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an age God will be enthroned in his Church, whose desire for the conversion of sinners may be not more on their account, than that He may have the glory of redemption. Let now piety wane, while the Church, with the world, still admires the great work of doing good. An early symptom of the decline will be, that exclusively religious ideas will have less sway, while considerations addressed to the humane feelings will not have lost their power. Thus the conversion of men will be valued according to the good which it brings them, and that good will seem to consist more in deliverance from hell, than in moral renovation. In process of time thus, the mind of the age will derive its measure of happiness from the sensitive, rather than the moral part of our nature. Then the general improvement of society will be pushed forward with a zeal first awakened by Gospel truth. The great problem will now be to relieve distress, to repair injustice, to raise the degraded. It will seem as if the Gospel's efficiency consists in putting into operation the various civilizing causes, which the wants of the age suggest. But before long these will assume the chief place in the estimation of benevolent minds; Christians will fall down to a level where men of every and of no creed can join their movement, until at last the great hope for mankind will be reposed not in Christ and the Spirit, but in changes of government, improved prisons, emancipations of slaves, cultivation of the intellect, cheap books, comfortable houses. Thus the age will have sunk to a disbelief in God's spiritual agency, and to a faith in man's power of growing better by means which contemplate only the present life. And if the next step should be a decay of benevolence itself, if experience, discovering that the highest civilization may be consistent with the deepest depravity, should in disgust give up the task of benefitting man, and selfishly draw itself within its own shell, that would be nothing strange,-it would be parallel to the course which piety without humanity must take,-the course of running into heartless forms and abject superstition.

The benevolent men of an age like the one supposed, might. not at once perceive that the quality of their goodness was becoming thinner and flimsier. They might all the while congratulate themselves on their real gains, without turning to the other side of the ledger. For if the first impulse came from a Divine source, the declension would be nearly imperceptible, while the end to be accomplished would be worthy of all praise. There might then be pæans over the growth of virtue and happiness, triumphal anticipations of a faster progress in the future, a sense of health, when disease was fastening on the

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system. There would also be danger of self-complacency, and even of self-righteousness. Just as the Pharisee is the product of an age succeeding a religious one-retaining its forms, its zeal, its creed, without its mainspring of godliness, so in such an age the zeal of philanthropy, in one of its various channels, might regard all doubt or difference as flagrant sin, might refuse to commune with all who varied from its notions of morality, might reduce moral excellence to one performance, as for instance to benevolent contribution, might confine itself to one form of effort, feeling that all others are of trifling

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2. On the other hand-I remark in closing-piety will give tone and power to philanthropy. Some who hear me may have fancied that they saw in what I have said, a leaning towards underrating the importance of Christian activity, in any save a strictly religious direction. But in fact my aim has been to show that piety and philanthropy ought to be found together; and I hold in small respect the opinion, that religion, as distinguished from the forces which it puts into motion, is sufficient to renovate the world. Such an opinion is theological rather than Christian: it no more honors religion, than we should honor God by losing sight of the secondary agencies through which he acts. But it is not enough that the spirit of Christianity gives birth to a thousand kindly efforts for human welfare; that it is not too abstract to favor improvements in the hovels of the poor, nor too spiritual to aid in constructing roads of communication, nor too devoted to the Bible to encourage the diffusion of human learning. This is not enough. It must be a nurse and controller, as well as a mother of benevolent effort, which indeed can never grow old enough to guide itself. This presence of piety is needed for the strength and the success of philanthropic feeling. It keeps alive in the benevolent man himself the conviction that he is engaged in the cause of God; whence faith is sustained within him, and courage amid defeats, and a high tone of generous affections. It impresses the world with a sense of its power, because it associates God in their minds with the human endeavor, and calls forth respect for those who are actuated by such high principles. When a man, with humanity nerved by piety, advocates the case of the oppressed, he stands forth as one of the old Hebrew prophets,-God's messenger to rebuke sin,-not merely as a defender of the abstract rights of man. It is seen that he feels that God has a voice in the matter,—God, whose image is foully defaced, God whose institution of the family is despised, God who abhors covetousness and injustice.

When he treads narrow lanes, descends into damp cellars, or scales filthy garrets, he is seen to come as God's messenger, with an aim which does not stop at the relief of misery, but looks to the eternal interests of the forsaken and to the honor of redemption. So, too, when in any enterprise, not exclusively religious, he mingles with men prompted only by human kindness, they find that with sympathies like theirs, he has a selfsacrificing love, a faith which reckons upon the help of God, a sense of the far-reaching importance of the object, which deepens the energies of his allies. While the removal of each evil is an end in itself, it runs back also for him to a higher end, the same end for which the Father sent the Son, and the Son wrought works of mercy in the world. Thus he finds more meaning in benevolent endeavors than his partners do, who share not his spirit: they see the natural meaning,-he, the natural and the spiritual.

Will not success, again, be sure to attend upon enterprises controlled by piety? Will they not have the smile of God? Will they not either disarm or terrify the enemies of human welfare? Will they not excite the mingled respect and love of the miserable? Will they not secure the world from a reaction of weariness in a coming age? Will they not, springing from perennial principles, be likely to last with their early zeal undiminished? Will they not plant Christianity, wherever they plant the seeds of temporal good?

May then all zeal, in works of benevolence indirectly connected with religion, be so tempered and regulated by a godly spirit, that God shall be in and with everything done for human welfare. Then will there be a steady progress, until all men shall be drawn to him who was lifted up at once to bless man kind and to glorify the name of the Father.

ART. II.-HOME EVANGELIZATION.

Eleventh Annual Report of the Society for Promoting Collegiate and Theological Education at the West.

Prayer for Colleges; a Premium Essay," Written for the Society for Promoting Collegiate and Theological Education at the West." By W. S. TYLER, Professor of Greek in Amherst College. New York: Published by M. W. Dodd, for the Society.

FOR more than twenty-five years, the attention of our churches has been called, with peculiar earnestness, to the amazing importance of Home Evangelization. Not that the matter had been utterly neglected before. There was an earnest movement in this direction about the commencement of the present century. What is now called the "Old Connecticut Missionary Society," grew out of it, and not only the new settlements in Vermont felt its benign influence, but the whole of Western New York and Northern Ohio received an impulse, which has resulted in the establishment of Gospel institutions throughout the whole extent of that territory, and made it almost an exact counterpart of New England.

Since the year 1826, however, Home Missionary enterprises have been constructed on a broader scale, and have extended their influence to the furthest bounds of civilized society. The churches have been appealed to in behalf of the new settlements in Michigan, in Indiana, in Illinois and Wisconsin,in Missouri and Iowa and Minesota,-in Oregon and California, and now the cry is, for Kansas and Nebraska. Never, since the early settlement of our country, has there been such a pressing demand for effort in this direction. Never has the necessity for a thorough Home Evangelization been so palpably manifest to all right thinking men, as at the present crisis. Never before has the fate of our country so trembled in the balance, and seemed ready to move in either direction, in accordance with the current that shall gain the mastery. Never has it been so manifest, that nothing can save us, but a thorough instruction of the people in the principles of the Gospel-a training of the masses under the influence of Evangelical truth. Never before has it been so manifest, that "the salvation of America is the hope of the world."

We are not only a spectacle to the world, looked upon with

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universal interest by men of all nations; but we are receiving and incorporating into our society the emigrants from all the nations under heaven. These men, who come to us from the four quarters of the globe, have, most of them, their friends and correspondents in their native country. The influences they feel here, are soon communicated there-and thus a power is given to us, of sending back an influence, where our missionaries have never traveled-where even our Bibles are rigidly excluded. The Romanists of Europe and the Pagans of Asia are feeling our influence, through the people who have come to our shores-an influence which saps the very foundations of their superstitions, and prepares the people for a new order of things-a new religion, and a new state of society. If the people of this country can be thoroughly evangelized, if Christian institutions can be established and sustained, and made influential in every portion of our country, if the people can "all be taught of God," so that "all shall know the Lord, from the least even to the greatest," is it not manifest that an influence must go out from our land, more powerful for good to the nations of the earth, more pervading and far-reaching than from all other nations whatever? an influence which God may use, and doubtless will use, in converting the nations more rapidly and more extensively, than by any means hitherto brought to bear upon them. The opinion of President Edwards-that the millennium is to begin in this country-after having been laid aside and hardly thought of for half a century past, is beginning to find believers and advocates. And the feeling is becoming more and more pervading, that whatever else is done, or not done, the people of this country must have the Gospel. They must "all be taught of God." There must be no class neglected,-nor must any portion of our land be suffered to remain, even for a short time, unblessed by the benign influence of Evangelical Christianity.

As evidence of the strength of this feeling, we have only to take note of the steady onward movement of all those societies, whose primary object is to evangelize our country-the Bible Society, the Tract Society, the Sunday School Union, the Home Missionary Society-and last, but not least, the society whose name is given at the head of this Article. Could anything but a deep and abiding conviction of the indispensable necessity of this home work, have carried these societies forward in their movements, and sustained them through every crisis, and furnished them with funds so ample-an income so steadily increasing and of such amazing magnitude. If it had been predicted a quarter of a century since, that such sums would be collected, and such an amount of benevolent agency

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