levied, as it were, an army of God's servants, and called a general council, and writ letters to the bishops, to summon them to repair to this convention or spiritual parliament. Neither did he only give command for the assembling of a general council, but sought to further it by his imperial authority, permitting some to take up his horses in his name for the performance of this journey, and provided for their convenient trayel by wagons and other means. "What a good emperor! We wish he had been better.

It seems however that after all the pains which the emperor took, he failed in his purpose. And we should mourn over the awful degeneracy of that state of society, in which the human conscience can become the vassal of civil power. Neither could the synod, with all its mighty apparatus and imposing grandeur, control the error they sought to cure. The heterodox became more inflexible, because the orthodox had become more arrogant; and spiritual governors must not tantalize immortal spirits, for they are of high birth and glorious destiny. And no wonder that the council should be frustrated in their designs. For synods have not, nor can they ever acquire, the authority which they pretend and desire to wield, when men think for themselves, which all men ought to do, if they wish to be companions for the seraphic intelligences of glory. Synods cannot blend disjointed thoughts, as if they were tying up a ruptured artery; nor heal division, as if they were winding

*Eusebius' life of Constantine.

a bandage round a broken limb. The eye must see when there is light, and the ear hear when there is sound; and the mind that is stupified, the principle of intellect that does not "overleap a wall," which a human architect has built, is like the eye obscured by an unnatural film, or the ear deafened amid dissolving elements.Mind is gone when men may restrain it; or there is a last effort in reserve, like Samson's expenditure of recovered strength in the Philistine temple-but it is amid the flames of Tophet.

When error is once introduced; when reverence for the authority of the scriptures has declined; and when christian men have learned to employ bitterness, sarcasm, ridicule, and ingenuity, as their controversial weapons, who can foretell the issue? Excitement has arranged hostile parties; the unity of the church is broken; her beauty, so lovely in the eyes of tender christians, is blighted; and the most vindictive feelings crowd all spiritual graces out of the human bosom. Such was the case, when Alexander, on the one side, and Arius, on the other, took the field, and forced the whole christian church into interminable altercations. To restore harmony, and induce both bishops and their people to think alike on the subjects that divided them, the oecumenical council, assembled at Nice, thought of framing an authoritative rule of faith, ycleped a CREED. They supposed, that having civil power to back their decisions, every thing would be accomplished, and that they could compel the Arians to believe

their Creed. All nature frowns at the cruelty of persecution; and who ever imagined that persecution could drive the human mind from its range of thought, when holding communion with its great Creator? The Creed did not unite the contending parties: they still manœuvred and disputed; stratagen was employed against stratagem; and reviling was returned for reviling. And who is so uninstructed on the subject of moral unity, especially after such streams of blood have flowed, and men have concentrated all their powers, to produce it, as not to know, that LovE, LOVE, is the celestial band which makes spiritual intelligences harmonize; commissions angels to mingle among earthly scenes; and forms the essence of Deityproclaimed in the grace of the gospel, expended in the sorrows of Immanuel, and hourly dispensed to man as a pensioner on "the fulness of Godhead?" O, what a puny thing is a human Creed!

It is a correlative fact, of great importance, that, in this present age, the church is recognizing her spiritual unity, and that her members are cherishing love to one another. Christians are discovering their common similitude; and the associations which they are now forming, and which so often bring them together to mingle heart with heart in the GREAT CAUSE, are of the most fascinating kind. They are throwing off "the painted earth-made vizors, which conceal the human face divine," and their extended communion charms every eye by its enchanting love

liness. The result of it must necessarily be to put down all these authoritative rules. The result of it has been to bring them into disrepute, and enfeeble their control. The longer they exist, and the more efficiently they act, the more visible will that result become. Like a mountain of polar ice, loosened from its northern fixture, and hastening to dissolve under milder suns, these ecclesiastical exotics will droop and wither, and die, where charity kindles her burning coals. It is the province of love to unite men together, and heal the divisions which separate them; it is that moral bond of union which God himself has created, and by which he intends to bind together all things in his spiritual kingdom. At last we shall see the members of Christ's body "fitly joined together, and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part." "Unity indeed will be produced; not that unity which sectarians so clumsily define, and which their unceasing contentions have made so entirely chimerical; but the unity of the spirit, "which is to be kept in the bond of peace." Such a sect we do most heartily wish. to see formed. Not a sect which covets the honour of giving birth to generations of controversial heroes, and promises a crown of immortality to the victorious polemic, who has been striving with his brethren. But a sect, "built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building filly framed to

gether, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord."

We humbly conceive that we have now traced these human Creeds and Confessions of Faith to their true origin. They are wholly destitute of a divine warrant. They are the offspring of ecclesiastical power, created by human ambition, and sustained by civil law; they sprang from scholastic theology, introducing subjects of contention among christians, and courting decisions from human authority. They are the institutions of a degraded state of religious society, and the representatives of deteriorated moral principles, argument, and feeling. When the church made them, she "left her first love;" she forsook "the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." Such is the biography of these expiring rituals, down from the unmanly contests of the council of Nice, through all the variegated scenes of the reformation, the perilous distractions of Puritanic times, and the unsatisfied scruples of many dissenting parties, to this age of great, general, universal, needful, prophesied changes. They are like the synods-members in fact of the same troublesome family-of which the great and good Gregory Nazianzen declared, "that he had never seen a good effect, or happy concluson, of any one of them;" but that they "rather increased than lessened the evils they were designed to prevent."

In concluding this first part of our remarks, we think it worth while to observe, how far the