of all this, the elect, the true-hearted disciples of Christ, will be safe. His angels will guard them. He will gather them under his protecting wing; "gather them with his arm, and carry them in his bosom.” Here we have a beginning, a progress, and an end. At the end is comfort to the elect, and destruction to the wicked and malignant persecutors. [To be concluded.] ARTICLE VI. THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. By Rev. Charles White, D. D., President of Wabash College, Ia. DIVINE revelation may be regarded either as a body of truths for intellectual inquiry and admiration, or as a collection of rules and motives for the guidance of human life. These two aspects run into each other, but may be properly conceived of and spoken of separately. For its contemplative uses, religion cannot be too greatly esteemed and respected. Its lessons and influences, however, for this real, acting world, where we spend the preparatory portion of our being, are more immediately important and indispensable. It is the happy feature of our time that religion, like science, has left her cloistered retreats and her abstruse speculations, and passed into the earnest, matter-of-fact concerns of mankind. This decided assumption of the practical on the part of religion, marks the present as a signal era, in her aggressive movements toward the conquest of the world. This was to have been unhesitatingly looked for by all the pious students of the Divine character. A visible and effective industry is a distinguishing attribute of the great Author of Christianity. Said Christ: "My Father worketh hitherto and I work." This, that is, the Divine example, is the great principle of the universe. Christianity without practical bearings would have been an anomaly and a contradiction in the Divine dispensations. We proceed to consider the fact and the advantages of a practical eharacter in Christianity. I. First, the fact of such a practical character. One proof of this may be found in the mission itself which religion is to fulfil in the world. That mission is, in brief terms, to carry light, purity, happiness to the entire family of man. Its great work in this universal sphere is to wake all the immense tract of intellect that slumbers in the nations; to purify all the moral spirit that heaves and glows underneath it; to effect an intellectual and moral creation striking and illustrious like that of the six days of Omnipotence in the beginning. There is included, it is perceived, in such an immense accomplishment, a mission into every heart of a thousand millions, a mission into every such heart, as a place of evil spirits to cast them out, as a place of death to raise the dead, as a place vacant of all moral goodness to settle a family of affections fit for heaven. Such a mission to all that dwell on the face of the earth, a mission charged with such social, intellectual and moral regenerations, leaves no doubt of the character of religion being that of a great practical instrumentality. - A glance at the almost insuperable difficulties to be overcome in effecting the meliorating religious changes indicated, will serve farther to establish the practical nature of Christianity. The contentedness of ignorance with its own darkness; the depth of moral corruption; the inveteracy of human prejudice; the tendency of men to fatal forms of error; these present obstacles and resistances which nothing but an agency most practical can remove. What pains and prayers and incessant persuasions are required to train one child to virtue? What practical power then is wanted to enter a world and cleanse all human thought, all human feeling, all human action? It is to be remembered that the world besides being purified is to be kept clean. Each thirty years presents another thousand millions for the action of Christianity. It has the same great regenerations to effect for each successive generation down to the end of the world. Religion, in order to such a vast and continued accomplishment, must be a perpetual as well as an immense activity. The practical element in the system of Divine ethics appears in the prominence which it gives to the individual as a responsible actor. Pantheism absorbs man in the Deity. God, according to this form of Atheism, is the immense ocean including all existence; man is a single drop of the grand universal mass, undistinguishable and irresponsible. Other forms of infidelity extinguish all but a single point of man's existence, by cutting off all of it lying beyond death, thus robbing him of immortality. To a being thus narrowed to a hand-breadth, action or inaction, industry or indolence, have but a slender importance. The Socialists are in danger of sinking and paralyzing the individual by lodging in a community nearly all his independent motives and responsibilities. In all society constructed under despotisms, monarchies, titled aristocracies, the individual is generalized and much obscured in a great amalgamation known as the national character, will, government. In respect to all private interests, as well as public, the visible organ of authority, the representative of the empire, speaks, arranges, decides; the individual is scarcely known, consulted, cared for. Like one of the boxes or packages of a ship's cargo, he goes with the rest and partakes of the general destiny, not of his own will or wisdom, but simply because he chanced to be stowed away in the hold along with the common mass. Religion contemplates specially our individuality. It clusters upon man a large family of individual duties. It does not overlook his relations to society, nor remit or diminish one claim resting upon him to mingle and move with the mass of the community. But here, in this his social position, where he is wont to be counted, not as a whole but as a small augmentation of a whole, as an infinitesimal of the common mass of public feeling, public opinion, public influence-even here religion follows out her element, her commingled drop, arrests it, and legislates for it as a unit, an isolation! She invests her individual with full, undivided responsibility. She never permits him to merge himself with his fellows, corporate or non-corporate; she never permits a single particle of his conscience to be yielded up on his entering any fraternity; she never permits one item of service to be withheld on the plea that copartners are under equal obligation to perform it; she proposes to bestow her full glorious rewards on him singly, if he singly be worthy; she proposes all her woes to him singly, if singly he be unworthy. By thus separating men from masses and amalgamations, by thus setting down each man apart and constituting him an entirety accountably to breathe, to think, to desire, to will, to act, to attain, religion holds an influence in producing human activity of vast and incalculable power. Left with none to depend on but himself he must act, or gain nothing, he must act, or lose everything. No man has an oarsman to push him while he is asleep. He must up and strike for himself; lustily and alone must stem the tide or be swept on hopelessly into uselessness, ruin and oblivion. The associated fact, ever recognized in the Scriptures, if not by statement certainly by inference, that the great ends of life, not attained personally, are not attained at all; that who VOL. IX. No. 34. 31 succeeds not by his own labors has failed; and who wins not by his own prowess is defeated — this adds a perpetual and powerful influence to great and multiplied individual labors. The conscious dignity with which religion invests men, by investing them with this conscious individuality, is an additional inducement to human activity. As a self-constructing, self-acting, self-responsible isolation among the works and intelligences of God, man is intensely prompted in order to be worthy of himself, to attempt great outward efficiency and accomplishment. Brave a man may be, as an undistinguished ingredient of a body of soldiery; but detached and drawn forth singly for a daring exploit, the motive to chivalrous action is immensely augmented. By religion every man without exception is thus detailed and assigned singly to a momentous, a hazardous, a holy service. He feels the honor and importance of his position; he turns his eye upon the great interests dependent upon himself alone; his heart swells with noble, high purposes, as he thinks of the part committed all to himself to perform. Under a lofty and generous impulse, created by this consciousness of a great entrustment exclusively in his own hands, he will go out to almost incredible energies and labors. Religion, by thus making every man an independent, responsible actor, has set up and secured in the world an agency capable of producing a religious industry and thrift and accomplishment as great and important as the world needs. What forbids that the earth should be all tilled and all be made fruitful even as a well-watered garden? The practical bearing of religion is apparent from another fact, that it enjoins those internal states of the heart which are eminently fitted to produce action. Whatever links and involves itself immediately and strongly with the warm workings of the soul, will always necessarily have an eminently active and practical character. The production of outward activities is on this wise. All feeling, all stirring in the heart, loves and demands an outward expression, an ostensible form. Emotion will not remain in the soul still and quiet permanently, any more than ignited gunpowder will smoulder slowly away without an external manifestation. Nor is the spirit's excitement content with the moving of particles among themselves as a mere ebullition; they swell up, run over, spread abroad; they create all around a rich scene of life and of fruit. Without emotions issuing thus into action, man would be, in respect to all other beings, if not in respect to himself, a mere physical structure, a mere block to move and be moved by im pact or attraction. But he is not such a thing; he is no block; he is a being of deep, vivacious sensibilities, every one of which is making outward demonstrations incessantly. Is it for a moment to be supposed or admitted that the human affections, in all other cases giving birth to vigorous activities, become inoperative lethargies the moment they have a religious character? The moment they have a religious character they rise to intenser energies, superior stability. Especially do they make larger and more remarkable external exhibitions. Let us represent to ourselves, then, the assiduous labors, the crowded occupations to which men are pushed by their worldly passions in the absence of religious feeling. Let us mark how under the love of money man crosses all the lines of latitude and longitude; how impelled by a love of honor he goes up to the cannon's mouth; how under the impulses of a secular enterprise the earth is covered over with the traces of his presence and his industry; how the mark of his axe and his fire is left wherever he has pitched his tent; how, wherever he has favorably settled himself, dwellings, roads, harvests, cities, temples, exchanges, armaments, overthrows, reconstructions have invariably attended him. These are testimonies of his vast outward energies and achievements in obedience to the secular portion of his sensitive nature. My allegation is that, equal to all this and greater than all this, and a thousand fold better than all this, are the active services which are produced by the emotions of religion. Affectionate reverence for God is one of these. Let the Divine character be opened gloriously to a susceptible, responsive understanding and heart, so that this affectionate reverence shall be deep and great; equally deep and great will be the active obedience that shall follow. There have been celebrated earthly captains, who had inspired such an enthusiasm and respect on the part of a subject people or an armed host, that their announced wish and will would instantly put millions in motion. Will not a fervent consecration of the heart to the great Sovereign of the world make his intimations more effective! Will not his presence and his word call out submissions and services greatly surpassing these in fidelity, importance and permanence? Think of a company of men; the Almighty in the midst of them; their souls all moved, thrilled, uplifted toward him! What will they shrink from to which their great Master calleth? Another of the emotions of religion is a penitential feeling, a true contrition for all offences against the will of Heaven! Than this there is no more active a principle belonging to our nature. What |