The earnest impress of the moulding hand, "Life's sun at setting may shed brighter rays, The meekly lifted brow. And then went home." She taught me this, The selections for our funeral wreath have been made in reference to their appropriateness to the deceased author, rather than for their poetical merit. Her fame has not been augmented by her elegiac poems; they show forth the warmth of her affections and sympathy, and the strength of her Christian Faith. Their sacredness and spirituality should raise them above the shafts of criticism. Among the principal works of Mrs. Sigourney, we will name her "Letters to Mothers" and to her "Pupils," many volumes of Miscellaneous Poems, some of them long enough for a volume; her "European Travels," "Pocahontas," "The Man of Uz," "Past Meridian," and "Daily Counsellor." Her posthumous work, "Letters of Life," is a simple wreath, crowning the am-ple pedestal of her life's labors. ART. IV. THE CHURCH AND UNITARIANISM. In this paper we discuss the relations of Unitarianism to the Church. By Unitarianism, we are to understand neither the Arianism of the Fourth Century, nor the Socinianism of the Sixteenth. The matter is of Unitarianism as developed in this country, and in the face of the American Church. cause. In the first place, then, this Unitarianism is an effect, and, like every other effect, must have an adequate and logical Its cause we understand to be Puritanism. The heresy itself comprises much of the so-called religious as well as irreligious sentimentalism of the age. Two questions naturally present themselves for answer. 1. Why is Unitarianism? 2. What is Unitarianism? In answer why, we shall in measure also answer what. These two things answered, the methods and duties of the Church, concerning that heresy, will be more plain. Such is the order of this discussion. The so-called Protestant Reformation on the continent of Europe was a revolution, so far as its own limits reached,— universally so; and like every revolution in human practice or opinion, it had its passion and its peril. Its passion was, to free itself from almost everything, visible or invisible, that formed any part of the Church, against which it fought. Its peril was, that having thrown away the old, when it attempted to construct the Faith, which, at least in its surroundings, was to the men of the Sixteenth Century new, it would fail to find the Truth. It followed its passion; and it met its peril. The Anglican movement was, in a better sense, a reformation, but not a revolution. We affirm, that the Anglican Church under Henry, and Edward, and Elizabeth, was not the new Church of God, but the old Church of God in England. On the Continent, in sweeping, with unseemly haste, the rubbish from the house of the Lord, they overthrew the house itself. In England, contrarywise, where careful hands, guided, we say, by an Almighty Hand, which followed the requests of a nation's prayers, had swept away the rubbish, the beautiful structure of the One Church, which is the same in all time, remained unharmed. This is a question of fact, between the men who deny, and the men who affirm. As Churchmen, we affirm the fact, and appeal to history. The Anglican movement, then, differed from the Reformation in Germany, or Switzerland, or France, in these, among other particulars. 1. In affirming that there is no such thing as a new Church, since Christ did establish, once for all, His Church, which is His Body,-a visible outward establishment,—one Church, under one government of the three Apostolic Orders, with one Order of Sacraments, with one Faith, which, held at first so universally that men never thought of questioning or discussing it at the demand of heresy, asserted itself in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, as shaped by the oldest Councils of an undivided Church, to be the Faith, within which all Christians stand, and outside of which there is no salvation. Inspired by such sentiments, the Anglican Reformers dealt very cautiously with the Church of their fathers. They aspired to remove what was temporal and Papal; but they did not meddle with what was Apostolic and eternal. In this way they exposed themselves to the charge of being trimmers and time servers, while they, in contrast to all the other Reformers, were simply endeavoring to follow that media via, or middle course, between Papacy, on the one hand, which would preserve everything, and that fanaticism, on the other, which would destroy everything which was not new; a middle course, we say, to which they were compelled by their whole theory of Christ's Church on earth. We do not forget the State-craft, or the personal passions of some great actors in the solemn trial hour of our Anglican Reformation; but we give God thanks, that His Holy Spirit led Anglican Reformers to carry such an even and passionless hand, in their discrimination as to what was, and what was not of the Church of God. It was a natural result of the spirit of the Anglican movement, that it taught, as a very vital and radical lesson of its Communion, reverence and obedience towards that Catholic and Apostolic Church, whose structure it had refused to disturb in any part, and whose ancient Creeds it affirmed to be filled with the Spirit of God. It very naturally taught, moreover, that this living Body of Christ, and under Him the Salvation of the world, held in her keeping, and at her interpretation, the everlasting Word of God, which contained the mysteries of man's redemption. On the other hand, the whole spirit and dogma of the Continental Reformers were otherwise. The extremes of Geneva and Zurich could not be satisfied with the moderation of Lambeth and Canterbury. The evident historic truth, that God's Word contains all things necessary to salvation, became so far dissociated from all other correlated truths, that, dismembered from the other Articles of the Catholic Faith, and without the poise and balance of the whole Catholic dogma, it could not fail to set itself in bitter enmity against Church authority, and then, finally, altogether against the Anglican idea of the Church of Christ. The passionate, and we doubt not, honest impatience of mistaken men in our own Communion, aided in their zeal and numbers by the influence of Continental Reformers, created the schism of Puritanism. Puritanism went out from us, standing upon the dogma, that every soul, under God, is to interpret Scripture for itself, and that there never was, nor is, nor can be, any Church which hath the authoritative interpretation thereof. It is true, they differed from us in other matters; but the main question between Churchmen and Puritans is, as to the authority and nature of the Church. Their dogma, above stated, was the final, essential, and most radical avowal of their dissent from the whole drift and dogma of the Church, in Ecclesiastical, as well as spiritual matters. It does not lie in the way of this discussion to remark upon the struggle which the Church maintained with Puritanism in England. It is sufficient to mention the fact, that when the men called Puritans, self-exiled, came to New England, they brought with them the Puritan dogma, that every man, under God, is to determine the meaning of Scripture for himself, though the Puritan practice was otherwise. That was all very well, so long as they were all agreed; but, as a matter of fact, when any man came among them, saying, "Under God I have found Scripture to mean something else than current Puritanism," they at once invoked Church authority to confute him, with a vindictiveness and an earnestness, that would have surprised Bonner or Laud. But, instead of the authority of the Church, of the Councils and Apostles, they invoked the learning of Cotton Mather, and the infallibility of the Cambridge Platform. Denying their own dogma, they hung or banished men for practising it; and, bitterly hostile to the Church, confirmed, by their behavior, her doctrine of the necessity of Church authority, as the keeper and interpreter of Holy Writ. Puritanism, in this country, accomplished its destiny in two ways. 1. By its Ecclesiastical tyranny. 2. By its doctrinal Theology. Refusing to accept the Catholic Creeds as their Confession of the Faith, which, while they are the boundaries of the Faith, within which all men must stand, are Catholic enough to allow, and even encourage differences in non-essentials, and without their restraint, and the deliberate poise which these ancient symbols would have lent them, they fell into those extremes of speculation, which, carried on in profession of zeal for God's truth, lead, finally, to the most grievous Heresy and Schism. We may adduce the current Puritan doctrine of the last Century, touching Grace, Regeneration, Election, in illustration of what is meant. Boasting to be wise, under the guidance of that which is written, they became wise above that which is written; and they enforced a Creed far more colossal in mysteries than the Nicene or Athanasian, with an assiduity and patience which would have done honor to an inquisitor of the Court of Spain. New England Unitarianism, the mother of the so-called Liberal Christianity in this country, sprang, in the first place, from the doctrinal Theology of Puritanism; but the movement has been always aided and abetted by the Puritan idea of what Christ's Church is. When the Puritan or Calvinistic party had pressed their dogmas to such extremes as to shock the general conscience of the men of their Communion, and endeavored to make them current by an irritating display of non |