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 WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
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 PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, 
 
 22, School Street. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This little volume proceeds from a design simply to preach 
 a sermon. Its substance has mostly been given in the form 
 of instruction at the West Church ; and, but for exceeding 
 the proper limits, was proposed also for a Thursday Lecture. 
 I do not connect my name with its title, because the book 
 itself contains only some hint of the sublime meaning such 
 a title suggests. But I write not anonymously, and disown 
 no just responsibility for whatever I may say. It were 
 needless to inform any reader, that my subject has been 
 suggested by the present state of the general mind upon 
 radical questions of religion ; and as I have alluded in one 
 passage to the topic of a discourse by Dr. Bellows, which, 
 beyond most of a similar kind, has succeeded to fame, I ask 
 leave here to say, that, in the whole drift of my thought, I 
 have projected an independent treatment of my theme. It 
 is in no opposition to that gentleman, my most dear friend, 
 that I could anywhere appear. If I take a different direction, 
 as seamen have diverse routes to the same ports in Europe 
 or the Indies, nevertheless I admire the way he has pursued 
 his ; and I by no means undervalue his course in present- 
 ing, in some sense, a humble counterpart. Seldom, indeed, 
 has the press of this country put forth matter, which, for 
 combination of intellectual power and rhetorical splendor, 
 with frank speech and a good spirit, can be compared with 
 his two recent productions. There is no abler advocate alive 
 
4 PREFACE. 
 
 of any point in religion he may lay down ; and it may be 
 doubted if any technically Catholic author in the land has 
 argued the case of the church so finely, in its humane sig- 
 nificance as well as its logical force. Evidently, too, he has 
 done this with a motive disinterested, purged from all per- 
 sonal aims, and inducing the entire consecration of his ener- 
 gies to the work of relieving, nourishing, and cheering the 
 whole fellowship and body of Christ. As the Roman orator 
 consulted for the republic's safety, he has been anxious lest 
 the nobler commonwealth should receive harm. 
 
 Otherwise, though by necessity of conviction or nature I 
 may be constrained to speak, I have no regret, but only re- 
 joicing, in the masterly performance of his undertaken task. 
 Great good to the denomination of which he is a member, and 
 to the church at large, must result from the earnest debate he 
 has had the ability to move. Not from stir, but from sleep, 
 is our spiritual danger; and New-England men, therefore, 
 will thank for his work's sake the New-England's son now 
 their New-York missionary brother. Quite unimportant to 
 him is such open commendation or recognition. He will 
 care for the truth only, and welcome from friend or stranger 
 whatever least sign of its direct shining or faint-reflected 
 light. Yet is it of consequence to all persons in delicate 
 bonds of relationship, so far as they may, to keep the public 
 apprehension in conformity with private esteem. Let this 
 excuse references such as it is no wont of mine to make. 
 May He, whose being is the link of all our unions, lead us 
 into his perfect truth and love ! 
 
 C. A. BARTOL. 
 
THE 
 
 WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 T?VERY reader of the Bible must have no 
 ticed, in the Revelation, the solemn, seven- 
 fold arraigning of the seven churches in Asia by 
 the Voice of that wonderful vision described 
 as appearing to John. This supremacy of the 
 spiritual in religion over the ecclesiastical is 
 asserted or implied throughout the New Testa- 
 ment. In assuming it, however, I design no 
 contradiction of the plea, that Scripture is not 
 our only rule ; that the church pre-existing is a 
 co-ordinate power with the Holy Writ it pro- 
 duces. But I affirm the amenableness of both 
 book and body to the Spirit which is their com- 
 mon parent. Proposing no abstract, but a plain 
 
 l 
 
b THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 and practical discussion, I shall speak of the doc- 
 trine of the Spirit as our only authority in its 
 Principle, its Abuse, and the Kemedy. 
 
 I. Let me treat of the Principle. 
 
 There is in every soul, awake to its wants, one 
 question, — On what authority, as to the things 
 I should believe and do and hope for, can I rest ? 
 Always a question, it has of late been agitated 
 among us with peculiar warmth. According as 
 it is by individuals for themselves decided one 
 way or another, what uprooting of the oldest 
 ties, changing of vital relations, and sudden tra- 
 versing by human creatures of the whole orbit 
 of their lives, and sphere of Christendom ! 
 There are a great many answers to this ques- 
 tion, from all the churches and sects, and modes 
 of faith, in the world, — answers resolving them- 
 selves into this invitation from every party: 
 " Come with us ; we have the truth ; all doctrines 
 and forms beside ours are spurious." The answer 
 in the Bible, especially given by Jesus and his 
 apostles, and also spoken or echoed in the depths 
 of the soul itself, admits no authority but that 
 of the Spirit, Ecclesiastical authority, of one 
 
TO THE CHUECH. i 
 
 church or another, of the church in part or 
 altogether, over the soul of man, does not exist. 
 The church anywhere, local or universal, is but 
 a creation and agent of the Spirit, useful only so 
 far as the Spirit is in it represented and obeyed, 
 accountable to the Spirit for its shortcomings 
 and misdemeanors. So the writer in the Reve- 
 lation indicts it at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, 
 Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, for 
 actual sins and declensions ; noting scarce a sin- 
 gle branch of it clean of spot, and none without 
 fearful danger. What a dread list is made out 
 of sins, — of idolatry, impurity, moral debility, 
 vanity, lying, lukewarmness, and failing love ; 
 yea, in the chosen synagogues of the Lord ! 
 This fact, that the church itself is corruptible, 
 and liable to err, as universal history and expe- 
 rience indeed prove, blows all to pieces its pre- 
 tence of supreme authority as to truth, duty, or 
 destiny. Whence, indeed, comes its right to 
 stand between the soul and God? Where, in 
 any Romish, English, Episcopal, Congregational, 
 Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, or 
 Calvinistic establishment, does any perfect pu- 
 rity or wisdom show the warrant of its business 
 
8 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 to command the mind or to order the conduct of 
 men ? The New Testament deals mostly w r ith 
 local churches ; and a church more or less local 
 is alone available to the soul as an authority in 
 the sense claimed. The church at large is, as 
 Paul writes to Timothy, the pillar and ground 
 of the truth. But the fortifying of truth in the 
 world differs from the inspiring of it in the soul ; 
 and this text empowers no church, authorizes no 
 concert, to rule the children of God. When the 
 people of any sect or denomination would make 
 proselytes of us, and have nothing better than to 
 say, " Come with us, and join our communion ; 
 we alone are Christian, with the warrant of God 
 and favor in heaven," — then let us reply by dis- 
 owning any such authority. Even Jesus, with 
 his disciples, insisted not on anybody's following 
 visibly in the same troop. He blamed some of 
 them for rebuking those who chose to do good 
 their own separate way. Let us, in turn, never 
 say to any one, " Come with us ; " but, " Go with 
 the Spirit, and come only so far as you can find it 
 here ! w Let us heed only such teachers as refer 
 us, not to their creed, their assembly, their style 
 or book of worship, as final or sufficient ; but to 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 9 
 
 the Spirit of truth, beauty, goodness, — the uni- 
 versal, infinite, pure, and loving Spirit of God. 
 
 But how very vague, indefinite, and impracti- 
 cable to most persons, teaching such a generality 
 seems ! " You talk of the consciousness of God," 
 said one to a preacher : " I cannot say I ever had 
 it, or that I even know what you mean." So 
 many will ask, " What is this Spirit of which 
 you speak ? We do not find it. Where and how 
 are we to get it ? When you present to us arti- 
 cles in a creed, forms of service in a church, to 
 strike the eye and ear, we can take hold of and 
 be affected by them. But Spirit, — invisible, 
 intangible, inaudible, — we are not reached or 
 touched by it ; and it will not suffice for our 
 instruction or salvation." I can only answer, Of 
 such lowest ground a rational creature can take, 
 let us beware. Unbelief in the Spirit is the 
 only essential infidelity. I know how men in 
 religion, as all other things, are moved by out- 
 ward sights and sounds. I know T how dim and 
 unreal to gross and carnal minds is internal 
 influence. Ah ! with what deep policy the an- 
 cient Catholicism has taken, not only affections 
 and faculties, but the Jive senses, under its 
 
10 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 charge ! Touch of holy water, smell of incense, 
 taste of the wafer, sound of music, and sight of 
 all gorgeous things, are her recruiting sergeants, 
 sponsors for her votaries, and sentinels at her 
 gates. A late traveller, accustomed to our sim- 
 plest New-England worship, tells, what is plain 
 to every just observer, how, in a Romish cathe- 
 dral in Paris, it seemed to her the splendid and 
 noisy spectacle was contrived in every part to 
 draw the soul away from itself, so that it could 
 not dwell on the realities revealed within. I 
 will not undertake to say what proportion of 
 human beings are in so sensuous and irrational 
 a state, that such appeals of swinging censers, 
 choral voices, holy crossings, and solemn masses, 
 alone can win their sacred regard. Let us be at 
 least magnanimous enough to allow that the 
 same mode of religion cannot affect equally all 
 men. Some outward mode is in all cases neces- 
 sary for social man. The question, then, is not 
 of having any form, but of the sort and pro- 
 portion of form ; its relation to the Spirit ; 
 in short, whether our very forms shall, as 
 they may, be spiritual or not. There is such 
 a thing as a spiritual form. In the bread and 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 11 
 
 wine of the Supper, Jesus meant to establish 
 such a one : for how earnestly he corrected his 
 disciples' first misapprehension, of eating his 
 flesh and drinking his blood, by declaring the 
 vital and spiritual sense of his words ; thus dis- 
 allowing and denouncing beforehand the Romish 
 superstition, so inveterate, of his bodily presence 
 in the Eucharist ! The form of a man, when the 
 man is intent on carnal pleasure, is a material 
 form indeed. But when it is lighted with 
 thought, and sublimed with holy love, while the 
 meanings of the heavenly world flash frequent 
 as an electric summer night in every expres- 
 sion, and are re-enforced with tones of inspira- 
 tion, how spiritual ! — transfigured as truly as 
 Christ's on the mountain. 
 
 The Spirit itself has necessary external chan- 
 nels, — temples, rites, and appointed days, — as 
 well as a secret apparition. All Christians prac- 
 tically own the need and value of some sensible 
 method and concerted order of praise, prayer, and 
 teaching, for united and affectionate devotion. 
 Nevertheless, we may consistently disown, and 
 discard from our practice, and resist, that impo- 
 sition of the pomp and excess of ritual which 
 
12 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 eclipses the hidden Deity, and drowns his whis- 
 per in the heart. Indeed, my aim in this essay 
 is, against all lower judgments, to affirm the 
 existence of a great and growing number in 
 the community, for whom the plainest style of 
 adoration is the best. We, Independents, in 
 our dependency on God, deny that any more of 
 mechanism and repetition and symbolic dis- 
 play than we already possess and use is need- 
 ful or would be profitable for ourselves or our 
 children. Men are, indeed, still too gregarious. 
 I saw the foremost in a flock of sheep lately 
 sidle from the country road, and leap through a 
 ragged, uncomfortable gap in the wall ; and no 
 efforts of the drivers, with whips and exclama- 
 tions, could keep a single one of the hundred 
 from leaping through at the very same place. 
 It is astonishing how like a flock of sheep we, 
 with all our nobler humanity, still are, as we 
 rush, one vast, emulating, imitative crowd, to the 
 exhibition, the parade, the play, the new engine, 
 the balloon, or oration. Let us not overlook 
 signal advantages in this excitable sympathy, 
 but only be advised of the mischief it must work 
 if it hinder or over weigh our sublimer, solitary 
 
NJ 
 
 TO THE CHURCH. 13 
 
 fellowship with God; and aver the legitimacy 
 of a host of religious believers, whose religion is 
 not to part with their personality in the closest 
 accordance of their prayers. They cannot sur- 
 render their position. They are far enough from 
 being the majority ; but they ask for room ! 
 
 The question between the Church and the 
 Spirit is, whether corporate power shall have 
 undue ratio in religion. It was the very ques- 
 tion between Luther and the pope. Luther, 
 shocked with the iniquities of Eome, as John 
 was with those of the churches in Asia, cast off 
 her authority, and maintained the soul's privi- 
 lege of immediate access to God. The pope, 
 the cardinals, the councils, said, " No: the Church 
 is between the soul and God, vested with his 
 authority. You cannot come to it or have it by 
 yourself alone, or at all, save through our rule." 
 Here was the battle. It is very commonly sup- 
 posed and declared, that the German reformer 
 fought for the right of private judgment. This, 
 as the best scholars now appear to agree, is a 
 great mistake of his design. He hardly believed 
 in that, or was true to it if he did. Later than 
 his day was it politically vindicated, if not dis- 
 
14 THE WOKD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 covered. Even yet we grope after its nature 
 and limits. 
 
 But the sublimer principle, that the private 
 soul has an approach to its Author otherwise and 
 more direct than through the church-door, Lu- 
 ther did preach and exemplify, and conquer the 
 right to exemplify and preach ; as it is the posi- 
 tion on which, in every free body, as our Lord 
 requires, we stand and build. Is it said, " The 
 Holy Ghost does not visit the private soul " ? 
 I might reply, Certainly it does not most com- 
 placently visit the unloving soul, unconscious of 
 its dear ties with other members of the Father's 
 family, if I did not remember, that, though the 
 loving soul alone may receive it abundantly, it 
 alone can quicken the dead soul to love. But 
 to insist that it can enter these inner chambers 
 of the bosom only through the material courses 
 of our formal connection with, and obeisance to, 
 some external organization, is to revive the de- 
 spotic claim which all our spiritual ancestry, with 
 Jesus at the head, exploded ; and no coming 
 age, according as it is virtuous or enlightened, 
 can abide. We are Protestants in virtue of our 
 negative attitude to the tyranny that would pre- 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 15 
 
 vent our positive communion with our Almighty 
 Source, and our share of all the riches of life 
 and love, self-sacrifice, toil for our race, and hope 
 of immortality, it imparts. A draught at the 
 fountain, instead of the lower, muddy stream, is 
 that for which we cry. What but private souls, 
 astir with the love of God and mankind, and so 
 refreshing their powers at the spring of all good- 
 ness, have been the redeemers of the church 
 and the world? In how many a single, burning, 
 prophetic breast God has chosen his peculiar 
 battery of power ! 
 
 But will any one inquire again, if this postu- 
 late of the sole authority of the Spirit does not 
 vacate that of the Lord Jesus Christ ? I rejoin, 
 It is the very and only authority of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, the exact authority he asserts and 
 enjoins. Though he had, as he said, the Spirit 
 without measure, he cites the Spirit as the only 
 sufficient supply for all. Before the glory and 
 infinity of the Spirit he himself how meekly re- 
 tires ! How he affirms his individuality to be 
 nothing before the grandeur of its revelation; 
 tells the disciples, the Spirit must be their in- 
 structor after he should vanish away; and de- 
 
16 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 clares to the Pharisees the pardonableness of 
 speaking against him, but not against that Spirit, 
 which was the very power of the All-Holy and 
 Eternal One ! How his lesson for all the world is, 
 that to be born of that Spirit, whose only earthly 
 semblance is the strong and boundless wind, is 
 every mortal nature's urgent and inevitable need ! 
 Theologians have disputed about the procession 
 of the Spirit, — ■ whether it be from the Father 
 only, or from the Father and the Son. He who 
 was the Son countenances no subtle reasoning 
 about what he takes for granted in its vital 
 force, its open privilege and universal oppor- 
 tunity, in the possible experience of every child 
 of Him who to each asker gives himself, in won- 
 derful communication, more freely than earthly 
 parents make their little presents of bread or 
 raiment or gold. The doctrine, that there is for 
 the soul no authority but the Spirit, is not my 
 doctrine, but that of Scripture and of Heaven, 
 and of him whose very name was the Word of 
 God ; he being, indeed, always what he saw and 
 said. 
 
 Undoubtedly there are ways and means, as 
 well as "a direct illumination, of the Spirit; but 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 17 
 
 the Spirit is not to be limited to ways and means 
 of any name or kind or number. What the 
 procession of that Spirit is, when it began, how 
 far it goes, how many minds or ages it includes, 
 or where it shall end, who shall tell? Jesus 
 did not commence it ; historical Christianity did 
 not create it ; it is uncreated. All its prophets 
 have never been mentioned to us. To make us 
 more sensible of it is the office of our faith. I 
 can only, in a few poor words, indicate its pre- 
 sence or describe its work. 
 
 I beg you, my reader, to consider, then, that 
 there is something in you beside yourself. There 
 is something in the air around you, not of the 
 atmosphere, which the chemist cannot solve. 
 There is a light, not of the sun, lighting every 
 man that cometh into the world. There is a 
 voice beyond that of man or nature, gentler 
 than the softest whisper in counsel to us, and 
 louder than the rending thunder in our remorse. 
 There is a feeling of present divinity, of which 
 we are never quite rid. There is a being we 
 are conscious of above our own, ordaining, sup- 
 porting, commanding, awing, consoling, teach- 
 ing, blessing it. In our solitude there is another 
 
18 THE WOED OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 with us ; and, in our society, One, invited or 
 uninvited, not counted in the list or written on 
 the cards. It is the Spirit. The flash of truth 
 in you, the path of honor pointed before you, the 
 impulse of justice to walk therein, your act of 
 goodness, your abstinent purity, — these are all 
 from it. Your thought of perfect kindness, may 
 God give it ! — your flame of holy love, may God 
 kindle it ! — your swifter than arrow's flight of 
 ascending prayer, — did you make these with 
 your cunning contrivance, your curious fingers, 
 and of your own potent will ? No : the Spirit 
 breathed them into you. Part and parcel of the 
 Spirit they are. They alone are intrinsic evi- 
 dence, that all your ideas of a great Father's 
 yearning, of a higher state for your departed 
 ones, as being dearer to him than to yourself, 
 are not vanity. I did not make my love : then a 
 higher Love made it, and will justify it for ever. 
 You did not create your own apprehensions of 
 Eternal Purity and Goodness : you, then, may 
 trust and hope in them, spite of sorrow and 
 death, to enliven and save and keep you world 
 without end. They are beams which, followed, 
 must bring you to the resplendent orb. They 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 19 
 
 are the essential stuff of which the universe is 
 formed, without which there would be no uni- 
 verse ; and in them you are immortal and ever- 
 lasting. 
 
 Proofs and confessions of this abound. They 
 afford the most touching tales of all history. 
 Said a wise minister, giving to some younger 
 men his ordination-charge, " When an idea of 
 goodness rises in you, prize it beyond whole libra- 
 ries of learning.' 7 Such an idea is more worth 
 than all books and Bibles. Said a wife to her 
 husband, — a man of apocalyptic imagination, 
 like John's, he was, — a Why do you pace round 
 the room, muttering so to yourself?" — lL Be- 
 cause/' he humorously answered, " I like to talk 
 to a prudent person." But his conference may 
 have been with the Holy Ghost. For we are in- 
 deed in no closet or desert ever alone. There is 
 a second person always ; or, rather, each one of 
 us is second, and that first. If u one with God is a 
 majority," who may not be in the majority when- 
 ever he wall ; yea, though the people rage, his 
 friends forsake him, and public opinion crucify ? 
 Such communion is not always divine. A man 
 may move his lips thus in conference strangely, 
 
20 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 when Satan, or some ill demon, is his consulting 
 advocate for the case in hand ; but the Spirit of 
 our Father in heaven offers itself for our compa- 
 nion and the mate of our mind. When we 
 accept it, it is the only authority in religion. 
 There is no contradiction between it and the 
 lustre of Holy Writ. Its accents are in unison, 
 as he assures us, with the word of our Lord. 
 All solemn, sincere exercises and authentic di- 
 vine records are but its remembrances and 
 signs and precious provocations. To refuse it 
 is alone to be faithless, hopeless, selfish, and 
 unforgiven. 
 
 But, do you say, " We are not single and sepa- 
 rate believers, after all : we are a church. It does 
 not signify in this matter what passes between a 
 man apart and his God. Perhaps there is no 
 road between God and a lonely man. Perhaps 
 we can travel into heaven only through each 
 other's hearts ! How does this Spirit manifest 
 itself, seek and solicit us in our union together ? " 
 Truly this is the question. " In no disorderly, 
 extemporaneous way," say a host of our fellow- 
 Christians, " but in a set style of worship and 
 fixed arrangement of words." Not thus alone or 
 
TO THE CHUKCH. 21 
 
 chiefly, I reply. I will not deny that living water 
 can run in canals, or stand fresh for a w^hile in 
 reservoirs, like the huge granite one yonder, as 
 well as bubble from fountains and flow in streams. 
 But that it is any better water for its confine- 
 ment and standing, I am not disposed to admit. 
 That it may become stagnant, who does not 
 know ? That, in every basin and service-pipe 
 of meeting-house or missionary enterprise, ex- 
 cept for its mysterious and incalculable supply 
 from the cloudy pavilion of God, it would utterly 
 give out, and be dryer than the potsherd Job 
 scraped himself with, or than the ashes among 
 which in his soreness he sat down, what bigoted 
 formalist, save in utter stupidity, can deny ? 
 
 But it is alleged, that, among dissenters from 
 the Establishment, the tide of devotion is low, if 
 not, indeed, quite run out. Does not a noted 
 Unitarian, in a late letter from abroad, announce 
 it so among Unitarians ? Yes ; and how many 
 opponents echo and reduplicate the charge ! 
 " Oh ! " say some to the free congregations, with 
 their spontaneous style, "you do not go to church 
 for worship at all, but to hear preaching, and see 
 what a man, called by courtesy a minister, can 
 
 2 
 
22 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 invent with his genius, if he have any, and do by 
 himself.' 7 But must not a man or men, in some 
 sense, speak and do every thing, in whatsoever 
 convention ? Is the form or phrase of devotion, 
 by a man pronounced, in itself more holy, I won- 
 der, than the periods of a discourse ? What 
 rescript from the kingdom ever so declared it ? 
 Is not the Spirit at liberty, if it will, to take the 
 sermon, too, for its instrument, and pour its 
 treasures of celestial feeling and spotless pur- 
 pose through that into the hearers' minds ? Does 
 it not often flood the breast with love, humility, 
 and new resolve, in this very way ? Is it not 
 more likely to do so than through the long, mono- 
 tonous repetitions of the same supplicatory lan- 
 guage, against which Jesus warned us, so apt 
 to become mechanical and dead, or through 
 homilies more lifeless and uninspired? Is not 
 all speech of truth a lowly homage and bowing 
 before God? Does shutting one's eyes, or put- 
 ting a handkerchief to one's forehead, constitute 
 devoutness? Or does it consist in stating and 
 accepting the divine law ? Nay, did not Jesus 
 himself, the great example, preach to people, 
 earnestly and at length, a great deal more than 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 23 
 
 he prayed among them? Are we to insult him 
 by alike rejecting his pattern and despising his 
 word? No; but to pour and welcome religious 
 affection, adoration, illumination, through hymn, 
 address, doxology, benediction, — every portion, 
 however administered, of this real drama of 
 knowledge and praise. 
 
 u But the minister does it all," it is scornfully 
 said and flung at the congregational style, 
 wherein there is no general reading and reciting 
 as in a monitorial school. Not so, I maintain, 
 need or should it be. Not so is it, unless to our 
 shame ! Silent as a worshipping assembly may 
 be in that living quiet, deep as the hush of 
 death, it is no solitary actor that is engaged in 
 conducting the service. Talk, of one or a mul- 
 titude, is not the only communion. Many a 
 mute listener is more active with God than 
 sometimes is the loud, swaying, perspiring 
 figure in the desk. Gesticulation and noise are 
 not activity of soul. Often, and most likely 
 when the magazines of heaven are open through 
 the minister's mind, ecstasy of consent and aspi- 
 ration removes every barrier of the pews. Be- 
 side the lips of one poor mortal man that are 
 
24 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 moving, all are performing their part. Each 
 communicating soul in the attendant multitude 
 mingles its desires and confessions in the ascrip- 
 tion of homage, and receives the answer of 
 direction and comfort and peace. 
 
 The Spirit, then, is our only authority. If I 
 were going to name a church, it would not be 
 Church of the Trinity or Unity, of the Disciples 
 or the Episcopate, of Saints or Souls, nor even 
 of the Messiah or Saviour, dear unspeakably as 
 these titles may be ; but of the Spirit whence 
 Messiah and Saviour drew. Be we apart or to- 
 gether, let us mind the Spirit. Let us look and 
 listen for it. Let us meditate and pray till it 
 arrive, and unveil itself to cheer us. The rea- 
 son we do not hear and receive it more is the 
 tumult we are in of other things. Late at night, 
 some time ago, six miles off, I stood waiting near 
 the tower of a village-church. The clock struck. 
 The mellow vibration continued after the ham- 
 mer stopped, till I was amazed at its long dura- 
 tion. If other earthly noises are not allowed to 
 encroach too much, the Spirit, with sweeter 
 tone than of any instrument, will continue 
 sounding in our souls. 
 
11 He that hath an ear," — that is, everybody, — 
 ** let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the 
 churches." We all have an ear, deeper than of the 
 flesh, hearkening to something beneath all bells 
 and breezes, tongues or outward motions. It is 
 the dearest desire of my heart, if I know what it 
 is, that we Congregationalists should be a church 
 of the Spirit, in this finer hearing. Our service 
 is called bare and meagre. We must bear the 
 reproach. Doubtless the sonorous, priestly in- 
 toning and responding from sabbath to sabbath 
 of the same idolized words (is not the idolatry of 
 words as bad a violation of the command as that 
 of graven images ?) would, in the weakness of 
 human nature, win greater crowds, filling the 
 seats, and stir them to a more vivid superficial 
 delight. But would it be spiritual and profitable 
 to the soul ? I think not ; and I thank God, as 
 a Congregationalist, for our joint success, and 
 our hope still to prosper, without such alluring 
 accessories, not in the gospel, which might con- 
 vert people to us, and not to him. Let us trust 
 his Spirit. With combined and separate en- 
 treaty, let us beseech it. In our life, let us obey 
 it. For the building of our character, unseen 
 
26 THE WOED OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 and mysterious as it is, let us rely on it. The 
 stout and aged woods grow from invisible gases 
 of earth and air. Breathing what we never saw 
 fashions and sustains our own fearful and won- 
 derful frame. To this city and Jerusalem of our 
 abode, wide acres yonder, pushing out the tide, 
 are added by a puff of transparent steam, turn- 
 ing the iron wheels that roll hills, interior and 
 out of sight, into sea-side, solid plains to hold 
 up streets and dwellings and courts of the Lord. 
 Could we open ourselves to the working of that 
 marvellous force, which exceeds all the elements 
 of nature and applications of art, there would be 
 a moral result transcending material growth 
 and human structures, as eternal glories shame 
 the triumphs of sense and of time. 
 
 IT. There is an Abuse to be considered. 
 
 I have stated the doctrine of Scripture and 
 reason, that the Spirit is the only authority in 
 religion. I have defined, and tried to vindicate, 
 our old ancestral position. Are we worthy the 
 position ? In the Old-Testament story, the ark 
 of the Lord was held by ungodly hands, and 
 the anger of the Lord smote the holder dead. 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 27 
 
 So many professors of truth come short of the 
 glory of their trust. We pride ourselves in 
 being Liberal Christians. But there is a sort of 
 liberal Christian that ought to be disturbed. 
 We are hot in our liberality against rites and 
 creeds, especially exclusive dogmas of fanati- 
 cism, and forms of the High Church. • We call 
 ourselves spiritual. I am not insensible of the 
 graces of many of the spiritual school. In their 
 purity, piety, and humanity, they are among the 
 best of Christ's witnesses and God's children on 
 earth. But I have now to speak of the disloyal 
 or defective spiritualist, whose so-called spiritu- 
 ality is an abuse. He is a Liberal Christian, 
 graciously accepting the name, and, in the coun- 
 ter designation of Orthodoxy, recognizing only 
 errors from which he revolts ; yet he is of very 
 small credit to his own faith. He seems correct 
 on the negative side. He is shocked at such 
 notions as total depravity, moral inability, vica- 
 rious punishment, and everlasting woe. He is a 
 very intellectual man, and no one ever accused 
 him of a want of sense. He is a keen critic of 
 other people's mistakes, little as he applies the 
 knife, violently as he may resist its application, 
 
28 THE WOED OF THE SPIEIT 
 
 to himself. He sees the truth as with a pro- 
 phet's vision. But there is no nerve running 
 from his eye to hand. He does scarce a trifle of 
 the truth he sees. He is a perfectly religious 
 man in theory. He acknowledges the beauty 
 and the bond of every divine sentiment and law. 
 But he wears his religion quite as uncomfortably 
 as a certain man I knew of did his cork-leg, 
 which he put on occasionally because it helped 
 him to get along to his office through the street ; 
 but took off whenever he could, because it made 
 him so uneasy, and did not feel like part of him- 
 self. 
 
 *Ah ! if we laid aside all the religion we use 
 simply to further us through this world, how 
 much should we have left ? Let us remember 
 the fate of the wood, hay, stubble. How tho- 
 roughly our gay and zealous friend of theolo- 
 gical progress manages to forget ! Indeed, this 
 advocate of the Spirit is a singular character. 
 He has no superstition, and no devotion either ; 
 he is no bigot and no enthusiast; he curses no- 
 body with his austerity, and blesses nobody with 
 his love ; he does not fear God, and does not 
 truly worship him. Very often he is a respecta- 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 29 
 
 able man, no open sinner, commits no gross 
 excess, has no iron fist or brazen face ; but all 
 virtue and all vice alike seem with him to sink 
 and disappear in some vast, empty gulf — like 
 those dry pits that in some places deform the 
 earth's surface • — of actual indifference, spring- 
 ing from philosophic unconcern. u Am I that 
 name?" with ineffable tenderness, in the play, 
 asks Desdemona, when her real sanctity had 
 been so unfairly coupled with a vile term. We 
 have plenty of ignominious appellations for our 
 opponents, and many a grand and noble one for 
 ourselves. Witness our sermons, conversations, 
 newspapers, and reviews, in which so easily and 
 cheaply we can run our opponents down, and 
 exalt ourselves to the skies ! But, when we use 
 the generous title spiritual to describe our own 
 class of believers, how many careless and worldly 
 persons among us, nominally included in the 
 class, might very reasonably, in another w T ay, 
 inquire, " Are we that name ? " No ; not unless 
 the spirituality goes from your brain to your 
 heart, touches your countenance, enriches your 
 voice, and hallows every member of your body 
 and act of your life with the mighty and gentle 
 
30 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 manners that mark the children of God. If you 
 be but a voter for the spiritual faith, a retained 
 lawyer in its cause, a professor of the heart, with 
 no warm heart under the profession, you carry 
 men forward no more than does a painted vehi- 
 cle, and praise God no more than the show-pipe 
 on the organ. 
 
 Therefore, when we thus hold forth the Spirit 
 as the only authority, we must not be surprised 
 if those who differ from and narrowly observe 
 us say, in scorn, "Oh! the Spirit, is it? That 
 can be quoted for any thing ! " Nor is it a 
 sufficient reply, though proverbially true, that 
 "the Bible can be quoted for any thing; as 
 even the Devil can, and in human shape does, 
 fetch Scripture to justify his ends." Let us 
 rather honestly confess there is a specious and 
 spurious as well as genuine spirituality. To 
 spirituality itself, in the highest point of new 
 thought and original excellence, no objection 
 should be made. Let us have the absolute reli- 
 gion of which so much is said. Of Transcendent- 
 alistSj for five and twenty years, we have been 
 hearing. Where are they? A Transcendentalist, 
 I suppose, ought to be a person who transcends, 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 31 
 
 exceeds, other people in wisdom and virtue. 
 Let us have transcendental love and sanctity. 
 Alas ! the misery is, that our transcendentalists 
 are so many of them no transcendentalists, but 
 terribly fail to enact the superior mind and cha- 
 racter they preach. The famous spirituality of 
 many is only a proposition, not a fact. 
 
 In truth, Christianity itself is a religion far 
 more absolute than any other which, under such 
 a designation, has been proclaimed. Compare 
 the New Testament with the lectures and dis- 
 courses in these days delivered to supersede it, 
 and judge for yourselves ! Jesus Christ ivas 
 the wondrous truth and goodness of which he 
 told. In his disciples, thus far in the world's his- 
 tory, the manifesto has come nearest to a reality; 
 and no man has proved more manly or divine for 
 fancying he had outgrow T n the gospel. When 
 our neighbors propound something as better 
 than that, we at least ask the privilege, as law- 
 ful for systems as for articles of merchandise, of 
 inspecting. In the mock-auctions of a neighbor- 
 ing metropolitan city, articles of jewelry and 
 gold are every week struck off at what to the 
 purchaser seem wonderfully low prices, till he 
 
\2 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 iearns that the precious metal of his glittering 
 new time-piece is pinchbeck, and the lustrous 
 gem cunning paste. Then, on his complaint, 
 lo ! what screams of remonstrance and denial to 
 the officers of justice from the detected auc- 
 tioneer ! So when, by some searching mind, 
 dealers in the counterfeits of moral principle are 
 exposed, how they resent the slander of their 
 reputation, and outrage on their sense of charac- 
 ter and self-respect ! Nevertheless is it needful 
 to guard against all the forms which the bad and 
 hollow spirituality of the day may put on. 
 
 At home and abroad, the cry is lifted, that 
 every thing in these times we eat or drink or 
 wear, or use any way for the convenience, com- 
 fort, or necessity of existence, — every thing is 
 adulterated. We talk of the order of the day. 
 Adulteration is the order of the day in our great 
 social parliament of trade. We walk by the 
 shop-window, and see in capital letters, on 
 boxes and jars, the unblushing pledge of a parti- 
 cular manufacture, — foreign importation from 
 London, Paris, Vienna, — the pretended genu- 
 ine composition of what is a base mixture, a 
 forgery, and a poison ; and the very dealers, in 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 33 
 
 what to our children at least is one essential 
 part of our domestic diet, tell us now, at last, 
 that by no possible efforts of theirs can they 
 persuade their agents even to let us have the 
 small allowance of taking our milk and water 
 separate I It becomes a sober investigation 
 indeed, when we must withstand the worse 
 foisting-in of untrue types of spirituality. 
 
 Some of these I proceed to name. 
 
 The first is the negligent type, noticeable in 
 not a few, who, like old Gallio in Achaia, care 
 for none of these things. They thank God, and 
 sacredly swear to men, that they are emanci- 
 pated from the heavy, galling yoke of creeds 
 and forms. They have espoused, for their part, 
 the simpler, spontaneous, congregational, liberal 
 worship. But do they value and support the 
 very worship they have espoused ? How 
 much ? Two hours a week ? Ah ! — following 
 out that figure of espousal, — what woman 
 would be content with tokens of regard only 
 equal to those they pay to their own portion of 
 that church which is in Scripture called the 
 bride of Christ ! How constant is their attend- 
 ance, and how earnest their attention ? Do 
 
34 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 they neglect even the simple means they pos- 
 sess ? How big a cloud in the sky does it take 
 to keep, not alone the sick and weak, but half 
 the congregation, away ? Truly, I fear that is a 
 problem it would cost the mathematical chair at 
 Cambridge, with all its world-renowned genius 
 in meteorology, too much labor to solve ! Why 
 do they absent themselves ? Because there is 
 no help for them in the sanctuary ? And mean- 
 while, too pious for these courts, are they in 
 their closets and on their knees ? Let them 
 answer before God ! What dress must they 
 wear, or other fashionable circumstance observe, 
 w T hen they appear? How much heart have 
 they, even on the spot, of fellowship with their 
 fellow-worshippers? Does it astonish and pain 
 to hear such interrogations from the lips, per- 
 haps, of one who is continually charged with 
 being too mild and softly exculpatory of every 
 sin in his discourse ? To put the interrogations 
 is greater pain ! Very pleasant was it to unfold 
 the principle of authority as being in the Spirit 
 alone, but a strange, unwelcome work to inquire 
 after our derelictions from it. Yet if any of us be 
 selfish individuals, disconnected particles of the 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 35 
 
 common soul, united in no bonds of affectionate 
 communion, but rather like so many slippery mar- 
 bles, together only because of the bag or vessel 
 that holds them, and rolling each its own inde- 
 pendent way as soon as released, why then the 
 coldest ritualist we denounce is just as good as 
 we, and the revivalist, that copies the engineer 
 throwing pitch into his furnace, has more claim 
 to respect, sublime as may be the maxims of 
 freedom and knowledge and toleration, which, 
 as lights of the world, we set forth ! Little in 
 the judgment of God, very little at the door of 
 heaven, will it avail a worldly, miserly, and icy- 
 tempered man, that he cast in his lot with the 
 most enlightened and advanced denomination. 
 You who are anywhere, in village or city, called 
 a society j corporation, parish, churcli, ask your- 
 selves what mutual ties, strongly binding and 
 gladly owned, correspond to these names ! 
 What vital relation, not to the place, the pulpit, 
 and the minister alone, but to each other, do 
 you sustain ? 
 
 But again : there is also the lax as well as the 
 negligent type of this spurious spirituality, of 
 which we should beware. It is no new thing for 
 
36 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 those, thinking themselves saved by their own 
 faith or by grace from on high, to imagine 
 their morals no essential matter. " We need a 
 preacher yet to come/ 7 said one, " to inculcate 
 simple morals ! " What theories about the indul- 
 gence of the appetites, the relations of the sexes, 
 the obligations of the married state, and all the 
 show and luxury and pride of life, — yea, under 
 the color of a more elevated and spiritual condi- 
 tion, — prevail among many, who have adopted 
 the spiritual principle, in the sense at least of 
 throwing off all the bondage and law of the let- 
 ter ! Truly, by such, not only all bonds are dis- 
 owned, but all liberties taken. 
 
 Manifold are the demonstrations of this ini- 
 quity and disease. It is a grief to allude to the 
 flippant vanity with which, for example, shallow- 
 hearted persons, in print or talk, declaim against 
 faulty popular patterns of adoration and duty, 
 while they themselves, by no grand or lowly 
 trait, furnish the least recommendation of a finer 
 standard. Because they are free from some 
 groundless terrors and old slaveries of inherited 
 opinion, they conceive they are better than any 
 hero of an evangelical missionary or Catholic 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 37 
 
 saint of the calendar, — any Judson or Fen^lon : 
 as though some smooth popinjay of a play- 
 thing should in its levity, as it makes little 
 noise, be praised up for a grander utensil than 
 the huge engine that creaks and groans with 
 its ancient service; or some new-painted plea- 
 sure-yacht of feasters on their trip down the 
 harbor be preferred to the ship, the ugly barna- 
 cles on whose bottom show her voyage through 
 distant deeps; or to the " Great Eastern/' because 
 an explosion, not shattering her bulk, has oc- 
 curred in part of her works ! To slough off the 
 dead skin of old habit may be well ; but for a 
 spiritual religion, I apprehend, real qualities are 
 required. If there were no life or beauty under 
 the skin, why need a creature be rid of it 
 at all? 
 
 It is a bitterness to the soul when educated 
 literary or scientific men fail of that bowing be- 
 fore the Supreme Being, and obeying of his law, 
 which is the only crown of other attainments, 
 however splendid. Without it, other attain- 
 ments are next to nought. It is almost a dis- 
 couragement to faith itself to read the page of 
 some English, German, American critic, and 
 
 3 
 
38 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 have to say to him, u Your objections are well 
 put ; but where are the sweetness and humanity 
 which should wait on your views, so enlarged ? 
 Why this towering arrogance and jealous am- 
 bition instead ? You renounce the bad, and 
 acquire not the good ! w It would seem as if we 
 could have no leaders among us in this country 
 who are not egotists. It is alarming to see, in 
 any shape, that worst paradox and monster 
 chiefly generated, as the ethical geologist would 
 tell us, in the most recent periods, the unspiritual 
 spiritualist. 
 
 11 Are there any spirits present ? v is the ques- 
 tion regularly put in the circles of which we 
 hear so much. I will not say it is a question of 
 sheer nonsense and pure folly. Fbelieve spirits 
 of the departed, good or bad, may be present. 
 Whether they communicate or not in the way 
 supposed, is indeed another affair. Of that I am 
 yet to be convinced; although I would rather 
 credit the coarsest spiritualism thoughtful men 
 question and our wiseacres curse than be one of 
 those many Sadducees, believing in neither 
 angel nor spirit, who perhaps crowd so after the 
 best places and sweetest morsels of all earthly 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 39 
 
 good, because they expect or possess no hea- 
 venly ! But certainly, without waiting at the 
 table for rapping or writing, for mysterious lights 
 or incomprehensible motions, to the question it- 
 self, " Are any spirits present ? " we may answer, 
 M Ay, the Spirit you perhaps little thought of, 
 the Spirit of God, is present ; and all spirits be- 
 side in the universe cannot eclipse it,, and should 
 not put it out of mind ! " That Spirit, glorious 
 in majesty, wondrous in praises, though not 
 grossly manifested, as it cannot be to mortal 
 sense, never goes. It abides to rebuke every 
 carnal way into which our shining premises 
 licentiously open, and to call us into paths of 
 purity, honor, and peace. I have no liking for 
 a long and rigid face of pietism. I account the 
 thought of God a cheerful and smiling thing. 
 But I say, better belong, like Saul before his 
 conversion, to the " most straitest sect " now of 
 our religion, than take a loose privilege of being 
 deaf to that Holy Spirit's word ! 
 
 But of this pseudo-spiritualism one species 
 remains, that ought to be named distinctively 
 by itself: I mean the vindictive. This is the 
 proudest, most pretending, and plausible of all. 
 
40 THE WOED OF THE SPIEIT 
 
 Nay, it begins with most sincerely attempting 
 the reform of every evil. But the mighty enter- 
 prise, through the mingling of unworthy human 
 passions, becomes gradually inflammatory and 
 inordinate in its steps. The vindictive spiritual- 
 ist not only scourges the sin : he denounces the 
 sinner; gives him no quarter; pursues him in 
 public as well as in private, by name, and in the 
 sharpest and most scorching terms. With out- 
 stretched, contemptuous finger, he points at 
 rents, which we all have, in the robes of his 
 fellow-creature, forgetting there may be in his 
 own, however handsome -looking coat, holes 
 larger and worse, if not the same ; and, though 
 he be free from the numerous transgressions he 
 lashes, his very lashing may, and, if without kind 
 affection of which he gives small proof, will, 
 become in the sight of God more odious than 
 them all. " You/ 7 said one to his friend, who dis- 
 claimed certain habits, — " you have, then, none 
 of these vices of smoking and drink?" — " No/ 7 
 was the reply ; " but that old Serpent, the 
 Devil, that crept into paradise, may creep into 
 my soul through some one large passage, as well 
 as through many smaller apertures." 
 
TO THE CHUKCH. 41 
 
 A man's self-deception in his malignity and 
 revenge is space enough to let in the entire reti- 
 nue of the adversary. To stick knives or pins 
 into the flesh is not considered kind. Is it more 
 kind studiously to hurt and torment the feelings 
 of the mind ? No : this is a bad quality. It is 
 made up of conscience, conceit, and hate, with- 
 out divinity or love. This vindictive mood is 
 confined to no one party. Every one shows it 
 who does not love in his heart the very antago- 
 nist he blames. It does not signify whether it 
 is the conservative, who has sometimes declared 
 that he would like to drive the antislavery man, 
 the reformer, like a brute through the street, 
 and would not interfere, or throw him a rope, if 
 he were in the water, to save him from drown- 
 ing ; or the radical, who for ever girds at the 
 dead dissenter from his thought, or, with angry 
 voice and spiteful pen, insults gray heads that 
 are crowns of glory, if we have any on earth, 
 among the living. On both sides, it is anti- 
 spiritual, or, if spiritual at all, not after a hea- 
 venly sort, but that of the place otherwise 
 entitled and described. Speaking without per- 
 sonality, there is a combative character, liable 
 
42 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 to its own sins. The American prize-fighter is 
 not the only bully ; the Italian, who sells his 
 dagger, is not the only bravo: there may be 
 duellists without swords or pistols, and an assas- 
 sin with no club or knife. I have seen one hunt 
 his adversary, m. full view of the common eye, 
 for a special foible or bad habit, till I thought 
 the vengeful pursuit of any crime or sin the 
 worst of all crimes and sins ; for if, imitating 
 the style of the naturalist, we should essay a 
 new classification of offences, we should have to 
 put, not sensuality or bribery, bad as they are, 
 but cruelty, that cuts coolly in two a fellow- 
 man's heart, at the head. 
 
 The self-appointed sheriff and volunteer exe- 
 cutioner in the spiritual world, like the Hebrew 
 avenger of blood, runs swift and eager after his 
 victim, with thrust and sneer, and laughter- 
 provoking gibes of no good-humored kind. But 
 he does not resemble the Christian. Oh ! how 
 far is he from the Christ ! God be thanked for 
 him, once in the flesh, and his image ever in the 
 world ! So sadly tender as well as awfully solemn 
 he was, even in what are called his denuncia- 
 tions ! But bitter and inhuman are the sentences 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 43 
 
 on guilt of those Pharisees, ancient and modern, 
 for whom to be pleased is to persecute. God 
 save us from being of that vindictive class of 
 the falsely spiritual, whose pleasure is in their 
 satire ! God deliver me from any satisfaction, 
 God smite me with a holy distress, in portraying 
 their mistakes in periods I abbreviate as much 
 as I can ! God pardon us all our partaking of 
 such guilt ! We recoil at the theological conceit, 
 that the redeemed in glory find their comfort in 
 the torments of the lost. But I know not that 
 it is any better to enjoy tormenting the life or 
 maligning the repute of our fellow-men on earth, 
 than to delight in seeing their misery beyond 
 the grave. Surely nothing but the hope of 
 defending some against the abuse of this su- 
 preme doctrine, of the Spirit our only authority, 
 could have persuaded me to the scrutiny of 
 morbid symptoms I have made. May the Spirit 
 itself of God and our Father defend us, guide 
 and heal ! 
 
 III. The Eemedy. 
 
 Be it said first, respecting the abuse of their 
 own doctrine in the spiritual school, it is all 
 
44 THE WORD OP THE SPIRIT 
 
 told by themselves. However other orders of 
 Christians may disclose or conceal their trou- 
 bles, these people certainly make a clean breast. 
 Little they heed Napoleon's pithy proverb of 
 " doing our washing at home." Rather they point 
 to the soil on their garments, and ingenuously 
 describe every vain attempt at its removal. 
 Such confession is never a signal of the worst. 
 Even the self-imputation of a want of faith, into 
 which a brave brother articulates manifold whis- 
 pers of doubt, must be taken with this grain of a 
 salt that has not lost its savor. This quality of 
 the lowly and praying publican should never 
 discourage us. Good and saintly men will always 
 lament the coldness or decline of religion. The 
 world is to them ever half a ruin. Said a dis- 
 tinguished Baptist to me lately, " I consider 
 piety everywhere at a low ebb." Before the 
 glorious and soaring ideal, by which we are 
 tantalized and rebuked, our actual faith hangs 
 behind, as from its swift motion streams back 
 the comet's train of light. 
 
 The account of the evil is itself a great 
 exaggeration. It is a mistake for even sacred 
 sorrow to become excessive, inspire distrust of 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 45 
 
 sound premises, and paralyze exertion by run- 
 ning into despair. A tender conscience always 
 overrates the evil in the world. The abso- 
 lute grief at transgression and defect may not 
 be inordinate, yet its relative statement may 
 miss the mark of general truth. Courage against 
 the world, the flesh, and the Devil with all his 
 hosts, is every sincere man's rightful and only 
 starting-point. " Fear," well said one, " is no 
 argument." What is it, even connected with 
 the ablest intellect, but Polyphemus in his cave, 
 — power without sight? Let us not suspect 
 the spiritual principle, whatever monster may 
 come pretending to be its child, nor compromise 
 it by confounding its legitimate operation with 
 its abuse. If a man issues a book, or makes a 
 speech, containing more gall than belongs to 
 a healthy system, and puts it on the spiritual 
 ground, let us not desert that ground, but in- 
 quire whether he fairly occupies it. Let nothing- 
 scare us from laying our emphasis still on the 
 Spirit. It is our only hope. It has sure healing 
 for every sickness of the soul. As to unbelief, 
 where does every test show its centre to be ? 
 Verily, not in the Protestant part of Christendom, 
 
46 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 but in Rome ! The last dot of the telegraph tells 
 of its fearful spread among the youth of Italy. 
 The French About, with his essay on the Roman 
 question, is but one of a thousand witnesses. 
 
 Yet 7 at every hint of unsatisfied hunger on 
 the rationalist side, how the mother-church — 
 settled on her seven hills — lifts and a little flut- 
 ters her wings, as if to receive under them more 
 of her wayward brood ! She offers us her vote 
 in exchange, if we will give up our immediate 
 reliance on the grace of God. Let ns decline 
 the proxy ! 
 
 For, next, let it be said to her, that unbelief 
 itself is not always bad or wrong. If, from the 
 midst of the scepticism that secretes itself under 
 her huge cover, she sneers at the doubts that go 
 along with our liberty, — as the Bible tells us 
 our liberty goes along with the Spirit of the 
 Lord, — let us reply, that these very doubts may 
 have a good, certainly not a quite melancholy, 
 account of themselves to give. The divinity- 
 student, who went to the elder Henry Ware 
 mournfully to own that he was troubled with 
 doubts, was astonished at the good man's reply, 
 that he had certainly made much progress if he 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 47 
 
 had got so far as to doubt ! Of the very doubts 
 in question, incident in these days to the exer- 
 cise of our rational nature, we ask, Whence do 
 they arise ? In part, at least, from the sublime 
 process, in the light of growing science and 
 experience, not of dissolving, but enlarging, 
 the idea of God. This is to be the religious 
 glory of the coming age, — a better idea of God ! 
 Our children's eyes will see it, if ours do not. 
 
 The old Hebrew Jehovah, sitting on a throne 
 of jealous power and favoring a particular race, 
 does not meet the need of an expanding hu- 
 manity. The invention of a threefold Deity, to 
 correct that ancient narrowness, jars on the 
 unity shining everywhere in the world and from 
 the human soul. The staggering of the mind, in 
 arriving, through its own upward motion, at the 
 conception Jesus preached of an infinite and 
 universal Father, must not be branded as dis- 
 belief. Even any temporary alienation of in- 
 telligence into atheism must be greatly laid to 
 the charge of superstition. If the scientific 
 understanding in some quarters of the world 
 wanders from the faith, theological bigotry in 
 other quarters debases it ; and who shall decide 
 
48 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 which is worse ? How boldly Bacon says, u It is 
 better not to think of God at all, than to think ill 
 of him " ! Certainly, better think or speak of him 
 faintly than foully. If Humboldt is silent about 
 the Cause of all, it may be because he cannot 
 accept the popular divinity, and like Gothe in 
 the famous passage about the Deity, in " Faust/' 
 sees a glory he knows not how, or is too lowly, 
 to name. 
 
 Once more : be it observed that these remarks 
 are made, not from any wish to deny the abuse 
 of the doctrine of spiritual authority, but to 
 bespeak a just estimate and candid considera- 
 tion. We may deny any suspense of faith in 
 Christendom, especially in its Protestant part ; 
 we may question if faith ever did, or, on a great 
 scale, can suspend ; we may affirm that the Son 
 of man, coming now, would find it abundant 
 as never before on the earth ; yet, we must as 
 yet add, in what mixture of imperfection and 
 sin ! Too plainly we behold the evil not to be 
 anxious for a remedy. Alas ! thousand-fold is the 
 brood of speculative vagaries and practical mis- 
 chiefs named spiritual, and fathered upon God ! 
 How extricate ourselves from this confusion, in 
 
TO THE CHUECH. 49 
 
 which the banner of Heaven floats over its foes ? 
 When a vessel on the high seas is suspected of 
 sailing under a false flag, a speaking-trumpet, a 
 blank cartridge, a shotted gun, may bring her to. 
 How fetch to judgment the pirates of the land, — 
 suiting their several latitudes with as many sets 
 of colors as do the rovers of the sea ? It may 
 be answered in general, The Spirit itself is the 
 great detective of all forgeries of its speech. 
 " Diamond cut diamond/ 7 we say, with more 
 meaning in the words than we may apprehend. 
 The true diamond alone can expose the false. 
 Before the Spirit, only, no moral counterfeit can 
 stand. " The spiritual man judgeth all, and is 
 judged of none," how truly says Paul to this 
 very point ! We very soon see the spirit a man 
 is of, and successful deception is less common 
 than we suppose. 
 
 It may be said, " This is true for the private 
 soul ; but what is the remedy in the "church ? " 
 
 First, not formalism. It is a chief sign of 
 the times, how much ability, benevolence, and 
 knowledge move for relief in this direction of 
 more form in religion. But, alas ! how often to 
 how little purpose this direction has already 
 
50 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 been taken ! The annals of the church, by 
 unhappy precedents, are put in the way of its 
 progress. Undoubtedly, its vital unity is to be 
 traced and maintained ; but of how many a 
 phase and incident in its course is made a bad 
 example ! what imperfection in the past con- 
 founds or retards perfection in the future ! and 
 how mean is the inspiration of history to that 
 of God ! When the traditionist points us to 
 some old judgment for a present argument, how 
 often we can hardly help saying, "What a pity he 
 is so learned ! M Scholarship itself is a hinder- 
 ance, if by it the Spirit is made secondary, or kept 
 out. Not what habitually the church has done or 
 the race has done, but what the Lord will have 
 us to do, is for ever the first question. True, 
 the majority of men are but partially amenable 
 to rational words : they must be taught by 
 pictures and ceremonies, whose veneration is 
 but one step from idols of wood and stone. But, 
 before the dawn of reason, the temple-scenery 
 dwindles and disappears. If retained, it becomes 
 pageantry and hypocrisy to thoughtful minds. 
 To return to it, as a medicine for the uncertainty 
 of enlightened men, is to offer to their wounds the 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 51 
 
 very blocks over which they stumbled. u Fishers 
 of men," Jesus called his disciples ; but all men 
 are not to be taken in the same manner. From 
 the nets fitted to take some fish in the sea ; others 
 swim away ; and cultivated persons in this age 
 can rarely be caught in any ritual mesh. The 
 teachers of such must beware of overlooking 
 the illuminated quality of the constituency they 
 are born of and bound to lead. They must 
 maintain modest customs of worship, not as the 
 vital organs, of which they are but decent 
 robes. 
 
 Moreover, Jesus himself proposes no great 
 organization as factor or physician of his dis- 
 ciples. His church was no officered or official 
 corps, but a living fellowship of faith and love. 
 Every visible band in it is by him put, not in, but 
 under, authority. One great stream of power 
 behind, all else in the world is but reception, 
 instrument, and propagation. If it be said, "Au- 
 thority is not attributed to any little section, but 
 to the general church," we must reply, There 
 is, indeed, a general church ; but it is mostly 
 invisible. Its numerical suffrage is beyond our 
 reach : no creed or council ever gave it. Fifty 
 
52 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 generations of it are in heaven. According to 
 its sanctification, it approaches to identity with 
 the mind of the Spirit. But its appliance to our 
 need is less appropriate and less accessible than 
 that of the Spirit itself, that waits and knocks, 
 and is ready to come in. 
 
 Certainly I propose no quarrel, for I have no 
 discontent, even with ijie High Church, in its 
 place. I would not unchurch, by unspiritualizing, 
 the church itself, or any part of it, further than 
 it is unspiritualized in fact. I know well, and 
 greatly honor, the numerous and often splendid 
 examples of Romish and Episcopal piety. Better 
 Christians have seldom been made than in those 
 communions. We should only oppose the as- 
 sumption, that any ecclesiastic ritual is more 
 than a local expedient, has any binding authority 
 for all, or is good beyond certain very strict 
 limits ; and let us do so, with regret, somewhat on 
 the ground of that liability to corruption which 
 so manifestly qualifies its value where it is used. 
 Alas ! how often its majestic line becomes a me- 
 chanical phrase ! so that one, hearkening in great 
 foreign cathedrals to the performer's tone of 
 mere memory stereotyped in his voice, sometimes 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 53 
 
 sadly feels how little, in any touch of spontane- 
 ous emotion, it varies from the metallic note, in 
 which the bird called a mino salutes us with the 
 amiable, wearisome, and hundred-fold repetition,, 
 from the perch of his gilded cage. An eye- 
 witness tells me he saw in St. Petersburg little 
 children, taught to go through a manual of de- 
 votion of which they could have no sense, who,, 
 as they rose from the forced bodily conformity 
 of prayer, fell to playing with the silver and 
 malachite railing of the temple. Which was most 
 acceptable to God, — their ignorant homage, or 
 their innocent play ? We have been told that 
 the impersonal sort of utterance — after the 
 peculiar, well-known style of the set periods 
 of prayer — strains the voice itself more than 
 the natural tones of any preaching. What could 
 more decisively prove it vicious ? Doubtless,, 
 solemn recitation of hallowed texts and clauses,, 
 to some extent, especially on the recurrence 
 of great experiences of human life, may act r 
 like a galvanic series, to confirm, by multipli- 
 cation, the deepest feeling. It would, however, 
 seem almost as though the sentences them- 
 selves, when so perpetually brought forth after 
 
 4 
 
54 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 uniformly equal periods of time, might complain, 
 like tired soldiers, of being too often put upon 
 duty '! 
 
 Of course, we must not deny the proportion 
 and choice of comparative good and evil from 
 opposite modes in this matter. The advocate of 
 the spiritual way should not blink the arguments 
 that still remain for a liturgy : its re-acting from 
 the people to the priest ; uniting all in the same 
 words ; with its easy-chair equalizing the clergy, 
 in their gifts or without gifts ; coming a precious 
 heirloom from the past, and spinning on the 
 thread of religious unity to new generations ; 
 familiarizing the young early to devout expres- 
 sion ; and being at least an alphabet of prayer 
 for the yet spiritually lisping majority of men. 
 But here is the point : that, for a large and most 
 important minority, it clearly will not answer or 
 serve ; not because they are blasphemers, but 
 because their devotions find in it no sufficient 
 aid. The attempt to join it with the free tones 
 of prayer is a failure : the liturgy eats up the 
 liberty, or the liberty the liturgy ; and whenever 
 the soul rises into transport of fellowship with the 
 Father, repetition of appointed periods will seem 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 to it as impertinent as reading our love for 
 earthly kindred to them out of a book. 
 
 Besides, the liturgical is not our lawful, he- 
 reditary manner. Our Pilgrim sires, when they 
 broke from it, not only consulted their own 
 necessity, bflt prescribed, prophetically, for the 
 wants of a multitude of the best of mankind. In 
 some of our churches, and in our old University, 
 there seems, indeed, to be a receding from their 
 judgment, and a conscientious affecting of the 
 opposite style, as likely to reclaim the erratic 
 temper of the time. It is a course dubious of 
 reaching the result at which it aims ; and if, as 
 is pretended, spirits with significant tokens re- 
 appear, the ghosts of our ancestry may certainly 
 be expected to communicate on this point. 
 
 No effectual specific, then, can be found in 
 what were called " the ornaments of religion n 
 three hundred years ago, but have in them no 
 soul-penetrating virtue, and will never generally 
 be resumed by such as have once laid them 
 aside, and really tasted of better things. To 
 the ritual remedy, there is objection enough 
 in the very fact, that its emphasis is on the 
 church, above the Spirit. Where the church 
 
56 THE WOKD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 is the first word, or the most frequent, and 
 the Spirit second, and more seldom used, what 
 departure from both Scripture and reason could 
 be more wide and plain? 
 
 Nor, next, in places where the gospel has 
 been published and is regularly proclaimed, will 
 it do to rely on advertising our religion as a 
 remedy even for the neglect it suffers. By 
 advertising it, I mean wishing to let people 
 know how much we have of it, — affirming our 
 personal or denominational superiority in it. 
 Unpopular parties, alike with those greedy for 
 more popularity, are tempted to this resort. In 
 a community's stupid and stubborn ignorance 
 of what is for its good, it may seem justifiable. 
 The general advantages of advertising cannot 
 be denied. Of men in business it is said, u They 
 failed because they did not advertise." But 
 spiritual goods are of a peculiar and delicate 
 sort, rendering it for them a questionable means. 
 Especially painful is the conflict of invitations 
 from rival ostensible depositaries of that Holy 
 Ghost which has on earth no shop or permanent 
 receiver ; nor a less mournful sight, that of re- 
 ligious societies regarding the worship of God 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 57 
 
 as a financial concern, and judging of their 
 prosperity by the fulness of their buildings and 
 sale of their pews. This fulness and sale may 
 be from reasons more or less religious. There 
 may be a drama or concert in the church, instead 
 of teaching or worship. The meeting-house, how- 
 ever, of which it can never be said, on particular 
 occasions, that " hundreds went away, unable to 
 obtain admission," seems, in this country, con- 
 sidered of an inferior sort. 
 
 Information of religious services and inten- 
 tions, if there be in it no ambition, may be 
 wanted and desirable ; but, mostly, quiet work 
 is best. Not with dogmatism, but diffidence, is 
 here offered to others a conviction, strong in 
 itself, affecting customs about which good men 
 disagree. But the continual printed list, to the 
 wistful eye of those in quest of a sensation, 
 of the notable, as contradistinguished from the 
 uncelebrated and less worthy, preaching of the 
 day, is one straw or trifle among many indica- 
 tions of a superficial quality in our religion. Of 
 the three dimensions philosophers designate, we 
 have more length and breadth than depth. There 
 is great want of cubic solidity in our piety and 
 
58 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 virtue. The convention, the association, is good; 
 but yet more needful is a seeking to the Spirit 
 with earnest thought. There is a communion 
 without conversation or spoken word. Religion 
 is not a beggar, to be patronized ; but a prince. 
 So let it be shown and served, and its riches 
 and favor received. 
 
 Diverse are the manifestations of the error we 
 should shun. Vulgar appeals to publicity for 
 articles on hand, and stirring up temporary ex- 
 citements about religion as an interest separate 
 from life, alike lower the dignity of the pulpit. 
 Feverish heavings of the general heart, called 
 "revivals," — which set everybody running away 
 from his house and affairs, where his character 
 should be reared and disciplined, to look after 
 his insulated soul, — may be necessary to men 
 engrossed in the world, or dead in trespasses 
 and sins ; but, like rude shifts to get out of the 
 mire, should be thrown aside as soon as their 
 feet touch firm ground. When we read placards 
 of prayer, — " Come - in, stranger, five minutes, 
 ten, or fifteen," — how we think of him who 
 posted no such bill, rebuked the Pharisees' phy- 
 lacteries and street-devotions, and said, " When 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 59 
 
 thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and shut the 
 door M ! The late unprecedented religious com- 
 motion in Ireland, whatever moral benefits may 
 attend it, has run so much into the form of a 
 bodily malady, that the physicians have had to 
 interfere. 
 
 Let us have less of talk and physical emotion, 
 — more of trust and peace. The great institutions 
 of society should, like ships of burden and deep 
 draught, move calmly on the tide of time ; 
 by their own gravity, and the weight of the in- 
 terests they foster and represent, drawing the 
 attention they deserve and will reward. Let 
 there be zeal in their behalf, if not fitful 
 and crackling, steady-burning and according to 
 knowledge. Let scholarship, genius, and elo- 
 quence enlist, indeed, in the cause of piety ; 
 and let the winds, after the law of moral 
 acoustics, blow what rumor thereof they will 
 abroad : but solicitation of regard for our par- 
 ticular conventicle looks too much like gasping 
 for breath, or desiring public pity for a precari- 
 ous enterprise. Let us not, even to keep out of 
 difficulty, advertise our piety or truth : let us 
 sink and vanish from the earth sooner ! It was 
 
60 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 well intimated by that soul of singular insight, 
 P. W. Robertson, that self-advertisement is the 
 last resort of a feeble cause. The hypocrites of 
 old blew their trumpets before them, because 
 there was in them no strength of character, — 
 no march as of a celestial host. Troops on parade 
 are noisy ; but, as they go to battle, they are 
 still. 
 
 No doubt, there may be an assertion of our 
 claims consistent with humility, and for the sake 
 of the service of God. There are not wanting 
 ethical counsellors to assure us, on the highest 
 grounds, that we must be bold to take our place 
 and raise our voice, else of the greatest merit 
 there w T ill be no heed. The world, it is said, 
 will allow to us the position we seize. Truly a 
 morality after the Louis Napoleon kind ! We 
 cannot mistrust the motive with which a Euro- 
 pean teacher told an American seeker for wisdom, 
 " You friends of progress do not put yourselves 
 enough forward. People would flock to you, if 
 you more confidently assured them of the truth 
 and good you possess." But will not truth and 
 good be seen of themselves, without being so 
 carefully and wilfully bolstered ? How can the 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 61 
 
 sun be hid in a corner ? u How," exclaimed 
 Plato, " can a man be concealed ? " All boasting 
 cheapens. Our most pithy proverbs teach, that, 
 where there is most exclamatory laudation, the 
 substance falls short. A man was seen, on the 
 last Fourth of July, at the edge of the Common, 
 beating a drum, and stoutly declaring his pur- 
 pose to summon all flesh ; but it was to a mise- 
 rable wax-figure exhibition. The grandeur of 
 nature, the beauty of truth, the glory of genius, 
 and the ecstasy of devotion, omit the drum ! Let 
 us rejoice in the mutual amity, in this land, of the 
 pulpit and the press, — the theocratic power and 
 the third estate ; and that neither has felt the 
 chains they wear in Italy and France, and so 
 widely through the earth. Let the pulpit and 
 the press honor and uphold each other ; but let 
 not the former ever come to the degradation of 
 being suspended on a paragraph, while the latter 
 maintains its independence of any ecclesiastical 
 behest. 
 
 This caution would not here be so insisted 
 on, but that it goes to the heart of all reality 
 and worth. A single aim is the rare excellence ; 
 and daily events show private honor the most 
 
62 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 important and imperilled virtue. Where so 
 much, as in this country, is determined by the 
 popular voice, we are in danger of holding all 
 dependent on it, and of presenting every thing 
 to the popular eye. But supreme excellence is 
 not by hand-vote, and never a creature of the 
 majority. Much of the most conscientious and 
 durable work of the true architect is out of sight. 
 At the foundation of the edifice, and on the back 
 side of the pillar, in groins and arches of his 
 structure, he toils and carves as on the portal 
 and the shrine. So is it with the builder of the 
 spiritual temple of God in his own and others' 
 souls. Never with ostentation is a holy man's 
 effort. In religion, especially, let us be on our 
 guard against the self-blazonry which is the epi- 
 demic of the day. Let us have no reference, in 
 what we do or say, to the suffrage or the clap. 
 Let us never commit the old sin of numbering 
 the people who are with us. Let us toil, and 
 not tell of it. Let us pray like the saintly 
 woman, who, to the inquirer after her secret 
 prayers, had none to speak of. Let the doings 
 of our right hand be such as the left is not 
 acquainted with. As there were once professors 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 63 
 
 of poverty, let us be lovers of obscurity ; and 
 we need not fear the Just One, God, will ever 
 throw away our deed. 
 
 We may, on this high spiritual basis, have 
 small congregations. But for small congrega- 
 tions something is to be said. That was a small 
 one in the upper chamber at Jerusalem ; a 
 small one of dispersed fugitives after the resur- 
 rection of Christ ; a small one — only about a 
 hundred and twenty — met to complete the 
 number of apostles made vacant by the traitor's 
 fall ; and a small one on the day of Pentecost, 
 till the noising abroad of the miracle brought 
 the multitude together. But what great con- 
 gregation, with its ephemeral, out-of-door admi- 
 ration of some stirring, declamatory word, ever 
 moved the world like these? 
 
 The conclusion, then, is, that, for all the cor- 
 ruptions incident to our religion in human 
 imperfection, there is no effectual remedy but 
 just to try the religion itself. Every thing, from 
 David's sling to the prophet's roll, must be 
 tried. Let us try our religion in its own authen- 
 tic, spiritual characteristics ; which are external 
 simplicity, social loyalty, and personal fidelity. 
 
64 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 First, external simplicity. The great mistake 
 to which rational Christians are now exposed 
 is that of seeking an antidote to the ills of 
 their own constitution in imitating the complex 
 ways of other bodies. Is not the true wisdom, 
 instead of aping, rather to offset these with a 
 strict simplicity? What but this is the unde- 
 niable trait of the New Testament and of the 
 early disciples ? How poor and provisional 
 indeed, and in what low adaptation to the weak- 
 ness of human nature, is the reason, originally 
 and always, for any disfiguring or abnegation of 
 it! Authentic history informs us how, in the 
 times of that pope-king, Henry VIII., the forms 
 of the English Church were devised and copied 
 from the Romish, precisely on account of the 
 gross ignorance of the clergy. Ah ! what need 
 we more than the hounding persecution by 
 Henry's daughter, the Protestant Elizabeth, of 
 many of her subjects, for not Romanizing suffi- 
 ciently for her policy in their worship, to 
 dissuade us from all bondage to such forms, 
 even did we not recoil from the first low ground 
 of their practice ? Let us, at least, have dignity 
 enough to respect our antecedents and the root 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 65 
 
 that has borne us ! Let us, in the line of the 
 Pilgrims, — which God grant may never be 
 broken or run out ! — worship in simplicity. 
 What and exactly how much appeal to the ima- 
 gination and taste, by architecture, music, 
 painting, and statuary, may consist with reli- 
 gious simplicity, we may not presume to decide : 
 only that none can do so, which overlays the 
 fundamental feeling ; nay, which is not quite sub- 
 ordinate and incidental to the grander spiritual 
 exercises of thought and love and homage in 
 the soul. 
 
 The tendencies of the age are irresistibly to 
 this very point. The interruption for centuries 
 now of the finest of all specimens of cathedral- 
 building at Cologne ; the unfinished state of 
 many a little modern edifice, vainly attempting 
 a splendor resembling that of more ancient tem- 
 ples ; the dependence on a precarious pilgrim- 
 age of St. Peter's itself for costs of repair ; with 
 many a sign beside, — indicate the age of the 
 magnificent structures of piety as passing or 
 past. On a fair consideration of the reasons 
 and issues of this, — in a finer development of 
 the soul come to its manlier estate, and, for 
 
66 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 loftier motions of love and truth, putting com- 
 paratively childish things away, — we shall find 
 it no subject of bitter regret. It were a foolish 
 inference, that piety itself is therefore failing, 
 or ever going to die. It may have, with plain- 
 ness, exquisite proportion in its shrine : but it 
 does not, for its life or excitement, rely on aisles 
 or arches; on the sheafed pillars, like wheat- 
 bundles in the field, that support them ; on 
 sculpture bending from the niche ; or the 
 stained window, that lets in the discolored 
 light. Nay, even for the imagination, beside 
 this fine tuition, in a primary school of the 
 chisel and the brush, there is an inexpensive and 
 inestimable education, in the forms of nature, 
 in the course of Providence, and the wondrous 
 events of our faith. 
 
 We may lament the decay of sacred art ; Ave 
 may cry shame on the selfishness that lavishes 
 luxury on a private dwelling, and leaves bare 
 the holy walls ; we may think Ruskin's " lamp of 
 sacrifice w burns so fair, 'tis pity it could not be 
 lighted in all our sanctuaries : but, for some 
 generations now, the essentials of worship have 
 proved their independence of its show. Our 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 67 
 
 Christianity is hereafter to be sought less in its 
 splendid isolations, and more in its unseen per- 
 vading of human life. Its temple and altar to 
 God are becoming such as 
 the famous doxology : — 
 
 " To Him whose tempi 
 Whose altar, earth, s< 
 
 Its spiritual simplicity must be asserted as one 
 of its chief attributes. Our thoughtful Chan- 
 ning gave, as the cause of his declining to 
 preach at a certain dedication, that he could 
 not express such interest in the fine build- 
 ing as might be desired. There is, indeed, a 
 higher concern ! Jesus Christ does not seem to 
 have expended much admiration on even the 
 goodly stones of the matchless edifice which he 
 declared must come down, and greater than 
 which he pronounced the divine humanity, 
 whose figure stood so mean under its glittering 
 height. 
 
 Great, indeed, is the struggle to which this 
 simplicity of the Master puts the follower's soul. 
 As it was said, only Jove could touch the thun- 
 der with his naked hand; so many will argue 
 
68 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 that the lightnings of truth in the spiritual 
 world must be folded up, instead of being 
 received or wielded in their unmitigated, flash- 
 ing strength. But our Lord himself, while 
 using for the dull of heart many a parable, 
 plainly apprised his friends of his expectation, 
 that they, and all truly believing in him, should 
 hold letter and symbol in an ever-diminishing 
 proportion to his direct sense. The great argu- 
 ment of numbers will still long be on the other 
 side, and against such simplicity. But w T hat 
 Pagans, are we, if to that argument we yield ! 
 The lesser number must be not only counted, 
 but weighed, or our sum is not proved. 
 
 Next, we must try our religion in its social 
 loyalty. What imports, is the communion of its 
 votaries, not the circumstances in which they 
 commune. If great principles bring them to- 
 gether, though only two or three, they are a 
 church, in a catacomb or a barn, or a cave on 
 a hill-side. An increase of common interest in 
 the objects of its association would augment the 
 prosperity of any local church, more than all 
 the lures of style and manner it could hang out 
 as banners to attract the public, and distance 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 69 
 
 competitors in that race of popularity so univer- 
 sal in this land. It is indeed mournful to remark 
 the wide lack of this loyalty, to witness the 
 slight attachment of multitudes to the spot of 
 their fathers' labor and sacrifice, and to the seats 
 where the shadows of departed kindred still 
 linger, as if even the Indian virtue were not 
 ours ; and to note, in the easy strolling of crowds 
 from place to place, the proof how little many, 
 persons even imagine themselves united to 
 carry any purposes, or to be after aught more 
 than the temporary diversion of their minds.. 
 More conspiring in every tribute of homage,, 
 more co-operation in every work of charity,, 
 verily we need. 
 
 In fine, and above all, our remedy is to try 
 our religion in its main attribute of personal 
 fidelity. The most beautiful and promising ar- 
 rangement without this is but a cloak, and not 
 the cure. " There is too much individuality j 
 there is not love and fellowship and social 
 intercourse enough," we hear it loudly com- 
 plained. Verily, strange terms of accusation ! 
 As if individuality were disintegration and dis- 
 solution ! The more true individuality, the more 
 
 5 
 
70 THE WORD OP THE SPIRIT 
 
 union. We do not find fault with the chemical 
 atoms, that they are too decided atoms : they 
 combine all the better. So the Broad, yea, the 
 Universal Church, when it comes, will be a com- 
 bination of souls, all the more fast together for 
 their separate sincerity and truth. There is, no 
 doubt, an ungracious individualism, the farthest 
 possible from true individual culture or perfec- 
 tion. But the great want is, not simply more 
 conspiring together in this or that design, — 
 wise or foolish, good or bad, — but better men 
 and women to conspire. May the Lord multiply 
 individuals of the right stamp, in all personal 
 faithfulness ! 
 
 Individuality indeed ! Is not the love itself 
 that binds us to God and our fellows intrinsic 
 part of our genuine individual being? It w r ere 
 not worth offering to God or one another, unless 
 it were. Will a sacrament, without the senti- 
 ment, of brotherhood, make a Christian's love ? 
 No more than free papers, without freedom in 
 his heart, will make a slave's liberty. We must 
 beware of a delusion from names. Not they 
 who most mention sympathy may have it most. 
 Nominal saints are not seldom less lovely than 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 71 
 
 confessed sinners. "Do not marry a philan- 
 thropist," said to her friend a woman who had 
 seen of the fraternity some that did not mani- 
 fest the feeling they professed. Of all things, 
 bring not the Spirit's effectiveness into doubt. 
 When its organs appear, no more plainly will a 
 hammer prove its office to drive nails, or an 
 engine its fitness to draw the train, than will 
 they vindicate its use. 
 
 What alone we should wait and look for is the 
 incarnation of the Spirit in the shape of living 
 men. Most significantly is the Incarnation a 
 great doctrine of our faith. But was it, as theo- 
 logians suppose, summed up, quite ended and 
 exhausted, in the Lord Jesus Christ ? No : per- 
 fect as it may have been only in him, it re-ap- 
 pears in every daily beautiful life. We are sure 
 of the virtue of no system till it has been tried. 
 The idealist is shocked at the offspring which, 
 from his own doctrines, human passions some- 
 times bring forth. But, wherever the Christian 
 Spirit is reproduced, the Christ himself is pre- 
 sent and lives on earth. Defiant, ungracious, 
 and warlike heralds in the name of the Spirit 
 may stand up, and hurl forth their message as a 
 
72 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 missile ; but the Spirit disowns them. If the 
 Holy Dove offer to descend into their assembly, 
 how soon it averts its face, and flies from their 
 levelled gun ! 
 
 Yet, without violence or wrath, this personal 
 fidelity must be evinced in trying the applica- 
 tion of religion to life. The old notion of the 
 supremacy of the pope to the king was the 
 shadow of a truth. All secular affairs should 
 obey the divine law. The church on earth is 
 valuable so far as it enacts and induces such a 
 result. This universal and unlimited obedience 
 it is the pulpit's business to hold forth and 
 require. It sometimes renounces it in part; 
 but it cannot be excused, anywhere or in any 
 thing, from this paramount task. It is some- 
 times blamed, and may be at fault and blame- 
 worthy, in its method of performing it. It is 
 reproached with preaching politics. If it vio- 
 late the decent neutrality of political parties, or 
 grieve the conscience of good citizens for their 
 honest opinions' sake, the reproach is deserved. 
 It does not belong to its province to take sides 
 with antagonist sets of hearers. Yet does it 
 not fall within its sphere to enjoin integrity, 
 
TO THE CHUKCH. 73 
 
 veracity, and purity in civil life ? Does it break 
 any fair friendship or true honor in rebuking 
 falsehood, bloodshed, and bribery, and in depre- 
 cating the spread of inhumanity and slavery? 
 Nay, the servant of the Lord, who is dumb 
 when Iniquity stalks abroad, and Tyranny sets up 
 her standard in the guise of Freedom, and who 
 perad venture condemns other servants because 
 they speak, abdicates his office on the spot, and 
 subjects himself to impeachment at the final 
 bar. If there be certain departments of legis- 
 lation, society, and business, which are clean 
 outside the domain of religion, what little cor- 
 ner of this universe shall she find, like a muez- 
 zin crying to prayer, to announce in the ears 
 of men her commonplace generalities, — " Read 
 your Bible and say your prayers ; be good and 
 do good!" In this position, her privilege is 
 gone ; her voice is an abstraction ; her sphere, 
 a mystery ; her teaching, a scheme ; and her 
 utmost skill, while the earth is groaning and 
 travailing in pain for the manifestation of the 
 sons of God, to keep things as they are. Not 
 long could she live and abide on the earth, with 
 no other function but this. Nay, she were not 
 
74 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 here, but long since extinguished in her blood, 
 had she discharged no other ! 
 
 It is said, u The sacred desk should confine 
 itself to the themes of gospel-salvation, as Paul 
 and Jesus did." But what was it Paul and Jesus 
 did? They applied religion to life in Judaea, 
 and far and wide through the heathen world. 
 Were they alive now and here, would they but 
 refer to habits and theories once prevailing at 
 Jerusalem, Ephesus, and Corinth ? or apply reli- 
 gion to life in Boston, and wherever they should 
 go ? Ah ! religion, that with them was so vital 
 and real, has become too technical and tradi- 
 tional with us. It is, indeed, now soberly al- 
 leged, that our religion was completely made 
 for us and finished eighteen hundred years ago, 
 with a curse upon him who should add to or 
 diminish it by a tittle or jot. But was it con- 
 cluded verily in literal terms, and in so many 
 words ? Do we not read that the letter } even of 
 the Bible, killeth? 
 
 To the grand tradition of our religion let us 
 cling. But to hold fast to all the occurrences 
 and decisions of ecclesiastical annals from the 
 first, providential and saving as they may have 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 75 
 
 been in their several times, would be like tack- 
 ing to any tool, instrument, or steam-apparatus, 
 all the rude beginnings of invention which im- 
 provement has, one after another, successively 
 displaced. Yet this is what the ecclesiastic 
 agents would have us do ! The immortality of 
 truth is in its new applications. They may be 
 sometimes hazardous at the outset, like those of 
 science to art, in the ship, the railway, the tele- 
 graph, and the balloon ; but they will be safe 
 and blessed in the end. What applications 
 among heathen fanes and idolatrous symbols, 
 under the edge of axes, before the shadows of 
 crosses, and at the gloomy mouths of dungeon- 
 doors, fronting the pagan splendor, were made 
 by the original Christians ! We need to re- 
 peruse the tale of those glorious old martyr- 
 doms, which a word of compromise, an act of 
 concession, a pinch of sweet dust on a flaming 
 shrine of Jupiter, a bending of the counte- 
 nance before a beauteous image on the wall, 
 or one assenting motion of lip or finger, might 
 have spared. But the sufferers could not afford 
 so much ! Thank God, and thank the sufferers, 
 that they could not ! It is not for us to vie 
 
76 THE WOBD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 with them after the very same fashion of cou- 
 rage and self-sacrifice ; but our own applications, 
 at every risk, and with all consecration and 
 denial of ourselves, let us make. Then, as the 
 cedar, though cut and sawed, and transported by 
 land and sea, loses not its savor, but salutes us 
 with its sweet fragrance even by the waysides of 
 business and across the dusty pavement, trodden 
 under foot, and ringing with the wheels of travel ; 
 so every act of our career shall be genuine, and 
 smell of the tree of life. 
 
 Whoever would be under authority, just, sav- 
 ing, and supreme, let him hearken, then, to the 
 Spirit. Everywhere, without us and within, to 
 the open ear eternally sounds its oracle. Its rule 
 is no easy one to live by, even for an hour. It 
 emancipates us into no license of personal folly. 
 It remands us to unfailing reverence for all it 
 has done through every instrument, and uttered 
 in any mouth, since the world began. It is its 
 own evidence, and has no witness but itself. It 
 can be caught in no system ever by theological 
 mechanics put together. It escapes the limit 
 of all forms and formulas. From the audience- 
 chamber of the breast, from the bosom of human- 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 77 
 
 ity, from the fresh work and from the old word 
 of God, it speaks ; while truth, holiness, and 
 love are its invariable dictates. No new eccle- 
 siastic policy it issues, no modern sect bids us 
 join, to meet no ancient association does it order 
 us to wheel round ; but to be living branches of 
 the Christian vine we grew from, good members 
 of the race we are born in, and docile children 
 of Him by whom we are begotten. It asks not 
 who is orthodox, but, as in the case of Nathanael, 
 who is honest and without guile. It accepts 
 not the person of the Liberal, but of the loving 
 and the just ; demanding to what and to whom 
 we are liberal, what our liberality is, and whether 
 and how far it is to our own errors and sins, or 
 to other men's. At once it breathes new inspi- 
 ration, vivifies long-standing records, and brings 
 to remembrance the teaching and example of 
 every heavenly prophet and ascended saint. 
 Truly is its name and type the atmosphere. 
 Like that, it is not only in us ; we are in it : and 
 what the outer element is for a while to our 
 perishing body, from its boundless spread and 
 eternal purity, this finer air will be for ever to 
 our soul. In proportion as we breathe it, abuses 
 
78 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 will disappear as diseases do, less from drugs 
 than from a healthy clime. 
 
 For the Spirit, then, be our prayer. It may 
 be said, " However well spirituality may be in 
 its place, we need ecclesiastical policy too, and a 
 social league, in order to any effect among man- 
 kind, and to draw us away from the hurtful 
 seclusion and impotence to which an over-spirit- 
 uality tends. 77 Let " honest arts " of plan and 
 contrivance certainly be employed as far as they 
 can avail. Let it not, however, be supposed that 
 the Spirit is not a worker hitherto, Sundays and 
 every day, and of all workers the chief. Out 
 of what solitudes, hermitages, and closets it 
 comes, in shapes such as Jesus from the wil- 
 derness of the Jordan, Paul from Arabia, and 
 Luther from the monastery, to disturb the minds 
 and manners of men, to revolutionize and uplift 
 the world ! How it burns up the wood, hay, and 
 stubble from heart, house, and street ! Institu- 
 tions that we talk so much of are its conse- 
 quence, not its cause. A man is sometimes — 
 in the world's annals has been ten thousand 
 times — more than a college, and, as an organ 
 of the Spirit, communicates better lessons than 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 79 
 
 a library or a university to his race. In that 
 common supplication, sometimes appointed by 
 Christians for "an outpouring of the Spirit," 
 let us first of all, and most of all, therefore 
 join. 
 
 This statement of the doctrine of the Spirit, 
 as the soul's only authority, disowns not, but 
 alone accommodates, the fact, power, and value 
 of the church in its subordinate place. The 
 church is itself a vehicle of the Spirit, but not 
 the only conveyance. It has no refusal of the 
 Spirit; no right to countermand its unofficial 
 appearance in any person, or to contradict its 
 inner and immediate gift. The use of discus- 
 sion is simply to set church and Spirit in proper 
 relative proportion, as ideas in our mind, and 
 forces in our life. To allow the church prece- 
 dence in our thought, till the Spirit becomes a 
 rare conception and unwonted influence, is no 
 more an offence to reason than it is a departure 
 from the Lord Jesus, who dates and derives 
 all from it for himself, while unto it he enjoins 
 his followers 7 main resort. 
 
80 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 If it be said, u This direct access to God is 
 a barren notion, because, as Christians, we are 
 in and of the church, mere heirs of its property, 
 and, but for it, our pure individuality were a 
 spiritual nonentity," the reply is, Of course, 
 our approach to the Father is in the circum- 
 stances of his providence ; our ecclesiastical 
 fellowship, like our kindred blood and social 
 ties, is one of those circumstances; while all 
 things — birthplace and human friendship, and 
 the earthly personality of Jesus — must be con- 
 strued as but circumstances in comparison with 
 the sublime and matchless reality of our Divine 
 Source. Besides, one medium of grace as the 
 church may be, it is not as from a local and tem- 
 poral ruler that its own communication is most 
 vital and abundant. It is called an organization ; 
 but it is before and beyond what we call its or- 
 ganization. Doubtless it can and must organize 
 itself, or be organized by the Holy Spirit in its 
 members' hearts. When organized, truly what 
 multitudes and majorities of individual men lean 
 on it, drink from it, are attached and built into 
 it, like the thousands of marble statues that 
 adorn some of its edifices, and centre in its very 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 81 
 
 shape their hopes of heaven ! But because of 
 ignorance is such stopping with it as a finality 
 for mankind. This is not the true state of the 
 soul. Practically necessary as it may be, it is 
 bare initiation of better things, which should be 
 earnestly asserted and predicted, and brought to 
 pass. 
 
 Is it, however, stigmatized as quite visionary 
 thus in general to esteem the soul, instead of 
 regarding the wants of actual men and women, 
 to whom the church will always be the way? 
 and is it alleged that so highly spiritual a doc- 
 trine overlooks the broad distinction between 
 ends and means? In religious matters, I an- 
 swer, this distinction holds but poorly and in 
 part. The ends of truth, goodness, and holiness, 
 are in their means, and inseparable from them. 
 In this lies the beautiful verity of Herbert's . 
 hymn : — 
 
 " In all I do, be Thou the way ; 
 In all, be Thou the end." 
 
 Will it be inquired if the doctrine I have main- 
 tained does not leave all to the mercy of private 
 judgments and the vagaries of individual opi- 
 
82 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 nion ? I can only affirm, in reply, the existence 
 and operation and accessibleness of the Spirit 
 itself, above all these, to illuminate and correct. 
 Oh for more intuition of its light ! Behold 
 what mighty minds are, in their conceptions, so 
 under the laws of space and time, that they can 
 imagine heaven itself only as remote beyond 
 Saturn and the sun, instead of pervading the 
 world, and being the altered aspect of the uni- 
 verse to the disembodied soul ! Is it objected, 
 again, that the Spirit has been tried among us 
 so much, that it is at least timely to call atten- 
 tion to the important and neglected functions of 
 the church? Ah ! is it not precisely because 
 the Spirit has been tried so little, that the 
 church has so prevailed to eclipse it, as, with its 
 overweening and apparent size, the dull and 
 small moon does the splendid magnitude of the 
 sun, from which it borrows all its light? 
 
 Yet who will not cordially confess his obliga- 
 tions to the visible body of Christ, marred and 
 crucified like his own mortal body as it has 
 often been ? Verily it is that without which we 
 might have been left in the dark. If we can 
 have a more living and inspired church, how 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 83 
 
 even the infallibility ascribed to it would be 
 approximated by the fact ! Meantime, let us 
 acknowledge and affirm our membership in it, 
 such as it is. We will not, indeed, give up to 
 it any advance of thought or criticism, character 
 or humanity. Where but in it, if not wholly or 
 always of it, have we made this advance ? We 
 do not return to it, because we have never 
 separated from it. We should as soon think of 
 returning to our kind ! We are branches, never 
 cut from the trunk which has grown out of the 
 seed Christ dropped in Judsea, any more than 
 from the stock of human nature. The church 
 is not an audibly praying and praising company 
 alone, within the walls of one or ten thousand 
 buildings ; but it is all Christian society and 
 civilization. Therefore James Martineau's late 
 letter on the Unitarian Position, although to 
 some it may seem to gain in words its distinc- 
 tion between church and society only by nar- 
 rowing the sense of things (for is not spreading 
 theological truth the proper business of man in 
 the church ? and do not men associated for such 
 an object truly accomplish church work ?), yet, 
 in its affirming the unsectarian character of the 
 
84 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 church itself, is admirably courageous, catholic, 
 and grand. We are born in the church. We 
 cannot be rid of it more than of our mother. 
 We did not make it : it has rather had a hand 
 in the making of us. Therefore we cannot, in 
 our debates, quite comprehend it, as we cannot 
 put any vital relation into our understanding; 
 and the vitality of every relation would cease if 
 we could. Let us assume our church-member- 
 ship, and look on all attempts to exclude us with 
 the innocent and extreme surprise with which 
 a distinguished American statesman, of world- 
 wide fame, regarded the attempt to thrust him 
 out of his political party. 
 
 Well will it be, if thus in some measure, as 
 well as by more mysterious agency, the life of 
 God be sustained in our breast ; well, if tech- 
 nical views of redemption give place to real. 
 Yet how recently, on a notable occasion, the 
 everlasting deliverance of a human soul was 
 imputed to an understanding of the " scheme " 
 of salvation ; and the terms of philosophy sub- 
 stituted for an incarnation of the truth, as the . 
 ground of acceptance with God ! Amid such 
 theoretic errors, which turn religion into an 
 
TO THE CHURCH. 85 
 
 abstraction, what is our first business but to 
 insist, not on explaining or manipulating, so 
 much as living, the gospel ? Let us all, ministry 
 and laity, do our Christian duty where we are, 
 in our particular churches and communities, and 
 to every one that has with us, far or near, among 
 friends or down-trod outcasts, any tie. We 
 shall then find ourselves indeed in that fellow- 
 ship, not of the will of the flesh, which no man 
 can number, and from which no man can put 
 us out. We shall, under God, be unawares 
 creating the church in which we believe. We 
 shall not credit his possible failure to carry for- 
 ward his cause. Our faith will not fail; for 
 thinking it fails is the only failure to which it 
 can be exposed. 
 
 The Spirit before the church, in time and 
 thought, in order and power, — such is the sum 
 and conclusion. Especially in prayer is this 
 principle plain. The tones of voice, when many 
 sing together, may be natural ; but rarely when 
 they audibly pray together. Therefore is it 
 best that the spirits of all should ascend in one 
 utterance, which the Spirit may articulate or 
 accept. Of the Spirit, eternity is the attri- 
 
 6 
 
86 THE WORD OF THE SPIRIT. 
 
 bute : immortality is that of the church. Our 
 idea of the Christian Church — that living 
 communion of faith and love which our Lord 
 established — will depend on our idea of him. 
 If we look on the importance which has been 
 assigned to him in the world as an accident, 
 impertinence, and illusion of the eye, we shall 
 endeavor ourselves, or expect some coming man, 
 to prick the overblown dimensions of the sphere 
 that still bears his figure through the space of 
 ages above all beside, and brings it meek and 
 lowly to every waiting soul. But if it seem a 
 more hopeful enterprise, by our little machinery 
 to cause the vast airy vessel of the solar system 
 to collapse on its way, then his will be to us, as 
 by the apostle it is called, an everlasting king- 
 dom, — the same that prophet foretold and 
 psalmist sung, and in which the Spirit is mani- 
 fested, though not spent. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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