mation, which quickly transferred to the social and political the lawlessness which it inaugurated in the religious sphere, might perhaps have suggested to him reflections which he never made. If he had seen revolution become a permanent factor in modern societies, it is just possible that civic and sectarian license would have seemed to him to spring from the same root, and to have a common principle of life. He might even have discovered, if such meditations had ever found a place in his mind, that both come from the impious denial of the authority of God, and of the Church to which, by His decree, it has been delegated. One-half of this truth he saw, but not the other. Schisms in the body politic were intolerable to him, and he loathed the suppression of order and liberty which flows from them; but he was more jealous about the unity of the commonwealth than that of the Kingdom of Christ, and more solicitous for the rights of the Republic than for those of God. "Let me warn you," he said, "in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party," which, he truly added, "is itself a frightful despotism." If he could have exorcised the same spirit in the ranks of fierce and self-willed sectaries, who long denied to others in his own country the false liberty of conscience which they claimed for themselves, the despotism of triumphant political factions would never have suppressed in that country the rights of minorities, nor substituted the coarse and imperious domination of an unscrupulous party for that respect for the common interests of the whole community, and especially of its weaker members, of which the Church of God has always furnished the only example.

A French preacher once announced in a city which had a large military population that he would deliver a course of sermons on Napoleon, and prove, by the facts of his life and death, that the great Captain had attested by his personal example all the truths of the Catholic religion. This venial artifice filled his church with the hearers whom he desired to attract, and who learned that Napoleon had received six out of the seven Sacraments, including Penance and Extreme Unction. Washington only received one, if indeed he received that, but he has left many a text which might be expounded with greater profit than some which are more popular in American pulpits. If he saw no harm in sects, because the unity which exists only in the Catholic Church, and which is the mark of all the works of God, seemed to his erring human judgment equally superfluous and unattainable, he at all

Ubi supra, p. 274.

events insisted that they had no right to insult the Church against which they had chosen to revolt. He happened to be in Boston, when a rumour reached him of an intended Puritan and No-popery celebration of the 5th of November. He resolved that at least no man under his command should lend any countenance to it, and announced that resolve in the following "order of the day" addressed to the American army. "As the Commander-in-chief has been apprised of a design formed for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the Pope, he cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be officers and soldiers in this army so void of common sense as not to see the impropriety of such a step." And the special reason which he gave for this emphatic prohibition deserves particular notice in a day when, as in England, a reckless and impudent press, which aims only at reflecting all which is least manly or truthful in popular prejudice, habitually outrages the most sacred convictions of other nations, even those with which it is most essential to preserve relations of amity and mutual confidence. The American army, allied with French and Canadian Catholics, was in constant intercourse with both, and "to be insulting their religion," * Washington added in the same remarkable document, "is so monstrous as not to be suffered or excused." Three quarters of a century later, General Scott, another American commander-in-chief, leading his army into Catholic Mexico, warned his troops, in equally explicit terms, to respect the religious convictions of the people whose capital they were about to enter. It is this habitual manifestation of good feeling and common sense, contrasted with the mean and fretful bigotry of the average Englishman, which fortifies our hope that thoughtful Americans may yet unlearn the delusions of their age, and range themselves in a not remote future on the side of God and His Church.

However indulgent Washington may have been to the divisions in the religious which he deprecated so strenuously in the civil order, if he could have obtained a glimpse in some magic mirror of the unutterable confusion which they were finally to create in the country which he loved so well, it is possible that endless varieties of creed might have seemed to him as little worthy of praise as conflicting theories of government. He might even have understood that social stability is not sensibly promoted by spiritual chaos, and that the spirit of revolt acts with the same energy and with equal inde

* "Words of Washington," selected by James Parton, p. 49. Boston 1872.

pendence in both spheres. Men who will obey no authority in questions of the soul will submit to that which governs the body only as long as they are compelled to do so. Teach them to-day that they are at liberty to reject the one, and they will discover to-morrow that they are free to conspire against the other. Are they not everywhere acting on that conviction? It is evident to the most blunted apprehension, that if it is innocent to violate a Divine law, à fortiori it cannot be criminal to despise a human one. The Communistic theory, with all its devilish applications, is only the doctrine of the Reformers applied to social and political questions. That doctrine will. lend itself to many a new assault on the life of nations before its capacities of evil are finally exhausted, and its ultimate harvest, the last Reformer of all, is revealed in the person of Antichrist. We cannot but think that if Washington had lived in our day, his calm and robust good sense, rarely obscured by passion or clouded by the mists of prejudice, would have rightly interpreted its phenomena. Principles which lead everywhere to shameful anarchy, and make the Christian religion only a source of ignominious and unappeasable strife, so that it contrasts unfavourably, as an instrument for promoting unity, with Buddhism or Islamism,—would have seemed, perhaps, to the gentle philosopher of Mount Vernon, destructive both of Christian faith and social order. They make Christianity little better than a jest. They reverse its maxims, repudiate its spirit, and counteract its aims. By making the individual conscience, however darkened by ignorance and self-will, its only foundation, instead of the august and unfailing authority upon which God willed it to repose securely, they substitute the pretended rights of error for those of truth, and degrade a Divine revelation into a senseless and contradictory record of all the delusions which human fancy can beget, or human imbecility adopt. We should like, for example, to have heard Washington's opinion of the following catalogue of religions in a single state of the American Union, in the year 1854. No intelligent Hindu or Japanese could read it without a burst of laughter, nor without being confirmed in the conviction, to which his acquaintance with the products of the Reformation always leads him, that the Christian is the most absurd and irrational of all human religions. If it were really what the catalogue in question would seem to imply, we should cordially agree with him. Here, then, is a picture of what a nominal Christianity had become in the State of Missouri-and it is precisely the same in every othertwenty-two years ago.

First on the list before us come the Baptists, whose pecu

liarity it is to postpone, at the risk of never receiving, a sacrament which they do not consider necessary till the soul has famished for a good many years without it, and which Mr. Bright lately told the House of Commons, "in my sect we do not consider necessary at all." The illustrious tribune seems to us more logical than the Baptist; for if man can safely live unregenerate during one half of his life, his risk is only partially increased by spending the other half in the same state. Number two on the Missouri list is the Christian Church, which has probably very little claim to the first title, and certainly none at all to the second. The Free Church follows next; and if Christian liberty consists in a cheerful emancipation from the yoke of faith, the bond of unity, and the obligation of obedience-a proposition which we should dispute if we had leisure,-its members have no doubt chosen an appropriate name, which fairly indicates their condition. Episcopalians tread on the heels of the "Free Church," which they resemble in this, that while the latter reject bishops altogether, the former are humbly content to have the name without the thing. Their sect has unconsecrated rulers who do not rule, whom it would not obey if they did, and could not if it would, because they all contradict one another. Lutherans assume the name of an individual who has urgent reason to regret that he ever had a name, and whose malediction is probably not alleviated by the fact that there are still human beings foolish enough to bear it. When they meet him face to face, if that should be their sorrowful destiny, they will wish they had borne any other. It is not well for Christians to be called after a man, and least of all such a man. Methodists and Presbyterians come next, and they have as good a right to make a religion for themselves as anybody else; that is, no right at all. It is only God who can make a religion. Having made one, which was not theirs, He will never make any other. The Union Church is another ornament of the happy State of Missouri. If it counts only a single member, we can believe in its union; if it has more, we doubt if they are in union with themselves, and are sure they are not with anybody else. The Boatmen's Church does not suggest to us any remark, except that we should not like to navigate any stream, however shallow, in the boat which carries its flag. The Church of Christ is the tenth on the list; but as it is quite certain, beyond all controversy, that He founded another and a different one, which was built on Peter, the Missourian counterfeit can only deceive those who wish to be deceived. Evangelists, who come next, are comparatively modest. If they claim kindred with Apostles, they

we

at all events do not usurp the name of their Master. German Protestants is the title of another sect, which expresses so little, that there is perhaps an exact proportion between the tenuity of its positive belief and the vagueness of its indefinite name. The German Evangelical Church differs, presume, though we cannot say in what, both from the Lutherans and the German Protestants; but if these three varieties grow in three separate gardens, with a high wall between them, a moderately skilful horticulturist would no doubt refer them all to the same botanical genus. Independents find their place in the same list, and their name suffices to condemn them. They may be, or at least wish to be, "independent" of every Divine authority, but for that very reason they are all the more shamefully subject to a human one. People who refuse submission to the ruler whom God has appointed over His Church, are fitly chastised by becoming the parasites and sycophants of some "independent" spouter, more or less eloquio suavis, as S. Augustine said of the Manichæan Faustus. The Jews come next, and after them the Mennonites, who might as well be Jews for any interest they have in Christianity. The Mormons, who have adopted one feature of the Pindaric mythology, and converted obscenity into a religion, follow the Mennonites, and are followed in turn by the Republicans, a name which can hardly be said to indicate very clearly the theological opinions of their sect. We have heard of a gentleman who proposed to substitute "celestial republic" for kingdom of heaven, and to offer to the "President of presidents" the prayers which he declined to address to the King of kings. We incline to suppose that he must have been the founder of the interesting church of Republicans. Rationalists occupy the next place in the spiritual almanac of Missouri, and are probably a different species from their European kindred, who have too little esteem for the churches of other people to think it necessary to have one of their own. Unitarians, who congregate in the same State, differ from other Protestants only in this, that while the latter assume the Christian religion to be purely human, by undertaking to "reform" it, each after his own plan, the former, with greater consistency, contend that the Founder of a religion so multiform and unstable must have been human also; an argument which seems to us to admit of no reply. Lastly, the list closes with the Universalists, who generously offer to everybody the salvation which they have not yet secured for themselves.*

*See "Gazetteer of the United States," by Baldwin and Thomas ; art. Missouri, 1854.