rely most securely on the settled order of society, and their liveliest sympathies lie on the side of submission, good faith, and good feeling throughout all sections and classes of the country, But they have been led, by processes within their own minds as uncontrollable as the winds of heaven, and which they honestly trace to the workings of that spirit which Christ compared to the wind that bloweth where it listeth, to contemplate every possible enslavement, or reenslavement, of any human being, under any supposable array of circumstances, in this age of the world and within the great American republic, as a terrible offense against the plain will and word of God, and against that humanity which he has made and called his child. They believe the system of negro slavery as it exists in the United States to be explicitly at variance with the Almighty's will and law, and with all the duty, integrity, purity, and innocent happiness of man. They regard it as the special and overshadowing affront of this nation against the Father of eternal justice, truth, liberty, love. They know that it is an anomaly in our national institutions, an abnegation of our history, a plague in our politics, a gigantic curse upon industry, a foul insult to morality, a blight upon learning, science, and the arts, the annihilation of God's ordinance in the family, the prostitution of woman, the scourge of innocence, the violation, direct or indirect, of each of the commandments, and the denial of the Gospel, the intensest meanness and the foulest filthiness and the most profane impiety, the consummation of crimes, the comprehensive antagonist of the kingdom of Heaven, constituting, in the whole and in each of its parts, the abomination of desolation,' 'standing where it ought not.' They deliberately and assuredly believe, that every man so convinced and so seeing, ought in every place, by every means, in street and house and shop and office and caucus and legislature and pulpit, to bear his most earnest, express, unmistakable, consistent witness against it,-against all its spirit, rules, methods, actings, devices, excuses, but most of all, against its aggressions and extensions. They believe that such aggressions are forbidden by the civil constitution, while the very continuance of the wrong, in any shape, is rebuked by the entire spirit of that venerated instrument, and by the designs and convictions of the men that formed it. I ask you if it is more than just, that these men should stand exempt from being ranked with rebels and revolutionists,-if it is more than reasonable, that enlightened legislation should show some respect for such citizens,-if it is more than right, that they should dispassionately labor and pray for some relief from a requirement which would render their active obedience to the magistrate, by the re-enslavement of a fugitive, in their eyes as direct and impious an affront towards Almighty God, as falsehood, blasphemy, or robbery." pp. 427–30.

"There is no measure, especially in a republic, so radical, as that which arrays what is most Christian in a nation against the magisterial authority; no publication so inflammatory, as a law that commands a moral people to do that which a large majority of them believe to be unjust; no document so incendiary, as one that sets on fire the quenchless instinct that abhors oppression, or wakes from sleep that unmanageable instinct which has shaken so many thrones, that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."" p. 430.

In the preface to this volume Professor Huntington remarks that "one topic, the reconciliation in Christ, though by no means neglected here, has a less extended and less complete presentation, because of a desire to discuss it separately, and more at large and more at leisure than is possible now." Our gratification at the views which he has already given to the public on that topic, was expressed in our last number. We hope that he will soon give it the more extended discussion which he desires. On account of his peculiar history, experi ence, and relations, there is no man in the country who could so effectually serve the cause of Christ by such a discussion.

ART. VII.-THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO LAW AND

GOVERNMENT.

[The following article is a discourse which was delivered before the ♣. B. K. at Cambridge, on the 17th of July, 1856. The publication of the discourse having been requested from various quarters, the manuscript has been committed to the conductors of the New Englander, and by them the discourse is offered to their readers in its original form]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:

The diffidence which I feel as a stranger, rising to speak in such a place as this, is alleviated by the trust that you will hear me with a hospitable kindness. Honored by your invitation, I come acknowledging the bond of that fraternity in which all men of letters are members of one guild. And as an alumnus of old Yale, let me say that I rejoice in the opportunity of paying a tribute, humble but hearty, to the yet older dignity of

Harvard.

I know not how it may be with others, but such are the habits of my own mind that, as I enter the precincts of an institution like this-venerable with the ages that have passed over it, yet fresh and growing as with immortal vigor-the associations of thought carry me back to the founders of this institution, challenging for them the reverence due to benefactors of their country and of mankind. At Yale these associations carry us back only to the closing year of the seventeenth century, when two generations of the Anglo-Norman race in New England had already lived and died. Our founders were the grandsons of those who, in their town-meetings along the Connecticut and the Sound-which were then what the Mississippi and the upper lakes now are for remoteness-appointed, year by year, "collectors of the college corn," giving from the food of their own households for the sustenance of the college in "the Baye." But Harvard is the eldest-born of Puritanism. Her numbered centuries of life are coincident with the centuries of New England itself. Her birth was when Boston was little more than a hamlet of rude huts; when the border-ruffians prowling around the most recent settlements of the West were painted Pequots; when the report of a refuge for truth and freedom in this wilderness had not yet ceased to be news, fresh and stirring, in the conventicles and consultations of the English Puritans under the first Charles. Here, then, the genius of the place calls up around me the shadowy forms of those heroic men, the first fathers of New England. This is their uni

versity. In their conflict with wild nature-in their perils, their weakness, their weariness and their poverty-they founded a college, and here it is. Here let their memory ever flourish. Here let all that was right and true in their principles be guarded as a sacred treasure. Here let all that was heroic in their manliness and all that was saintly in their faith and devotion, waken ingenuous minds to kindred virtue.

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The great attempt of the men who founded the Puritan commonwealths of New England, was alike religious and political. Philosophers have framed, or sought to frame in speculation the day-dream of a perfect commonwealth, but the founders of these States labored and suffered to realize their high conception. That which they undertook was not merely to escape from persecution by voluntary exile; it was not merely to gain a peaceful home and a fair inheritance for their families and their posterity; it was not merely to achieve liberty for themselves and for the new communities which they were gathering; it was something higher and more sacred than all this. It was not simply to establish, far away from all impertinent interference, a purer and more primitive ecclesiastical order; it was something at once more political than this, and more religious. The devout imagination" that filled their minds and inspired their highest efforts, was the vision of a new and true theocracy-not the dominion of a priestly order, but the Kingdom of God. Their day-dream was the vision of a State in which every law should be the uttered will, not of the magistrate or of any human legislator-not of the people, merely-but of the High and Holy One from whom the State derives its being and its rightful power. Whatever errors they made in the structure of their political institutions or their laws, were made in the honesty and the earnestness of their attempt to translate their sublime thought into reality. We may acknowledge those errors wherever they have been detected by the progress of the ages and the successive births of truth; yet let us never cease to honor not only the heroism of their endeavors, but the religious dignity of their idea. That great idea was well expressed by John Cotton, when from under this western sky he wrote to his friend John Davenport in London, that here he seemed to have found the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. It was essentially the same thought with that which, in the dawn of the world's history, was divinely breathed into the mind of Moses-the thought of a kingdom of God on the earth. It was the same thought which gave unutterable grandeur to the visions of the Hebrew prophets the thought of a coming and perfected kingdom of God. And with all reverence let me say, that in their

self-sacrificing endeavors to realize that great thought, they were followers of the world's Redeemer, who came to establish the kingdom of God, and whose idea of that kingdom will be fully comprehended among men only when the prayer shall have been completely answered, "Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."

Without inquiring why or to what extent they failed in their attempt to realize the idea of a perfect conformity between the laws of the State and the will of God, I venture to propose a theme suggested by their attempt, and illustrated alike by their failure and their success, the just relation of Christianity to ·law and government. I need not profess my conscious incompetence to the full discussion of such a theme, but if from my own. point of view I can offer some suggestions which shall have the effect of stimulating other minds to a more learned and thorough investigation of the subject in the light of history as well as of philosophy and religion, I shall not have spoken in vain.

There is a distinction-more intelligible, perhaps, than definite-between law and justice. I do not mean the lawyers' distinction between law and equity, which is only the difference between one system of judicial methods and maxims and another; I mean the distinction which everybody recognizes between laws as ordained and executed in civil society, and that justice which is before and above all human laws, and is their only warrant at the tribunal of conscience. All law, by its very nature and name, pretends to be justice. At whatever moment its pretension in that respect ceases to be recognized, it loses all its sanctity, and becomes an odious and a hideous thing. The justice of the law must commend itself to the sense of justice in the people, or the law becomes oppressive and intolerable. Thus among every people not governed by mere force, the law is a product of the national life; and so far as we know what their laws are, we know the character of that people, the nature and degree of their civilization, their moral sensibilities and sympathies, and above all, the measure in which their sense of justice has been developed or obliterated. The sense of justice, among a people not absolutely enslaved, is never far in advance of the laws in which that sense of justice is uttered and applied. Thus it happens that in some languages, and especially in the language of that free and brave old people whose laws have become in one form or another, the basis of almost all European and American jurisprudence, the terms can hardly be found in which to express the distinction between law and justice. Ler and jus are far more nearly synonymous in Latin, than law and justice are in English.

Doubtless law has the effect to modify and cultivate the pop

ular sense of justice. But let us not forget what the order of nature is. The sense of justice makes the law, and not the law the sense of justice. A law that represents not right but only the will of a dominant power-a law which contradicts the sense of justice among the people on whom it is imposed-cannot bend that sense of justice into conformity with itself. Magistrates may attempt to sustain the obnoxious statute by power and terror-judges, in solemn session, may pronounce it valid -politicians may argue that justice must yield to considerations of political expediency, and in the name of the public welfare may entreat the people to be patient and to conquer their prejudices-casuists may perplex themselves with exquisite distinctions about passive obedience and conflicting duties; but every application of such a law-every attempt to carry it into execution by the physical force of the government-stimulates and stiffens, instead of subduing the sense of justice which it violates. When law expresses what the popular mind can recognize as justice, then and only then does it quicken and guide the moral judgment and educate the moral sensibilities of the people. Oppression, long continued, may barbarize those whom it crushes, by training them through successive genérations under the sway of violence; it may so extinguish the better sentiments of their human nature that they shall be ready to deal with all others when they get the opportunity, as others have dealt with them; but mere oppression, though it take the form of lawoppression governing by edicts that represent not right but might -can never control or shape the sense of justice. The power of the law to educate the moral sense, must depend on the recognition of its justice by the moral sense of the people whom it governs.

If we look for an illustration of what may be done for the moral elevation of the people by the influence of law, there is one signal example which occurs in a moment to the thoughts of a Christian assembly. The Hebrew tribes, when they emerged from their slavery in Egypt, under a leader divinely commissioned and instructed, were in many respects a degraded and barbarous people. In the Mosaic institutes, recognized and honored as law at this day by the descendants of Israel in every land, we see the system of influences by which that chosen race was to be trained for its high and peculiar destiny. The little country allotted to those tribes was to become, in the fulness of times, the seed-plot of reformation for the world; and the influences by which this was to be effected-or rather the germs of thought and sentiment from which all this growth of the world's renovation was to spring-are contained in "the book