reverence, for those essential views of the gospel, known as Liberal Christianity. It is not the lack of a cause and a rallying cry, but of trumpeters to sound the charge that the progress of that Reformed Christianity halts,-which was predicted in the partial reformation of Luther, and is now able to complete its victory; but stays its advance because its leaders, sicklied o'er with thought, paralyzed by philosophic indifference to opinions, or blunted as reformers by the width of their own intellectual culture, have lost their sense of accountableness to public wants, their sympathetic tie with the masses, and their feeling of obligation to make their own Christian convictions the working powers in the public religion of their country.

We can understand the well-mannered sneer with which the burly sects of Orthodoxy are certain to meet such a pretension, and the still more discouraging waive of incredulity with which the larger part of the ministers of the Liberal Faith are likely to offer the van, in this new crusade, to those who have boldness to take it. As for them, they are too modest and catholic to set up any claim to a purer and more rightful Christianity! Contented with enjoying their convictions and views, they ask only the charity and mercy of other denominations, not to be denied the Christian name; not to be charged with blasphemy, atheism, and infidelity; and on their part they will neither "meddle nor make" in the general field of popular theology. The people may think what they choose about Christ, or even profess what they cannot think, and it is no business of theirs!

We do not believe in this kind of spurious catholicity, nor in this sort of good-natured, do-nothing, mealy-mouthed indifferentism. It is a matter fast becoming of vital importance, that the religious creeds of the people of this country should be re-adjusted to their general intelligence, political progress, scientific discoveries, and interior and practical convictions. The breadth of the interval between is too wide for safety, sincerity, or directness. It is corrupting to general veracity to be professing formally what is essentially discredited. The ministry takes on a kind of sacred buffoonery, when it

attempts, as it must in this state of things, to be on the side of the popular creeds, and on the side of the popular doubts and denials also. Religion becomes a matter of police and machinery and political management, as to outsiders it has appeared in the late Episcopal Convention at Philadelphia. Whatever earnestness is left, seems to be in behalf of imperilled dogmas or sacred usages, not of the life of God in the soul of man. We have lived to see religion degenerate into a bowing, polite, and only half-sincere companion of the commercial and political interests that chance to be most in vogue. It is perfectly plain that the intellectual, moral, and spiritual life of the country has broken ecclesiastical bounds; and, while in one direction it is tending to a pure philosophical secularism, it is in the other tending to an unrestrained worldliness and folly. The dangers to our political future, to social life, domestic manners, and personal character, involved in the present prevailing insincerity in the popular creeds, taking away the very standards of uprightness and downrightness; introducing a levity into the treatment of moral distinctions, and undermining the very foundations of frankness, simplicity, and truth,―ought to give a solemn pause to those who suppose it to be their duty to treat the shattered creeds of the Church as the brave captain of a dismantled vessel treats the wreck, staying aboard till every passenger is in the boats, and striving to the last to keep up the impres sion that the ship is not going down.

What would become of society and Christian civilization, secretly exclaim these divines, if the Westminster Catechism, and the Thirty-nine Articles, or the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds, or the Saybrook Platform, should give way; or if the reverend doctors in divinity should publicly concede that these documents were not just what in past generations they have been taken for! Reverend fathers! please try it. We will insure not only no moral and spiritual depreciation, but an immediate improvement in the whole tone of practical morality, real reverence, and vital piety. Protection is as fatal to the interests of gospel truth, as it is commonly found to be injurious to manufacturing and commercial interests.

The creeds stop thinking at all in thousands, and provoke hostile thinking in hundreds. They make mechanical believers of most, and serious, ingrained unbelievers of many. They create a religious interest which is distinct from the moral, practical, and real interests of society. They make a set of men who become to the gospel what the scribes were to the law, pettifoggers in textual divinity. They gradually lose the real affections, and cease to express the real feelings, and no longer serve the real interests of society; and then it is time they were ordered out of the hymn-books and prayerbooks, where they caricature the convictions of those who sing and say them with any reflection, a number which, alas! gets, after a while, to be very small.

If we have any hope of making our Liberal Christian faith a great working power, it must not be by denying that its force lies in its practical ability to bring the gospel into direct and effective connections with the real interests of life. It is a horrible reproach to the prevailing Christianity of the Church, that it does not control the vice and crime, the filth and wickedness, that are fast ruining the life of our great cities. The gross conspiracies that make so much of our traffic a fraud upon the public; little getting to market, whether beef, bread, vegetables, or milk, without a vile combination of middle-men to keep up prices, and rob rich and poor alike; the extortion of some of our great houses, so enormous, that a great English manufacturer, lately over, found his own goods, after heavy duties were paid, selling here at a profit twice as great as the original price of the goods at his own factory; the horrible criminality of our tenant-house system, which depraves more people every year than all the churches in New York, taken together, are able to sanctify and save; the dreadful and irresistible power of the corrupt men who control our municipal and State legisla tion, and defeat, for a long time, every bill which the wise and the disinterested frame and support, these terrible things prove some fatal weakness to exist in the Christianity of our times; prove the modern Church to be an expensive establishment for doing nothing or obstructing action in many

of the most important departments of human well-being, and cry loudly for radical reform.

We believe that false doctrine lies at the bottom of this inefficiency; that a habit of directing people's minds away from present, immediate, and practical duties, to speculative beliefs and mysterious articles of faith, whose theatre is another stage of being, has encouraged sentimental and artificial notions of religion, and somehow enabled people to reconcile selfishness, inhumanity, slavery, bribery, and corruption with stout professions of Christian faith and pretensions to Christian character. We want now some body of Christians, who, while firm in their faith in the divine authority of Christianity and in the rightful headship of Christ, believe there is nothing in true religion which common sense and physical or metaphysical science do not confirm; who, saving the essence, will have the courage and plainness to sweep the rubbish of middle-age theology away, and to take in hand as the first of Christian duties the salvation of the world from sin, and all that produces sin; from oppressive distinctions, from bad government, from intemperance and licentiousness, and whatever favors them; from the tyranny of capital in the hands of avaricious men, who will risk a thousand lives in a rotten ship, for the chance of making an additional dividend, or will pen up three thousand souls within a few hundred square feet of ground to die of their own filth and misery, in order to squeeze the utmost rental out of a miserable and seemingly God-forsaken crew of rag-pickers or beggars. Can we introduce a better kind of Christianity into this heathen metropolis? If we have not faith and courage to think and say that our Liberal Christianity is a purer, more practical type of the religion of Christ, than that which rests on the current creeds,-then we had better subside, and get out of the way of the great majority who would rejoice if we ceased to trouble them with our complaints and our new lights. But if we are really in earnest, and willing to work to show what our faith is, there is a great and glorious future before us.

We might hope to reclaim and organize under Christ's ban

VOL. LXXX. -NEW SERIES, VOL. I. NO. I.

2

ner the intelligence, the worth, and the courage which have wandered away from the Church, and, combining with it, begin a great practical reformation, by announcing that our religion is neither polite nor fashionable nor prudent nor conservative, nor any thing else that means death-in-life, and "peace and order" before truth, humanity, and duty; but, instead of that, an application of the everlasting precepts and spirit of the Sermon on the Mount to the immediate affairs of men and things, in which ministers and people find themselves on a common level, and all alike busy in good works; going about doing good, after staying at home long enough to carefully plan it, and know what they are going about; and admitting no part of life, neither politics, pleasure, commerce, trade, nor domestic economy,-no interest of society, neither ballot-box, theatre, tenant-house, nor palace of trade, to be beyond the pale of its scrutiny, or the sway of its influence, or the shield of its protection.

With such a plain, home-thrusting Christianity accepted by a few thousands in every city, how soon would the real men and women of this country gather to the glorious work! and what a mighty reform in the practical life and economic and moral condition of this whole nation would speedily attest the fruits of a return to the original simplicity of the gospel of Christ, to the plainness of God's commandments, and the immediate teachings of the Holy Spirit of truth and grace!

ART. II. -THE GREEK SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA.

1. Essai Historique sur l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, par JAQUES MATTER. Paris: 1820. 2 vols.

2. Histoire de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, par JULES SIMON. Paris: 1845. 2 vols.

3. Histoire Critique de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, par E. VACHEROT. Paris: 1846. 3 vols.

4. De l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, par J. BARTHÉLEMY ST. HILAIRE. Paris: 1845.

IN the brilliant period of its rise under the Greeks, Alexandria presents one of the most singular examples in history of