ing of a well furnished host of Puritan ministers, and our country is safe; its songs of liberty shall swell forth in sweeter notes; truth shall have free course; and the overwhelming influence of an intelligent Christianity-illustrated in the holy living, the pure example, the free spirit of living churches, owned and blessed of God-will do for the groveling, ignorant, and servile population that flows in upon us from the old world, what the personal efforts of an army of transient preachers, or flying laborers, can never accomplish. Romanism, if broken down, and banished from our free country, is to be broken down by the presence and influence of our free institutions by the Gospel exhibited in its transforming effects upon society-by showing a more excellent way in the life and prosperity of those embracing its truths in their purity. This is the living epistle on which Paul relied for his highest instrumentality in the world's conversion. Every church, thus planted and sustained, is a light placed where it must be seen-is the leaven in society, by which the lump is to be leavened. The hardened, the stupid, the bigoted, and corrupt devotee, may refuse to read. His priest may burn the Bible and the tract which charity placed in his hand. He may be too deaf to hear the argument which affection presses upon his understanding, and too blind to perceive its conclusions; but these living, free, and devout churches are before him and around him-amid their members he moves, and with them transacts the business of life from day to day. If his own personal bigotry shall have closed all the avenues to his soul, his children mingling in the common school, and watching the elasticity of their spirits who breathe the air of religious liberty, will be, sooner or later, imbued by the same spirit; and what can not be done by precept and argument, will yet be accomplished by

the contact of society and an inspiring example.

If the views we have advanced are correct, and for their truth we appeal to all who have resided on the soil, and mingled in the scenes of western life, then it seems to follow with the certainty of a corollary in mathematics, that it is an indispensable part of the means for evangelizing the West, that facilities should be furnished for educating thoroughly upon the ground, the teachers and ministers by whose agency the work is to be accomplished.

Local circumstances and relations work out singular transformations of character, and with singular rapidity. Had the pilgrims and their descendants continued to dwell in the crowded cities and narrow homes of the father land, who needs the spirit of inspiration to teach him what would have been their dissimilarity to the present population of New England?

The causes that combine to produce change of taste, character and habits, in our western population, are far more numerous than any that existed in the early settlement of New England. Among these, the intermingling, in the population, of people of every conceivable taste and habit, is far from being the least. The results indicate a more rapid change than most persons would anticipate. The sturdy old Puritan character does not indeed rapidly pass away. The influence of education, and early moral culture remains, and furnishes a field where the " good seed" may be sown with hope. But the free air they breathe, far away from the restraints of religious teaching and well organized society, modifies essentially their temper and habits. It frequently occurs that those, who in the land of their birth were in the lowest conditions of society, suddenly find themselves standing at its head. This growth, though

not always in accordance with the ordinary laws of progress, or a proper regard to due proportions, is yet absolute as well as relative.

Men who in the circles where they had their origin, would have ever stood back, relying upon others' opinions, are not unfrequently, in a new settlement, thrown upon their own resources, and compelled to think and act; and hence, by the same law of necessity, they are forced to read, observe, and resort to all available sources for informa tion. Hence it is that the West abounds with what are sometimes called self-made men-men who have fitted themselves for the emergencies into which they are thrown.

That such men should be more accessible, or be more easily moved by a ministry, themselves imbued by habit and by education with the same spirit, and familiar with the traits of character with which they are to come in contact, is in accordance with the plainest principles of

common sense.

men

We do not say a word to detract from the acknowledged usefulness of the hundreds of young from our eastern seminaries, whose labors are already devoted in season and out of season, in carrying the consolations of the Gospel to the millions of our countrymen. We disparage not their efforts when we 'say that men imbued with the western spirit, trained amid western influences, and educated in the region where they are destined to labor, will have more adaptation, and with greater facility become all things to all men, than those educated abroad. It is not enough that their primary education is obtained at the West. New England might as well expect to increase the usefulness of her future ministry by sending her sons to Europe for their education, as might the western churches by educating their young men in the colleges of New England.

Nor have we taken in the whole view, when we have contemplated this want of adaptation to a new field of labor in the youthful missionary. Many indeed there are of sufficient elasticity of mind, to accommodate themselves with surprising facility to the aspects and condition of society in a new country. There are however men of great excellence, of pure classic taste, and refined sensibilities, and to whom success would have been certain in a community homogeneous with themselves, who lack the directness, the fire, the pithiness, and the power of adaptation, essential in a western speaker who find their talents undervalued, their tastes ill suited to the state of things around them, and despond under the disappointment. The romance of missionary life vanishes with their first acquaintance in their new station. They expected to find a people tractable, and reverent, paying great deference to the opinions of one of enlarged mental cultivation and full of theological lore a people filled with admiration of the love that could prompt to such self-sacrifice for the single purpose of doing good to men. Instead of this, they find a community many of whom have become so accustomed to self-instruction in other matters that they scarcely feel the necessity of much religious teaching, and who, if they do not "better know the Lord," are not wanting in the opinion that they are "wiser than their teachers are"-a community many of whom feel that they confer rather than receive a favor, when they employ "a missionary from the East," and "subscribe" three hundred dollars as his annual salary.

We would be far from intimating that there are no exceptions to the state of things here described. Nor is it irremediable where it exists. Men who are thoroughly pre-acquainted with the elements with which they have to contend, and who have skill

to meet these elements, will find them by no means among the most difficult, to be molded and shaped into the forms that render society desirable. The transforming power of the Gospel is never more happily illustrated than it has been in its influence upon such communities, in many hundred instances. So far as we have been able to consult facts and make observations, men of western habits and education have been most successful in accomplishing these results.

Let it not here be said that we are advancing views antagonistic to the statements made in another part of this article. We would by no means forego the Puritan element in the instrumentalities to be employed in western evangelization. We only say, let that element be nurtured and developed on the ground where it is to be called into active service. Let it be done in institutions after the New England model, and under the instruction of men themselves deeply imbued with the New England spirit.

We have, before we close, a word to say of the pecuniary support which is to be furnished to the class of thoroughly educated men, who leave the pleasant homes and refined society of the eastern states to devote their lives to the moral and intellectual culture of the West. Men who go there to gratify their ambition, or their love of wealth, find a field equal to their highest hopes. It is rarely true that any class of men, who go to the West relying upon their own resources for support, fail to improve their condition in life. In all the departments of skill and manual labor, industry meets its sure reward.

It is otherwise with those who rely for their support on voluntary con tributions. Those who fill the de partment of instruction in western colleges and theological seminaries, and who labor as ministers of the Gospel, must rely to a considerable extent on the benefactions of eastern churches. Nor is it enough that their persons do not grow lean from hunger, or that they are protected from the elements without. The character of the men who are to be converted, and trained for usefulness on earth and glory in heaven, by their instrumentality, and the nature of the service they are to render, present the strongest argument for an elevated standard of intellectual culture. The West must have men to fill both her chairs of instruction and her pulpits, who shall not be satisfied with the amount of intellectual capital with which they engaged in the service-men who shall employ the best hours of life with intense thought in a well furnished study-men who shall be untrammeled, on the one hand, by the poverty that makes the heart sick; or, on the other, by those worldly cares which furnish the only alternative when a competence is withheld. If there are men on earth who deserve a competence, they deserve it who enter the wilderness, and give a life time to the work of gathering an infant church, and setting in order whatever is wanting to make that church, and the community with which it is associated, worthy of our pilgrim ancestry; worthy of the high destiny of the nation of which they are a part; worthy of Him who redeemed them with his blood. This competence can not be furnished at the West.

As successive generations pass away, and go down to the grave, there is a natural tendency in truth to go along with them, and be buried out of the sight of those that follow. Hence, if a member of a present generation, beholding the threatened loss of any truth, interposes and saves it, or, searching the tombs of the fathers, finds and brings up to light again a buried treasure of past time, he not only deserves well of all his contemporaries, but richly merits also that unequaled reward which truth itself, like virtue, is ever ready to pay.

Somewhat like these were our reflections when rising from the perusal of Dr. Hopkins' sermon, founded upon those marvelous hints of Paul concerning the subjection of the "creature" or "creation" to 66 vanity," or the "bondage of corruption." Rom. viii, 19-22. Not indeed that the leading sentiment of this discourse, viz. the correspond. ence of the phase of terrestrial nature to the moral character of the human race, had been entirely lost in the graves of the fathers,-for it has made a lasting impression upon the mind of many a living reader of Beza, Milton, the elder Edwards, and others both before and after them: but that to many, it was like a lost truth, and that to more there was danger of its soon becoming so. To help on with its burial, has been the whole drift of a philosophy which has been struggling in modern years, and with far too much encouragement, for supremacy. Men have been sedulously taught by it, that past ages put altogether unwarrant

* A Sermon preached before the Annual Convention of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts in Boston, May 29, 1845. By Mark Hopkins, D. D., President of Williams College. Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin, 24 Congress st. 1845.

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ed stress upon the figures, by which the Scriptures represent the enormi. ty of the nature, and the magnitude of the effects, of sin; and that, however it may be in poetry, it is not in fact true, that there has been such an apostasy as brought death into the world, and all our woe." Preachers, essayists, lecturers, and editors, numerous, gifted, and popular, have with a zeal worthy of the best cause, every where taught the people to hold, not only as a fancy, but as a perfect horror, the idea that Satan should be permitted such success in his dark and dreadful plot, as to entail disease, pain, and death upon man; much more, that he should be suf fered to exult in a whole world defaced, deformed, or wrecked. no doubt their teachings have taken strong hold. They have succeeded in introducing, to a lamentable extent, a "fashion," or "form of sentimentalism, which leads some to see only what is beautiful and sublime and useful in nature"-which is admirably rebuked by Dr. H., not only on the page from which these quotations are made, but also by the

And

entire sentiment of the discourse. And many thanks are due to the man, who ventured to stand before such an audience as was gathered in Boston, May 29, 1845, and take such broad ground concerning the curse of sin; and who was able to vindicate so well the views which the New England fathers held as the true meaning of these words of Paul, and to interpose so good an effort as this to save truth from falling in the streets, or from being buried in the grave แ as a dead man out of mind." It was 66 a word fitly spoken."

But we must restrain our pen, for we intend no set eulogy. Neither do we design a criticism. We leave them for others.

We will remark, however, that with a selected topic like this, and before such an assembly, and especially from one who comes as an accredited prior from the cloisters of learning, and in an age where such official ones are presumed to have stood on the Pisgah of Science, expectation looked for no ordinary production. Nor did it look in vain. The items are very few, if any, of argument or style, and as few of philosophy to which adverse criticism could take exceptions. Nevertheless, some veterans in exegesis, might strongly, if not justly, contend with Dr. H. against the extension of the word "lois" beyond the animate to the inanimate and senseless creation. Perhaps, also, many readers who sympathize with the preacher, in the main, will withhold their assent from his sug gestions as to the ultimate causes of the present state of physical corruption. No doubt there are men, not of the Unitarian school, who, if bent on strict philosophical scrutiny, might deny the actual distortion, or bending aside of nature, organized beings excepted, from a state in itself absolutely perfect, and which in itself might have been no other wise had sin never entered the world. The inquiry can, without doubt, honestly and orthodoxly be made, whether, in order to produce this instructive and admonitory correspondence between the physical and moral face of the earth, it is unavoidably necessary that the curse and degradation of sin should reach further than animation and its senses, and produce a state of actual degradation and deformity in the rest of nature likewise; whether a degrading and primitive change in the inhabitants of the world, on the one part, is not sufficient to establish this sin-rebuking sympathy, or correspondence, of mind with matter, without an absolute degradation of the world itself, on the other part; whether to beings sinless, though corVOL. IV.

6

poreal, there would be a choice for elements in " repose" above elements in motion; whether to unfallen angels, standing where we do in nature, the earth would indeed have "the appearance of being a ruin ;" whether the judgment of man's mind on this point is not dependent on the medium, i. e. the senses, by which the mind procures her facts; whether, to one both without sin and the "infirmities" of sin, any "terror" would forerun the "beauty," as "the rainbow spans the thunder cloud;" whether, if the earth" yields scantily, and to the hand of labor only," sinless beings would need that she should yield more freely; whether, if the listeners were themselves different, the "wild shrieks and howlings of the tempest" might not be very music; in short, whether, to use the words of the discourse itself, "the relations of man to the material universe as changed by the fall," necessarily imply a change both in man and in the universea change in the universe for man, as well as in man for the universe— or, simply a change in man or organized nature; and so there be, "not only seeming, but real evil, in the system of things with which we are connected.

But we make not these inquiries for ourselves. The two theories, if so they may be called, arrive at the self-same result. Practically, they are identical. If the earth to man be cursed, that is enough; it is a matter of no moment to us now, whether it wears that appearance to angels or not.

Either of these suppositions, as before hinted, would be, and already is, set down by many wisdom-boasting lips, as mere song, savoring of large credulity, and unworthy the embrace of disencumbered reason. Nevertheless, either of them may be true. The world has long since learned, that "to err is human ;" while, if there is any certainty, any truth, any resting place for the sole