schools, provided Protestants are alert and vigorous and aggressive, and steadfastly unyielding in their defence and use of these instrumentalities and agencies.

We must vie with Rome. We must anticipate her. We must have Bibles and a school-house wherever she has adherents and a church. She is scattering her poisonous leaves by the hundred thousand. Wherever these leaves fall we must wing an antidote. Already she is on a vigorous crusade among the freedmen. We must see to it that she does not bind worse fetters on their spirits than were the bodily bonds of them that the war broke. Having given the freedmen civil liberty, it will be a criminal shame if we do not lead them to the sweets of that liberty wherewith Christ makes his people free, and thus save them from the spiritual thraldom of the Papacy. Westward we must push our Protestantism, occupying all the waste places, possessing the land with intelligence and godliness. The unscriptural dogmas of Romanism must be frequently exhibited and discussed and shown to be antagonistic to God's Word, in the ordinary ministrations of our pulpits. There must be a vastly increased use of the press, both in extent and efficiency, seeking to inform the public mind and arouse the public conscience, concerning the efforts and the claims of this usurping Romish hierarchy. In addition to all this we must more thoroughly organize our forces, and armed with the mind that was in Christ Jesus and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, we must seek directly and aggressively, boldly and unceasingly, to evangelize the Roman Catholic population itself.

Let divinest love fill our hearts as we go to this warfare. We have had too much of malice and rancor and human motive. "Constrained by the love of Christ:" that is the highest impulsion to any work for God. With love for the truth and love for the Master, and love for the victims of Romish superstition and ecclesiastical tyranny, let us go forth to establish love's supremacy-to break the rod of sacerdotal oppression by the peaceful sceptre of Christ; to rescue from the restraints of priestly despotism by giving the true liberty of the sons of God; to charm men away from Popish mummery and painted crosses by the attractive power of the thing signified by Christ's one cross; to stop their payment of a price for salvation, by telling them of a Saviour offered without money and without price. Over our moral waste places and among our ignorant masses, West and South, and in our great metropolitan centres, we must carry, in the spirit of the Master, the principles of His Gospel.Before the divine potency of that alone will the proud barriers and the dark images of Romish superstition fall. And only thus shall we be able to keep, what we have fallen heirs to, conscience without persecution, the ballet without dictation, legislation without sectarian preference, speech without ecclesiastical gag, religious difference without anathema, and a church without a pontiff.

Church Unity.

REV. E. S. PORTER, D.D.

THE several branches of the Evangelical Catholic Church are every day coming nearer toward one another. And they are coming in virtue of the assimilating force that is deeper than creeds, and deeper far than mere preferences for special forms, whether of worship or of government. That force is defined in Holy Scripture as the "unity of the Spirit."And this, I maintain, is the only organic unity for which we are to pray, labor and legislate. Ecclesiastical combinations must be its product.

Let us then inquire into the nature of this unity. To do so understandingly, we must consider the meaning of three words in very common use, Christianity, Church, and Religion.

Christianity is regarded by the Rationalists as a system of truth more or less divine, which must needs be measured by human reason before it can bind the consciences of men. This low and inadequate view of its character generates sects that pass for Christian, yet, though Protestant as against the superstitions of the Papacy, still are not evangelical, inasmuch as they deny the infallibility of the Holy Scriptures, and reject the vicarious atonement of our Lord, with all its related doctrines.

The Orthodox faith is this, that Christianity, objectively considered, is the completed revelation of the Divine will contained in the sacred word. It is the truth as it is in Jesus, accompanied by the Holy Ghost. Christianity is Christ revealing himself to the human consciousness. It is a life-force, working with supernatural energy in creating the kingdom of God in the earth. As such, whether as truth written by the pen of inspiration; or as a revealing power making known the way of salvation; or as a spiritual energy enthroning Christ head over all things to his Church, it is perfect and complete. None can add to or take from it without incurring wrath.

But subjectively Christianity varies with individuals, classes, communities and denominations, and it varies because of physiological differences that always have and always will exist, under apparently different styles or forms of religion, that will presently be considered.

Christianity is God manifest in the flesh, first in the person of the man Christ Jesus, and then in the Church, which is his body. The soul is Christ, for the Church lives only as Christ lives in it just as really and potentially as the human soul lives in the human organism.

Of the Church it is to be noted first of all that it is one in the line of historical transmission. There is but one God, one Saviour, one Sanctifier, one inspired record of revelation, one heaven, and One Name after which the whole family in heaven and in earth is named, and so there can be but one Church of God.

This Church is Catholic-that is, it includes all who of one age or all ages, fear God and keep his commandments; and because it contains all the truth necessary to salvation.

What, then, is essential to the being of a church? Souls that are in fellowship with the Divine Mind and cultivate holiness through the grace of the Spirit, looking unto Jesus as the author and finisher of their faith. Thus the Church may be "in the house" visible yet unorganized, having not a single formal rite, and offering without priestly direction the sacrifices of broken and contrite hearts. But as these believing souls are gathered into assemblies, and orders of procedure and of government become necessary, then the Church should have the "word" in its purity, the sacraments in their simplicity, and duly appointed teachers, to reprove, rebuke, instruct and exhort. The external, ecclesiastical arrangements, which we style Church government, are not of the essence of the Church itself, and are to be liked or disliked, in proportion as they may help or hinder the evangelistic work of the Word and Spirit.

The instant you undertake to erect an ecclesiastical rule, order, or rite, into a supreme test of faith and of discipleship, and go on to maintain that a certain mode of administration, whether in ordination or baptism, is essential to the being of a Church, you have adopted the baneful heresy that has covered the past thousand years with passionate strifes and fanatical wars.

Wherein consists the unity of the Church? There is a vast difference between ecclesiastical unity, which is of the external appliances of government; and organic unity, which is the product of the Holy Spirit. On this point definite views are most important. It has been charged over and over again, and with so much confidence in its seeming truthfulness, that Protestants are divided, that they have no common life, no unity of purpose, but are like fragments of a dismembered body, rushing hither and thither without harmony or direction, that it is time to arrest the vagrant slander and expose its falsehood.

The evangelical denominations have the only organic unity that is possible, and that is, the unity of the Spirit whereby they are made one through a common life derived from Christ, the Head. You can not stick men and women together with any ecclesiastical paste that has yet been invented. You might gather green branches, and arrange them in beautiful order around a central post, and bind them there with iron bands, so that they should seem to be a tree; yet would they wither, for the want of that organizing force that runs through the fibres of the oak, and makes root, and trunk, and branches all one, with an identity of nature.

An outward union, of opposite or divergent things, mechanically contrived and forcibly executed, can never have a common life, by any such human methods. For God only can control the springs of life, and He

always works from within, making the visible to be the product of the invisible. Thus, the unity of the race is not destroyed, but remains active, notwithstanding governments are despotic, oligarchic, or republican. Nor is this unity impaired, even by diversities of external customs. For mankind is one, despite all the differing grades of institutions maintained for its welfare.

The unity of the race is predicated upon the proofs of a common origin, and upon the possession of a common nature. And thus we affirm that all those who are begotten again in Christ Jesus and possess the life of Christ in their souls, are one in a deep, real, permanent kinship, notwithstanding external variations. And, what is more, there can be no other unity universal and perpetual in the Church than this. It was for such unity that our Saviour prayed, and who will dare to say that his prayer has remained unanswered all through these eighteen hundred years?

Rome, the great anti-Christian power, has been fighting on a thousand battle-fields, to compel an external, mechanical unity; but human nature, tortured, persecuted, and immolated by her fierce persecutions, is incapable of submitting to an outrage that would expel freedom from the world. She has met with as much success as though she had passed a decree that all the earth should be flat, all rivers of the same depth, and all flowers of the like color, and then had armed her champions to go forth and enforce it.

The Father of Spirits has not made all souls equal in texture, capacity or stature! How then will you bend them all down into a dismal, dreary, stagnant, miasmatic marsh, to be flooded from one putrid pool, wherein the bilge-water of Noah's ark is kept for their sole refreshment?

No! organic unity, as an ecclesiastical device, is but as a dream that glides off from the opening eyelids, when the sweet dawn chases away the fantasies of the night! Alexander, who conquered the world, was the forerunner of ages of national chaos, and so the visible head of the Church, in Rome, is convicted in the tribunal of history of being the leader of a most seditious rabble of heresies, divisions, strifes, and enormous schisms, that will be healed never, until his mitre has rusted in that crowded sepulchre where he has caused to be interred the rights of humanity as the foundations of his throne.

Compare and estimate what this divided and disjointed Protestantism has accomplished, with what the organized unity of Rome has done in the portions of the earth over which they have exerted control. Compare England with Spain, Prussia with Austria, Switzerland with Italy, the United States with Mexico, and to what conclusion must every man of sense come? The real power has been with the Protestant denominations, whose reliance has rested on the sacred Word.

The unity of the Church, then, must be confessed to be in its ever

living Head. This gives its history a divine consistency, and its life a divine and therefore indestructible energy, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. This is a unity which neither invalidates creeds nor forms of administration, but is superior to them all. For neither creed nor rite can be any substitute for that organic spiritual union which subsists between Christ the Head, and all the members of his living body, which is his Church,

The catholicity of the Church is not a numerical quantity. Catholicity and universality are not words of the same meaning. The Catholic Church was once in the family of Seth. Then it floated in the ark with Noah. Then it traveled from Mesopotamia, and reposed at night with Abraham beneath the Syrian skies. Then it went down into Egypt and up into the wilderness, and finally until the fulness of time, took up its abode in Canaan.

They who are called of God and are sanctified in Christ, with their children, make up the whole Church numerically. But the test of catholicity cannot be cut down to any one or more characteristic of any one branch of the Church. The Church that is to be will enthrone Jesus Christ as supreme, make his word the whole directory of faith and practice, and fellowship all who believe with the heart and confess with the mouth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Having thus spoken of Christianity and the Church, it remains to say a few words respecting religion.

It is the subjection of the whole man, body and soul, to the authority of the one Lord and Master. All true religion is education. But education, whether secular or religious, is a very complex affair. It will be graduated by the capacities of pupils, qualifications of teachers and the general theory of its use. Carry over these simple maxims into the sphere of religion, and we shall find:

1. That to large masses religion is an intellectual conception of a dogma or creed, with whom Orthodoxy is a right way of thinking in technical terms. Two persons believing the same thing, but using different words to express it, the one long and the other short, accenting syllables with unequal degrees of force, become heretics in each other's eyes. For each is willing to suspend the problem of salvation upon the form of a word or the stress of a syllable. This much and no more, has divided parties and plunged nations into fearful wars.

2. With other masses religion is feeling, a mystic impulse, a wild rapture, or a frenzied agony of indefinable bliss, that groans or mutters or shouts while the ecstacy lasts. To such the meets and bounds of a creed are hateful and evil.

3. Another class regards religion as a devout performance on the Lord's day. It is a social decency, that is as well in one house of wor