of death and eternity, of God's controversy with his ungodly living, and of the risks of his abandonment to hopeless hardness of heart, he need not therefore blush before any comrade nor apologize to any questioner. It is by such suggestions that the first steps are often induced out of worldliness, frivolity, impiety, towards repentance. The thought that this is the sinner's last call, that if he refuses this, no heavenly word will ever more break again on his heart, that fearful thought has risen up in the soul like a cloud of midnight-darkness, appalling as the shutting in of the long night of endless despair; and the spirit, thus aroused by this "terror of the Lord," has not dared to run the hazard of this tremendous peradventure. Thus being fixed in a determination to defer the business of religion no longer, the mind has yielded itself to other and more elevated considerations through which God's spirit carries onward the new creating work.

Thus far the argument, which both logically and theologically we regard as irrefutable. As it is grounded not in the conditions of special stages of barbarism, or semi-civilization, or anything of this factitious or temporary kind, but in elementary spiritual truths, it is an argument as well for the nineteenth century as for the ninth or first. It has a bearing or two of present urgency, inside the Church, which must hold us a page or two longer before closing this paper.

The prevalent reluctance of many good people to an outspoken deliverance of the alarming doctrines of our faith, is alike philosophically and religiously wrong. Are they Gospel facts? Then they should be announced. Is "God angry with the wicked every day?" Then it should be known; and if men forget it, then it should be reiterated.

It has already been intimated that this susceptibility of fear is not of so lofty a nature as are others of our endowments. Nor do we believe that men ever become christians under its simple prompting. "Fear does not produce virtue; the fact that a man restrains himself from sin to avoid the punishment of hell is no proof that he is converted :—but it goes out into the highways of a blighted and delirious world, and there, like a terrible prophet of the wilderness who foretells the coming of the mild Redeemer, startles and arouses men. Its office is prelim

inary, external, awakening; it is the beginning of wisdom."* Then, let the Elijah, the John, though clothed in the rough garb of the desert, fulfil his pioneer ministry, that so the Christ may come in power and grace to the humble, the consciously needy and perishing. You say, that men cannot be driven into religion. True; nor can they be flattered or coaxed into it. But this is the case:- certain aspects of God's law, government, purposes, bear directly and alarmingly on human sinfulness, and are suited to the end of conversion to piety, if so blessed by the Holy Spirit. If presented, conversion may 'not follow. If withheld, conversion will not, in most instances, be attained. That is, men are not likely to turn unto God with their whole hearts, unless they see very distinctly that there is something exceedingly undesirable and appalling from which to turn. Lot fled in haste to the mountain when he saw Sodom all in a blaze behind him, and the plain beneath him heaving with volcanic throes.

Ministers, moreover, are not to be called bigoted, severe, behind the just requirements of the age, who exhibit the sterner shadows of God administration. As well call the surgeon cruel who hurts you in probing a deep wound or in setting a broken bone. The pain he inflicts does not argue the want of a tender spirit. His design is beneficent, and you will thank him when the cure is completed. The teacher of religion is sacredly bound to teach the whole of it, its hard as well as its easy lessons. lessons. He too is a spiritual physician, and he must practise like his Divine Master. Nor is it his fault if there is no pain-destroying ether which he can administer, so as that the surgery shall proceed unconsciously to the patient, and he find himself a sound man without knowing how it happened. On the contrary, the very nature of our work requires that every conscious power of the soul be awake to coöperate in this act of a restoration unto God. And whatever can aid in this awakening of the soul to its salvation is demanded to be employed, by the purest good-will, the divinest compassion. They are the cruel men in the pulpit who never send a thrill of alarm through the pews; who prophesy smooth things, who hush God's thunders in the lullabies of Arcadian measures.

*Bayne's "Christian Life," p. 37.

If an orthodox day of judgment be necessary to keep DownEastern lumbermen from plundering each other's logs, (and so, it is said, even Boston liberalism has decided,) who shall show that it and its correllatives are not just as much needed to check our city-merchants from defrauding one another, and in bringing them to contrition and restitution for such sins?

We do not mean that topics of this character are to be continually exhibited in the instructions of the sanctuary. They are to be discreetly used in due season and proportion. They are adapted rather to the condition of the careless or the reckless transgressor, to those who "are at ease in Zion," than to the mind already awake to religious inquiry, or to the believer advancing upon the upward road. To these, love has other more befitting accents and appeals. But how shall the masses of ungodly men and women be made to feel the beauty of holiness, the attractiveness of Christ, the spiritual excellence of God? — how be arrested to turn an eye toward heaven, except by some lightning-flash, some thunder-peal from those azure depths of mingled light and gloom, splendor and terror? God, who made the mind, understands its wants, its workings. And men who preach his truth will not find a better guide to follow than his own method of dealing with those whom He would have to fear his displeasure that they may be brought to taste his grace. That method is "goodness and severity." It is simple, sensible, rational, biblical. "Of some have compassion, making a difference and others save with fear, [èv poßw, with anxious zeal and with solemn threatenings,] pulling them out of the fire;" feeling ourselves and making them feel that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

ARTICLE VI.

IT WAS ALWAYS SO.

age

THE good old times! who has not heard of them? the when patriotism was unselfish and manners uncorrupt, when

cities were simple in their tastes and frugal in their habits, and the country was tilled by men who feared God and kept his commandments. The good old times! when youth treated age with respect, when doctrine was sound, and good men walked with God heavenward, instead of sailing with the adversary in gilded barges down the stream.

The very mention of such times is like a breath of mountainair to the invalid cooped up in the stifling lanes of the city. It is like the sight of his early home, bringing glad memories of childhood to the heart now old and sad and solitary.

It is not strange, then, that we find this admiration of the past in all ages. Even the heathen, amid corruption round about him, paints the picture of a golden age, and heathen poesy adorns it with all that is lovely and of good report.

The old man, long familiar with the hollowness of earthly good, turns regretfully to the time when all seemed real, and no troublesome suspicion of what might be beneath, marred the enjoyment of the gilded surface glittering in the sun. Even the Christian grappling with defiant sin, and watching unto prayer against the treacherous dealing of wily foes, sighs for the simplicity of primitive piety, when good men did not need to be armed with the whole armor of God, and stand forever on their guard.

So the past is commended as the age of piety and peace, while the present is worse than all that has gone before, and prepares for greater evil yet to come. This is a view natural to many minds. But all such comparisons are unprofitable, because it is difficult to compare the two correctly.

We cannot form an accurate estimate of the present. We see only a part of it; the rest we judge by hearsay; and while our information is deficient, our conclusions are still wider of the truth. That which we see assumes undue prominence. It becomes the standard whereby we judge the much larger part that is unseen. Our native land seems large, and distant countries small, though in fact much larger. There are few among us who are not surprised to find the empire of Brazil larger than the whole United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the little country of Switzerland nearly twice as large as Massachusetts, which last is scarcely larger than the

diminutive Duchy of Würtemberg. Now this onesidedness, so palpable in our geography, exists as really in other things. The men with whom we come in contact give character to our ideas of the rest of the community. Then, besides all this, many things are not what they seem to be. There is an apparent and a real world. The affliction, which we class among evils, may be such a manifestation of the love of God as ought to be classed among the highest blessings. The event that seemed to involve the ruin of the nation may prove to have been its salvation. So also to most men there is an outer and an inner character. We may count him a co-worker with Christ, who is really serving Satan; we may deem a flaming professor a veritable saint, when he is rotten at the core. On the other hand, we may assign one of God's hidden ones a place among the ungodly, whereas he is being made meet for an inheritance among the saints in light. Even inspiration does not always correct this false judgment. It was a Prophet of the Lord who complained that he was left alone, while seven thousand men had not bowed the knee to Baal. And it was an Apostle who wrote, "By Silvanus, a faithful brother unto you, as I suppose, I have written briefly."

If our judgment of the present is liable to such mistakes, how much more our judgment of the past, where so much more concurs to mislead us. Just as we insensibly make our abode the centre of the world, so do we make our own age the centre of history, and measure things not by an absolute standard, but in their relation to our stand-point.

Then there is much that we can see in our contemporaries that is not to be seen in the men of a past age. When we look on a living Christian we see a strange mixture of good and evil. The actings of grace and depravity succeed each other in such strange combinations that we are bewildered, we seem to look at the changes of a kaleidoscope rather than at a finished painting. But in the biographies of the sainted dead, grace is brought into the foreground, and depravity is thrown into the shade; then the good things scattered through long years of actual life are crowded into a few pages of the memoir; and as the eye glances over them we forget the long intervals that separated the actual occurrences, or the protracted process that produced the excellencies we admire.