1. It may aspire to lead in the Church, to form men's opinions for them and tell them as it were ex cathedra what they ought to believe and do. It cannot be denied that this, rightly done, might be very beneficial, and would please many subscribers, for, with all our boasted right of private judgment, few men really study and think out theological questions for themselves, but are very glad to have some one in whom they have confidence tell them. what they ought to believe. But to do this requires two things, great ability and learning in the Editor, and an income sufficiently large to enable him to obtain from chosen writers such articles as he may need for the purpose. In the present case both these requisites are wanting. 2. There is another position the REVIEW may take, almost if not quite so useful as the former. There are now and always have been different parties in the Church; and we are all very prone to form our notions of the opinions of those who belong to another party, rather from what our own writers say of them than from themselves. Often on comparing notes we find our differences to be much less or less important than we had supposed. By bringing out clearly and fairly, without allowing controversy, the various views tolerated in the Church, and thus enabling men to see what others really believe on disputed points, the CHURCH REVIEW may promote harmony and union. And thus, as a recent Church paper has kindly said of us, "do a good service in showing the world that the points of agreement between the various classes of Churchmen are more numerous than the points of difference." It is also of historic value to have thus brought together, with their own names, the writings of representative men. This is the plan on which during the past year the AMERICAN CHURCH REVIEW has been conducted and which to a certain extent the present Editor proposes to continue. But it by no means follows, from this willingness to present to its readers all sides, that therefore the Church Review is to have no settled policy, or Church views of its own. The desire of the present Editor is that while the Review shall within certain limits continue to be a "Our Church Work," Sept. 18th, 1875. 'The well-known Contemporary Review is conducted on somewhat of this plan. representative of the opinion, the learning, and the life of our whole Church, it shall in its general teachings advocate a Churchmanship conservative but not obstructive, evangelical and apostolic, eclectic but carefully discriminative, attentive to the problems of the present age, and endeavoring to solve them by the old unchangeable truths of Revelation. An old feature of the REVIEW under its first Editor will so far as possible be revived, viz. the giving in each number a synopsis of important Church news, thus preserving in permanent and authentic form, documents and matters of interest in the history of the Church. The Editor has received promises of help in his work from several of our Bishops and from some of the ablest writers of the Church. The next volume will contain a series of articles on Latin Hymnody by the Rev. John Anketell, a History of the Establishment of the Church in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, by Canon Ketchum ; and articles on Foreign and Domestic Missions, Suffragan Bishops, Sunday School Libraries, and other practical questions of the day, as well as articles Historical and Literary, among others by the Rev. Drs. Egar, Huntington, Fulton, Dean, Dix Drumm, Hale, Newton, Wilson, Garrison, McElhinny, etc., the Rev. J. H. Ward will continue his excellent Book Notices. The effort will be to make the REVIEW such in its character that it will become a necessity not only to every Churchman, but to those who wish to know what the Protestant Episcopal Church really is, and indeed to all of literary taste. And now a few words of business. The Editor cannot do all this unless the Church will sustain him in the effort. Publishing is expensive work. He therefore does not hesitate to ask of all the friends of the REVIEW to aid him; 1st. By subscribing themselves, or, if they have already done so, by at once paying up their subscriptions; 2d. By obtaining new subscriptions for the coming year (see cover). Let each present subscriber obtain at least one new one, and the REVIEW will be placed on a firm basis. EDITOR. AMERICAN CHURCH REVIEW. SECULARISM AND THE CHURCH. Under an edict of Valerian in the Seventh Persecution, a soldier at Cæsarea, Marinus, was offered by the Empire the office of Centurion. As the was held out to him, a rival claimant of the place stepped forward and pronounced him legally incapable, being a Christian. A delay of three hours was ordered, giving him time to recant. In the interval, deep if not long, the Bishop, Theotecnus, took Marinus by the hand and led him to the church. Pointing first to the sword in the soldier's belt, and then to an open volume of the Gospels, he said, "Choose between these two." Marinus silently raised his right hand and laid hold of the Book. "Now," said the Bishop, "mayest thou obtain what thou hast chosen!" Eusebius states that Marinus was afterwards beheaded. His fellow-believers, who knew what becomes of martyrs, said that he was crowned. When John, Archbishop of Milan, in the middle of the Fourteenth Century, inherited a civic lordship by the death of his brother, Lucchino Visconti, and was required by Clement VI. to make his choice between the spiritual authority he had wielded hitherto and the secular title now bequeathed to him, it is related that he rose from his throne in the cathedral, after a gorgeous celebration of the mass, and holding up in one hand his crozier and in the other a drawn sword he said to clergy and people, "These are my arms, spiritual and temporal, and with the one I will defend the other." Put with the blade of steel the bag of gold with which he and his class, in all that sordid time, bought of kings and cardinals what the sword could not compel, and we have a measure of the farthest aberration of the Church from Christ. In the space intervening between the martyr of the East and the Suzerain-prelate of the West, she had turned completely round. With wealth and force, the two hands with which " the world" has always grasped dominion, ecclesiastical Rome betrayed Him whom imperial Rome could only crucify. More and more from that time on, avarice, an ignobler passion than that of arms, has assumed the same sinister patronage of the Faith which, in the more heroic worldliness of Constantine and Clovis, of Teutonic conquests and crusades, had been usurped by armies and their captains. Modern Secularism is essentially mercantile, as the old Secularism was military. The manifestations vary, but the thing is the same. Material ambition, material splendor, material delights, unrestrained by the Law of God, make Secularism. Our age is seeing what the churches of Milan and the Italian Republic saw five hundred years since-a worldly patronage of Christianity its most dangerous foe. The time has come when "this world" itself begins to arraign the Kingdom of God, on accusation of worldliness. Unbelievers now refuse to accept the Faith because its disciples reduce their life to a level undistinguishable from the world's life. Lecky, the apostle of Rationalism, deplores the "marked decline of the spirit of self-sacrifice" as "a shadow on the otherwise brilliant picture of human progress." A vigorous newspaper of no religious pretentions, which speaks the thought of many thousands of thinking men in America, says to its readers, "The process of religious decay is partly due to the increasing commercial character of the church organization." It sneers at churches conducted by stock brokers on the same principles on which they would conduct the opera," high pay for good music, with plenty of novelty." And it concludes, "We are sorry to see no papers on this theme in the programme of the Evangelical Alliance." Another still more popular organ of public opinion lately said, "Christianity is not suffering to-day chiefly from the assaults of its enemies. Unable, it would seem, to bring the secular spirit of the age into correspondence with their hereditary religious faith, many among the nominal members of the church militant, instead of fighting the good fight, are full of blank misgivings, and moving about in worlds not realized." It is not a new reproach, but it is more and more damaging the longer it can be made without being instantly refuted. What made Voltaire say he hated Jesus Christ? The secularized Gospel of his time and nation,—of massacres and thefts, of St. Bartholemew and the Draggonades, of pride and What made Voltaire at the same time admire and eulogize the Quakers? The unsecular Christian love among them, which, in spite of their loss of primitive ordinances and apostolical orders, preserved still a primitive simplicity of living, and an apostolical" weanedness from the world." vengeance. No possible interpretation of the New Testament can conceal the fact that there is carried all through it the assertion of an antagonism between the principles of the doctrine of Christ and the principles of human conduct as it is without that doctrine. In nearly every form of declaration that language admits, this inherent, necessary, perpetual opposition is declared. It is radical and persistent; it is in theory, in logic and in practice; it pertains to the native powers, the ideas, the spirit, the objects, of two opposite systems of life for man. We define this contrariety in a form at once the most exact and the most comprehensive when we say that, according to the principles of human conduct without the doctrine of Christ, man lives supremely for himself, while according to that doctrine he lives supremely from affection for God, and for a good which is common to himself with other men. main spring of human life, separate from the life of Christ, is selfinterest. The main spring of alì life originating in the life of Christ is a sense of Duty under Divine Law, inspired, elevated, spiritualized, by disinterested Love. One is a force of restriction, the other of expansion. The opposition, therefore, is diametrical; and the contrast becomes yet more manifest when it is found that the one, in the pursuit of its ends, is subject to no moral regulation, or at best to a control that is capricious, feeble, and without permanent sanctions or penalties, while the other is held in complete The |