Discourses on the death of President Harrison.-1. Mr. Turn- bull's Sermon.-2. Mr. Smith's Sermon:-3. Mr. Putnam's 2. Ostervald's Essay on the Composition and Delivery of a 3. Nott's Sermons on Public Worship. 4. Bancroft's History of the Colonization of the United States. THE CHRISTIAN REVIEW. No. XXII. JUNE, 1841. ARTICLE I. THE JESUITS, AS A MISSIONARY ORDER.* THE missionary spirit contributed to the discovery of our continent. "The man who gave to Castile and Leon a New World," was full of high religious aspirations. With much of the superstition, Columbus had more than the piety, of his age. He regarded himself as commissioned by a higher than any earthly court, in the great enterprise which he pursued with such calm constancy. On reaching the shores he had long sought, his first act was to kneel in devout thanksgiving. If his chroniclers have truly reported his prayer, he blessed the God who had deigned to use his humble service in preparing the way that his own sacred name might be preached in this new portion of his universe. And in his last will, he charges it upon his son to maintain divines who should be employed in striving to make Christians of the natives, declaring this a work in which "no expense should be thought too great." *This article was originally prepared, as an address before the Society of Missionary Inquiry in Brown University, before whom it was delivered at their anniversary on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1839. A separate publication was intended, in pursuance of the request of the Society. Various causes have prevented its receiving the additions and changes it was once the writer's wish to have made, and have delayed its appearance to the present time. VOL. VI.-NO. XXII. 22 Little knew Columbus of the trains of religious influence that came in the wake of his great discovery. In those weary days and nights of anxiety and watchfulness, when his solitary courage buffeted, single-handed, the mutinous remonstrances of his companions,—when, with such difficulty, he kept the prow of his vessel turned still toward the West,-if he understood little the peculiar aspect of the shores he was fast nearing, he knew quite as little of the mysterious instrumentality, already provided in the Old World, to grasp and shape the New Continent as it emerged from its concealment of ages in the recesses of ocean. Had he been asked, on that morning of triumph when his eyes first beheld, green, bright and fragrant, the shores of the new-found world, who would be the instruments of its conversion to the true God, how blindly would he have answered. For its religious instructers, he would have looked to the universities of the Spain that had patronized him, or of the England or the France that had neglected him; or he would have turned his eyes to his own native Italy. But we, to whose gaze have been revealed those leaves in the volume of Providence that no mortal eye had then read, have learned to look elsewhere for the religious guides already training for the new-found hemisphere. Standing in fancy by the side of the great Genoese navigator, we look back over the intervening waste of waters to the Old World. But our eyes turn not to the points that attract his gaze. Ours wander in quest of Eisenach, a petty town in Western Germany. In the band of school-boys that go from door to door through its streets, singing their hymns, and looking for their dole of daily bread, we catch sight of the full, ruddy face of a lad now some nine years old. Those cheerful features bear the mingling impress of broad humor, vigorous sense, good-nature the Lost genial, and a will somewhat of the sternest. The youth is the son of a humble miner. His father has sent him hither, some three years ago, that the boy may be taught Latin, and many thought it no shame to ask. That lad is Martin Luther; a name soon to ring through either hemisphere, the antagonist of the papacy, the translator of the Scriptures, and the instrument of a spiritual revolution, that is to impress its own character, not on Northern Europe olly, but also on receive such help as poor scholars in Geher; a name the larger half of that continent, of whose discovery that school-boy will soon be told, as he bends over his grammar or bounds through the play-ground. And here have we found one of the master-spirits, that is to fix the religious destiny of the New World. We look yet again for the rival mind, that is to contest with Luther's the honor of fashioning American character and history. Our next glance is at Spain, that country from whose ports had been fitted out the little armament that is riding on the sea before us. But it is not to its brilliant court, or to its universities, then famous throughout Europe, that we look for this other mind, that is to aid in casting the spiritual horoscope of our continent. On the northern shores of the country, in the province of Biscay, and under the shadow of the Pyrenees, stands an old baronial castle, tenanted by a Spanish gentleman of ancient and noble lineage. In the family of eleven children that gladdens his hearth, the youngest born, the Benjamin of the household, is now a child of some two years old. That tottering infant, as he grows up to manhood, will at first mistake his destiny. Smitten with the chivalrous spirit, that hangs as an atmosphere of romance. over the Spain of that age, he will become a courtly knight, delighting in feats of arms, and not free from the soldier's vices. But his ultimate history will be of far different cast. Wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, his shattered limb will confine him to a couch, where his waking hours will be spent in reading the legends of saints, and from that couch of pain he will rise an altered man. For this prattling child is Ignatius Loyola. This baby hand is yet to pen the "Spiritual Exercises," that far-famed volume, which still remains the manual of the Jesuit order, the book that has swayed so many a strong intellect for this life and the next, and shaken some minds even to insanity. He is to become the founder of a religious fraternity, who shall be the Janisaries of the Romish church, its stoutest champions against the Reformation, and its most daring emissaries around the globe. Neither Luther nor Loyola ever visited our shores, yet no two of the contemporary minds of Europe so signally controlled the religious history of this continent; and both were in their boyhood, the one at a German grammarschool, the other romping in the nursery of an old Spanish castle, when Columbus planted his foot on the shores of St. Salvador. The institution, which Loyola created, early wrapped itself about the history of our country, fathers of the Jesuit order having, both in the northern and southern portions of the continent, borne a large share in the work of discovery and civilization. Had the efforts of France been but crowned with answering success, this body of men had given their own religious hue to our territory. Seven years before Plymouth Rock received the disembarking colonists from the May-Flower, and twenty-three before Rhode Island had its first European settlers, "France and the Roman religion had established themselves in Maine."* Still sooner, Jesuits were in Nova Scotia, and in 1625, Jesuit missionaries were laboring on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The early governors of New France were zealous patrons of such missions, and that Champlain, whose name is yet borne by one of our lakes, declared that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the conquest of an empire, and that the object of a Christian king, in extending his dominion over an idolatrous country, should be only to subdue its inhabitants to the sway of Jesus Christ. Not on the course of the St. Lawrence only, but in the remote depths of our wilderness, and on the shores of our great western lakes, the Jesuits had early planted their missions and gathered their converts from the Huron, the Algonquin, the Iroquois, the Illinois, and other tribes of Indians. It has been the boast of the order, that Providence made the birth of their own Ignatius Loyola to coincide so nearly with that of Luther, by the same arrangement of divine benevolence that is said ever to provide the antidote in the vicinity of the poison. Their writers are also accustomed to say, that in bringing so closely together the rise of their founder and the discoveries of Columbus, God had evidently pointed their way to those missionary labors upon our continent, in which they engaged so early and successfully. Well may the Protestant, and especially the citizen of these United States, bless in his turn that fatherly care of divine Providence, which neither al * Bancroft, Vol. I, p. 28. |