ard in morals or attainment in life, which can be asserted of a class, or transmitted by descent, which has necessitated the phenomenon, startling at first, but, when well examined, highly encouraging, that its every great revival has occasioned division and debate. Christianity has been a struggling light, a fermenting leaven, a purging flame; at its every revival, men have striven, as it were, to crystallize it and still keep it hot, whereas it has indeed crystallized, but instantly began to cool. Were it not for Sectarianism, would not certain churches have become absolutely dead-decayed willow-trunks, hollow, dry as tinder, hoary yet not venerable? That divisiveness is in its nature bad, we were certainly the last to deny; that the strength of union is so great, that the Christian ought to look well ere he foregoes it, is also true; yet we must believe that, when our Lord Jesus spoke of his bringing division into the world, his eye glanced over the whole interval between that hour and the millennium, and that, though the unspeakable peace which He breathed over his disciples ere departing from them is ever to be sought after by the Church, and may at times blissfully envelop it as it wraps in its ethereal atmosphere the individual soul, yet it can not hope for unbroken repose until it is touched by the rays of the latter morning. And this fact is of extreme importance, for instruction, for warning, for consolation. It is well that men be constantly reminded that Christianity is, once for all, essentially and eternally dif ferent from a power of respectability; that it has a perennial tendency to turn this world upside down, that it raises the soul into a region of other and loftier feelings and habitudes than can be attained by the embracing of any system or the following of any rules, that it is a walk of tribulation gloomy with the frowns of kinsman and fellow-citizen. Christianity is a personal, real, and even awful agency, and no

yearning for peace must be permitted to neutralize the effect of this consideration.

Though there is thus much to be questioned in Dr. Arnold's views on churches and creeds, we must again affirm, and with emphasis, that there was embodied in these views a great amount of invaluable truth. The prominence he gave to the great fact that priesthood, in all relating to meditation, intercession, or peculiar hereditary privilege, found its completion and conclusion in Christ, is sufficient of itself to impart value to his system. There is, perhaps, no idea in the circle of theologic truth more glorious or pregnant than this. That every member of Christ's mystical body, His Church, is a king and priest to God; that converted men are now God's Levitical tribe on earth, witnessing for Him before the world, and bearing censers filled with fire from off the heavenly altar; that no Christian, whatever his sphere, can absolve himself from the responsibility and duty of preaching Christ in his life and conversation; that the clergy have no power as distinguished from the Church, and are simply that part of it set aside, as fitted in a more marked degree than the others, to preach and to rule; these and kindred ideas would, if they pervaded the minds of Christian nations, so completely dissipate at once all superstitious reverence toward the pastorate, and all class opposition to it would shed such a spirit of true internal unity, and harmonious, intelligent content through our churches -would animate to such fresh and far-extended zeal in the efforts of all to spread the Gospel of our Lord, that no earnestness, no iteration, can be excessive, in their advocacy and demonstration. All the writings, too, of this truly Christian man, whether on this or on other subjects, proclaim to the world the sad fact that Christianity has yet but slightly leav

ened its affairs, and call for a thorough penetration by its spirit of every province of things.

Contemplating the whole phenomenon of Arnold's belief in this church-state, we can not but conclude that he fell into that mistake of noble minds, to represent the world as by no means in so ruined a condition as has been deemed, and hope for speedy amendment, by simple declaration of error, and proclamation of truth. Nature seems, as it were, to kindle this hope, that the young and ardent may go in full heart to the work, and not leave the world to absolute stagnation and death. Had Luther, when he felt the giant stirrings of the young life in his bosom, been permitted to catch a glimpse of those griefs and forebodings, with which, in his latter days, he was apt to regard the state of the world, his hand had scarce been steady enough to hold that pen whose end shook the miter in the Palace of the Seven Hills. The glory of exultant hope gleams over Milton's earlier page, yet he lived to mourn the evil days on which he had fallen, and to shadow forth his own stern sorrows in Samson Agonistes. All great and noble souls seemed to have begun their work in hope, and ended it in sorrow! Arnold could not even have given utterance to his scheme as a present measure, without conceiving more favorably of men than their state warranted.

When death overtook him he was, of course, as far from the attainment as ever. Toward the end he said: "When I think of the Church, I could sit down and pine and die.” He retained the idea to the last, but was beginning to have misgivings. "I am myself so much inclined to the idea of a strong social bond, that I ought not to be suspected of any tendency to anarchy; yet I am beginning to think that the idea may be overstrained, and that this attempt to merge the soul and will of the individual man in the general body is,

when fully developed, contrary to the very essence of Christianity. After all, it is the individual soul that must be saved, and it is that which is addressed in the Gospel." And again, shortly before his death: "I feel so deeply the danger and evil of the false system, that despairing of seeing the true Church restored, I am disposed to cling, not from choice, but necessity, to the Protestant tendency of laying the whole stress on Christian religion, and adjourning the notion of Church sine die." This certainly is in the right direction; in conformity with the spirit not only of the Reformation, but of the New Testament. Consider, once more, the close personal dealing of our Saviour's discourses, and the burning earnestness of Paul's discussion and enforcement of the points pertaining to individual salvation in his several epistles, and this must become evident. The Old Testament dealt with systems and nationalities; the New Testament deals with individual conversion, with individual life: the old dispensation had its kingdom of Israel, seen among the nations as a cluster of beams falling from heaven on one spot, in a dark weltering sea; the new dispensation has its kingdom of God, all noiseless and unobserved, in the individual heart: the old dispensation had its temple on Moriah, crowning the mountain with gold, and adorned with the richest and rarest workmanship of the ancient world; the new dispensation has the soul of man for its temple, viewless, and, to the unpurified, unennobled thought, unimposing, yet all-containing and everlasting. It is an unseen, a spiritual sublimity that Christianity aims at; its ineffable holiness is discerned in the fact that it enrobes the soul in an immortality which can even now be recognized to hold more of heaven than of earth, and to have no element which will not flourish best in the serene air of eternity; confound it with systems and hierarchies, with the pomp and

show of visible ceremonious uniformity, and you overlook its essence; there will be no end of your wandering. Let Christians awaken to convert the world; that done, all is done; that missed, though the world tottered under the weight of cathedrals, and the pile of ghastly uniformity had a base as broad as Sahara, all were lost.

Arnold's view of the office and education of the theologian in our day deserves a passing glance. It recognized the value of the human element, as distinguished from the barely theological, the fatal danger, that students of theology become mere discriminators of doctrinal correctness, mere defenders of creed and system, mere catechetic expounders of the truth, mere denizens of the school or library, failing to unfold within them that expansion of human sympathy which is the means in God's hand of the action of man on man. Soundness in doctrine is of vital importance; yet theological education must wander from the spirit of Christianity, if it becomes a mere instruction and practice in systematic or exegetic theology; it is well that a fisherman can keep his net in order, perceiving and rectifying the slightest rent or weakness; yet the manner of casting the net is also of great moment, and we appeal to those informed in the matter, whether it is not common to find young men armed at all points in exegetic and controversial theology, who yet fail utterly when they come to cast the Gospel net out into the world. Christ called his disciples to be fishers of men, to the grand practical task of world-conversion; when He sent out the seventy, His summary of doctrine was very short, while His detail of the method of their preaching was much more extended.

Arnold's political views need not long detain us. He loved politics extremely; he considered it a noble ambition which prompted the desire of ruling. The leading features of his