He undermines the confidence of men in the reality of all religious feeling, and instils the suspicion that every manifestation of piety is pretension and cant. An impression of this sort is not to be feared in the case of Dred, because the sarcasms at formality and hypocrisy are qualified by the presence of characters which speak out and live out the excellence of the Gospel. We will not murmur at the sly sneers at theology, for we are willing to regard them as directed at cold dogmatism, or at the spirit of mere speculation on themes which have an infinite, practical interest for every human being. Theology, however, is properly the sum of our religious knowledge, cast into the form of science. The study of theology is the contemplation of the religious truth which God has revealed to the intelligence of man. We shall not waste time in proving that such a study, undertaken with a right motive, is the grandest and most sanctifying effort which the human intellect can put forth. Nor shall we spend our breath in repelling the vulgar assertion, that religion is a subject which is less understood, the more it is studied-in other words, that theology, by a legitimate tendency, narrows the mind, and corrupts the religious sentiment. There is a cant of liberalism in our day, quite as offensive as any form of cant which it opposes. A theologian who forms his opinions by carefully interpreting the Word of God, in the light which the studies of scholars and the experience of saints for two thousand years, have thrown upon its pages, is pitied for his prejudice, if he withhold his credence from notions which have no surer foundation than a dream of Swedenborg. He is deemed sadly behind the age, if he declines to foist on the Christian faith new Articles, which he can at once recognize as old errors, exhumed and clothed in a modern dress. We have never met elsewhere with more bitter intolerance, than we have seen in the loudest preachers of toleration.

There are other points suggested in the perusal of Dred, on which we should be glad to speak. We must leave the book, with these imperfect comments, but not without expressing our satisfaction in the fact that freedom has found a friend so able and devoted, as the author of these volumes.

ART. IV.-NATIONAL SINS AND THEIR RETRIBUTION.

WHAT an outcry! On all sides there is dismay-in one direction and another there are yells and shrieks-at the portentous collision between the deepest and most earnest convictions of religious men on the one hand, and the administration. and tendency of our public affairs on the other hand. "Politics in the Pulpit!" "Church and State!" "Higher Law Fanaticism!" Such are the exclamations by which the Devil and his emissaries would scare religious men away from the serious consideration of questions that have become political, because political men and political parties have sold themselves to do iniquity. The loudness and discordant terror of the outery show that the collision is real. Our national policy, under the influences which have gradually obtained a complete ascendency in political affairs, is at last manifestly-as it has long been stealthily and with little suspicion of its actual tendency and quality-in conflict with the most elementary ideas of duty and religion, as they exist in the consciousness of a Christian mind. The great question of the times is not a question of political economy merely, nor merely of the balance of powers in government. It is at once far deeper than all such questions, and more within the reach and grasp of ordinary minds. It is whether there is any such thing as moral right or wrong in politicswhether there is a God to whom nations are responsible, and who visits their crimes with retribution-whether injustice, ordained and guarded by national power, and incorporated into a nation's life, loses its essential quality, escapes from the universal and inexorable law of retribution, and becomes a holy thing. Thus it is that the Church of God in this land trembles, through all its living members, with unwonted agitation. Thus it is that the pulpit has become so terribly obnoxious to politicians. In 1850, Daniel Webster and his associates, in the crime and folly of the hour, deliberately undertook to demoralize the American Church and pulpit, or, perhaps, to use for their political purposes a Church and a Ministry which they supposed to be sufficiently demoralized already. The experiment was partly successful; as reams of sermons against the higher law, and of clerical speeches at political meetings for the safety of the Union, sufficiently attested. But four years afterwards, when men of baser quality undertook to finish what

Webster had begun, and when the pretended Union-saving of 1850 brought forth fruit after its kind in the Nebraska bill of 1854, the moral and religious sensibilities of the American people began to awake. Men began to see, with their eyes half opened, that the Bible, New Testament and Old Testament alike, is in conflict with the course of politics. Preaching became political. It could not be otherwise, for politics had invaded the sphere of religion, and the abomination of desolation was standing in the holy place. Politics had undertaken to dethrone God, to abrogate his immutable laws, and to crucify Jesus Christ afresh. The preaching which, at such a crisis, could be otherwise than political in its felt bearings and applications, would convict the preacher of faithlessness to his awful trust. As the timid disciples who forsook their Lord and fled in the hour of his betrayal, and even he who denied him, grew bold when Christ had been crucified; so the preachers of the Gospel in this land, when political godlessness thought itself victorious and secure, found that their holy text-book had a voice of guidance for political duty, and a voice of commination for political crimes. The function of the Christian Ministry in a free and Christian country is not wholly unlike the prophetic function in the ancient Hebrew State. And in the present crisis of American history, keeping within its proper province of religion and of the exposition of God's law, it has been as real a terror to knavish and godless politicians, in high places and in low places, as Elijah was to Ahab.

A compilation of texts and themes, that have been handled in sermons complained of as political, would be a curious and instructive sight. What is political preaching? And what preaching is there which is not political in such times as these? To preach against slavery is of course political preaching; but to preach for it, with President Lord and with the host of southern preachers, is what such Christians as the New York Journal of Commerce and its allies call preaching the Gospel. To expound any commandment of the decalogue, after the old Puritan fashion, with "all the requirements and forbidments," showing all its applications to actual human duty, will almost certainly be preaching against the institution of slavery, which puts the whole decalogue to scorn; and inasmuch as the great political question of the day is, whether slavery shall be a national institution, upheld and extended by the national power, such preaching is of course political, and will be denounced accordingly by all who hold that religion and the pulpit have nothing to do with politics. If ministers of religion must preach nothing which the Atchisons and Stringfellows, and

their confederates in Washington and elsewhere, will feel to be political, they must have some other text-book than the Bible; they must have some other God than him who spake of old to the fathers by the prophets; they must have some other Christ than him who said, "Wo to you, Scribes and Pharisees;" who bade his followers "beware of the leaven of Herod;" and who beheld the city and wept over it, with the lamentation of a patriot heart, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," "if thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!"

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What, for example, can a pastor do, who has watched the progress of the measures for enslaving Kansas, with a heart that can feel for humanity, and that lives in fellowship with Christ; who, being himself a Southern man by birth, and blood, and early training, knows what the institution is which wicked men, controlling the national government, are striving to fasten upon the helplessness of a dependent people; and who has just heard of the bloody violence committed in the Senate chamber by a ruffian representative of organized injustice? What shall he take for the text of the sermon which he must preach, on the ensuing sabbath, to an assembly of citizens who share in the responsibilities of the sovereign people? Opening his Bible, he lights upon this passage:

"Then He said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah, that they commit the abominations which they commit here for they have filled the land with violence, and have ventured to provoke me to anger. Therefore will I also deal in fury; mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: and though they cry in mine ears with a loud cry, yet will I not hear them. He cried also in mine ears with a loud voice, saying, Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his destroying weapon in his hand; and behold six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand. And one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer's inkhorn by his side, and they went in and stood beside the brazen altar. And he called to the man clothed with linen, which had the writer's inkhorn by his side, and the Lord said to him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the men that sigh and that cry, for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. And to the others he said, in my hearing, Go ye after him through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: slay utterly, old and young, both maids and little children and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary."-Ezek. viii, 17, 18, and ix, 1-6.

Is he forbidden to preach from such a text as this-so opportune to the passing crisis? And if while preaching from this text, he does not say something against which the Devil will cry out "Politics," will not his conscience condemn him? and

will not even the Postmaster, if there happens to be one in the congregation, feel that he is afraid to speak God's truth?

We have before us the manuscript of a sermon prepared and preached, from this text, in the circumstances which we have described. We give the substance of it to the public as an illustration of the inevitable duty of preaching politics whenever political agitation thrusts itself into the legitimate sphere of preaching.

No portion of the history of mankind is more instructive than that which we find recorded in the word of God, respecting ancient Israel; because no history so illustrates by examples the principles of God's government over nations. Of the events recorded in that history, it is explicitly affirmed by an inspired writer," All these things happened unto them for ensamples, and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come." No portion of history, therefore, is more worthy of thorough and earnest study, than this of the ancient Jews. I do not mean a merely superficial perusal, which is intent chiefly on picturesque incidents and striking characters, but rather that deep philosophical study, which traces effects to their causes, and follows causes into their consequences, and which by a wise generalization, attains to the discovery and distinct conception of principles, applicable everywhere and at all times, under the sovereignty of a God who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will, and who is the same, yesterday and to-day and forever.

It is one of the sublime facts brought to our knowledge, through this recorded history of Israel, and intimated in this passage from one of Israel's most eminent prophets, that principalities and powers in heavenly places, intelligences far higher in the scale of being than ourselves, are interested spectors of the events which are transpiring in this world. Those ethereal minds need not be imagined as confining their attention to individuals; but nations with their multitudes of actors, and the multitudinous array of events which are ever crowding into the field of history, may lie, as it were, ever spread out in one expanded scene, before their earnest observation. And not alone or chiefly, as passing events, filled with excitement, and calling into intense but transitory exercise, the passions and the varied powers of busy and earnest actors, are the events of the world's history regarded by those celestial minds; but the events and deeds of earth are estimated in heaven by their moral characteristics, by their rectitude or wrongfulness in comparison with the standard of eternal truth, and by their in