad enough in the beginning to take their stand on a movable foundation, and they must move on with it, or be left to balance themselves in vacuity; and if they do move on with it, they will simply arrive-nowhither. They are doomed, and they cannot escape. Hence it is all their motions affect us only as the writhings and death-throes of the serpent whose head is crushed.

Regarding it of the greatest importance that the whole matter should be brought to its true and proper issue, and believing firmly, that when the real alternatives are distinctly apprehended and admitted, that many Protestants will choose "the better part," we are not displeased to witness the very decided tendency to transcendentalism now manifesting itself throughout the Protestant world. It is a proof to us that the internal developments of Protestant

ism are not only bringing it to its strictly logical termination, but, what is more important still, to the term of its existence. The nations which became Protestant rebelled against the God of their fathers, the God who had brought them up out of the bondage of ignorance, barbarism, idolatry, and superstition, and said they would not have him to reign over them, but they would henceforth be their own. masters, and rule themselves. He, for wise and merciful but inscrutable purposes, gave them up to their reprobate sense, left them to themselves, to follow their own wills, till bitter experience should teach them their wickedness, their impiety, their folly and madness, and bring them in shame and confusion to pray, "O Lord, in thy wrath remember mercy; save us from ourselves, or we perish!" To this desirable result it was not to be expected they would come till Protestantism had run its natural course, and reached its legitimate termination. They would not abandon it till they had exhausted all its possibilities, and till it could no longer present a new face to charm or delude them. In this transcendental tendency, we see the evidence that it has run or very nearly run its natural course, and in transcendentalism reaches its termination, exhausts itself, and can go no further; for there is no further. Beyond transcendentalism, in the same direction, there is no place. Transcendentalism is the last stage this side of nowhere; and when reached, we must hold up, or fly off into boundless vacuity. In is prevalence, then, we may trust we see the signs of a change near at hand; and any change must certainly be in a better direction.