We should make less use of the logical faculty, and more of the intuitional; regarding the text less in the light of rigid, mechanical, legal, and therefore cold, dry, and dead enactments; and more as free, glowing, unstudied outpourings of heart, and soul, and life, from the Spirit of God to the spirit of

man.

A few words as to the advantages supposed to be gained, by the peculiar form and matter of the foregoing system, may perhaps be offered.

First, and most obviously, it meets every species of unbelief on its own ground-that of reason. Or, rather, it undermines and sweeps away the ground of all unbelief, as if the earth should sink beneath our feet into the depths of a soundless

ocean.

Or, secondly, should unbelief still be persisted in, it is handed over to the blackness of utter darkness and despair, in which the soul utterly, and self-condemned, and lost, without plea, defense, or shadow of hope, flies shrieking for refuge to a possible God, even though enthroned on Sinai's mount. How completely all motive for wishing to shun the All-seeing eye, or shut the soul to the evidences of His existence, is thus removed, and so the very life of infidelity nipped in the bud, we need not say.

Thirdly, observe the gradation by which the successive series rise, each above the preceding, in the argument; each thus lifting the mind to the level of its successor, until, finally, the advent of revealed religion breaks, like the morning, upon the vision; offering, not an abnormal construction, standing in a certain antagonism, or at least exception, to the common course and expectation of nature, and natural thought, as is true in a sense of other theological systems; but the complement of nature's great circle, the culmination of Pan-truth's all-shadowing mount, the soul, and crown, of all moral and spiritual thought.

And this suggests, fourthly, perhaps the highest value of whatever is peculiar to the system in hand, viz, that it goes far to harmonize and forestall that unfortunate antagonism, partly consciously, partly unconsciously held, sometimes expressed, of

tener felt, between reason and faith, from which even the theological mind of the age is by no means free. The existence of such an antagonism is proved by a thousand signs which cannot have escaped an observant eye. We think, not with a single eye to truth, but with a squinting glance aside, to mark our bearings toward certain prescriptive bounds. New forms of thought are tried very frequently, not by the test of truth, but of their effect upon other doctrines supposed to be true. Many a theologian can find no better place in which to hide those difficulties, which every mind must place somewhere in theology, than between a clear and positive affirmation of the whole soul of man, on the one hand, and the supposed authority of revelation on the other. Reason is extensively regarded with fear, and a free, bold, enthusiastic thinker, with distrust. Of course the opponents of the truth are not slow to seize upon and appropriate the admission which we thus offer; and straightway it is treated as a fact conceded, that reason and faith regard each other with no friendly eye. The disastrous effect of all this need not be described. And can it require an argument to show that it is an unsound state of mind? Truth is a jealous dame; she will not reveal her face to one whose eye glances furtively toward a rival. What would be thought of a mathematician, who in some profound process of investigation, instead of surrendering his mind confidingly to the rigid law of the demonstration, cramps and constrains the reasoning at every step, by the foregone determination to arrive at a certain result! The soul of the Baconian philosophy consisted in questioning nature, and accepting submissively her responses. The only true spirit of investigation,-the only real thought, in any department, is that which follows truth, never looking whither she is about to lead. And he who rightly conceives the nature of truth, never fears that she will lead away from herself, or away from the God who is the personification of herself.

Now this whole mal-adjustment of forces, which are sisters, and should be friends, it is easy to see that the course of thought before us completely resolves. The apprehensions of the theologian are relieved,—the inflation of the sceptic suffers

collapse. We think no more under limitation and constraint, with intellectual muscles swaddled, and spiritual nerves unstrung; but with eye single to truth, without fear of consequences, the rejoicing soul inherits the promise to "mount up with wings as eagles, to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint."

Finally, apart from all consequences, looking at the system. itself in its material and form, it seems to us more truly scientific, more thoroughly philosophical, and therefore better adapted to feed and exalt the mind, than the commonly received forms of theological doctrine. It begins at the proper place, with what is known, and within reach. It is Baconian, -collating and questioning the unmistakable phenomena of nature. It proceeds by the truest gradation, and develops its theme in the true spirit of science, by following like a child the simple conduct of truth.

ARTICLE IX.-THE DOCTRINE OF LOYALTY.

To settle the meaning of a word is often a matter even of the highest consequence to the welfare of society. Most especially is this true of words that are used with a standard reference to great moral and political distinctions. Never do men put themselves in the wrong so often, or with so great seeming perversity, as when they have only confused, half-partisan ideas of the right. Thus it is enough, at such a time as this, to make thousands disloyal, that they have only random notions of loyalty, or such as come to them only in the smoke of a merely contentious use. The time has come, therefore, when this word, never till quite recently applied to American uses, should, if possible, have its meaning clearly made out and determinately settled.

of

Heretofore we have looked upon this word, and, in fact, have even spoken of it, as a strictly old-world's word, capable never any fit application to the conditions of American society. It supposes, we have conceived, some kind of hereditary magistracy, such as belongs, in other nations, to royal and princely orders. Thus, when Mr. Dana published, thirty or forty years ago, his rather famous Article on the need of Orders in the State, to impersonate, and connect with a personal sentiment, the otherwise vapid and dry abstractions of law, his regret was, in fact, that we had no place for loyalty, and that, on our footing of equal society, no such necessary homage to a natively personal magistracy is possible. He had probably never heard the word loyal applied to an American citizen, and had no conception that it ever could be. All the great sentiments that figure under this word he conceived as belonging to the poetry of a more poetic society, blessed with the picturesque figures and distinctions of noble orders. And yet we find ourselves using, now, the words loyal and loyalty, as freely as they were ever used by Englishmen. We think, too, that we mean something by them, and, in fact, are having

any

as great sentiments in them as ever swelled the bosom of people in the world. And we are certainly so far right in this as a very badly confused use of the words allows us to be. We may even thank God in the fact that a public fire has broken out, finally, in our republican society, such as shows the capacity of fire to be in it. We have seen the consciously great sentiment of a great history bursting into flame, and we hope it may never cease to burn, till the stars grow dim in the sky.

We are, just now, a kind of revelation to ourselves in this matter-surprised by the majestic figure of our self-devotion, and of the immense, all-dominating loyalty now visible, that before slumbered and was hid in the recesses of our republican feeling and life. And we are none the less ludicrously affected, in this really grand waking of high sentiment, by the awkwardness with which we sometimes carry ourselves; even as the blinded Cyclop plucks up, as he wakes, the pine tree for his staff, stalking down the hill sides, with unsteady feet, and bellowing after the enemies he cannot see or seize. We lay charges of disloyalty, but have really no clear sense of what it is. We glory in the character as being just what it is not. We claim a right to the name of it, on grounds that wholly misconceive its meaning. We even put it in a field where it does not belong; for the gentlemen of the law assume a special right to be its expounders and patrons, as if it were a matter belonging to their sole jurisdiction; when it is, in fact, no matter of legal significance whatever, and never belonged to the jurisdiction of the law at all. Indeed, this latter mistake is so common that, in almost all our discussions of the subject, the charges we lay and those we repel, there appears to be a certain reverting to the law and to legal standards, in the impression that the matter is resolvable there.

In our endeavor, therefore, to settle the meaning and place of loyalty, we shall be obliged, first of all, to examine its relations to law, or to show, as we easily may, that it is, in fact, no subject of the law at all.

A somewhat conspicuous legal advocate, in New York, un