THE GREAT NEED OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AT THIS TIME. The general condition of the Presbyterian Church at the present time is such as to be a subject of sincere congratulation to all who love it. The fruits of the great struggle of 1837 have in part been developed, and the extraordinary prosperity which has marked the progress of events, in her history since that time, indicate in the most cheering and conclusive manner, the approval by the Great Head of the Church, of the efforts then made, to purge out the evils which disfigured her beauty and threatened the integrity of her existence. Her borders have been greatly extended. Her ministry and membership have increased in high proportions to their number when the separation was complete. Her whole system of measures for the promotion of the truth, has been in full and successful operation; the utmost harmony of belief in the established articles of her Creed, distinguishes the preaching of her ministry; and the whole aspect of affairs is such as to call for a devout acknowledgement of the goodness and grace of God. We do not mean that there are no occasions for feelings very different from the sentiments of gratitude and triumph, which we have just declared to be demanded by the present aspect of the Church. There are things which call for regret for their existence, and for effective efforts to remove them. The arrangement of the administrative policy of the Church, calls for modification and improvement. There is reason to regret the extreme positions which have been taken in some of the official documents of the Boards and that a system of action has been based upon these views, which has excited a just resistance in some quarters of the Church. There is also great reason to lament that so large a portion of the Church, seems to have failed in the most obvious duty of supporting the great mission enterprises in which the Church has embarked. But taking all in all, there is great and commanding reason to rejoice in the rapid development of the Church, and in the signals of prosperity that greet each other all over the wide and varied field of her operations. Let us thank God and take courage; and while we address ourselves earnestly to the rectification of all that seems evil, or susceptible of improvement, let us send up the incense of an unaffected gratitude that there is so vast a preponderance of good. In looking over the articles in which there seems to be room for improvement in the present state of the Church, we are disposed to call attention to a deficiency which we presume no one will deny to exist, and which it is of vital importance to the success of all her operations, should be corrected. It is simply the deficiency of faith; the want of severity of conviction; the absence of a strong and vehement belief of the creed of the Church. Whatever difference of opinion may exist on the mere matters of policy, alleged to be susceptible of improvement, no one will affirm that the Church has been perfected in faith. If not yet perfect, her faith may be increased: to the promotion of this end we address the considerations which follow, to the earnest attention of the reader. We do not mean by this deficiency of faith, that the Church has departed from her creed, or that the spirit of scepticism has invaded her precincts. On the contrary, we do not believe there ever has been a period in which the great doctrines of the Westminster Confession were more universally and harmoniously held by the ministry of the Church than at present. The Church does not need to have the objects of her faith modified, but only the severity and completeness with which she conceives of them. Her faith itself needs the modification. That faith is defective in degree, not vicious in nature. is chargeable with unbelief, not with infidelity: she needs a baptism of the Spirit; not a correction of her theology. Her great need is a deeper and severer conviction of the truths which compose the grand structure of her creed and policy-a more realizing sense of these great and wonderful realities-not only of the truths which she holds in common with other branches of the Church of God; but of those which are peculiar to herself. is the faith of the heart. She Faith, as that term describes the gift of divine grace to the soul of man, on which the issues of salvation are suspended, is not the simple assent of the intellect to the evidence of a truth; it is a realizing sense of the truth itself. The one is the faith of the head: the other In the one the mind assents to a statement as a mere abstract verity: the other assents to it as the presentation of a fact. Faith, as defined by Paul, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." Nor will the Church of God ever awake in the full measure of her strength, until she can accept fully the articles of her own creed as descriptions of existing facts, and not the mere abstract verities of a systematic theology. Her ministry will never preach the gospel as they ought, until they are full of this faith: they must believe and therefore speak. Her eldership will never know their power for good until they believe with simplicity and severity of realizing confidence, the laws and relations of their official character. Her membership will never come up to the measure of their duty on the one side, or of their privileges on the other, until they are penetrated by the power of this great principle, and roused to comprehend the fulness of that vivid life of labor, tribulation, and joy unspeakable, into which they would be conducted by a compliance with their duty. There are truths solemn and truths joyful, truths full of awful and overwhelming grandeur, and truths full of the sweetest and most melting tenderness and pity, to be realized. A realizing sense of these will re-act with tremendous power on the nature of him who contemplates them; they will imprint themselves upon him; they will expand his intellect; they will rouse his conscience; they will break down his pride; they will teach him how to weep and to rejoice; they will fill him with the powers of the world to come. There is no such principle of education as faith: it presents truths under relations which are es sential to completeness of intellectual vision. No man can be an educated man in any complete or comprehensive sense of the term, unless he is possessed of this living faith. It will develope a series of phenomena in and before the mind, of the most wonderful description. It will pour a fiery energy into the soul, which will do more for the development of its faculties than any other stimulus which can be applied to them. There ought to be in the Church a deeper and severer conviction of the immortality and existing condition of the soul. The great business of the Church is to save souls; not to become merely a conservative power in society-the teacher of morals, the upholder of law, the educator of the moral department of the human soul, the stimulant to the progress of all intellectual and spiritual improvement. These are its subordinate and collateral ends; ends too, worthy of the highest efforts of the highest intellects, and the highest degrees of virtue to attain. But the grand end of the Church is the preaching of the Cross of Christ, in order to the glory of God in the salvation of souls. What is implied in both of these ideas? Who really understands clearly what it is to seek the glory of God? Much more, who is it that feels it as well as understands it; whose heart expands to its great and mighty powers, giving a practical, daily and perpetual impulse in every thing he undertakes; present incessantly in the soul, and pressing it from one degree of advancement in practical holiness to another, until the whole character of the individual begins to glow with the fulness of that spiritual beauty which it is the privilege and absolute duty of every individual to seek? What is it to glorify God? It is not to make him glorious, but to display his glory, to unfold the secret splendors of his divinity, to display the real nature and effect of the various attributes which make him God, by giving samples of them. It is not to display these as abstractions, but as embodied in great and living realities. All the displays which God has ever made of himself have been embodied in great facts, and the chief end of man is to concur in the production of these results, in the use of appointed means. These results, when produced, are full of power to promote the well-being of the race of creatures; for the glory of God is inseparably linked, under various modifications, with the good of the universe. Thus is man to glorify God: it is to embody in our lives practical illustrations of wisdom, power, goodness, truth, justice and grace; to expound the great elements of infinite excellence, that the real nature of God may be seen, and in the brightness of the vision to fill the universe with joy. The vision of pow er, justice, mercy, beauty, intellectual and moral excellence, and in proportion to the degrees of each, or the combination of all, must be a fountain of infinite delight to man, and of glory to Jehovah. Take the other grand end of the Church, the salvation of souls. What are the implied ideas which make this the most awful and sublime of all enterprises which can engage the attention, or enlist the energies of man? They are that man is a sinner, guilty, polluted, up : condemned to suffer the wrath of God forever, and that the soul is immortal, to remain immortal even amid the gloom and awful corruption of the second death. Let the mind dwell upon each of these adjectives; let the nature of the faith required in them be deliberately exerted upon each. Realize that it is true-that all these are truetrue of us individually, true of our wives, children, fathers, mothers, friends; true of all the race. Do not flinch let the soul gird herself with meekness and humility; with honest and inexorable resolution. Let the facts grow into the soul, until it is bowed down in tears, and unutterable pity; and see, Minister of Christ, if your preaching of the Cross, and your efforts to persuade men to escape from the wrath to come, will not be tinctured with a tenderness, a solemnity, a fiery and vehement energy, a grandeur and pathos of appeal which it has never worn before. Think of the immortality of the soul, realize the nature of death, conceive the nature of that inevitable birth into a new state of existence which is before you personally, and all others, and let the grand idea pass from the abstract into the concrete form, and stand before you-a reality; not as the mere abstract verity of a creed. Do this, not once or twice, as a mere experiment, but do it habitually. You are not required to believe the facts of life and the doctrines of the gospel as a mere temporary experiment, but as the constant and abiding principle of life. It will take no profound philosophy to see, that such a faith, such a realization of truth, such an evident sense of things unseen, will infuse a far deeper and more serious life into the Church than she is now living. It will give a gravity, a seriousness, a weighty and prompt resolution, a fear of God, a contempt for the world, which will inspirit the growing selfishness and worldliness of the Church in these days of increasing luxury and splendor, with an element, which will utterly consume her shame, and fill her with the heroic spirit of her earlier days. Such a faith will do more to quench vanity, worldliness, ambition, and the worship of mammon in the ministry and membership of the Church, than anything that can be conceived in the way of a remedy. It will also have been perceived that it will require courage to exercise this faith. It will require courage: it will require a patience, a firmness, a fortitude, a meek and self-renouncing spirit; yea, there is room for the exercise of the highest heroism that ever animated the human faculties in becoming a deeply spiritual and an intensely believing follower of Jesus of Nazareth. But how glorious is the modification of character it will produce! Remember that this great principle of faith acts, not only on truths that are grand and awful, but on truths that are glorious and joyful beyond all expression: it realizes all; and each stamps its own image deep into the nature of the gazing and wondering spirit. Sanctify them through thy truth: this is the grandest utterance of all philosophy, replete with more practical power at once to rouse, to solace, to guide, and stamp with undying energy the enthusiasm of the human mind, than all the utterances that ever came from the shadows of the groves or marble collonades of Athenian wisdom. Take again the power and willingness of our Master to save this guilty and dying, but immortal essence. The gospel is glad tidings of great joy: it embodies elements of the deepest and most precious power: it is glad tidings to the lost, the guilty, the helpless. Who of the ministry in our day has any deep, abiding and growing sense, -the vivid conviction of the fulness of truth in each of these items? How often do they preach it with a listlessness, a want of confidence in the gospel as good tidings, a species of feeling, arising, it may be from the disciplinary delays of the Spirit of God, to give power to the truth,-a feeling, which seems to define itself in utter, practical want of confidence in the real nature of the gospel, as good news. Brother in Christ, do you believe the gospel? Then away with all such miserable, guilty folly. Sound the trumpet cheerily in the ears of the people. Do not flinch because you preach it to the guilty; for it is good news to the guilty. Do not blanch because you preach it to those who are unable to help themselves to a participation in its blessings; for it is good news to the helpless. Do not allow your hearts to grow practically under the conviction that the gospel is only designed for believers; it is a gospel for sinners: Christ, came to call-not the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The gospel comes to make christians of the ungodly; but its primary proposition is always made to man in his capacity as a sinner. Let your faith grasp deeply and comprehensively the real nature of the gospel as a system of remedies, based upon a pre-existing state of facts, in the nature and life of man, designed to remove and modify these ills, and full of preciousness in its power to accomplish all that it undertakes. The delusion which underlies and animates all the efforts of infidelity to overthrow the gospel, is one of the most remarkable that ever asserted dominion over the human understanding. The infidel thinks that it is to his interest not to believe the gospel. But the gospel is merely a system of remedies, based upon a pre-existing state of things in human life, and in this pre-existing state of facts lie the grand ideas which make the subject of religion so gloomy to the spirit of man. None disprove the gospel; but are men the less mortal, the less wretched, the less the victims of conscience, or the less certainly bound over to annihilation, or to an immortal existence beyond the grave? Let the sceptic study the effects of life, the phenomena of his own soul, the system of existence in which he is living, and when he has seen and felt the true necessity of the world, and of his own soul, let him return and begin to study the real nature of the Gospel of Christ. Believe the preciousness of the gospel, and you can make it appear precious to others. Lastly, in general terms, whatever truth is embodied in your creed, or exists in the mass of realities, both within and without you, embrace it earnestly as a fact. If it be a duty, accept absolutely the obligation it imposes, and cease to exibit the odious and grotesque absurdity of admitting things to be true, yet not believing them to be true. If it be a privilege, seek to estimate it as a privilege, and to use it to the uttermost. If it be a statement of fact, receive it as |