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W. No doubt of it.

B. Nevertheless, you hold to the innate rectitude, perfectibility, and self-sufficiency of human nature !

Č. I take a very different view of the case. I believe Christianity was from God, that its first preachers were inspired and holy men, but through the ignorance and perversity of their immediate followers, who only imperfectly understood their doctrines, it began to be corrupted by an admixture of surrounding heathenism, and has been growing more and more corrupt down to our times, save the partial purification effected by the Reformers in the sixteenth century, and by their suc

cessors.

B. Yet human nature is impeccable, perfectible, sufficient of itself to attain its destiny, and there has been continuous progress in knowledge and virtue from the earliest ages down to the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when reformers are as thick as grasshoppers on an August afternoon !

P. I take a different view still. I believe that man has fallen, lies under sin, needs redemption, and can be redeemed and attain to his destiny only by Divine grace. Thus far I agree with the Church, and have no confidence in the sufficiency of human nature for itself. I believe also that redemp

tion is through the atoning blood of the Saviour, and that the Christian Church, one and Catholic, was founded by Almighty God, as the ordinary medium of salvation. But the Bishop of Rome encroached upon the rights of his brethren, and gradually usurped power over the whole Church, and set himself up as the vicegerent of God, and allowed no liberty of instruction, nor right of private judgment. From that time all manner of errors crept into the Church, the simple doctrines of the Gospel were overlaid with a mass of heathenish notions, and the pure worship instituted by the Apostles was corrupted by the introduction of the whole heathen ritual.

B. When did all that take place?

P. Why, I cannot fix the precise date when it took place, but it began with Constantine, and continued from that time down, till Luther and Calvin sounded the note of Reform.

B. How do you suppose the usurper happened to be the Bishop of Rome rather than any other bishop? Do you not hold that previously all the bishops were equal?

P. It was owing to the fact that Rome was the capital city of the empire, and the church of Rome the richest and most influential church of the time.

B. If I recollect aright, when, according to you, this process of usurpation began, Rome had ceased to be the capital city of of the empire. Constantine had founded Constantinople, and made it the capital of the empire, and the customary seat of the emperors of the whole empire was never afterwards at Rome. Your first reason, therefore, fails, and may be dismissed. Your second is no better. That the church of Rome was the richest church of the time is not a fact. It had been from the beginning one of the poorest, and was for a long time in splendor and wealth far inferior to many of the Oriental churches, such as those of Antioch, Alexandria, and Constan- · tinople. Constantinople from the time of Constantine was a Christian city, while Rome remained long after a pagan city, and had pagan Senators as late as the time of St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan. The city of Rome was almost the last stronghold of paganism in the Western Empire, and had not been wholly Christianized at the close of the fifth century. None of these external causes you assign can explain why the usurper was the Bishop of Rome, rather than the Bishop of Constantinople, of Antioch, or Alexandria.

Then this usurpation does not strike me as a very feasible thing. Grant, if you will, what in fact I deny,—that the Roman pontiff had a disposition to encroach, to usurp power, you must bear in mind that his disposition must have been met by the resistance of all the bishops in the world, who, you must presume, were as much disposed to keep their power as he was to usurp it. Now, supposing the eighteen hundred bishops of the Roman empire to have commenced with the fact and the right of equality, ignorant of the Papacy, and acknowledging no primacy of power in the Bishop of Rome, and each as determined to keep his power as the Bishop of Rome was to usurp it, what progress in usurpation do you imagine the Roman pontiff could have made? Suppose, as on your ground you must suppose, that each of these bishops had the disposition of the Roman, the odds against his success and in favor of them would have been far too great for one to be willing to bet on his head, or for any reasonable man to accept your theory.

But suppose the matter to be as you state, what is your remedy? If God has founded a Church, and taken no better care of it than you suppose, who can rely on it? If your theory be correct, God must have founded his Church, and then abandoned it to the care of men, and concerned himself no further with it, which is sheer Epicureanism, only transformed

from the natural order to the supernatural, and involves sheer atheism as its logical consequence, as much as it does when confined to the order of nature. If God abandoned his Church to the care of men, and they through their ignorance and perversity corrupted it, so that for at least eight hundred years the true Church was no longer to be found on the earth, what surety can you give, or have you for yourselves, that, even if you could restore it, as your fruitless efforts for three hundred years show you cannot, men would not soon corrupt it again.

Your grand error, my young friends, is in the denial of Providence. Some of you are out-and-out Epicureans, and hold that God made the world, gave it a kick, set it agoing, and bade it go ahead on its own hook and take care of itself; others among you do not say quite so much of the natural world. You are willing, one division of you, to say that he had so much regard for the world that he founded a Church for its redemption and salvation, and another division of you, that he made a revelation for its benefit; but you both agree that he abandoned the Church or the revelation immediately to its fate, -threw it upon the great concourse of men, and said, Here, take it, and make the most of it. I have no further concern with it. Here you deny the providence of God in the supernatural order. Now I beg you to reflect seriously on this denial. God has created the world from nothing, and it is only by virtue of his immanence in the world through that creative act that the world exists or does not return to nothing. But he remains thus immanent, and all created power is insufficient to annihilate or displace a single monad. By the same free act of his will by which he created the world he preserves it, and suffers no change in its physical constitution to take place but according to his own good will and pleasure. So also by his grace has he created the Christian order, or the "new creation," the Church and all that pertains to it, and it subsists only by virtue of his immanence in it through his act of grace creating it, and were he to cease for a single moment to be so immanent in it, it would sink instantly back into nothing. So long as so immanent, it is and must be preserved, and all the powers of earth and hell strive in vain against it. Men may beat against it, and break their own heads in the shock, but they cannot move or injure it. There is, then, no medium between its entire indefectibility and its total ceasing to be. Your theory, whether you call it the Church or simply revelation, of its gradual, partial, or total corruption, is unten

able, and you have no middle ground on which to stand between the Roman Catholic Church and the absolute denial of Christianity; and if you deny Christianity, you have nothing but sheer humanism, the absolute divinity of human nature, putting man in the place of God, setting him in the temple of God to show himself and to be worshipped as if he were God.

ART. VI. LITERARY NOTICES AND CRITICISMS.

1.- The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Boston Ticknor, Reed, & Fields. 1850. 12mo. pp. 322.

MR. HAWTHORNE is a writer endowed with a large share of genius, and in the species of literature he cultivates has no rival in this country, unless it be Washington Irving. His Twice-told Tales, his Mosses from an Old Manse, and other contributions to the periodical press, have made him familiarly known, and endeared him to a large circle of readers. The work before us is the largest and most elaborate of the romances he has as yet published, and no one can read half a dozen pages of it without feeling that none but a man of true genius and a highly cultivated mind could have written it. It is a work of rare, we may say of fearful power, and to the great body of our countrymen who have no well defined religious belief, and no fixed principles of virtue, it will be deeply interesting and highly pleasing.

We have neither the space nor the inclination to attempt an anal. ysis of Mr. Hawthorne's genius, after the manner of the fashionable criticism of the day. Mere literature for its own sake we do not prize, and we are more disposed to analyze an author's work than the author himself. Men are not for us mere psychological phenomena, to be studied, classed, and labelled. They are moral and accountable beings, and we look only to the moral and religious effect of their works. Genius perverted, or employed in perverting others, has no charms for us, and we turn away from it with sorrow and disgust. We are not among those who join in the worship of passion, or even of intellect. God gave us our faculties to be employed in his service, and in that of our fellow-creatures for his sake, and our only legitimate office as critics is to inquire, when a book is sent us for review, if its author in producing it has so employed them.

Mr. Hawthorne, according to the popular standard of morals in this age and this community, can hardly be said to pervert God's gifts, or to exert an immoral influence. Yet his work is far from being unobjectionable. The story is told with great naturalness, ease, grace, and delicacy, but it is a story that should not have been told. It is a story of crime, of an adulteress and her accomplice, a meek and gifted and highly popular Puritan minister in our early colonial days, a purely imaginary story, though not altogether improbable. Crimes like the one imagined were not unknown even in the golden days of Puritanism, and are perhaps more common among the descendants of the Puritans than it is at all pleasant to believe; but they are not fit subjects for popular literature, and moral health is not promoted by leading the imagination to dwell on them. There is an unsound state of public morals when the novelist is permitted, without a scorching rebuke, to select such crimes, and invest them with all the fascinations of genius, and all the charms of a highly polished style. In a moral community such crimes are spoken of as rarely as possible, and when spoken of at all, it is always in terms which render them loathsome, and repel the imagination.

Nor is the conduct of the story better than the story itself. The author makes the guilty parties suffer, and suffer intensely, but he nowhere manages so as to make their sufferings excite the horror of his readers for their crime. The adulteress suffers not from remorse, but from regret, and from the disgrace to which her crime has exposed her, in her being condemned to wear emblazoned on her dress the Scarlet Letter which proclaims to all the deed she has committed. The minister, her accomplice, suffers also, horribly, and feels all his life after the same terrible letter branded on his heart, but not from the fact of the crime itself, but from the consciousness of not being what he seems to the world, from his hav ing permitted the partner in his guilt to be disgraced, to be punished, without his having the manliness to avow his share in the guilt, and to bear his share of the punishment. Neither ever really repents of the criminal deed; nay, neither ever regards it as really criminal, and both seem to hold it to have been laudable, because they loved one another, as if the love itself were not illicit, and highly criminal. No man has the right to love another man's wife, and no married woman has the right to love any man but her husband. Mr. Hawthorne in the present case seeks to excuse Hester Prynne, a married woman, for loving the Puritan minister, on the ground that she had no love for her husband, and it is hard that a woman should not have some one to love; but this only aggravated her guilt, because she was not only forbidden to love the minister, but commanded to love her husband, whom she had vowed to love, honor, cherish, and obey. The modern doctrine that represents the

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