New England influence was dreaded; and the question whereunto that thing would grow, became alarming to that class of Presbyterians who were in danger of finding themselves in a permanent minority. Parties were formed. The Presbyterian church was shaken with contention. The great scheme of church power fortified in theological seminaries and in General Assembly Boards, began to be developed, and new controversies were engendered. Was it strange that Congregationalists in New England, especially the younger clergy, began to look upon that form and system of church government with a critical eye? Was it strange that they began to judge it by its fruits? Was it strange that they began to doubt its superiority to the simple and catholic system of New England, when they saw such men as Albert Barnes and the venerable Lyman Beecher arraigned for heresy, and persecuted, year after year, from one judicatory to another. It is in this way that there has grown up a generation of Congregational pastors and ministers-some of them now beginning to be old men-who are Congregationalists not by the mere accident of settlement in Congregational churches, but by conviction. They have studied the subject in the light of Scripture, of history, and of philosophy; and the more they understand the real difference between Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, the more important does that difference seem to them. Yet this was not a sectarian feeling. There was in it no aspiration towards denominational propagandism. Generally the New England churches and their pastors were far more ready to give thanks for their own freedom than to insist on imposing it upon others. Their sympathies were with their brethren in the Presbyterian connection, and valuing the Gospel far above any form of church government, they cherished a vague hope that the spirit of Presbyterianism would be gradually mitigated.

2. It is manifest that since the schism, the excision, the disruption, or by whatever name the catastrophe may be called, by which the Presbyterian church became not two denominations, but two churches, the exscinded Presbyterian brethren have grown far more Presbyterian than they were at first. They were exscinded professedly for their Congregational origin and practices. Before the excision their strength was in their relation to New England. When they found themselves cut loose from the Old School party, and the whole machinery of Presbyterianism in their hands, their first movement was towards Congregationalism. They altered their constitution, making their General Assembly triennial, and curtailed the vaunted but mischievous right of appeal. Had they gone on in that direction, consistently and courageously, the result might have been, after a few years, some general Evangelical Union, by which they and the Congregational churches might have been essentially one body. But suddenly all this was reversed. For the last six years or more, our New School Presbyterian friends have been sedulously cherishing what they call "a denominational spirit," by which they mean just the opposite of a congregational or merely parochial church spirit. They are growing ambitious to

extend and build up their "denomination," for so they call it, as if they were a denomination, and not a mere fragment of the Presbyterian denomination. They are growing ambitious to be one of the "national" churches, with centralized power and consolidated institutions. As yet, indeed, they are far behind the Old School body, but their train is on the same track, and they are going forward with as much steam as they can raise. We cannot stop to inquire into the causes of so great a change, but one cause of it is too obvious and too significant not to be mentioned. For almost twenty years they have been an independent Presbyterian church; and they have been working the machinery of Presbyterianism till "the spirit that is in the wheels" has possessed them. Their younger clergy, especially those whose experience does not reach back to the time when the New School party was only an oppressed and insulted minority, are alive with the spirit of the system. Hence that significant phrase, "young presbytery." The fathers who contended for voluntary associations against the church centralization of ecclesiastical boards, are passing away; and another king is beginning to reign "who knows not Joseph."

3. The recent growth of distinctive Congregationalism in the states west of New England, is among the inevitable consequences of the Presbyterian schism. While the conflict had not terminated in disruption, the sympathies of the New England emigration with their brethren, who were undergoing a protracted ecclesiastical persecution, and their vague hope that the genius of American institutions might ultimately predominate over the narrow and contentious Scotticism of Presbyterianism, counteracted in part their natural predilection for their own church order; and thus the New School party was continually strengthened by their sympathy. The Old School party also, on the other hand, had allies in New England, few, but active. We need not name them. It is enough to say that their policy, long ago, was that New England should withdraw from coöperation with the American Home Missionary Society, and should plant only Congregational churches at the west. But when the schism had been completed by that great wrong of the excision, that violent breach of faith, that memorable illustration of the recklessness of ecclesiastical faction, it was a matter of course that Congregationalists out of New England, as well as at the old homesteads, were far from being conciliated towards a system which had brought forth such fruits. Already, in old churches which their ministers had not been able to presbyterianize, and in the influence from New England to which we have alluded, there was a beginning from which the Congregationalism of New York and of the west has grown to its present stature. Attempts to resist it, to discountenance it, to cut it off from the benefit of sympathy with New England, resulted in the Albany Convention. The existence of Western Congregationalism is a fixed fact. Its essential identity in doctrine and in discipline, with that which lives on this side of Byram river, cannot be questioned.

4. The questions connected with slavery have had an effect on the

relations between these two systems of church order. The Presbyterian church-whether Old School or New School-is one church. Presbyterians in Ohio are responsible for the administration of church discipline among Presbyterians of the same church in Mississippi. Congregationalism repudiates the action of a national church. There are Congregational churches, ancient and honored, in South Carolina and Georgia; and they are not at all behind the ablest and most efficient of Southern churches in any department of Christian influence. But the churches of New England are not responsible for them. They administer their discipline in their own way, according to their own moral illumination and their own understanding of the New Testament, just as the Kirk of Scotland administers its discipline without being responsible to either of the General Assemblies in this country. Thus it happens that while in the N. S. Presbyterian Church there is a constant uneasiness about slavery, and uneasiness makes agitation,-an uneasiness and agitation which will invade the Old School body in due time-the Congregational churches of the North have no great difficulty. In some "infected districts," not a few have forsaken the New School connection because they were afraid to be in fellowship with church members who rob the poor and buy and sell the helpless, and because with their utmost pains-taking they cannot obtain from their Southern presbyteries even a declaration that there are no such members in full and undisturbed communion with their church. Those of our anti-slavery friends who abhor the Home Misionary Society for its complicity with slavery, are planting churches at the West on the principle of non-communion with all slave-holders. Their Anti-Slavery Missionary Society is not distinctively Congregational; it has only a little aid from New England, and that little is prompted by no "denominational” feeling; yet the majority of the churches which it sets up are Congregational,-its Presbyterian congregations connect themselves not with the N. S. Assembly, but with another of the sects into which Presbyterianism, by the law of its nature, is continually dividing itself. Meanwhile, the Southern Aid Society, rejected by Old School Presbyterians as an insult to their Boards, and working almost wholly in the interest of New School Presbyterianism, is attempting to supply the Home Missionary Society's lack of service in the slaveholding States. In all these ways, the difference between the two systems of church order as relative to slavery, is more likely to increase than to diminish,-especially as the New School Presbyterian Church in its growing zeal for nationality, and in its progress toward centralization, falls more and more under the influence of metropolitan pew-holders, elders, and contributors in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Such facts as these, we suspect, were not sufficiently pondered by the authors and subscribers of the Earnest Plea. The aim of the pamphlet is good; the spirit is good, and the effect will be good;-or at least we may be sure that if it does no good it will do no harm. To us the church extension scheme seems to be not an accident, but an effect of tendencies which it is much easier to lament than to counteract.

THE

NEW ENGLANDER.

No. LV.

AUGUST, 1856.

ART. VI.-LIEBER ON CIVIL LIBERTY AND SELF-GOVERNMENT.

On Civil Liberty and Self-Government. By FRANCIS LIEBER. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co. 1853.

DR. LIEBER has attained to such eminence among our political writers, that nothing, which he is willing to give to the world, can fail to command the respect of the best class of readers. Educated in Germany under the first masters of historical politics, and bringing with him in advance to the country of his adoption, principles, which at the most could only be theories in his native land, he is as thorough an American in his way of thinking, as if he were to the manner born; while he flavors our somewhat excessive fondness for political abstractions with a large and copious learning, which has explored the history of institutions throughout all time. Perhaps in ability to draw lessons from the past,, no American writer, whether statesman or publicist, equals Dr. Lieber: certain we are, that no English author in the same department can measure swords with him.

Dr. Lieber's political system may be characterized by its two poles, a thorough dislike and distrust of the French system, whether speculative or practical, and a hearty love of that, which, in England and the United States is considered to be liberty. He has had, however, too good a training in theoreti

cal politics to fall into the mistake, which Burke, with all his wisdom and almost prophetic discernment committed, the mistake of regarding politics as exclusively practical, as spending itself in endeavors to prop up the existing fabric of society, and to keep the cloud of revolution at a distance. He is at once conservative and inclined to bring institutions to the touchstone of justice, at once full of reliance upon a government of the people by itself, and persuaded that no good government can exist without safeguards, by which the private citizen and the minority shall be secured in the possession of their rights, and the government be maintained in the due exercise of its authority.

The faults of Dr. Lieber as a maker of books and a writer are as obvious as his merits. He is diffuse and prolix to wearisomeness. His style is lumbering, and occasionally deformed with words or expressions, which seem to be translations of German thought, rather than vehicles for pellucid English thinking. His method is not that of a logical mind, but rather that of a sound thinker who is embarrassed and almost overcome by his subject. In the present work the faults of style are more decided than in some others, whether because it was delivered in the shape of lectures, where great copiousness is pardonable, or was somewhat hastily written. This haste in writing must have been the cause of several mistakes in matters of fact, which we should not have expected in the works of so truly learned a man as Dr. Lieber.

One or two of these errors from haste, it may not be inexpedient briefly to point out. In Vol. I, page 146, our author, speaking of the right of association, says that "the more despotic a government is, the more actively it suppressess all associations. The Roman emperors did not even suffer the associations of handicrafts." The passages on which Dr. Lieber would probably rely will not bear him out. The distinguished German jurist, Dirksen, has corrected the old error of former writers whom our author follows. The emperors were wary in allowing new guilds for fear of political unions; but the old existed and even new ones sprung into being. And these corporations to which the Roman law expressly alludes, existed through all the important provincial towns of the Empire, as inscriptions make evident.

On page 175 we read that "a long time elapsed before this principle, [that the command of the sovereign cannot screen a minister or subordinate from punishment,] came clearly to be established in England. Charles the First reproved the Commons for proffering their royalty to his own person, while they