for all times, and will outlive all the systems in the world. Then how, and by what steps has it led the posterity of the Puritan pilgrims so wide of their father's pathway, and rolled out their narrow Calvinistic synagogue into this umbrageous confederation of Gentile Christianities? Sir C. Lyell ascribes it all to the peculiar polity of the congregational churches, and to the natural recoil of religious feeling from the strain of Calvinism. A notable example of such reaction at the fountain head has been seen in the church and clergy of Geneva; but the spiritual independence of every separate congregation is among the issues of Protestantism, which it was reserved for New England to sanction by law, and to make the basis of an extensive ecclesiastical discipline. It is a principle, indeed, inconsistent with truth, if religion be a catechism and a confessor; but if it be a compound of instinct, reflection, faith, and experience, a light of the soul itself-it must feed upon free meditation; and the independence of any body of consenting worshippers is but the natural right of so many individual minds to obey the laws of thought and the conditions of their intellectual being. Now, by insight, foresight, self-assertion, or self-defence or why not by the providence of God?the Puritans of New England, before they were tolerant themselves, adopted the essential polity of toleration, and also of progress. The law gave effect to it; and in every congregation, if the creed of the majority change, the minority must secede and set up no rights of freehold against rights of conscience. Such is the principle of the congregational churches, of which, according to the list in the Almanac of last year, there are in the United States 1727, with 1584 ministers called orthodox, and 300 with 250 ministers called Unitarian. Sir C. Lyell says that the separate congregational churches in England, both Old and New, are, in all, above 3000; which would seem to indicate a greater proportion for New England than we should have inferred from the figures in the Almanac. But whatever their number may be, they were the true root of American Protestantism, and of American education; and Sir C. Lyell gives a very interesting account of them in both those relations:

6

It is now,' he says, 'the settled opinion of many of the most thoughtful of the New Englanders, that the assertion of the independence of each separate congregation was as great a step towards freedom of conscience as all that had been previously gained by Luther's reformation. . . . To show how widely the spirit of their peculiar ecclesiastical system has spread, I may state that even the Roman Catholics have, in different States, and in three or four cases (one of which is still pending in 1848), made an appeal to the courts

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at law, and endeavoured to avail themselves of the principle of the Independents, so that the majority of a separate congregation should be entitled to resist the appointment by their bishop of a priest to whom they had strong objections.

But to exemplify the more regular working of the congregational polity within its own legitimate sphere, I will mention a recent case which came more home to my own scientific pursuits. A young man of superior talent with whom I was acquainted, who was employed as a geologist in the State survey of Pennsylvania, was desirous of becoming a minister of the Presbyterian Church, in that State; but when examined, previous to ordination, he was unable to give satisfactory answers to questions respecting the plenary inspiration of Scripture, because he considered such a tenet, when applied to the first chapter of Genesis, inconsistent with discoveries now universally admitted respecting the high antiquity of the earth, and the existence of living beings on the earth long anterior to man. The rejected candidate, whose orthodoxy on all other points was fully admitted, was then invited by an Independent congregation in New England to become their pastor; and when he accepted the offer, the other associated churches were called upon to decide whether they would assist in ordaining one who claimed the right to teach freely his own views on the question at issue. The right of the congregation to elect him, whether the other churches approved of the doctrine or not, was conceded; and a strong inclination is always evinced, by the affiliated societies, to come, if possible, to an amicable understanding. Accordingly, a discussion ensued, and is perhaps still going on, whether, consistently with a fair interpretation of Scripture, or with what is essential to the faith of a Christian, the doctrine of complete and immediate inspiration may or may not be left as an open question.'

Now the close connexion of all this with the moral culture of a people cannot be questioned upon general grounds; nor can anybody turn away from it, as remote from the business of life, who reflects upon our actual religious difficulties at home, upon our public divisions and our domestic estrangements, all springing from the old passion for doctrinal uniformity.

The love of truth is honourable in all; and with the disciples of an infallible church we will not dispute. But there can be only one infallible church; and if the Protestant world be but seeking for that through free inquiry, then the freer the inquiry, the greater the hope of ultimate unity. In the present state of the world, unity is irreconcilable with freedom; and, in default of unity, the outward simulation of it is plain falsehood. may agree that sincerity is not everything in religion: but insincerity, even on the right side, must be something worse; and how much of that there is in Old England, we should be sorry to see computed in a question of national character.

We

Religious insincerity, commonly called cant, is one of our special vices; and yet it does not seem natural to us, but results insensibly from our conservative love of old forms of speech which have survived their meaning, and ancient rites that have no life left in them. This is notable in Church and State alike; in our constitutional and legal fictions; in our public testimonials, tributes, toasts, epitaphs, and oaths, no less than in our solemn creeds, confessions, and thanksgivings. Consider, for example, in things sacred, our universal conventional indifference to the vows of sponsors in baptism, although the awful old service is scrupulously retained. So of the Ordination Service. Consider, also, the weekly recitation of the fourth commandment, and the response to it, without one word of comment or qualification on the part of the Church, notwithstanding that nobody believes a Jewish Sabbath to be either binding upon Christians or possible in modern life; and not the strictest Puritan of us all, not Scotland herself, even thinks of observing it as such. The immense variance between the letter of this law and the most rigid practical interpretation of it, confounds all English ideas of Sabbath keeping and Sabbath breaking; creates unnecessarily an awful malum prohibitum ; and lays snares in the path of innumerable honest and devout men and women. If the fourth commandment be, indeed, a law of the Christians, it is too certain that all Christians deliberately break it; but if it be a law of the Jews only, then all the scandal is chargeable upon those who, professing to have divine truth in their keeping, recite this law weekly from the altar, as if it were part of the Sermon on the Mount. In the same way, chapters from the Old Testament and from the New are read out to a congregation, with no other distinction than that one is the first, the other the second lesson.

Such inconsistencies, to those who will reflect upon them, will appear far more important and more fruitful of evil consequences than most of us are aware of. Then there are the deliberate dishonesties of the learned, imposing upon the people what they do not believe themselves, for the sake of the end it is supposed to answer. Sir Charles Lyell adduces at length the text of the three heavenly witnesses, which no scholar, since Porson's investigation of it, professes to believe genuine, but which is still, nevertheless, retained in our Bibles, and also in those of the episcopal church of America, notwithstanding their opportunity of expunging it when the American Episcopalians revised the liturgy and struck out the Athanasian creed. This disingenuous timidity has long been a reflection upon all our religious teachers. It is now becoming extremely dangerous to

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their influence and authority. There is no meeting an age of inquiry except in the spirit of perfect candour. The question which lies at the root of all dogmatic Christianity, is the. authority of the letter of Scripture; yet, strange to say, that question is neither a settled nor an open one even among Protestants. All the clergy of almost all sects are afraid of it; and the students of nature, intent only upon facts that God has revealed to our senses, have to fight their way against the self-same religious prejudice which consigned Galileo to his dungeon. The geologists, following in the track of the astronomers, have made good some very important positions, and number among them many eminent churchmen of unquestioned fidelity to their ordination vows. It is now, therefore, admitted that the text is not conclusive against physical demonstration. Is the text conclusive against moral induction and metaphysical inquiry? Let a layman put that question, and an awful silence is the least forbidding answer he will receive. No minister of a parish, no master of a school, no father of a family in England feels himself free to pursue any train of instruction that seems in conflict with a familiar text or a dogmatic formula, excepting only the subject of the opening verses of Genesis. He is either fearful of the ground himself, or he cannot clear his own path for others without opening a discussion, which is discountenanced on all sides and branded with reproachful names. He, in spite of himself, must take refuge in evasions and reserve, and close a subject of perhaps the liveliest interest to the most reverential minds, lest the works of God should seem to be at variance with his word. Here is the dilemma which will be found at the bottom of the education question in England. This is what is consciously or unconsciously meant in many important quarters by the cry against secular instruction. This is why the natural sciences were so long frowned upon in our grammar schools and colleges, and ancient knowledge preferred to modern as a sounder and a holier lore. The theology of the Vatican was at home among the Pagan mythologies, the Aristotelian physics, and the Hebrew cosmogonies; yet stood in awe of the Tuscan artist's optic glass;' and the spirit of the ancient Church has ever since been true to that instinct. But Protestantism, we say again, and printing have admitted the light of nature into the schools; and, in the unlimited ecclesiastical freedom of the United States, religion and education go hand in hand.

Certainly,' says Sir C. Lyell, no people ever started with brighter prospects of uniting the promotion of both these departments than the people of New England at this moment. Of the free

schools which they have founded, and the plan of education adopted by them, for children of all sects and stations in society, they feel justly proud, for it is the most original thing which America has yet produced.'

The Puritans introduced the congregational polity - the Puritans introduced also the free schools. In the log huts of the early settlers in Massachusetts were commonly found the Bible and Paradise Lost.'

'Full of faith,' says Sir C. Lyell, and believing that their religious tenets must be strengthened by free investigation, they held that the study and interpretation of the Scriptures should not be the monopoly of a particular order of men, but that every layman was bound to search them for himself. Hence they were anxious to have all their children taught to read. So early as the year 1647, they instituted common schools, the law declaring "that all the "brethren should teach their children and apprentices to read, and "that every township of fifty householders should appoint one to "teach all the children." Very different was the state of things in the contemporary colony of Virginia, to which the cavaliers and members of the Established Church were thronging. Even fifteen or twenty years later, Sir Wm. Berkeley, who was Governor of Virginia for nearly forty years, and was one of the best of the colonial rulers, spoke thus, in the full sincerity of his heart, of his own province, in a letter written after the restoration of Charles the Second:

"I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we "shall not have them these hundred years. For learning has brought "heresy, and disobedience, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us "from both."'

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Such are two opposite views of the value of learning which still agitate the world; and the question between them is no speculative question, but by many degrees the most practical of all the questions of our time. But here it seems right to call in the other witnesses whose works are enumerated at the head of this article, that no conclusion in this important inquiry may rest upon any prejudice of ours, or of any single writer, however discerning or dispassionate. The problem of the civilised world is, how to promote the continual improvement of our race by means of free institutions; for there is no sign that the principle of despotism either in Church or State can do it. Let the admirers of the absolute in human affairs mark the contrasts of history and of the living world. The political order of China is to British and American disorders like a cage of tame animals to the lords of the forest; the civic order of Rome is to the civic order of Boston like a cage of untamed animals to a park of friendly deer and kine.