ences that are moulding our national life, through our northern snows and torrid heats, our enormous river-courses and continental valleys, our wide-ranging deserts and mountains filled with gold and silver, our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It is a good thing to have our attention called to our Persia, our Palestine, our Tartary, our Egypt, our France, our Kamtchatka, if only the analogies be not pushed too far. All this jogs the sluggish imagination, and helps us to realize the real data of the problem, by showing us what varied types of civilization have grown up upon no greater range and diversities of soil and climate than our own. As yet we see but the bare stage on which the great drama is to be enacted. We steam up the Mississippi eighteen hundred miles from the Balize to St. Paul, from the orange-grove and palmetto to the pine and hackmatack, and ninety-hundreths of the shores on either hand are a wilderness. We need to steam in imagination up a river that shall start us from Egypt and land us in Berlin, a river whose banks are sites of a Memphis, an Alexandria, a Naples, a Florence, a Munich, a Dresden, not to impress us with the idea that we can foresee the reproduction of just such civilizations, but to set our imagination flowing, to help us to rise to the conception of the latent forces that shall modify man buried up in those orange-groves, cane-fields, cypress forests, cotton and tobacco lands, cornfields, meadows sweet with new cut hay along which we are sailing. And so with the lines we may run east and west, carrying us from Atlantic seaports, over the Alleghanies, through lands of hill and dale, across vast alluvial stretches, across vast rolling prairies, across arid deserts, over snow-clad mountain-ranges, on, on, till we look toward Asia over the broad Pacific. These are imaginary journeys through the future which Dr. Draper helps us to take, and which he lights up with vivid distinctness.

Whatever the solution of the precise causes, physical or metaphysical, that built up antagonistic ideas and antagonistic systems in the North and the South, Dr. Draper's appreciation of the essence of those distinctions of the political complications they drew on, of the passions and convictions.

they engendered, and of the characters they called out into prominence cannot be too highly praised. He has a fine, sympathetic imagination, which enables him to throw himself into the situation and feelings of either party in the great controversy. He sums up, with rare fairness, the honest complaints brought by the one against the other, and comprehends why they were felt to be honest. He helps to make the belligerent sections understand, and so both pity and respect, one another. We anticipate great pleasure and profit in going on with him through the scenes of the war, and heartily commend his first volume to the reading public.

75. 76. Aler

ART. VI.-ON SOME RESULTS OF THE VOLUNTARY· SYSTEM, ESPECIALLY IN OUR COUNTRY PARISHES.

WE of this generation are apt to look back, with a certain admiring envy, to the condition of things ecclesiastical half a century ago, when a parish settlement was a life-tenure; when the minister's modest stipend was a pretty certain life-annuity, and the parsonage a secure homestead; when the congregation was made up of the friends of one's youth and the companions of his children; when a ministerial association was a life-long friendship; when the minister's name and memory made the one most sure and permanent thing that marked the character of the town, and his position-farther removed, it is true, from wealth than from poverty-had yet attraction enough to be the goal of ambition, and the honorable reward of merit for a long succession of men of the best scholarship that the country was then able to furnish.

We have heard a great deal of natural lamentation and regret at the passing away of this state of things; and we have consoled ourselves, as best we could, partly by reflecting on the causes that made it inevitable, and partly by considerations of the immense gain, intellectual and moral, which the community has made in other directions. But, while the statements usually made on this subject have contained

the truth, they seem also to have hidden it in part. And there are some things regarding it, which it appears very desirable to put into a clearer light.

In the first place, we generally fail to see fairly the secular and political character of the New-England parish of half a century ago. Any one, it is true, well read in history or taught by experience, was aware of the fact; but the arguments we have oftenest heard kept the fact out of sight, and ran in another line of observation. In particular, the great visible prosperity of religious institutions in New England, and the great influence they have had in shaping the character and guiding the culture of our community, have constantly been quoted as triumphs of the Voluntary principle; and, on the ground of them, comparisons have constantly been drawn, to the disadvantage of the Anglican, the Roman, and other secularized State Churches. But this view might have been dispelled, not only by an hour's study of the first colonial annals, of a time when Church was more closely identified with State than ever perhaps anywhere, unless among the pilgrim colonists who rebuilt Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile; not only from the later colonial history, with its accounts of the banishment of Quakers or Baptists, and its persecutions of witchcraft, that faith might be defended in its purity by the State, but by a moment's consideration of the tenure by which every New-England minister of fifty years ago held his office. It was an elective office, and to that extent voluntary and republican. But it was created by the same constituency, and sustained by the same funds, that provided for highways, schools, and constables. It was neither more nor less voluntary than either of these indispensable secular institutions. What gave it the appearance of a purely voluntary system, was simply that degree of homogeneousness, sobriety, and neighborly feeling, which made it possible; nay, that very absence of strong individual conviction, that preference of secular to religious considerations, that worldly, practical, and common-sense habit of mind, SO strongly characteristic of our New-England country population, unless when its latent beliefs are challenged and pro

voked. It was in one sense voluntary; because there was, as yet, no open refusal, and no powerful protest. It was voluntary, in the same sense as the Catholic Church of the Middle Age was voluntary, when it embodied the only methods of culture and the only sentiment of unity known to a feudal time; as the English Church was voluntary, when it embodied and symbolized the national pride and strength in the deadly conflict against the aggressions of Rome. Its title was as good as those; but theoretically no better, except from the more uniform type of character, and the greater simplicity of doctrinal belief it represented. As regarded the individual citizen or the individual dissenter, it was as far as either of its predecessors in ecclesiastical history from making the claims or assuming the merit of a voluntary character, which a moment's examination must have dispelled.

Accordingly, when we consider the changes that time has brought about, and the degradation of the ancient Parish with its fifty-years' ministry, to the modern Society with its aver age of five-years' service, we ought first of all, if we can, to fix our mind on some definite point which marks the moment of visible transition from the old order of things to the new, which marks when the old order was no longer possible under the changed condition of the public mind; when the diversities of interest and discrepancies of opinion made it inevitable that an institution should give way, which had been at the very heart of all that was strongest, wisest, and noblest in the ancient Commonwealth.

Now, we find such a moment of transition in a phrase familiar enough to our boyhood, but which we do not remember ever to have seen employed in the discussions of this subject; namely, the abolition of the Third Article of the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution of Massachusetts, in 1833. That year definitely marks the passing away of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new. In order to show how radical was the change then made in the direction of religious liberty, and how strictly it may be regarded as the introduction of the voluntary system, we copy the following phrases from the original Bill of Rights, which embodied the

political theory and experience of the Commonwealth down to the period of the Revolution:

"The Legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require the several Towns, Parishes, Precincts, and other Bodies Politic or Religious Societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.

"And the people of this Commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their Legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subjects an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid, at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend.

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Provided, notwithstanding, That the several Towns, Parishes, Precincts, and other Bodies Politic or Religious Societies, shall at all times have the exclusive right of electing their public teachers, and of contracting with them for their support and maintenance."

Thus, as we see, the parish minister was a civil officer of the State, appointed by the primary source of political power, or free popular election; maintained from the same public fund with all the secular institutions of the State, and holding office by a tenure whose permanence and dignity were shared by the Judiciary alone, since at once custom and common law made it a life-tenure, to be abolished only on trial and conviction of unfitness, before a peculiarly constituted ecclesiastical court. We have drifted, in a single generation, so far from this condition of things, that it is necessary thus to recite the simplest facts of it, if we would understand the position of the New-England country minister of fifty years ago. It was an office in the State, standing, in point of dignity, wholly apart from every other. It constituted a permanent order of about two hundred men; claiming, on the average, a far higher education and wider social experience than any other in the rural communities. By culture, habit of thought, community of interest, professional sympathy, and permanence of position, they made up a political estate nearly as peculiar, and fully as powerful in its way,