does it entirely consist of doctrines applied to needed reforms. It involves a work upon the heart, a religious experience, the personal enjoyment of the love of God. Without this, doctrine is a dry skeleton, reforms are unsuccessful and unsafe, the grandest ceremonial is but a whited sepulchre. This spiritual life is susceptible of being combined, to a considerable extent, with art-forms and pleasant arrangements; and in quiet times it often turns them to a good purpose. But should they be lifted above their proper sphere, and should some emergency arise at the same time demanding more of vigor than of polish, it will cast all such ornamentations one side, and go forth to its work in the severest simplicity. In all periods of great awakening, the reforming party in the church has developed a tendency to lay aside mere ceremonial, much as a man takes off his coat when he takes hold of some hard work. Set formulas of worship, shaping everything to a settled propriety, constitute a kind of fair weather arrangement, under which to sit when the sea runs smooth, but when there comes a storm they must be folded up and laid away. A man who has come to some great soul struggle, such as Jacob had when he wrestled all night with the covenant angel, gets beyond his rubric; and the Syrophenician mothers, carrying to God their heavy burdens, find the prayer-book insufficient for the occasion. No really earnest soul will consent to be always shackled by prescribed forms.

Hence where such forms are made much account of, clung to, gloried in, you will find people commonly opposed to all earnest religious movements. In periods of reformation, the æsthetic religion takes sides against the reform; and when the Holy Ghost is poured out from on high and sinners are turning to God, its clergy with but few exceptions will stand in solid rank against the movement, lifting up their white hands in holy horror at the shocking irregularities of the occasion, preaching pretty sermons against religious excitements, and picking up the converts that have been so badly made, not excluding a great many who would have been rejected by the other communions. The grand duke Constantine once said of his soldiers; "I do not like war: it dirties their uniform!" For the

same reason the aesthetic religion does not like revivals, they ruin her lawns and laces.

The fate of these liturgical performances, in active times, has been singularly uniform. Witness, first, the introduction of Christianity into the world. The Jewish faith, out of which the later system was developed, had been embodied in a beautiful ceremonial; and as every particular of the ancient order had been prescribed upon divine authority, it might well have been expected that it would be continued under the new dispensation. But it turned out far otherwise; the new life which our Saviour infused into the old system proved the complete destruction of the ritual service. The religion of Christ had no sooner attained to a distinct individuality, than its spirit expanded quite beyond the capacity of the ancient enclosure. The old shell, smoothed so beautifully, and mottled with scarlet and gold, was too small; it split straight through; it fell off right and left; and the new evangel taking wings, soared above the hollow ruin, as different an object in all outward appearance from the Jewish body out of which it sprung, as from those heathen systems, upon which it went forth to make war. The church once fairly organized flung out her banner with this inscription: "Neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature! "

Just so it was again when the church herself needed reforming. As her love grew cold, and the zeal of primitive times passed away, she had more and more availed herself of a settled ritual. For a dying faith it was found congenial and convenient in many ways. And the trappings were multiplied as the spiritual decay went on, until there was little else to be found. There was some protest against this very early; and at an early day some separation from it; but the evil increased until that great uprising in which Luther and Melancthon, Zwingle and Farel called forth the Lord's people from the mystic Babylon. the tendency was, wherever that movement was felt, to break away from the ancient forms. In England, however, an attempt was made to save what was being so rudely cast off, at least so much of it as was not positively evil, and having put it in the vernacular of the country, to animate it with the rising spirit of the times. Nothing could seem more prudent; and

And

yet this arrangement produced almost immediate discontent. Those stately ceremonies and imposing forms, carefully as they had been revised, yet had the odor of the old abomination about them; and had they been ever so pure, they were unsuited to the wants of earnest men. Time, which allays so many discontents, therefore only made this matter worse. Authority was then interposed to put down the rising feeling, and that of course aggravated it. At last, as might have been expected, the crisis came; and in one day two thousand brave men who had fought the battle of the cross went out from their livings in the establishment, not knowing whither they went. Thus was Puritanism brought into the world: a movement from its very inception making protest against the æsthetic religion, and to this day wonderfully illustrating the power there is in the Gospel of the Son of God.

This exodus did not leave much life in the house whence it came out, but the little it did leave proved tenacious and productive. In due season, therefore, another secession occurred in almost precisely the same manner. A large party, of whom the Wesleys were the representatives, were awakened to a desire for a more spiritual religion. They had no thought of casting off the old forms, much less of coming out from the old church; and even when their congregations began to form by themselves, they only called them "societies," still indulging the pleasant illusion that they were not a separate body, but should soon be able to kindle up a soul beneath those ribs of death. But they found they had raised a spirit they could not control. God took the issue out of their hands. The result was inevitable. As the power of the Gospel began to be felt, all set forms and liturgical services became distasteful, the awakened multitude surged up against those restraints like the ocean waves against a crumbling cliff. The very idea at last became absurd. A warm Methodist praying from a book; shouting "glory according to prescribed form; answering " Amen" only where it came in course; going off with the "power" at a convenient pause in the services! It would not do: the living force could not be so "cabined, cribbed, confined." It came out from the grand old temples where it was born, and took to the cross roads and open fields. Then, it cast off almost every vestige

of mere ornament, the reform in that respect extending even to personal apparel. A Methodist was as well known in those times by his plain coat as by his religious zeal; his place of worship was as innocent of the sound of bell and organ, as it was marked by often less melodious voices; and the movement of that day stood forth to view in rugged grandeur, like a naked mountain peak newly thrown up against the sky, and still hot and hissing with the fires that gave it birth.

Such have been those great reformations, one and all, that arrest the eye as victory-marks along the track of the church of Jesus Christ. Their uniform tendency has been' to burst away from those artistic forms and splendid ceremonies in which a dying faith always arrays itself. Sometimes, by a reaction more natural than excusable, they have proclaimed war on all religious art. But this there has always been about them. They have rescued and defended the truth; they have borne the world onward in the direction of purity; and they have been marked by power. Such movements, from their earnestness, are somewhat impetuous also; and being impetuous, they become to a great extent extemporaneous as well. There is no time at any rate to dally with tinsel, nor patience to submit to perpetual routine. The voice of such an age is, "This one thing I do." There is a truth to establish, a sin to kill, an abuse to reform; and the word of God is shut up like fire in men's bones. Art must give way now before energy; embellishment before the impetus of the occasion; and all the mere æsthetic must wait upon the strength of the eternal God.

Those persons who at such times cling still to their elegant proprieties and liturgical arrangements generally stand upon the wrong side. The Church Esthetic and the Church Militant go apart like the poles. The former harbors the corruption which the latter is seeking to remove; it grasps the sword if it can, and wields it against the brave men who are fighting in the Holy War; and the hungry souls who ask to be fed with the bread of life are turned off with processions, and pacified with parade. That religion which puts these æsthetic proprieties in their secondary place is opposite. If it sometimes wears a "raiment of camel's hair," when a more beautiful garment would be as serviceable, there is this at least to be said, that it

will not flinch from hard work. It has been in the past the kind of religion that has chiefly leavened the masses: it is the kind that has pressed close upon the heels of emigration, and been found first on the frontier: it is the kind that has followed our armies in the march, and knelt by our dying men upon the field. In such rough duties the prayer-book and the surplice have very small place. They come in at a later stage. When the pioneer work has been finished; when the forests have been chopped down and the fields cleared, and the seed sown; when the meadows are all green, and the pastures growing, then. comes in the aesthetic religion. Tripping across the velvet turf in her silver slippers, spreading her tints upon the already regenerate soil, she says; "I am the church: I have the apostolic succession: how can you abide among such unfashionable people?"

Thus stand the two kinds of religion which it has been the aim of this article to discuss. The æsthetic religion commits no fault by associating worship with some gratification of our natural sense of the beautiful: its sin lies in reversing the order in which the two words, strength and beauty ought to stand. The Scripture terms are, strength first and beauty afterward. And in that Millennial consummation, for which we are laboring, we shall behold the perfect blending of the two. The church of the future rises upon our sight, "Fair as the morn," but not only or chiefly so: to this are added two things more: "clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." And so will it be in heaven. Those walls that flash their varied light green and gold before our sight-great and high: those fair palaces of the saints-eternal in the heavens! Everything glorious, everything enduring; everything magnificent, everything substantial; everything beautiful, everything strong. And those words which we recite in God's earthly courts with pleasure, recalled amid the swelling chorus and the white-robed throng, will take on new meaning and impart new rapture to the soul as we shout; "Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary !"

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