closely stopped, or was poured from them in penurious drops. Any thing, sooner than evaporation! The simplest truths became mysteries, the plainest ideas riddles, under a professional manipulation which handled them,-much as the apothecary gives his rain-water over the counter as aqua pura, and his bread pills as pillulæ panis. Indeed, the dogmatic idea of the gospel was a strictly medical one. The Church was a theological pharmacy and hospital. The gospel was medicine, not food. Christ lost the character of the good Shepherd in that of the great Physician. The care of men became the cure of souls. Mankind were not sheep going astray, and needing to be folded: they were wolves, that must be changed back to sheep, before any folding was possible. As to any natural aptitude in the human heart for knowing or loving God, it was wholly alien from him and hated him. There was nothing in Christ or Christianity which any child of Adam, anterior to supernatural grace and miraculous change of heart, could either love or understand.

Yet are we to suppose that the gospel of Christ was ineffectual, and produced none of its proper fruits, in this dogmatic, abstruse, and repulsive form? Far from it. The doctors who taught these creeds were, in the main, noblehearted, morally exalted, spiritually minded men; and, for the time, the most enlightened. They truly feared God, as well they might, with their views of his character. Their hearts and souls were fired to the vindication of his righteousness. They adored the mystery of an accursed race saved by the atoning blood of Christ. And they made as noble a use of these rough tools to emancipate the souls of their own time, as later heroes and martyrs have made of much finer instruments for the freeing of their generation. What they took out of the Godhead by their harsh notions of God as the Father, they put back into it by their tender notions of God as Son and as Saviour. What they took out of man's character as a rational being, they put back into it in his allowed openness to supernatural grace. They worked on a much ruder material than we do, in their earlier civilization; and fear had, in great part, to do the work of love. But the blessed gospel of Christ

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which can live without any dogma at all, without any skill or disposition whatever to dogmatize about it shows its vitaliitty still more strikingly by consenting to dwell, and that efficiently, in the most repulsive and self-contradictory dogmas; to occupy the meanest or the most uncomfortable and confused theological home, and make it radiant with its spirit and its truth. Who has not seen and loved the saintly sweetness, the thorough gospel piety, the Christian beneficence, of those who have entertained, and even hugged to their hearts, the most absurd and cruel dogmatic theories? Who does not know that Christianity has borne some of its sweetest fruits grafted on the wild thorn-bristling with five points here, and thirtynine thereof that theology which we read in the Westminster Catechism or the English Articles? Thank God! the life of the blessed gospel neither ecclesiasticism nor scholasticism can extinguish! It will live under a bishop's jewelled mitre, or a schoolman's musty logic, or a Calvin's bloody Institutes. The account which people in different ages give of it, the healing comfort and blessing they have in it, has little to do with its real power, or the essential spirit which passes into them from its use. The limestone broth which Lawrie Todd made for the poor woman in Scotland, out of her own meat and vegetables, with a piece of marble in the bottom of the pot, owed nothing of its excellence to the stone, although the innocent soul thought it was all in that wonderful ingredient. And as little does Scotch Calvinism (that hardest sort) owe to the gritty and gravelly ingredients it puts into the gospel porridge, for the piety and worth of its disciples. You cannot bring people near to Jesus Christ; you cannot keep them intimate with the spirit of the Scriptures; you cannot lead them to know Paul and John, Peter and James, David and Samuel, without giving them a saving influence strong enough to neutralize any thing wayward, eccentric, violent, in the methods of Church government or creed, by which in their case the communion has been effected. In narrow and crooked quarters, of Lutheranism or Calvinism, Christianity still lived and flourished. She lived in the Church of England, in spite of Laud, in spite of the rollicking clergy of Charles II., in spite

of bishops with estates rivalling those of princes, and habits to match. She lived and still lives in Methodism, with the lovely memories of John and Charles Wesley sanctifying her itineracy all the way to distant Oregon, where it still follows its faithful pioneer labors, the primer in one hand and the Bible in the other, planting schoolhouses and churches in the wilderness. In every Church she lives, spite of their creeds and forms, spite of their discipline and dogma; and in all does her own beautiful, effective, and indispensable work.

But who does not know that all these churches and communions are loosening their cords, accommodating their discipline and requirements to a changed mind, and a new sort of life among their own members? Will culture and refinement allow men and women in the immodesty of reciting their deepest religious experience in promiscuous gatherings called for that purpose? Will educated and independent Methodists attend class-meetings? Do Orthodox churches often discipline their members for heresy? Do they not allow even their ministers to deny and contradict their doctrinal platforms? Are not their most successful and popular clergy manifestly heterodox in the judgment of those who know what heterodoxy is,- -no matter what they or their Orthodox brethren may say about it? We have known of ministers with Unitarian sentiments who have preached acceptably for years in Trinitarian pulpits, sentiments which they avowed in every thing but the bald name. That name they professed not to like; but the thing they liked wholly, and the people liked it too. Is Christ, therefore, tottering on his earthly throne, losing his dominion among men, because of these manifest givings-way in the dogmatic structure which has so long passed for his religion? Are the truth, power, and grace of the gospel identical with, dependent on, to be measured by, the security of those ideas hitherto known as the creed of Christendom?

For it is past denial, that these dogmas, in any such sense as they were received in, a century or a half-century ago, are now abandoned and repelled. There is not one of them which is not so loose and roomy, by the wear and tear of time, by

the stretching and accommodation of service, that a Unitarian of moderate scholarship and subtilty cannot live in one corner of it, and his Trinitarian brother in the opposite corner, with equal intellectual comfort and ease. Christ who is "the express image" of the Father's person, who could say, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father," who shared the Father's glory "before the world was "—is "God with us," just as the vicegerent of royalty is in some sense the king; as the sun reflected in water is still the sun; as the heat is the fire; as the word is the mind that utters it. And so we might run through all the dogmas of modern Orthodoxy, accepting each with an interpretation as honest, doubtless, as that in which they are received by multitudes of their most educated and influential adherents. But to what end? It would be, after all, a mere darkening of counsel. It would be to accept them in a sense that would leave our own Unitarian faith still unharmed. It is far more important, at this stage of the Church's history, to be unmistakable as to the points in which we differ from popular Orthodoxy, than as to those in which we agree with it. Religious reformers must keep their eyes and their hearts upon their business. If they are in ear nest, and believe the truths they emphasize to be important to the progress of the gospel, they must emphasize them with vigor, persistency, and plainness, not blur and blot the lines. for the sake of peace and good-nature, or to escape contumely and abuse. Oftentimes the hard blows and harder names they have to bear are the best advertisement of their course. They may easily be too popular, or at least too easily borne with, for their own growth and good.

Suppose, now, the Christian gospel,- free from ecclesiasticism, with its assumed political power, its exclusive sacraments, its infallibility; free from human creeds, and all that theologians and scholars have done to cast it into doctrinal moulds; free from every thing but its own moral and spiritual principles, as commended by the holy Jesus, and kept in perpetual alliance with his historic memory and his spiritual person; enforced only on the intrinsic authority of its own truth and use, are we to think it is in any danger of being

forsaken? Is it to be more neglected than it always has been? Is it to be outgrown and flung away, its altars forsaken, its ministry abandoned, its simple memorials disused, its name, place, and real authority lost? Is society less under its control now than when those rigid dogmas or that rigorous churchism prevailed? Have free thought, and enlightened conscience, and diminished superstition, and less implicit belief, and more honest doubt and denial about the human outworks of the divine word, hindered or impaired the spread of its real power? Have they allowed more of irreverence and blasphemy towards God, more of hatred and malice among men? Are the schools, hospitals, asylums, and vast charities of modern times; are the ends for which wars are now waged and the spirit with which they are carried on; is the freeing of the serfs in Russia and the slaves in America, — indicative of a lessening power in the faith of Christ?

Christianity has nothing to fear from freedom of thought, freedom of limb, freedom of worship, freedom of doctrine, freedom of investigation; nothing to fear, and every thing to gain, in emancipation from scholastic dogmas and ecclesiastical authority; nothing to fear from science and philosophy, more than gold from the fire that purges out its dross, or sunlight from the winds that clear away the mists and clouds through which it has been struggling. This is Christ's most glorious day, because his truth is freest now. Never was his religion so practically loved and revered; never his invisible Church so wide, so full, so bright with love and worship!

ART. II. - DE QUINCEY AND THE RELIGION OF THE GREEKS.

THERE are few questions which the scholar finds more dif ficult to determine than that of the relations of Greek life to Greek Mythology. Common enough are treatises rehearsing the names and offices of the divinities, and vulgarly recount