of which new churches at the West are composed. It has been an important point in the Home Missionary effort from its commencement, to harmonize the scattered communicants of the Presbyterian, Congregational and kindred churches, so far as to gather them into one communion. "The plan of union" received the sanction of the General Assemby and the General Association of Connecticut with this end in view. The greater portion of our western churches are in debted largely to the provisions of that compromise for the present measure of their prosperity. And yet it amounted to little more than an external bond. It brought the scattered members of Christ's flock around the same table and constituted them one family, but their tastes, their habits, their opinions, on many of the doctrines of the Bible, their views of the discipline, and of most of the practices of a Christian church, still widely differed. The little church composed of a score of members, is the representative of some half dozen distinct members of our national confederacy, besides a fair delegation from the kingdoms of the old world. Each wishes a minister cast in the same theological mold with himself, attached to the same practices and trained after the same model.

Is the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to be administered? One would have it done "after the approved model of the New England churches ;" another would seat the communicants around "the table" neatly spread along the broad aisle; a third insists that the Savior used unleavened bread, and the ordinance is without validity except it be celebrated "after the pattern showed in the mount." The same diversity appears in their views of the administration of every religious service, from the highest duties of the sanctuary to the ordinary parochial visitations. Each values his own

mode, and is perhaps now, for the first time, advised that there is any other in practice, at least in his own denomination. To relinquish that in which he was educated, and around which his most sacred associations cluster, with the ardor of a first love, is giving up half his religion; is, at least, stripping it of its embel. lishments, and taking away its beauty. Nor are these feelings to be trifled with; they are sacred associations, and may not be roughly handled. When the missionary arrives and gathers such a church, and commences the work of building the spiritual temple, he is often thrown into circumstances that stri kingly remind him of the feelings of the Jews, at the building of the second temple. "The chief of the fathers, who were ancient men that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy." And yet of these diverse materials, the new pastor must erect a spiritual temple, homogeneous in its character, having symmetry of form and unity of design, or he fails in the errand which has brought him hither. "All the building" must be "fitly framed together," or it will not " it will not "grow into a holy temple in the Lord," and form "a habita"tion of God through the Spirit."

We have now the nucleus of a church. Let us inquire for the source whence the materials for its enlargement are to come. It may have accessions, it doubtless will, in the constant flowing in of emigrants. But these are as dis similar as were their predecessors. Besides, the proportion of religious people, and especially of our own denomination, to the whole emigra. tion, is small. Almost all Chris tian denominations are represented whereever a new settlement is plant. ed; but these add not to the strength of the little band whom we have seen gathered into a church. If it

is to increase and flourish, sinners are to be converted. But who are these sinners? Whence came they? Have they been trained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Are they the children of the covenant, who have left their early religious privileges with regret? who are eager to listen, and anxious to be lieve? who need but the converting grace of God and they shall be able to teach others? Are they those who from childhood have been made acquainted with the Holy Scriptures? Far from it. The converts at Corinth were scarcely in a more emphatic sense babes in Christ, than are the lambs of this flock in the wilderness. Such men are to constitute the pillars, if pillars it shall have, in this infant church. And who needs to be told that much ministerial labor and self-denial, and many hours of anxious thought must be experienced by this pastor, before such helpers shall have "learned to use the office of a deacon well, and purchase to themselves a good degree, and great boldness in the faith."

We might dwell at length upon the facility with which every shade of fanaticism fastens, indelibly, its impressions upon such a state of society the readiness with which error takes root in this fertile soilwhile there are wanting all the arrangements of a well organized society to resist its progress. The pastor, sustained by an intelligent, numerous, and highly cultivated church, encouraged by an organized and homogeneous society, where all is kept in countenance by a chaste public opinion, can never, while destitute of personal experience, be made fully sensible of the difficulties of maintaining discipline, and preserving harmonious movement in a church, such as we have described, while the influences from without, if not adverse, can not be said to be auxiliary.

With such materials to build with,
VOL. IV.

5

and so defective, there is still much to be done that is peculiar to this field of labor. The eye of this stranger, who has cast his lot with others in the wilderness, rests on the forms of society in the land where lies the garnered dust of his fathers. He remembers the neat church edifice, as it used to peer out from behind the green foliage of the trees which overshadowed it; the rich tones of the bell; the Sabbath's stillness; the silent and measured tread of the hundreds that flocked to the house of God to worship; the neatness, and order, and apparent devotion, of the worshipers; the burial place in the vicinity, its green sod dotted all over with the memorials which affection has planted by the graves of depart ed love. From these his eye wanders back to his college scenes, to the academy where were nurtured his first aspirations for the sacred office of the ministry, to the common school, whose power and purity have done more than all else, save the Gospel, for the land of the pilgrims. As he returns to gaze upon the scenes of his new home, all these are wanting-or, if a commencement be made, the first rude effort seems scarcely to indicate room for hope of future success. His church edifice is the humblest cabin, whose materials are as the hand of nature's great Architect formed them. The primitive forest throws up its gigantic trunks, and spreads its foliage so dense and high that the breezes scarcely fan, and the sun's rays can not cheer, this rude abode of the ark of the covenant.

A few fresh graves mark the spot designated as the last resting place of these adventurers. The gloom of the deep, dark forest broods over the spot, which has no monument but the fresh earth, and is enclosed only by the interminable wilderness. The Sabbath returns, but who knows that it is the Sabbath. The sound of

the woodman's axe, the crash of the falling forest, the crack of the hunter's rifle, and the slow movements of the emigrant's team, awaken associations of any other than the day of rest. The congregation, when convened, do scarcely more to remind the preacher, except by the contrast, of the pleasant scenes of a New England audience met for God's worship. And yet it may be, there occupy those rough seats the young men who are yet to thrill the nation with their eloquence, and sway the popular mind as the trees are moved by the tempest-the men on whose will is to hang the destinies of the land, and the prosperity of the church of God. There is energy there, but its fires have not yet been kindled; there is talent, but like the kernel, which yet the husk envelopes, it can not be seen. How shall it be cultivated? Whence are to come the means, and where are the provisions for its future training? The only blow yet struck is the preparation of this rude cabin, which serves the double purpose of the school-house and church. The academy is yet to be furnished; a conception of its plan, its location, the source from which it is to be derived, are among the things wrapt up in the future. We may not yet ask whether the higher institutions of science are to be enjoyed-and when and where. And yet here is an embryo world; and as the missionary fastens his eye upon the scene he pictures to himself a New England village with its church, its intelligence, its piety, its institutions of learning and religion, its Sabbath, its revivals, and its hundreds of devout worshipers, all supplanting this wilderness scene, and cheering this now desolate spot. In his hours of despondency he is almost ready to say, "If the Lord would open windows in heaven, then might such a thing be," but faith triumphs, and he resumes his work, with the inspiration of hope to cheer his heart

and nerve his arm, confident of ulti

mate success.

Let us now turn and see if we can discern how these changes are to be accomplished.

They are by no means to be sudden and miraculous.

The forest melts away as the fruit of patient industry. By a succession of well applied blows, each one of which seems too ineffective to demand notice, one gigantic oak after another is prostrate, till at length the harvest waves luxuriantly upon the soil. By the same slow and steady process, the conveniencies first, then the comforts, and, at length, the ele gancies of life, succeed to the privations and discomforts of the first rude home in the wilderness. Sometimes, indeed, a tornado will sweep through the forest, prostrating all before it, and seeming at first view to perform the labor of a thousand men, and yet it but increases the toil of the husbandman. gled trunks and massive roots that cover the ground, can be removed only at an expense vastly increased above what is demanded in improving the soil in its natural state.

The tan

The pastor of Christ's flock in the wilderness derives about the same aid, in kind and degree, from those moral whirlwinds that some. times pass over the field of his la bors, sweeping all before them. The fruit of all wise and thorough experience will, we think, amount to this, that the moral wilderness is to be transformed into the garden of the Lord, and made to bud and blossom as the rose, not by impetuous assaults, nor by rousing the tempest, but by "patient continuance in welldoing," giving " line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little."

But again, the means to be used must be modified essentially by the general character of those to whom the missionary goes on this errand. We have already spoken of the want of homogeneousness in the

materials of which western churches are composed. This feature is far more strongly marked in the mass of the population. Like the multitude whom John saw in vision, as they bowed before the throne above, they are "out of every kin dred, and tongue, and people, and nation." And yet it is true that there is one feature predominating over every other, and destined ultimately to give shape to the mass.

The Puritan element is distributed over this entire field, and is the leaven by which the whole lump shall be leavened. All the means employed and to be employed, in the work of promoting western evangelization, must be selected with this fact in view.

So far as the Home Missionary Society is concerned, this feature is strikingly prominent. Its missionaries, with few exceptions, are the descendants of the men who first peopled the rugged shores of New England, whose monuments are the churches, the colleges, seminaries and school-houses, scattered so profusely over the land of the pilgrims. They go forth on their great work of evangelizing the West, imbued with the same love of civil liberty, with the same high estimate of the value of intelligence, as constituting, though not piety itself, yet one of its most valuable auxiliaries-imparting to it character, strength, stability, inflexibility of purpose, and moral courage.

They go to establish the largest religious liberty-not a liberty that has its basis in a latitudinarian construction of the Gospel, and a reckless disregard of every known law of interpretation-but a liberty trammeled by few forms, bound by no traditions of the fathers, that makes every man the interpreter of his own duty, under the guidance of divine truth and a chastened conscience.

For their success they depend not on costly trappings, or imposing forms which address the senses

they make no attempt by the use of mysterious symbols, or tinseled drapery, to excite the imagination by imposing on the understanding, but in the simple manner of Paul, "by manifestation of the truth they commend themselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."

The law which they inculcate is not that of the letter which killeth, but of the spirit which giveth life. The religion they preach from the pulpit, and illustrate in their lives, is not, on the one hand, a dead orthodoxy which devotes entire sermons to the pins of the tabernacle, while single paragraphs suffice for the ark of the covenant, with its tables of the law and its symbols of the Gospel which overshadow it; nor, on the other hand, is it the reckless zeal which thirsts for conquest, that it may swell the number of its allies and gratify its own lust of power, while it sticks at the use of no means, if so be that the end is gained.

They regard the government of the churches they organize, not as a question of divine right, but as a means to an end. That end is the greatest good of the church itself, and its greatest efficiency as a means of good to others in securing their conversion by the grace of God. Local interests, and peculiar circumstances, and the previous habits and personal tastes of the members, are taken into the account in giving shape to, and modifying the form of, the government they adopt. The members must indeed. be men of piety and prayer-who walk by faith, not by sight-men of devout lives and holy conversation, and who shall be willing to associate together for mutual watchfulness and mutual assistance in the Chris tian life; but whether they shall reserve all their rights and powers to be exercised by the whole body of male members, or whether they shall delegate some or all of these powers to chosen men of good re

port, is a matter for each particular church to decide for itself.

The people to whom these missionaries go, are, for the most part, of kindred origin with themselves. If Puritan principles do not warm their hearts, there is yet Puritan blood there. If they are not imbued with the spirit of their fathers, they have not forgotten that they had such sires. If they do not venerate the piety of the men who resisted the despotism of Charles and his Star Chamber, and periled their lives to plant the standard of liberty in the new world, they yet admire their heroism, and their love of freedom, and remember that the same blood flows in their own veins. If on their infant heads was not placed the seal of God's covenant, the promise of God is not circumscribed within the limits of a single generation, but children's children may yet return and walk under its shadow. If they look back and leer at the religious spirit that imbued the common schools of New England in which they were trained, they yet know that the spirit of civil liberty has ever been nurtured in those schools; and though they talk contemptuously of blue laws and a ministry to whom they ascribe the same complexion, they are not unaware that all the liberty we have left us, and all we shall transmit to our descendants, may be traced back to the rigor of those laws and the conservation of the clergy they affect to despise. If they do not refrain from profaning God's Sabbaths, they can not so far banish the impressions of early childhood, as to withhold the concession that the Sabbath is the bulwark of our national liberties. If they do not love to render spiritual worship within the consecrated walls of the house of God, they still love to see its tall spire overshadowing their dwellings; they regard it as the chief adornment of their village, and listen to no music more thrilling than the mellow tones

of its bell. These men have a conscience; they have many sacred associations laid deep in the mind and among the early impressions of childhood. They know the value of religion, for their youth was witness of its divine fruits, and, with all their professed contempt of the Gospel, they are not insensible that there is within them, an "aching void the world can never fill." These men are scattered over the wide West. Whereever there is a water-fall, or a channel deep and silent enough to admit a steamboat upon its bosom, or a valley through which may be excavated a canal, or a plain over which a locomotive may whirl their produce to market, there you find them-they fill the chief stations in society-they give tone to all the laws

they give the decisions and furnish the precedents for future courts of justice-they control the education of the young-they design and execute the public improvementsthey give shape to society. These are the men to whom this Society proposes to preach the Gospel, and whom, by the grace of God, they expect to convert from the error of their ways. Better materials for the formation of intelligent, stable, efficient churches, can not be found on earth. There are men enough of this sort in every state west of the mountains to give tone to morals, and religion, and education, and civil liberty. If they can be drawn effectually to Christ, they will be the salt whose savor is to be everywhere salutary. With the New England population of the western states thoroughly converted, we dread not the assaults of the man of sin. Let him who blasphemously styles himself "the vicar of God on earth," marshall his minions, send out his Jesuit priesthood by ship-loads, and pour out his funds like water. We only ask the arousing of the Puritan spirit, the planting of Puritan churches, the organization and support of Puritan institutions, and the sustain