ordinary means of grace. We quote again from the letter referred to above: "As to the fruits of the revival I see very little except a rather thinly attended young people's prayer meeting and a rather increased interest in the Sabbath school. During the progress of the meetings there was, apparently, very little conviction of sin or distress of mind, nor was there much in the preaching fitted to produce such convictions."

We know men who are laboring now in regions in which such labors abounded thirty years ago, in churches that are full of members confessedly unconverted, and they work without hope of success except in the generation that is coming up with no memory of such scenes.

There are in our country large tracts that are called in our ecclesiastical phraseology "burnt districts." How significant the expression is, they only know who have seen the desolation and tried to cultivate the desert. Will our churches learn noth

ing from the bitter experiences of the past? Must New England and the West be burned over, in our day, by religious excitements without conviction of sin and without those influences of the Spirit of God which make men forever holy? No human mind can measure the evil results, for long years, of a spurious religious excitement, and the so frequent disappointment of our most ardent hopes, should lead to great carefulness in our judgments from appearances.

We know that we are never to do evil that good may come; never to violate any principle of moral obligation with reference to any supposed good result. There is no heavier responsibility than that of him who directs the soul, trembling under its concern about its immortal destiny. He who substitutes anything else in place of the direction that God has commanded, leading the sinner to suppose he can be saved without penitence, faith, and the new birth from heaven, does so at his peril. No number of supposed conversions under such teachings will be any excuse at God's bar of judgment. Great apparent good may result from the prevalence of falsehood, but the jesuitical dogma that the end sanctifies the means has no place in our creeds or in the word of God. A popular revivalist not long since spent most of the hours of the Sabbath, employing a man and horse, driving from church to church through all the surrounding coun

try, sometimes interrupting the worship, inviting the people to come and help him at his evening meeting. What would Edwards or Nettleton have said to such an act?

We know that the salvation of souls is through the truth. God, a sovereign, and using what instrumentality he pleases, tells us it is by the truth that men are saved. If then the truth concerning God's being and character, man's ruin by sin, Christ's atonement and the new birth from heaven, and kindred truths are clearly presented to the minds of men, nothing more is needed save the heavenly influence, and he who does not preach the truth, though his list of converts may fill volumes, brings no evidence of his divine appointment.

We know that the richest promises are made to those who trust in the Lord, and that the heaviest curses are uttered against those who trust in man when they should trust in God. "They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion which can not be removed, but abideth forever." "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and that maketh flesh his arm." We know that he who intelligently believes that men are converted only by the Spirit of God, and that the human conditions are already met, if he trusts only in the Lord, will not go after any extra human instrumentality.

We know that regeneration is only by the Holy Ghost. Whatever men may do, whatever excitements they may pass through, if the Spirit of God does not come to re-create them they can not be saved. They who can believe that God has committed the dispensation of his renewing grace to a class of men of whom no mention is made in the Scriptures, who receive their appointment in no way from the church, who set themselves over Christ's regular ministers in their greatest work, and whose mode of operation does not commend itself to the wisest and best in the church, will be likely to encourage the labors of revivalists. But they who can not believe this must decline their proffered help, notwithstanding their published success. Time disproves their assumptions and shows that those churches are most healthy and have the highest prosperity who trust in the Lord, under a solemn sense of individual responsibility and in the use of the regularly appointed means of grace.

Let it not be said that we oppose revivals of religion. Let

them abound more and more, but let them be of God and not of man. The best revivals in our history have come with the ordinary means of grace. Let the church continue to expect them in this way, and live holily, and she shall not be disappointed.

ARTICLE VII.

POPERY AS A PRESENT FACT.

BY THE REV. J. T. TUCKER, HOLLISTON, MASS.

Under The Ban: (Le Maudit.) A Tale of the Nineteenth Century. Translated from the French of M. L' ABBE * New York: Harper & Brothers. 1864.

Is the movement of society merely like that of a pendulum swinging to and fro unceasingly? Or does this movement, however apparently without progress, force onward the index finger of the great dial-plate of time, nearer and nearer toward the meridian of civil and religious emancipation from the world's old enslavers?

We candidly confess that no one thing more seriously perplexes this question to our own mind, than the fortunes of the Roman church within the last one hundred years. Not that it presses us to a negative answer of the above inquiry. For the Christian Scriptures deny that conclusion; and these are our 'sure word of prophecy," overriding all the seemingly contradicting teachings of history, or rather giving to these a hopeful interpretation which of themselves they might hardly suggest. We therefore believe that the Roman hierarchy will as certainly and utterly perish as did the old pagan imperialism of that seven-hilled city. This is not because it is yet demonstrated that papal Rome is either the Babylon or the Antichrist of Daniel and St. John. That may be an open question. But this with us is not that the papacy is, in its essential elements, an irreligious, anti-christian, corrupt and vicious organization, the wickedness of which is immeasurably intensified by its assumption of an exclusively divine commission to the honors and rights

of the church of God. Consequently, it must suffer the doom of guilt sooner or later, unless it repent. What prospect there is of this, we shall see. At the outset, however, let it be set down that, while we write the above charges against ecclesiastical Rome with the utmost deliberation as undeniably true, we do not dispute the often interposed statement that there may be some genuinely Christian souls in that leprous communion. That there have been many in earlier days, is a fact in which we all rejoice. That a few of the faithful ones still linger about those superstitious altars, we are glad to think. But this only proves out of what a "horrible pit" divine redemption may finally extricate a soul. Set this to the account of the charity which hopeth all things. It does not abate the condemnation of this system of spiritual fraud which has in it a life so tenacious that it will not, save by annihilating, die.

The Roman question is emphatically an American question. It is of more importance to us than even to Europe. That political much more than religious church has done nearly all the harm which it can to civilization and real piety in the old world. It has about spoiled the larger part of the territory which it has there occupied, as a theatre for the development of human nobleness and well-being. Where its opinions and practices have prevailed, it has made the problem of a general regeneration of national and personal life as difficult of solution as it can be made. But with us, it is only beginning its vitiating, desolating work. It is thrusting its poisonous sting into the just setting bud of our national fruit. Shall the great harvest of this shrivel or rot on our branches, falling off in putrid heaps like an orchard-full of curculio-bitten gages? There are at least two large classes of people who stand ready to meet such inquiries as this, with a very wise smile of superiority to these fears. They are, the habitually unthinking and indifferent masses of the community, who have no faith in a deluge until it drowns them and next, the politicians, who reckon the foreign vote in this country as a part of their capital. We have as much respect for this traffic, on the one side of a political issue, as we should on the other; that is, we have no respect for the using of any social question as a mere prop to partizan interests in the state. It seems impossible, however,

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to prevent this great magnet of the ballot-box from drawing to it every question which deeply agitates our people. Here lie the chief dangers of this Romish issue to us. They are acquiring huge proportions. There is nothing so difficult to be reasoned with as that scepticism which expresses itself in a shrug of the shoulders, or the significant lifting of the eyebrows. Meanwhile, the inquiry is getting air; "Have we an established church among us?" We have one, at any rate, which pockets tens of thousands of dollars to sustain its educational seminaries, and other churchly institutions, by the votes of city councils and state legislatures, out of funds mostly supplied by protestant tax-payers. The Roman priesthood sues for, demands and obtains a governmental patronage in this republic which no other religious denomination would dare aspire to. If one of these were to hint a wish for such favors, it would bring upon its head a hue and cry of general indignation for its clerical assumption and presumption. But Rome can do it constantly without offence. Here is an item concerning the New York city largesses to the papists, from the Times of December, 1864. Our readers can draw their own inferences from this sample of what has been going on for a quarter of a century past, in a geometrically progressive ratio.

"Five thousand dollars of the people's taxes to a purely sectarian institution, such as the college of St. Francis Xavier'; after liberal gifts to all Roman Catholic charities, such as thirty thousand dollars to the St. Joseph's Asylum,' fifteen thousand dollars to the Society for Destitute Catholic Children,' and within a few days two thousand dollars to a certain unknown industrial school of a 'Sister Theresa,' in Forty second street; while just about to spend three thousand dollars on engrossing a copy of their own resolutions upon Archbishop Hughes' death."

Leaving the reader to ponder these indications of popish propagandism among us, which might be multiplied to any extent, we will try to work our way, a little more thoroughly, into the heart of this Romish institution as it throbs in this our present century, by the help of the keen analysis of it which we have in the volume which heads our article. Anti-papal novels written by protestants are numerous. This is an interior view drawn by one who lives and is reputed to officiate inside its own