rightly. We may, by the aid of a revelation, which shines further into the darkness and spreads a clearer light around us and over the universe than any they had received, be able to correct their errors, and to perceive that the antagonism, in which they believed, has no existence in the world. of reality; but we must beware how we censure them for the views they took. They saw what they could see with their light and from their position, and we can do no more. Future generations will have more favorable positions and a stronger and clearer light than we have, and they will be to us what we are to the generations which went before us. As we would escape the condemnation of our children, so should we refrain from condemning our fathers. They did their duty, let us do ours, serve our own generation without defaming that to which we owe our existence and all that we are. All things are holy, and all doctrines are sacred. All the productions of the ever-teeming brain of man, however fantastic or unsubstantial their forms, are but so many manifestations of humanity, and humanity is a manifestation of the Divinity. The Son of Man is the incarnate God. He who blasphemes the spirit with which he works and fulfils his mission in the flesh, blasphemes the Holy Ghost. Silent then be the tongue that would lisp, palsied the hand that would write the smallest censure upon humanity for any of the opinions it has expressed, however defective, however far from embracing the whole truth, future or more favored inquirers may find them. Humanity is holy, let the proudest kneel in reverence.

This doctrine of progress, not only accounts for the origin of evil and explains its difficulties, but it points out to us our duty. The duty of every being is to follow its destiny, to seek its end. Man's destiny is illimitable progress; his end is everlasting growth, enlargement of his being. Progress is the end for which he was made. To this end, then, it is his duty to direct all his inquiries, all his systems of religion and philosophy, all his institutions of politics and society, all the productions of genius and taste, in one word all the modes of his activity.

This is his duty. Hitherto he has performed it, but blindly, without knowing and without admitting it. Humanity has but to-day, as it were, risen to self-consciousness, to a perception of its own capacity, to a glimpse of its inconceivably grand and holy destiny. Heretofore it has failed to recognize clearly its duty. It has advanced, but not

designedly, not with foresight; it has done it instinctively, by the aid of the invisible but safe-guiding hand of its Father. Without knowing what it did, it has condemned. progress, while it was progressing. It has stoned the prophets and reformers, even while it was itself reforming and uttering glorious prophecies of its future condition. But the time has now come for humanity to understand itself, to accept the law imposed upon it for its own good, to foresee its end and march with intention steadily towards it. Its future religion is the religion of progress. The true priests are those who can quicken in mankind a desire for progress, and urge them forward' in the direction of the true, the good, the perfect.

CONCLUSION.

Here I must close. I have uttered the words UNION and PROGRESS as the authentic creed of the new church, as designating the whole duty of man. Would they had been spoken in a clearer, a louder and a sweeter voice, that a response might be heard from the universal heart of humanity. But I have spoken as I could, and from a motive which I shall not blush to own either to myself or to him to whom all must render an account of all their thoughts, words, and deeds. I once had no faith in him, and I was to myself "a child without a sire." I was alone in the world, my heart found no companionship, and my affections withered and died. But I have found him, and he is my father, and mankind are my brothers, and I can love and

reverence.

Mankind are my brothers,-they are brothers to one another. I would see them no longer mutually estranged. I labor to bring them together, and to make them feel and own that they are all made of one blood. Let them feel and own this, and they will love one another; they will be kindly affectioned one to another, and "the groans of this nether world will cease;" the spectacle of wrongs and outrages oppress our sight no more; tears be wiped from all eyes, and humanity pass from death to life, to life immortal, to the life of God, for God is love.

And this result, for which the wise and the good everywhere yearn and labor, will be obtained. I do not misread the age. I have not looked upon the world only out from the window of my closet; I have mingled in its busy scenes; I have rejoiced and wept with it; I have hoped and feared,

and believed and doubted with it, and I am but what it has made me. I cannot inisread it. It craves union. The heart of man is crying out for the heart of man. One and the same spirit is abroad, uttering the same voice in all languages. From all parts of the world voice answers to voice, and man responds to man. There is a universal language already in use. Men are beginning to understand one another, and their mutual understanding will beget mutual sympathy, and mutual sympathy will bind them together and to God.

And for progress too the whole world is struggling. Old institutions are examined, old opinions criticised, even the old church is laid bare to its very foundations, and its holy vestments and sacred symbols are exposed to the gaze of the multitude; new systems are proclaimed, new institutions elaborated, new ideas are sent abroad, new experiments are made, and the whole world seems intent on the means by which it may accomplish its destiny. The individual is. struggling to become a greater and a better being. Everywhere there are men laboring to perfect governments and laws. The poor man is admitted to be human, and millions of voices are demanding that he be treated as a brother. All eyes and hearts are turned to education. The cultivation of the child's moral and spiritual nature becomes the worship of God. The priest rises to the educator, and the school-room is the temple in which he is to minister. There is progress; there will be progress. Humanity must go forward. Encouraging is the future. He, who takes his position on the "high table land" of humanity, and beholds with a prophet's gaze his brothers, so long separated, coming together, and arm in arm marching onward and upward toward the perfect, toward God, may hear celestial voices chanting a sweeter strain than that which announced to Judea's shepherds the birth of the Redeemer, and his heart full and overflowing, he may exclaim with old Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

CHURCH OF THE FUTURE.*

[From the Boston Quarterly Review for January, 1842.]

It is not very customary for an author to be his own reviewer; and yet there is no good reason why it should not be. The reviewer might then always have the advantage, not slight, of reviewing a work which he has at least read, and a subject in which he most likely takes a warm personal interest. Our purpose, however, is not so much to review this little book which we published a few years since, as to bring its subject, with some additional developments, more distinctly before the public.

This little book, one of the earliest of our publications that we would not forget, is not without its faults, and some of them very grave; but we value it more than any thing else that we have published. It is, upon the whole, the most genuine statement of our whole thought, of the principles which we believe must form the basis of the future church, that we have made. It has been now some five or six years before the public, without having attracted much attention, although it has not failed to secure some warm friends. And yet its success has been all that could have been reasonably anticipated. It is hardly fitted to be a popular work; not indeed because its style and language want clearness and precision, nor because its subjectmatter is beyond the reach of ordinary comprehension; but because it is altogether too brief in its developments, and too abstract and general in its statements; and also because it is written from a point of view foreign to the great majority of our countrymen.

The general scope and design of the work have in most cases been misapprehended; not altogether through the fault of the author, but through the want of familiarity on the part of its readers with the order of thought which it seeks on the one hand to develop, and on the other to combat. The design of the work was to state simply, briefly, but distinctly, the general principles which must govern the

*New Views of Christianity, Society and the Church. By O. A. Brownson. Boston: 1836.

57

religious and social future of the race; but so to state them as to refute the errors of a school becoming somewhat powerful in the old world, and which might possibly ere long find its way to our own country. In a word, the work presupposes in almost every page the writings of the SaintSimonians, and especially Henry Heine's De l'Allemagne. The author writes with these works constantly before his eyes, and labors, on the one hand, to show the church that it may accept the truths they contain, without involving itself in their errors; and, on the other hand, to show their authors that they can accept Christianity without becoming responsible for the unquestionable errors of the church. But this, as it was done without any formal statement, could be apparent only to such as had read the writings in question; and as these were but few, comparatively speaking, the real purport of the book could not be generally conceived.

The Saint-Simonians as a religious body have been dissolved; but their doctrines in a modified form, are perhaps the only doctrines that are at the present moment really making any progress in either France or Germany. They are no ordinary doctrines, and their influence on the future of mankind cannot be easily calculated. They contain truths of the highest order, of the most comprehensive reach, and truths, too, which must and will rise to dominion. But these truths, perfectly harmonious with the principles of the Gospel, nay, which are but the growth of the fundamental principles of the Gospel, are brought out in opposition to Christianity, and supposed by their authors to involve necessarily its destruction. With them Christianity was a very good thing in its day; and in the development of the race, in the institution and growth of a higher order of civilization, it has served a very useful purpose; but the race has now outgrown it, and demands not merely a new church, but a new religion. Against this view of Christianity this book of ours was written. We saw that the ground of attack upon religion was shifted, and that therefore it had become necessary to shift the ground of defence. The old sneers and cavils, the old attempts to impeach the purity of its morals, or the completeness of its chain of historical evidence, was to be abandoned; and Christianity was to be accepted, not as a living religion, having the right and the power to command men's obedience; but as a relig ion of the past, divine and authoritative for yesterday, and