by the clergy,-it has sprung up of itself from the people. It would be presumptuous to predict what will be the political results of this state of things in the church. We can see its tendencies. The conscience which can not endure slavery in the church, will sometimes feel a twinge at slavery in the state. The principle which is strong enough to burst the bonds of church fellowship, may not be satisfied without at least testing the rightfulness of our political fellowship. We trust that no such trial awaits us; but is it wise to augment those moral evils, which will call this principle into action, if act it should?

But even if this should not be the result, is there not serious reason to fear the alienation in feeling of a large portion of the community from the government? Such men will not make a rebellion; they will not threaten to dissolve the Union; they will retire as it were from their own country, and cease to cherish it in their bosoms with holy love. Who would not tremble for that country, in which the best and most enlightened part of the nation has withdrawn from all participation in the affairs of government on the ground of conscience? How dreadful the thought, that all those who pray for our country, should do it in doubt and fear, whether their prayers may not be answered in judg

ment!

We have thus gone over the ground which we marked out. We feel that this nation approaches an important crisis. The question to be decided is not for ourselves alone, but for posterity,-not for a party, but for the whole country,-not for the country alone, but for mankind.

"The whole civilized world," said Mr. McDuffie in the speech which we have already referred to, "is laboring under a perfect hallucination on the subject of negro slavery as it exists in the United States." The whole civilized world

then, is against Mr. McDuffie and those who agree with him. What he holds to be right, the world of mankind which has been instructed in the truths of Christianity and purified in morals and intellect by the light of civilization, holds to be wrong. What he regards as a good condition of society, it regards as the worst possible state—a state at war with the natural rights of man, with human happiness and with the moral nature and the revealed law of love which God has given to our race. And the whole civilized world will hold, future ages will hold, the God of justice and mercy who has never taken part with the oppressor, we deem it not presumption to add, will hold any movement of this nation in behalf of perpetual slavery, should it be successful, to be a still more outrageous wrong. But for what else is Texas to be annexed to this country? Military defenses, commercial advantages, English interference, are mere after thoughts brought in to palliate the enormity of the evil and to furnish a pretext to the conscience which can not endure the unmitigated wickedness. President Tyler, Mr. Calhoun, Mr. McDuffie have all said that slave interests are the paramount interests to be secured by this measure. The annexation would never have been sought, had it not been supposed that Texas would open a new market for slaves, that Texas might give predominance to the slaveholding interests in the councils of the nation, and that Texas would raise up a barrier which the whole civilized world would in its hallucination assault in vain. This is what the southern originators and patrons of annexation call upon northern freemen to vote for, and they do it with the confession upon their lips that the whole civilized world will condemn the act. demn the act. Shall we respond to the call? Shall we join with Mr. McDuffie and spurn the spontaneous feelings and the well settled opin

ions of the best and most enlightened portion of mankind? The reverend clergy, who have been set apart to preach the everlasting gospel of good will on earth towards men, of every civilized nation and of every diversity of name, are opposed to the extension and perpetuation of slavery. The church of Christ, which has been redeemed from sin by his precious blood and instructed by the Holy Spirit in the great commandment of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, is opposed to it. The wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of every civilized country, who have studied profoundly every state and condition of society, and the people at large, whose instinctive feelings and common-sense decisions rarely fail of being right, are opposed to it. The civilized world is unanimous here. Shall we pronounce all these to be under "a perfect hallucination," and bow down before Mr. McDuffie, and the South Carolina synod of moralists and statesmen as the only sane persons in the civilized world? But we thank the honorable senator for his confession. It has been substantial ly made before; it is now made on high authority. The civilized world is against slavery, and against every scheme to perpetuate it. Is not this enough to settle the question with every considerate freeman? Is there any known cause sufficient to warp the judgment and to mislead the conscience and pervert the instinctive feelings of mankind? But there are causes of self-interest and pride adequate to blind the vision of Mr. McDuffie and his friends, and make them mistake their own hallucination for the madness of all others. But "I am not mad most noble Festus," the civilized world can say, "but speak forth the words of truth and soberness." To us this universal decision of the most enlightened and virtuous portions of the world, seems to be a plain in Vol. II.

76

dication of the will of God, and the attempt of slaveholders 10 perpetu ate slavery like an interference with the designs of divine Providence.

Never was a greater responsi. bility placed upon any nation than is placed upon our own at the present crisis. Spain in the sixteenth century unconsciously encountered the heavy responsibility of introducing slaves into the New World, and there is nothing either in her past or present state which should make us emulous of her example. England trod in her footsteps and went beyond her in the traffick of human beings, and we ourselves alledged it as one of the causes of that war which cost her the fairest portion of her possessions, and if by a tardy repentance she has done what was in her power to repair the wrong, it was at immense expense and trouble. Shall we in the nineteenth century imitate the fatal example of Spain in the sixteenth, and commence at this day the career of spreading slavery over the whole southern part of North Amer. ica where it has been abolished? That is the question now before the people of this country. Its decision rests with each individual voter. It is this which gives its peculiar characteristic to the present contest. It was the Spanish government and a few of its favorites that involved Spain in this guilt; it was the English government and the commercial community that aggravated the evil; but if we annex Texas to our coun. try to perpetuate slavery there, it will be the people of the country who do it. If made, it will be the most extraordinary decision that ever was made in favor of slavery -a vote by a whole people in its behalf.

Upon every individual voter rests ultimately this decision. It is a case of conscience to each individ. ual. Each freeman, as he drops his ballot into the box actually votes for the perpetuation of slavery or

against it. There is no dividing the responsibility. The majority can not apportion the guilt of supporting slavery equally among its members, so that each individual shall have but a small share. The enormous guilt of the whole rests upon each voter. The individual does not vote for it a little, and thus throw in his fraction to make up one vote, but if he were the sole arbiter he would decide the same. He has the heart to do the whole, and this is the reason that in voting to perpetuate slavery, his responsibility is the same as if his own vote should decide the question. It may be difficult in many cases to determine how far the voter is responsible for the measures of the party to which he belongs, but surely where a particular measure is directly brought before the people to be decided by their votes, each

voter is responsible for the entire result. What man would dare, against the wishes and opinions of the whole civilized world, by his own act, to spread American slavery over Texas and make it perpetual there? And yet a vote to annex Texas virtually does this.

It may be thought, perhaps, that we are taking a party stand. But we can not regard the question of Texas as involving any political principle upon which the two great parties are divided. We but follow the lead of some of the most distinguished writers of both parties. We view the subject as they do, that it has been made, without any necessity, a party measure, and it is on this ground, that we have concluded, after looking deliberately at the difficulties in the case, to speak out plainly our sentiments.

To roll a snowball and to grow an oak are not the same thing. Enlargement of volume is a result in both cases; but beyond this, they have nothing in common.

In one,

the result is wrought by an external force; in the other, by a vital force within. In one, the swelling bulk receives all that will adhere to it, snow, mud or gravel, as it may happen, forming a promiscuous conglomerate mass; in the other, the new matter is carefully selected, taken up internally, digested, assimilated, and built into an organic, vital whole. In the snowball, there is, at no time, any internal power of production or self-enlargement. Not one of the particles in its cold body can it quicken or fructify; whereas, in the tree there is a vital, self-active power, which can work, feed, and send out the extensions of growth, as long as it lives.

The same distinction holds in reference to every organic and vital being; it must have its increase by a law peculiar to vital beings, i. e. by its own internal activity and a development from within. Nor is this less true of the mind, or intellectual life, than of animal and vegetable natures. There is no true enlargement of the mind, no increase of intellectual stature, save that which is wrought in and through the internal activity of the mind itself. To be a receiver only of the world's knowledge, to pile up the treasures of libraries in the memory, to overlay the soul with borrowed ornaments, and crowd its capacity with borrowed opinions and arguments, is no better than to swell the body and shape it into proportion, by laying on muscles of cloth or of clay. The creative and mercurial energies of the soul itself must be called into action, the

man himself must grow. He must learn to think, to wrestle with difficulties; his inventive and critical powers must sharpen their action. What he receives, he must receive as by digestion, and build it into the body of his intellectual being, by a process of internal assimilation. Otherwise his soul will only lie entombed in its knowledge.

So also with piety or Christian character. It must be a growth. Its increase and beauty must be wrought by the activity of spiritual life. Fires will not burn it into the soul. Statutes and penalties will not force it. Self-tortures and penances will as little avail. Sacraments and formal observances will not of themselves accomplish more. Its being is its life as a spiritual creature of God, quickened by his light and warmed by his love. Its volume is in its exercise, its aims and objects, its internal struggles and conquests; by which it grows up into Him in whom it lives, showing first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear.

Thus far we have spoken only of those vital natures which are individual. But the same law holds in respect to society, at least in many of its forms. Society is vital and organic. The family, for example, is a living creature, an organic whole, having a power of unlimited increase in its own vital and prolific nature. A single family, proceeding thus from one parent stock, will suffice to people a nation,-nay, it has sufficed to people even the world itself. It is not like a foundling hospital, which is peopled from without by inmates gathered from the streets, and by no laws of production within its own nature; but it is one regular coherent growth, a vital organism, unfolding itself till it fills a nation or a world.

The same truth holds, with suitable modifications, in the civil state. The true increase of a nation is not that which is made by conquest and

plunder, but that which is the simple development of its vital and prolific resources. Two centuries ago, there came over to these western shores a few thousand men. These were the germ of a great nation here to arise and come into the public history of the world, possibly as a leading member. Potentially speaking, these men had in themselves, i. e. in their persons, their principles, their habits, and other resources, all that now is or is yet to be of power and greatness in our republic. They went to work with a degree of spirit and energy never before exhibited. Habits of virtuous and frugal industry were unfolded by a wise and careful training. Simplicity of manners, for the first time, appeared, not as a barbaric virtue, but as the proper fruit of simplicity in religion. The mental vigor, produced by the same causes, was yet further sharpened by the necessities of a new state of existence. Population multiplied, wealth increased, the forests fell away at the sound of their axes, the natives retired before the potent and prolific energy of Saxon life, as before the Great Spirit himself. Cities rose upon the shores, the waters whitened to the sun under the sails of commerce, the civil order unfolded itself, as it were naturally, from the germ that blossomed in the May Flower, and, behold, a great, wealthy, powerful and free nation stalks into history, with the tread of a giant, fastening the astonished gaze of the world, all in the way of simple growth. We have made no conquests. We have only unfolded our original germ, the mustard seed of our first colonization. There is no other kind of national advancement which is legitimate or safe. The civil order must grow, as a creature of life, and unfold itself from within. If a nation will suddenly extend its boundaries and build up its splendor by conquest, as in the case of the Roman empire, or in the

subjugation of Mexico by Spain, how different is the spectacle. The elements of the civil order, being piled together by mere accretion, are without coherency or unity. The public life does not fill the public mass, and, without the organic power of life, it is ready to fall to pieces at the earliest moment. Wealth itself is poverty; power is weakness; breadth is dissipation; numbers, discontent and anarchy. A nation built by growth is as different from a nation built by conquest, as the tree that stands erect, filled with vital sap, covered with joyful verdure, and, when the win ter comes, tossing its bare arms vic toriously to the storm, from a pile of drift wood which the floods have heaped upon the shore to rot and perish. Accordingly the very word nation implies a nascent order and growth. It is no such pile of ruins as the external accidents of force and conquest may construct; but it is a birth, the unfolding of a vital germ through population, industry, art, literature, law and religion.

These illustrations bring us to the church of God. They are offered with no other design than to show forth, in a clear, intelligible manner, and, as far as their analogy will go, to substantiate a great and momentous truth, in regard to the increase of the church and the spread of the gospel, of which the church is the embodiment. According to the opinion of Christ himself, the church is as a grain of mustard seed, and its future spread is to be as the growth of a tree. It is a creature whose vitality is spiritual life, and it can have its increase only by the same law which pertains in all organic living bodies, i. e. by development from within, not by external accretion. It must be not as the snowball, not as the foundling hospital, not as the empire hewn out by conquest, but as the tree rather, the family, the nation, growing by its own internal life.

There is no truth, which the church has, in all past times, been so prone to overlook, or in the neglect of which she has suffered so many and terrible disasters. In fact, almost all the desolations which have befallen the purity and success of the church, have been wrought by attempts to propagate religion and extend the reign of Christ, by for ces and instruments that were really external to the church, and not by virtue of spiritual life in her own bosom. And if other desolations are hereafter to follow, as we have too much reason to fear, these also will flow from the same fountain of mischief. And therefore it becomes the church, now that she has undertaken in earnest to achieve the universal reign of the Redeemer, to inquire most carefully whether she is expecting to succeed by the vital power of her piety and by unfolding her own internal growth, or by the clumsy expedients of mechanism and by instruments that are carnal.

That we may have our eyes opened to the fearful dangers that beset the church, in her proneness to go after external means and instru ments, let us glance a moment at some of the mischiefs she has suf fered from this source.

First of all, she was seduced from her purity by an expectation of the splendid results to be secured by a union with philosophy. Christianity, the doctrine of Christ and him crucified, was true indeed,—a good and heavenly truth; but it was too naked and bald, too destitute of learning and philosophy, to command the respect of the world. And what might not be expected from a union of the Christian doc trine with the wisdom of the schools? Then it would be both true and wise together-both pious and profound; and the whole world would be obliged to accept it speedily. "We must give to the Greeks," says Clement, "who ask for that