Valley of the Mississippi. Hence the persevering and too often successful efforts to secure a foothold in every settlement of the West. Hence the accumulation of property, purchased, to a great extent, by the contributions of propagandist societies in Europe, whose treasuries are filled by men hostile to our institutions. Hence the establishment of schools of every grade, to monopolize, if possible, the education of our youth, and that, too, by men and women trained in the cloisters of the Old World, and whose first love and highest duty are towards an Italian prince, and not to American nationality. This formidable power, more formidable because it holds enough truth to hide from men's eyes its gigantic errors, and is so earnest in practical benevolence as to make men forget its past history of cruelty and oppression,- this corrupt church is a real danger to the Republic. Speaking by its pontifical head, it proclaims that liberty of conscience, of speech, of thought, and of the press, all that we hold dearest as American citizens and Christians, are delusions to be exploded, and eradicated from men's minds.

"Over against this peril rises the opposite, the Antichrist of Infidelity, threatening to sweep away all the old foundations of our faith, even the sure Corner-stone which human builders have ever rejected, but which was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, the Rock of salvation. Immigration is rapidly bringing to our shores vast numbers who have identified Christianity with the civil and ecclesiastical despotisms of the Old World, and who, in their intense re-action from such baneful influences, have adopted the wildest forms of unbelief. This foe to Christ and his Church is not idle. It has its schools, its pulpits, and its presses. It tends directly, and by a headlong descent, to socialism and to anarchy. It makes light of marriage; it profanes unblushingly God's holy day. Its end is death, death to all which we have prized as most precious in the legacy of our departed statesmen and Christian fathers.

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"What mind of man can estimate the responsibility of the Church's mission at such a crisis? How shall we fulfil it? how rise to the greatness, the grandeur, of the situation? These are questions which may well stir our souls to their very depths.

"Her first great mission must be to bear witness to the truth, the truth as it is in Jesus,' to the old and everlasting gospel, 'the power of God unto salvation.' Against infidelity she must lift up ceaselessly the standard of her Lord; 'contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints,' the infallibility of God's holy word, and the full and free salvation offered to man through the atoning sacrifice of the Lamb of God upon the cross, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.'

'a

"Preach the everlasting gospel:' this seems to be now the message of her ascended Lord. Tell the heedless, reckless, dying millions, of salvation, of the cross, of eternal life: this is their profoundest want, deny it as they may; and this is our highest work. We need great-hearted, mighty preachers, as in days of old. We need men of the boldness of St. Peter at Pentecost; of St. Paul's death-defying heroism at Ephesus, at Corinth, at Jerusalem; of the loving tenderness of St. John. We need the jealous love of the truth which dwelt in Athanasius and Augustine; the burning eloquence. of the golden-mouthed John of Antioch, and Gregory of Nazianzen. We need men of Luther's boldness and Melancthon's tenderness, the fearlessness of Latimer, the judiciousness of Hooker, and the fervid piety of Leighton and of Ken. May the Lord give the word, that great may be. the company of the preachers!

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Against Romanism our testimony must be no less strong and clear. We must assert the claims of the Reformed Catholic Church of Christ to be the Church of the apostles and of early days, cleansed of the defilements of the dark ages.

We must expose the pretensions of that corrupt

church, by showing her real weakness, her partial truth, to be the most dangerous form of error. We must awaken to a consciousness of the great trust Christ has committed to our hands. We must be wise to discern the times, and to neglect no instrumentality which may hasten the coming of the kingdom of God."

The general statistics of the Protestant-Episcopal Church for 1866 show 34 dioceses, 44 bishops, and 2,486 priests and deacons; the whole number of clergy, 2,530; parishes, 2,305; communicants added, 14,138; present number of communicants, 161,224; Sunday-school teachers, 17,570; scholars, 157,813; contributions, $3,051,669.64.

This church has under its charge 14 colleges, 9 theological seminaries, and 24 academies. Episcopalians attach high importance to sound and varied learning in every department of society. They publish 10 weekly periodicals, 5 monthlies, and 1 quarterly.

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES.

Congregationalism, as we have seen, came to this land with the Pilgrim Fathers. It is to be distinguished from Puritanism, though the Puritans were Congregationalists. As a mode of church government, it claims conclusive authority in regard to definitions of faith, and spiritual, financial, and disciplinary control for the individual church. The field of their greatest prosperity is New England; but they have extended their labors into other parts of the United States. They numbered, at last reports, 2,719 ministers, 268,015 communicants, and 283,798 Sunday-school scholars. In 1860, they had 2,334 churches, valued at $13,327,511, accommodating 956,351 people. The American Home Missionary Society (chiefly Congregationalist), in the year 1865, sustained 802 home missionaries at an expense of $189,965; and, through the American Board, they sent abroad 90 missionaries, besides male and female helpers. These laborious and self

sacrificing men and women have honored their Master, and the whole Christian Church, by the most exemplary purity, devotion, and efficiency in the hardest foreign fields; and are still moving on with the evident approbation and blessing of God. The Congregationalists are vigorous workers through the American Tract Society, the American Sundayschool Union, and among the freedmen of the South. They publish 6 weekly periodicals and 4 able quarterlies. In the department of education, they labor chiefly through schools and colleges which are not ostensibly denominational, and exert a widely-diffused influence in favor of the broadest education of the masses and the highest culture of public

men.

With respect to their patriotism and Christian power in the formation, development, and defence of this Republic, in proportion to their numbers, history awards them a very high position. In our account of the struggle for colonial independence, so large a space was, of necessity, given to Congregational influence, that less is required here. We refer our readers especially to a large part of the period of preparation. Rev. B. F. Morris* says their "form of church government is democratic. It was of Puritan birth; and, like the faith of the Puritans, it came fresh and vigorous from the word of God. It is the embodiment and practice of the American doctrine of popular sovereignty applied to church government, as it is to all the civil affairs of the nation. Each church is an independent Christian democracy, where all the members have a right to a voice in the government of the church, and whose decisions are subject to no reversal by any other ecclesiastical tribunal. The Bible is regarded as the text-book in theology and politics in Church and State, as it is in the form of church government; and, holding the Bible as the standard of form as well as of faith, the Puritans and their descendants constitute their ecclesiastic form after the pattern set them

* Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, p. 421.

in the Bible. The fruits of their faith and purity everywhere abound.

"The principles of their religious system have given birth and vigor to the republican habits and republican virtue and intelligence of the sons of New England.' The Congregational churches were not only schools of Christian faith, but of freedom, in which the ministers were the teachers, and the people the pupils; and whence came the men and women to fight and pray for freedom and the battles of the Revolution. During the Revolution, there were in New England 575 ministers and 700 Congregational churches, almost all of which were in active sympathy with the cause of liberty. In every possible way, they gave manifold proofs of their patriotism. It is no violence to truth to affirm, that, without the devotion and earnest activity of these churches, the Revolution never could have been effected. Their faith, and form of church government, were in harmony with the reigning spirit of liberty, and energized with all the efforts of patriots with piety and ardor, and infused into that great conflict those Christian ideas and principles which impart a divine dignity and grandeur to a people struggling to be free."

Rev. George Mooar says, "It has been the peculiar fortune of these churches to stand intimately connected with the civil life of the two Anglo-Saxon nations. Great writers not of their communion have given them the credit of preserving the constitutional freedom of England. Certain it is that these churches furnished the ecclesiastical ammunition for the fight which the Independents made under Vane and Milton and Cromwell. Certain it is that the Congregational churches of England now take the lead, as for years past they have done, in those movements which promise the final severance of the Church from the State. But it is in our own country that these churches have their eminent record in behalf of civil freedom and all that enters

* Addisonian Lecture, San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1865.