only by conforming to whatever rule of faith an individual may prescribe in face of the theory. If this is Christian charity we desire none of it. Yet such is the charity of "liberal" Christians. If we were called upon to prepare a catalogue of bigots who are not of the Romish faith, we should place first that distinguished gentleman, the late President of Harvard College, the man of "no denomination," who would proscribe men of all denominations from the government of a state institution; next, Dr. Dewey, who in his Berry street address declares that he "would rather be an infidel than a Calvinist, a strict Calvinist of the old school;" and yet withholds the Christian name from Rationalists; and for the rest, we would leave it to Mr. W. H. Channing to complete the list from his "liberal" friends in Boston. We do not doubt that Dr. Putnam is a truly liberal man; but the tendency of the system with which he seems reluctant to be longer identified, is either to the utmost looseness of religious opinions, or the extremest bigotry and self-conceit-rather (might we not say,) both combined.

Let it not be supposed that in thus tracing out the fallacies of the theory of isolation to which Dr. Putnam is led by his logical fidelity to the principles of Unitarianism, we are looking to ecclesiastical organization as the safeguard against infidelity. We desire no more of such organization than the simplest form that now exists among Congregational churches, upon the general principles of the Cambridge Platform. So far as Dr. P.'s objections to ecclesiastical councils and clerical associations are based upon any real or supposed legislative or judicial character which they may wear, we concur with him fully. We believe that churches should exist separately and independently, having no further connection with one another than by occasional corres

pondence and united action, in matters of mutual interest. We fully coincide with Dr. P. when he says, "I know of no legitimate idea of a church but these two; first, any local association of believers organized as any one of our churches is, for the purpose of promoting religious objects among themselves and around them; and second, that ideal, invisible church, which embraces all true followers of Christ wherever scattered through space or time,— an undefined church, universal, catholic. All attempts to realize an idea of a church between these two have failed as to the object proposed, namely, a real unity, and have been a fruitful source of sectarian discord, uncharitableness and oppression."

But we can not go with Dr. P. when he objects to councils as they are usually composed among Congregational churches. These have no resemblance to those ecclesiastical organizations which embody several local churches in one, and which are so foreign to every idea of a church contained in the New Testament. He objects to councils as tending to league several churches together ecclesiastically, and so to create an authority above the individual church. This objection has some force where the system of consociation exists, as that system is sometimes administered; but it does not lie against a proper council, which is neither a territorial nor a permanent body; is always selected freely by the church or the parties concerned, and is never legislative or judicial, but merely advisory, except by mutual agreement. There is nothing in the nature of such a body, to foster that jealousy of ecclesiastical dictation which prevails among Congregationalists who have been brought into contact with other systems of church polity. A council is a very different body from a presbytery or a synod; it can not perform the functions of either. It makes no laws, it issues no causes.

Of what use then is it? Dr. Putnam thinks it is of no use whatever. "When it does nothing," he says, "its business proceedings have too much the aspect of needless form ality; and when any of its members propose that something be really done, discord and defeat are the usual results."*

Now this accords neither with the true theory of councils, nor with our knowledge of their actual operation. It is not true, that their ordinary proceedings are an empty formality; nor that when they fail of a given object, they accomplish nothing. A council always has a moral pow. er, whether its decisions are acquiesced in or not; those decisions being to a greater or less extent the expression of public sentiment. A church, for example, desire to have a pastor set over them. They are fully competent to ordain a man, one of their own number if they please, to this office; it is their election which makes him their pastor, and not the mere ceremony of ordination, just as the ballot-box creates a Governor, and not the mere administration of the oath of office. "This ordination," saith the Platform, "we account nothing else but the solemn putting a man into his place and office in the church, whereunto he had right before by election; being like the installing of a magistrate in the commonwealth.... Ordination doth not constitute an of. ficer, nor give him the essentials of his office." The same Platform declares also, that the ordination service may be performed by some of the brethren of the church. A minister thus installed, might in time gain the respect and confidence of neighboring ministers and churches, and thus extend his own influence and that of his own church; but this would be done very gradually; and as every successive pastor must go through the same period of proba

* Page 9.

tion, there could be but little of that confidence and fellowship among neighboring churches, which was so abundantly manifested in Apostolic times.

But suppose that a church having chosen a pastor, instead of themselves formally inducting him into office, should invite the neighboring pastors and churches to advise with them in the matter, to assist them to ascertain more fully the fitness of the pastor elect, and to bear testimony to the same in the ordination service. In this way the new incumbent would enter upon his ministry under the most favorable auspices; he would be received at once into the fellowship of neighboring ministers and the confidence of the churches, and be placed in a posi tion which he could reach only by years of independent effort. Such approbation, as Cromwell said, “is a matter of conveniency for the sake of order, not of necessity to give faculty to preach the gospel." Its conveniency has been proved in the happy experience of the churches of New England.

If on the other hand, such an examination of the candidate should show him to be unworthy of the place to which he had been called, the council by advising the church to retrace their steps, might save them from a serious evil. Should the council appear to act arbitrarily in refusing to ordain a candidate, the church could invite another, which might decide more impartially; or if a second council should confirm the decision of the first, the church might be satisfied of the wisdom of that decision, and acquiesce in the general opinion of the neighboring churches. Should a church refuse to be guided by that opinion, it could still exercise its own original and inherent right of ordaining, while the neighboring churches could withdraw their countenance. It is this communion of churches, in which the independence of each is

preserved, so that no one church is subordinate to another, while yet the moral influence of each in the form of sympathy, advice, encouragement and admonition, is felt by all the rest,--which constitutes one of the most admirable features of Congregational order as distinguished from Independency. It is a manifestation of Christian unity, a unity not formal and lifeless, but moral and invigorating. "Although churches be distinct, and therefore may not be confounded one with another; and equal, and therefore have not dominion one over another; yet all the churches ought to preserve church communion one with another, because they are all united unto Christ, not only as a mystical, but as a political head, whence is derived a communion suitable thereunto."

We have given but a single illus tration of the nature and uses of this communion. We can not agree with Dr. P. that an ordaining council has never been the means of protecting a parish against the induction of an unworthy or unsuitable minister;" and even when it has failed of doing this, its protest has always been of service to the cause of truth. If, as he tells us, "there have been cases, in which the moral unfitness of the candidate has been known to members of the ordaining council, and yet the ordination has proceeded without objection," it is indeed time that such councils and the individual churches which composed them, should be discountenanced and condemned by the whole Christian public.

The same views are applicable to associations of ministers. As bodies representing the churches, and legislating for them, they have no proper place in the Congregational system; but as meetings of pastors for "mutual advice, support, encouragement and brotherly intercourse," they are invaluable. The

Cambridge Platform, Chap. xv, sec. 1.

Puritan ministers who signed the famous Millennary Petition presented to James I. as he came from Scotland into England, desired among other things, "that the clergy in districts might be allowed to meet together, and strengthen one another's hands as in old times;" but the request was passionately refused. Modern radicals in their jealousy of ministerial usurpation, declaim against similar meetings with no less zeal than did the royal bigot; but Dr. Putnam objects to them, not as tending to dangerous combinations, but because upon his theory of universal suspicion, men can not have sufficient confidence in each other to associate or combine at all. Meanwhile we rest satisfied with the practical operation of this simple and beautiful system of intercourse among ministers.

But while we, as Orthodox Congregationalists, can not assume the position which Dr. Putnam has chosen, we can easily understand how he has been led into it. Pressed by Rationalism on the one hand, and by what he considers a stern and formal Orthodoxy on the other, under the necessity of being identified with one or the other, or of ungraciously rejecting both, his courtesy leading him this way and his logic that, we do not wonder that he has sought the "liberty of indifference." He holds that " a Christian denomination ought not to recognize infidels as belonging to it, if it can find a test by which they may be justly declared to be infidels," and yet that "it would be hard to demand that men should be good logicians in order to wear uncontradicted the Christian name." Dr. Dewey says, as we have seen, that he would "rather be an infidel than a Calvinist," and yet he would not call a Rationalist a Christian, though he has not the face to deny the name to Calvinists. Dr. Putnam, with greater consistency, declares, that while he would not deny the name to either,

nor to any man who claims it with apparent sincerity, he would not on the other hand put himself in a position where he must decide, or even seem to decide, upon the claim of any man to the Christian name. He would be entirely uncommitted upon that point. He regards this as the only mode of maintaining inviolate his own profession of Christianity.

And is it so? Is Christianity so vague, that it is impossible to tell whether a man believes in it or not? It may be difficult in some cases to determine whether he is truly a Christian who professes to be such; but can there be any difficulty, in a thousand cases, in deciding that a man is not a Christian, and does not hold any of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith? Has God given to men a message which he requires them to obey under pain of his eternal displeasure--which they can reject only at the peril of their souls, (for we understand Dr. P. to hold to such a revelation)--and which is after all so vague, that we can not tell whether a man is a believer or an infidel? Is this the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world-a confused twilight ever blending with darkness? Let Dr. Putnam be assured, that what bewilders him is not the vagueness of Christianity, but the system in which he has been educated. The workings of that system are becoming thus confused and erratic, because it has not the cohesive power of truth. Unitarianism is fast losing its vitality. The first generation of Unitarians, who were educated in the orthodox faith, and who retained enough of that faith, many of them, in their own experience, to give life to the new system, are passing away; and their children have been educated in the Unitarian system of philosophy and morality, without this foreign evangelical element. The result is obvious. Philosophy, taste, religious sentimentalVOL. IV.

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ism, a system of esthetics, can not hold men together, whether its laws are general or particular, written or unwritten; but moral truth, truth which conforms to man's nature and wants, truth which has been a matter of personal experience in the soul, truth which moulds the character by the power of an inward life-this binds its subjects every where together. It does not bind them by its formulas-these rather express their union; it binds them to each other by the same moral attraction which binds each to itself. Unitarianism is crumbling to pieces, not for want of a creed; that could not hold it together ;-but for want of a moral coherency in its doctrines and in its disciples; for want of that vitality which belongs only to connected and consistent moral truth-truth harmonizing personal experience with the revealed will of God.

The approaching disintegration of Unitarianism gives a fine illustration of the tendency of Congregationalism to preserve purity of doctrine. How often have sectarians pointed to Unitarianism, as an illustration of the practical workings of our ecclesiastical system? But where are King's Chapel, and the Presbyterian churches of England? Congregationalism is strictly, a mere external thing form of government, not a system of ecte and Unitarianism can no more been tified with that form of polity, than infidelity with republicanism. That form has nothing to do with doctrine; and yet the truth is better preserved under that form than any other. When Unitarianism appeared in the Congregational churches of Massachusetts, instead of being retained in the existing system, it was compelled to come out and stand alone. It was thrown off or withdrawn from. Truth would not keep fellowship with it; would not live under the same covering. There was no "church" to anathematize the heresy, nor to

harbor it for the sake of peace. But the lovers of truth separated from it-or the heresy separated itself from them, by an instinctive and a mutual repulsion, and came out alone that it might die. This is the purifying process of Congregationalism. Acting by moral affinities, it compels error to separate from truth, and error unsupported falls.

Our rejoicing at the decadence of Unitarianism, is not the exultation of pride at the downfall of an enemy, but of hope at the prospective triumphs of the truth. Unitarians dissociated, as they must be more and more, having no longer any denominational character to preserve, nor sectarian pride or prejudices to foster; standing as individual inquirers or disbelievers, independent, thinking candid minds; will be more accessible to evangelical influences, and more easily brought to the knowledge and the love of the truth. They will have new affinities and new relations, toward those from whom they have been so long sev ered. What a responsibility does this state of things devolve upon Orthodox ministers residing in Unitarian communities, especially upon those in the city and the vicinity of

New York.

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Boston! They have a work to do, which would have tasked the powers of Griffin and Beecher and Wisner in their prime. There is no community on earth, where so much may be done, or done so gloriously, for the defense of the truth. What is needed now, is, not the revival of the old Unitarian controversy, but the discussion of the great first principles of all religion; a discussion so masterly and thorough as to command the attention and respect of Rationalists themselves.

But pastors, however competent for such an undertaking, can not devote their whole time to it; and yet it demands the exclusive attention of at least one mind. To meet the case fully, a lectureship should be established at some central point; and a Park, a Hopkins, a Fitch, a Taylor, be invited to discourse each Sabbath evening upon Natural Theology, Moral Philosophy and the Evidences of Christianity. Let the grand truths of God's moral gov ernment be launched into this chaos of opinion; and forms of order, strength and beauty will start up around them, and the voice of God himself will be heard thundering through the abyss, LET THERE BE LIGHT! J. P. T.

THE Fraternity of Odd-Fellows, the merits and demerits of which it is proposed to consider in this ar

*Journal of Proceedings of the Right Worthy Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd-Fellows, of the U. S. of America, and Jurisdiction thereunto belonging, from its formation Feb. 1821,

to the close of the annual session 1843, together with statistical Tables, showing the progress of the Order; and Notes explanatory of subjects not fully expressed in the text. Published by authority of

the Grand Lodge of the U.S. New York,

McGowan and Treadwell, 68 Barclay street, 1844.