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gling for the mastery in the South. Our hands are providentially set to this work, and we must not relax. Though the war is over the work is not; and while we look some to legislation, we must look more to moral forces to finish it. It is both vain and wrong for any to urge that they foresaw this oppressed and perishing condition of the freedman and this hostility of the white man to him when free, and warned against it, and so are exempt from aiding him. We must accept facts and results. A common evil is on us, a common work is demanded and a common good promised. We are to work out the national problem, no matter who so stated it. the times present it, and we must deal with it. work it as a Christian, a social, and a civil problem combined, is to succeed. Thus labored it must be a success. Nor ought the government with any hasty acts to withdraw its hand from this work. Having lifted up and set forward three millions into nominal freedom, it is obligated not only not to withdraw its hand, but to find and use legitimate means to make that freedom. a reality. So far as the negro question was an issue in the war by act of the government, it is not yet settled by the government. The hearing is simply adjourned from Bull Run and Richmond to Washington.

While we labor under the thought that the work is great, the elevation of an oppressed race, we may remember that equity, an unfolding Christianity, a progressive civilization, and the spirit of the times are with us as allies. Emancipation, in the form in which it came, was but the beginning of the work. The end of slavery thus, was the opening of the enterprise to elevate a race. Providence has given us a work that will test our philanthropy and call out our Christianity, as no national enterprise-ever did before. But to have done such a work and look back on its consummation will be ample reward for all toil and sacrifice.

A glorious and at the same time dangerous future is now before us. Other honors and perils than those connected with the freedmen await us. The resources of the country are beyond all precedent or estimate. They are therefore a vast power for good or ill, according as the moral worth of the people is high or low. We exult in an undivided territory and

of vast extent. Yet its very extent constitutes one of our dangers. The different sections have different and conflicting interests, as the maratime, the agricultural, the mining, the cotton, and the sugar growing. Each of these departments wants a favoring, a protecting legislation, which can be granted only through injury to the others. So have we national and natural tendencies to sectionalism and separation, arising from our vastness of territory. The safety of a government runs very much with lines of latitude, or east and west, because so it is more likely to have a sameness of interest. The dangers of a government run with the lines of longitude, because so it gets a wider range of interests in different climates, and these work a kind of natural disunion.

But as the war brought to the light and service able generals and commodores, who carried us successfully through the conflict of arms, so we doubt not the demands of the hour will bring forward statesmen, as broad and varied in their gifts and abilities for public service, as are our public domain and its interests. We have men, we think, who can take up this nation and turn it in their statesman hands and look at its four sides at once, and then balance it around a common good. We have sectional statesmen. We also have national statesmen, and so we are looking forward to an honorable, prosperous and glorious future. The providence of God in the successes of the past, and our present good condition, make us much more than hopeful.

ARTICLE VII.

ESTHETIC RELIGION.

WHEN the Psalmist exclaimed, "Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary," he struck upon two correlated ideas that are continually meeting us. Thus, applied to literature, they give us those two great departments, the solid and the imaginative ; in the arts, they are represented by the useful and the ornamental; and in nature they come to view again, in the continual

blending of things valuable for the practical purposes of life, with others agreeable to the senses or exalting to the sensibilities. Even in the original constitution of the human family these two thoughts found expression, the man being made from the dust, well knit and strong, while the woman was fashioned from choicer material, and after a more elegant pattern.

This twofold conception applies to religion. Strength and beauty are in the sanctuary. They stand in the walls and look down from the ceiling of every well built house of worship; they appear in the ordering of every well arranged public service; and they are braided together in the doctrines we receive, like the opposite colors in the cords of the tabernacle, or the inwrought purple and gold that curtained the most holy place.

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And where things are set in their proper order, "strength always comes first, and "beauty" afterward. Even in our worldly affairs, it will be admitted that what is useful should take precedence of what is merely entertaining; while in religion, as all must allow, truth should be held at a higher price than the mere drapery it wears, and life, reality and power set above all pageantry and pomp whatsoever. Sometimes, however, this order is practically inverted. Men become so enamoured of beauty as to introduce it into the sanctuary for its own sake; and all else that needs to go with it is either kept out of sight, or else brought in to set that off. Ornament is Ornament is put before use form takes the ascendency of spirit; and a kind of worship grows up, in which all outward proprieties are well arranged indeed, but in which solid doctrine and serious practice have very small place.

It would not be unsafe perhaps to say that there is some tendency toward such a misarrangement at the present day. It comes out here and there in the style of church architecture that is indulged; it is found in a fashion of church music somewhat cultivated; it sometimes reveals itself in the sermons we hear; and it is particularly manifest in the many things that are said, where once it would have been least expected, of the agreeableness and desirableness of a prepared form of service.

The object of inquiry in this article therefore will be, how these two elements, strength and beauty, are to be adjusted; what their relative position is to be in a public service; and

what their respective bearing is upon the intensely practical work of a minister of Christ. This inquiry will open the whole subject of Esthetic Religion, and will put it in contrast with the religion which is practical; it will give us side by side, the religion of beauty, and the religion of power.

I. The Religion of Beauty. What have we to do with our subject, taken from the side of tasteful arrangements and elegant proprieties? That we can not altogether exclude such things is obvious. Within certain bounds they may be employed with good effect. God has given us a sense of the fitness of things to which he himself is perpetually ministering, and which it is right to gratify to a certain extent, even in the immediate affairs of his worship. There is no objection to be made to the embodying of a religious conception even in a pure work of art; it may rather be taken as one of the fine tributes which Christianity has won from the better side of human nature, that the noblest monuments of this kind of genius have been wrought out from Christian themes.

A proper indulgence of our sense of the beautiful even in the homely round of common life has its uses. It helps to make our every day work something of a pleasure as well; it weaves a golden selvedge on the web of honest toil; it decks the cabin door with paint, and the wall with a picture or two; and by such little devices it beguiles our weary way, and carries to the heart of the worn worker a sense of home. And as to the introduction of the same element into our religious affairs, we may not only defend it upon the general ground of its naturalness and usefulness, but also upon express divine authority. One portion of the service of the sanctuary, the music, stands almost exclusively in this realm; nor will it ever be possible to rule out from our Christian assemblies these appeals to our sense of the agreeable, until we have either abrogated the exhortation to sing unto the Lord, or else fallen into a fashion of singing never contemplated by the Psalmist and the Apostles. God designs public worship to present some attractions for unspiritual minds; music is one of these among others; and as we clearly see from what he does, that God himself delights in outward beauty, so it can certainly do no harm to bring something of that quality with our public offering, in addition to the always

grand requisite, "the beauty of holiness."

Some preaching

may be done in this way, not as rendering other preaching unnecessary, but as pleasantly colleagued with it in a subordinate relation. Lessons of faith and hope have more than once been powerfully uttered by the silent marble, and charity and love have beamed on the soul in the glowing colors of the canvas. It is true that this is, for the work of saving men's souls, an inferior kind of preaching; but it can reach some men's hearts better than almost anything else; and under its gentle tuition the way may be prepared perhaps for the more regenerative instrumentality. The proper teaching of religion may even border upon the dramatic at times; for what else are the very sacraments of the church but a simple scenic representation of those truths we most need to lay to heart: "Take, eat, this is my body"!

It would not therefore be well to divorce our religious services from these appeals to the imagination and the aesthetic susceptibilities, even if that were possible; but, it is not possible unless we expunge something from human nature, and something from the Bible as well. The endeavor should be, simply to keep things in their proper order: Truth the queen, and Art the beautiful handmaid waiting upon her, the queen herself on the throne, and the handmaid kneeling at her feet. It is only the reversing of this order to which objection is here made, that turning of things upside down in which it becomes more an object to present our services in good taste than either to please God or save men.

It is one of the common evils of this misarrangement, that the feeling awakened by art alone is mistaken for the genuine sentiment of the renewed mind. It plays off a counterfeit ; men are deceived by it as they could not be were the Gospel set before them in greater simplicity. Where one's mind is greatly exalted, whether by some work of art, or by some overpowering natural scenery, he easily glides into a sort of religious fervor, expressing himself in terms borrowed from the vocabulary of Christian worship. And if an appeal is made to the same class of sensibilities through some service of religion itself, the delusion is often complete. The long drawn aisle and fretted roof, the pealing organ and the dim religious light, are elements

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