ART. III.-The Well-instructed Scribe, or Reform and Conservatism; a Sermon preached at the Installation of Rev. George F. Simmons and Rev. Samuel Ripley, as Pastor and Associate Pastor of the Union Congregational Society, in Waltham, Mass., Oct. 27, 1841. By JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. Boston: Benjamin H. Greene. 1841. 8vo. pp. 19.

We do not introduce this Sermon to our readers in consequence of its intrinsic merit, for it is but a commonplace performance; altogether beneath the talents and genius of its author, a most estimable man, and a successful preacher; but for the purpose of saying something on the very important and deeply interesting subject it broaches.

The man, who helps us to detect our errors, we always hold to be our friend; for he renders us an essential service, the most essential that one man can render another. We, therefore, feel that we are not a little indebted to the author of this sermon; for we had no conception of the impotent doctrine we had all along been insisting upon, till we found him reproducing it. We cannot reflect on our advocacy of the doctrine, here drawn out at length, without taking shame to ourselves, confessing our sins, and promising an endeavor at amendment.

The leading doctrine of this sermon is, that the well instructed scribe is one who retains a firm hold on the past, while exerting himself to conquer the future; that reform is progress; and that the true reformer labors ever to fulfil the old, never to destroy it. This is a doctrine, which our readers know, that we have. insisted on from the first; it is a doctrine which covers a great and vital truth; but as we have often brought it out, and as it is brought out in this sermon, its effect must be worse than that of falsehood itself. By its light Mr. Clarke proceeds to read a lecture of conservatism to reformers, and of radicalism to conservatives. To the first he says, virtually, though not consciously, "my

"you

good friends, you are too hot; " to the second, " are too cold. Let me beseech you, therefore, reformers, to cool off a little, and you, conservatives, to warm up a little; and then we may all come peaceably together, in a state of most perfect and blessed luke

warmness."

This is not Mr. Clarke's language, nor does it express the effect he aims to produce; but the effect the doctrine in question, as set forth, must produce, so far as it produces any effect at all. But is it necessary to labor to produce lukewarmness? Is it not more acceptable to the great Head of the Church, to be either too cold or too hot, than it is to be neither cold nor hot? Nothing is, or can be, more nauseating than to be lukewarm. Give us, we say, open, energetic, uncompromising enemies, or firm, staunch friends, who will take their stand with the truth, for weal or for woe, to live with it, or die with it; and not your half and half men, blowing hot out of one side of the mouth, and cold out of the other; neutralizing always their own exertions, and producing only a state of absolute indifferency.

Mr. Clarke must pardon the strength of our expression. We are censuring ourselves more than we are him; for we are an older sinner, and with less excuse for our sins. We, like him, have been for years blow-) ing hot and cold with the same breath, though unwittingly and unintentionally; and like him have mistaken. an imbecile eclecticism, for a powerful and living synthesis. We are both wrong. Reformers unquestiona bly often mistake their means, and fail in their ends; but they are never too hot, too much in earnest. The true man, he who feels the great heart of humanity beat under his left breast, is always terribly in earnest. He speaks out from a soul full of love, as if life and death hung on the issue, burning words, which fall like coals of fire on the naked heart of the sinner, and make him shriek out, in the agonies of hell, "What shall I do to be saved?" He can make no compromise with sin and iniquity, whether in church or state, in the individual or in society; but, armed with the word of

Wo to

God, and the terrors of God's law, pursues them through all their windings, fearless of the hosts of eneemies he may rouse up, the blows he must give or receive; resolved to save the soul or die in the attempt. There is his work, right before him; and he can eat not, slumber not, pause not, till he has done it. the anointed preacher, that calls out from the height of the Christian pulpit, "Stop, my good friend, you are running too fast, you are too hot; cool off a little, let me pray you." How the fiends must laugh to hear him!

Man was made for progress. The race, nay, the entire universe is in motion, flowing onward with all its waves of worlds and beings, as the current of a mighty river, and will flow on forever; for it flows out from the inexhaustible Infinite, is the unremitted effort of the infinite God to realize out of himself his own Infinite Ideal. But progress is effected by growth, by accretion, assimilation, not by abstraction and waste. The race advances by assimilating, to its own life and being, the truths which God successively reveals to it; and that which its own generations, by constant striving, (successively discover and promulgate. We, of to-day, are enlarged by all the past accumulations of the race. Into us flows all that has been; and which, swollen by our contributions, flows on through us, and will flow on, ever enlarging by new contributions, into the un(known ocean of eternity. Here is the significance of the doctrine we and others have been striving after. Here is wherefore the true reformer retains ever a hold on the past, while he labors for the future. He retains the past because it has flowed into him, been assimilated to his actual life; because he is the past, as well as the presentiment of the future, and can no more divest himself of it, than he can divest himself of himself.

There is no question that it is idle to war against the past. No man can be a reformer who has no tradition. Divest us of all tradition, of all that we have derived from the past, or which the race has assimilated of past labors,

as the body assimilates food, and we were mere naked savages, without industry, science, or art, wandering the earth forlorn, with no shelter but the caves or the inclement skies, and no means of subsistence but the scanty pittance doled out, with a grudging hand, by step-dame Nature. They who would so divest us, so cut us loose from all tradition, must ever be as impotent as they are mistaken. They are mere false meteoric lights, that rise and deceive for a moment, it may be, the simple; but instantly melting into nothing, leaving the glorious vault brilliant as ever; studded, as of old, with all its "sapphire flames," which shine on in their mysterious beauty, all unconscious of the mimic stars that collect and dissolve at infinite depths below. There is no need of exhorting the reformer to venerate the past. If he really be a reformer he carries all the past in his soul; and to tell him that he must retain it, is like telling the child that, if it do not retain from day to day the accessions it is constantly receiving, it will not grow!

The folly, we are guilty of on this subject, arises from our not having fixed in our minds, WHAT PAST it | is that we should retain. We have supposed that it must needs be the past that subsists in monuments, doctrines recorded in books, or engraved on tablets, moral precepts, lessons of experience, forms of faith or practice existing out of the soul, and the essence of which has not as yet been assimilated to the life of the race. But these, so far as they are true, and unassimilated, forming as yet no integral part of the life of humanity, belong to the Ideal and not the Actual, and therefore to the future and not to the past. The past is only that which has been realized, and become an integral part of the life which the race is now living. This is the only real past. This is what we term tradition; and this we cannot throw off, if we would; for it is a part of the very being with which we who now live were born. It constitutes our past progress, the growth to which we have already attained; and is the point of departure for new progress, for further and nobler

growth. So much is gained, and can never be lost. We need, then, give ourselves no concern about retaining it; but turn our whole attention, and exert all our zeal and energy in behalf of new acquisitions.

The mistake of preachers, and even philosophers, is in overlooking the true principle of progress, and in supposing that it consists only in the accumulation of monuments. Moses and the prophets, it is thought, live for us only in the Old Testament; Jesus and the Apostles only in the New; Grecian art and philosophy and Roman jurisprudence, only in the few fragments which all-devouring Time has spared. Poets, prophets, philosophers, who sung, inspired, taught, lived, toiled, suffered, and died, of whom there are no external monuments remaining, are to us as if they had never been. But this is false. As the warm life-blood, that flowed in the veins of Adam in the garden, still circulates in ours, so lives in us the life of all who have gone before Not alone in Old Testament or New, not in the Fathers, nor in ecclesiastical historians, live Moses, and David, and Isaiah, and Jesus, and Paul, and James, and John, but in that new life they have given to the world, into which, through them, the race has been initiated; and which we should live, and could not but live, were all exterior monuments of them destroyed. In order to slay Jesus and the Apostles, you must annihilate the race. Their moral life circulates in the soul of him who attempts to revile them; and gives force to his attacks on their pretended representatives. Lycurgus, Solon, Socrates, Plato, speak in your pettiest village politician, and debate through your least significant disputant in your least significant lyceum.

us.

We must remember that there is a progress of MAN, as well as of men; and that this progress consists, not merely nor chiefly in external monuments, whether industrial, scientific, or artistical, but in the enlargement, the actual growth of human nature itself. We say growth, by which we do not mean the creation of new faculties, or new elements of our being, but an enlargement of those with which man was originally consti