in Christ. He makes them feel their own meanness, and sin, and spiritual death without Christ. His language is often full of tenderest pathos and yearning over the souls of men. He has both a loving and a bold speech, one that scorches with unerring instinct the sins and follies of society, of the household, the pulpit, the bar, the bench, the counting-room, the fashionable world, high life and low life, and seeks to save the lost. His words have an immediate effect upon the morality of the nation and the salvation of the world.

How can we descend to notice the spots on this magnificent and beneficent orb,-the faults of style and the violations of taste? We would indeed but glance at them, and do so because young preachers sometimes unconsciously reproduce these while endeavoring to imitate his great qualities.

Mr. Beecher may perhaps afford to be a little careless now and then of the settled canons of good style, but others cannot; for, for men to become efficient in any art, they must learn to obey rules, they must patiently endure training in the principles of that art. This is the inexorable condition of success. No one can be at once free either in religion or in art. As in music," until one has mastered every conceivable difficulty he cannot dream of producing the most distant musical effect," so, in some sense it is true, that in writing and preaching one must come under instruction, and must master difficulties by painfully working through them. While Mr. Beecher has a wonderfully facile and beautiful use of language, he has not always a pure and correct use. His words are often obsolete, provincial, and inelegant, and his sentences are loosely and sometimes ungrammatically constructed, although the thought shines unembarrassed through this medley by its own light and clearness. The tendency also to lack of dignity of style may belong to a large nature that almost always has some streak of honest coarseness in its composition; but the thoroughly secular tone, the careless and jocular vein of remark in the pulpit, does sensibly wound the devotional susceptibility of some hearers, and rubs off harshly the delicate bloom of sacred awe in the worship of God's house, though the sweetness and purity of the preacher's unpremeditated prayers,

rising like streams of richest devotional music, would seem to go far to make up for any fault of this kind.

Then what earthly possible reason is there of Mr. Beecher's raving and bellowing, and tearing a passion to tatters, and being so unconscionably loud and explosive where there is no need of it, as if mere loudness were force?

The greatest men-for instance, Bismarck-are not always the best speakers; but we have wondered in listening to Mr. Beecher, why a man so constantly speaking as he is, and whose life and vocation it is to speak, does not perceive, that after a certain limit of stress and action has been reached, nothing of impressiveness is added to a thought by an additional violence of delivery-that the deepest volume of a torrent always goes smoothly. Wendell Phillips understands this thing better.

But we must close this spontaneous and quite unstudied strain of remark. The theme is so rich that it has been, we feel, most inadequately treated, but these words have come from a true pride in our great pulpit orator, from a sincere admiration and veneration of the man, and from a desire to point out, as well as we are able, to young preachers, some of the lessons to be drawn from such an example, that they must unbar their minds to nature and to every free spiritual influence, that they must love more fervently, that they must put down the animal in their natures, that they must lay aside indolence and self-conceit, that they must not only study books but men, that they must despise both the praises and the menaces of men, that they must struggle, and fight, and pray, looking to Christ as the sustainer and the crown-giver. To such, preaching to the people "the glad tidings" is the greatest and the most beautiful of human occupations.

ARTICLE IV.-THE FREE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND.

A History of the Free Churches of England from A. D. 1688 to A. D. 1851. By HERBERT S. SKEATS. Second edition. London: Arthur Miall. New York: Scribner, Welford & Co. 8vo. pp. 638.

In a ponderous but very readable volume of more than six hundred pages, Mr. Herbert S. Skeats (of whom we know nothing more) gives the history of the Protestant Dissenters from the Established Church of England, beginning with the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty, and coming down to the census of 1851. We in this country are familiar with the story of Puritanism from the date of the Reformation-or rather from Wycliffe and the Lollards; for it is inseparably blended with our own ecclesiastical history. But this volume tells a story with which American readers are naturally less familiar.

Modern Dissent in England is doubtless the historic sequel of the old Puritanism. The names of the great Puritans, Baxter, Howe, Calamy, and the rest-the memories of the Westminster Assembly and the Long Parliament—are a portion of what the Free Churches of England have inherited from the past. Yet the men who occupy, to-day, the position once held by the Puritans, properly so called, are not the Dissenters, but rather the thoroughly Protestant members of the Establishment-the Calvinistic or Low Church party-those who regard Ritualism with a religious abhorrence. They are the modern Puritans, believers in a national church established by the State, but dissatisfied with the discipline and tendencies of the national church as it is. They are unlike their predecessors, the Puritans of the heroic age, in that they meekly submit to existing regulations, and do not brave the penalties of non-conformity. They are neither imprisoned nor silenced; they are not deprived of their livings; they are not driven into exile; they go not forth to plant in some wilderness a new church purified from all mediæval corruption; they

do not even agitate their native country for a further reformation; they satisfy their consciences with protesting against the antique novelties brought in by men who are trying to get rid of even that measure of reformation which was wrought by Queen Elizabeth. The Dissenters have been, in reality, ever since the date from which Mr. Skeats begins his story, Separatists from the Church of England, as by law established, and not a Puritan or reforming party within the Church of England.

Under the Long Parliament, the Church of England was essentially a Presbyterian establishment, though the details of a classical and synodical government, like that in Scotland, were never perfected. Under the Protectorate, there were some clergymen who preferred the Congregational polity, and were permitted to "gather" churches on the platform of that polity in their parishes or in the ecclesiastical edifices in which they ministered. But the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II. was followed by the Act of Uniformity and the memorable expulsion of nearly two thousand non conforming ministers from their places in the ecclesiastical establishment. Of those ejected ministers, very few were Separatists or Independents; the great majority were Puritans, heartily accepting the theory of a national church established by law. They were commonly known as Presbyterians; though many of them repudiated that name, and, with Baxter, avowed their preference for a reduced or parochial episcopacy after the scheme proposed by Archbishop Usher. For nearly forty years they cherished a dying hope of so much reformation in the Church of England as would permit them to serve in its ministry. What they desired and waited for was not merely to be tolerated as seceders from the established order, but rather to be comprehended in the establishment. It was not till the great men of the Puritan age had gone to their graves, and the liberal intentions of William III. had been thwarted and finally baffled by the fanatical toryism of Parliament, that the Non-conformists generally accepted the situation and gave up their cherished hope of comprehension. Despair and the Toleration Act converted the Puritans into Protestant Dissenters. Thenceforward their congregations,

instead of being merely provisional arrangements to serve a temporary purpose, began to be permanent institutions independent of the state.

The revolution, then, of 1688, followed by the Toleration Act in 1689, marks the end of Puritanism as a struggle for reformation in the state church. Although the desire and the hope of "comprehension " lingered for many years in many minds on each side of the line between Conformists and Nonconformists, the story, from that date, exhibits the growth of religious institutions organized and maintained on what is now called “the voluntary principle." The Puritans, with their full belief that ecclesiastical reformation was the duty of the state, found themselves under a necessity either of compromising their consciences or of becoming reformers on their own account by gathering voluntary churches independent of the legally established Church of England. With all their dislike of Separation, they found themselves in the position of Separatists. They were "compelled to volunteer;" and the difference between a voluntary church established by Puritans or Presbyterians and a voluntary church established by Separatists or Independents became, as the hope of comprehension slowly died away, too little to be easily measured. Less than three years after the Revolution, less than two years after the passage of the Toleration Act, the difference was felt to be so slight, that a scheme of union between the ministers of the two denominations was contrived at London, and was joyfully accepted not only there but in many other parts of England. The platform of principles on which the union was affected, is said to have been drawn up by John Howe, and is singularly related to the history of American Cangregationalism. Approved and commended by the Saybrook Synod in 1708, it acquired a sort of authority in the Connecticut churches, and became, in some degree, a precedent for later "plans of union" with Presbyterians. Its full title, as originally published, was, "Heads of Agreement assented to by the United Ministers in and about London, formerly called Presbyterian and Congregational; not as a measure for any national constitution, but for the preservation of order in our congregations that cannot come up to the common rule by law established."