there is liberty there can be no permanent evils. Such as may arise will be temporary; they will cure themselves; they will be removed soon by the common sense and experience of men. New evils, occasional evils, will arise and be removed continually, while the great body of the Church shall be continually progressing in grace and happiness. It cannot be thus where there is intolerance. Evils, the evils which always appertain to things human, will in this latter case be made permanent; and the devotions of many souls will be repressed; and error will pass into malignity and heresy; and innocent diversity of opinion or of practice will go out into rancorous and deadly schism. This has been the woful history of the Church of Christ. It takes but the enactment of a positive law-done in a moment of deliberation, or, it may be, of carelessness or of passionto make a religious duty or a sin of a matter in itself indifferent or unimportant; and rulers, as well ecclesiastical as civil, should beware how they exert their power. The great fault of ecclesiastical legislators, in all ages of the Church, has been in legislating too much. They seem to have forgotten how wide and almost boundless is the application of a law, though it appear to be circumscribed; and that even a legal license will operate somewhere as a legal prohibition. They seem to have forgotten that there are laws in nature itself and in the Gospel as well as in their codes of canons. The legislators of a Church ought to have faith in the common sense and the deliberate judgments and the sincere hearts of the Christian people; they should trust much to the laws of experience, the laws of the human mind and affections; they should have calm confidence in the

gracious care of the Holy Spirit, the superintendence of the Head of the Church. They ought not to seek to curtail the liberty of the earnest soul in its searchings after holiness and God.

The Protestant Episcopal Church, as it now exists, is, in the highest sense, an adaptive Church. It is able to take in the countless diversities in the practice of the Christian community, and to hallow them all by the spirit of unity; to convert them all from opponents, often too bitter and severe, into friendly and loving coworkers with each other, all in the unity of its one capacious system. We pray that the day may be forever removed when this Church shall be taken off from its present free and adaptive principles, to be placed upon an intolerant and sectarian foundation. And if the day shall come when its own members and others professing Christianity shall understand well the adaptiveness of its system, then the glorious ideal of an united and happy Church will be realized. But never can that ideal be realized until these principles are acknowledged sincerely and in practice.

If the writer may be indulged in offering one word of advice to his Christian brethren generally, he will say: Let the principles of a Church so free and so adaptive be carried out. So long as men are willing to conform to laws which respect essential duty, leave them in other matters to their liberty. You cannot, you ought not to restrict them. If men are willing to strive after holiness, let them do so in every way; it is hard enough to be gained in any way. And be sure that whatsoever custom or effort will promote holiness is accordant with the design and the system of Christ's true

Church. Let men alone, leave them to themselves, so long as they are willing to come together upon the great essential principles on which Christ's Church is founded.

To the Protestant Episcopalian we say: Look well to the system of your Church, and endeavor to catch its spirit of forbearance and toleration, its spirit of wisdom and comprehensiveness. And remember, if ever you should be tempted to strive, or even to wish, to restrict the Christian liberty of your brother-his liberty in things not essential to salvation-then you will be tempted to war treacherously, and in the spirit of sectarism, against the grand and glorious principles upon which your Church is established.

SECTION XX.

RELIGIOUS DEVOTION AND ACTION.

Two tests of a Church. Religious Devotion-Formularies of the Protestant Episcopal Church-high spirituality-order of services-holy men of the Church-distinction between the system of the Protestant Episcopal Church and other systems for the production of devotion. Relig ious Action-variety and arrangement of evangelical subjects—in connection with liberty--and with adaptiveness-the Protestant Episcopal Church the revival Church of the United States-working of the system-such a Church should be dear to all true Christians.

IN looking at the system of a Church as a practical system, there are, among others, two grand results by which it must be tested: first, Religious Devotion, that is, its capacity to improve and cultivate the piety and spirituality of Christ's disciples; and next, Religious

Action, that is, its fitness to act upon the world in converting it to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In considering these results from the system of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, we can only allude to them in the briefest terms. We do so, that the reader may follow out the subject more fully in his own thoughts, and in the more extensive treatises of others.

I. RELIGIOUS DEVOTION.-The Formularies of social public worship, or, as the Church terms it, of common prayer, illustrate the spiritual standard of Churchmen.*

*"Our Liturgy," says Bishop Newton, was composed principally out of Scripture or out of ancient liturgies and fathers. Our prayers are addressed to the proper object through the proper Mediator: to the one God, through the 'one Mediator between God and man,' the man Christ Jesus. Each collect (prayer) begins with a solemn invocation of the one, and concludes with the prevailing merits and intercessions of the other. The variety of our service is another excellence in the composition of it, and contributes much to the keeping up of our attention and devotion. A sameness in anything soon satiates and wearies us; and it is as difficult to keep the mind as it is the body long in one posture. But by the beautiful intermixture of prayer and praise, of supplication and thanksgiving, of confession and absolution, of hymns and creeds, of psalms and lessons (of Holy Scripture), our weariness is relieved, our attention is renewed, and we are led on agreeably from one subject to another. The frame of our Liturgy is somewhat like the frame of the world; it is order in variety, and though all the parts are different, yet the whole is consistent and regular. What renders it more excellent is its comprehensiveness. There is nothing that relates either to ourselves or others, nothing that concerns us either as men or members of society, nothing that conduces to our happiness in this world or in the world to come, but is comprehended in some or other of the petitions. It is casy, while the minister is reading it, to appropriate and apply any passage to ourselves and our own case. A great deal is expressed, but more is implied; and our devotions in our closets, and in our families, we cannot better perhaps

We cannot enter here into any analysis of these. We beg the reader to examine for himself the Book of Common Prayer of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States; and we venture to affirm that, however high may be his attainments in the divine life, in express than in the words of our Liturgy, it is so suited to all ranks and conditions, and adapted to all wants and occasions. The congregation have particular reason to be pleased, as they have a larger share in our service than in any other whatever; and the minister and people mutually raise and inflame each other's devotions. It is a singular privilege, therefore, that our people enjoy, of bearing so large a part in our service; and it is this that properly denominates ours, what really none else is, a book (service) of COMMON prayer.”—Quoted in Bishop Hobart's “ Companion for the Book of Common Prayer,” pp. 8–10.

"I discovered in this (the Protestant Episcopal) Church, in addition to sound doctrine, evangelical piety, and a truly catholic spirit, the appendages of a Liturgy which furnished the worshipper with a medium of prayer that was appropriate, comprehensive, and spiritual, that afforded security against offensive additions as well as defections and variations, and that established a firm bulwark against any extensive or permanent degeneration into heresy-a form of public worship that gave and secured to the Scriptures their deserved participation in the service of the sanctu ary, and a discipline which a succession of ages has proved to be an effectual preservation of union and subordination. I was not a little confirmed in my determination to make this the Church of my choice, by the approbation which intelligent and catholic-spirited clergymen of my former communion awarded to the Episcopal Church; and among them one, who stands second to scarcely a clergyman in the land in point of influence, learning, and talent, assured me that, had he known as much of this Church when he was a candidate for the ministry as he now did, he should without hesitation have made his election to be an Episcopalian. In conclusion, I will only add that nearly fifteen years of intimate acquaintance with this Church has strengthened my bond of attachment, nor have I to record a single circumstance of a seriously adverse character, save this—that Episcopalians in general do not rise up to the lofty standard and sublime spirituality of the Liturgy, Articles, and Discipline of their Apostolic Church.”—Extract from a letter in the Rev. J. A. Clark's "Walk about Zion," pp. 277, 278.