at all; and it is utterly absurd to condition the right to teach one, on the right to teach the other. Now if the Church has the right to educate at all, she has assuredly the right to use the means to accomplish it she has the same direct right to teach the secular part of the curriculum as she has to teach any part of it. If she has the right to enter the educational field at all, she has the right to teach secular learning alone, apart from all religious knowledge. Should she do this from an imperfect judgment of the necessity of religion to the completeness of the curriculum, the true charge against her would be, not that she was doing what she had no right to do: for we are arguing on the supposition of her right to educate: but that her educational plans were grossly defective in leaving out the element of religion. Her right to educate, involves the right to teach all parts of the course directly; and is not impeached by defective conceptions of the means to do it, and to deny, as the Board seem to do, her right to teach secular learning as such, is to concede the whole issue, since to deny the right to use necessary means to an end, is a denial of the end itself. In short this confused vindication of its doctrines indicates most painfully that the Board are resting their whole grand scheme on grounds not distinctly ascertained even to themselves! To tell us in further vindication of their theory, that "religious instruction is the main and prominent object," in what is commonly understood by a course of liberal education, is a strange confusion of fundamental conceptions of the purposes of such a course. Religious knowledge is assuredly more important than any other; but it does not follow that it ought to assume the most prominent position in every course of instruction. Religious knowledge is certainly more important than an acquaintance with the carpenter's trade; but if a master carpenter should make religion more prominent in his instructions to his apprentices, than a knowledge of the craft, we presume no one would call him a wise trainer of boys in the mysteries of building, although he might give them more important information than a knowledge of that art. It is absolutely distressing to see the Boards reduced to such shifts of logic as these. To sustain an unwarrantable extension of the jurisdiction of the Church, they commit themselves to positions which confound the fundamental purposes of education, and to others in which all logical propriety is engulfed in the abysses of absurdity.

We had intended to have remarked on the singular indirection in which the report before us renews the endeavor to obtain some support from the relation of infants to the Church, for their theories of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; but we must defer it for the present. If nothing else indicated the growing necessity of the definite settlement of the nature and limits of that important relation, the hopeless confusion of several paragraphs in this report, would of itself, be decisive. We shall return to this subject at some period in the future.

SACRED ARCHITECTURE AND SPIRITUAL RELIGION.

THE purpose of David, so soon as quietly settled in his cedar palace at Jerusalem, to build a palace for Jehovah, the actual sovereign of Israel, whose magnificence should ever remind the people of His presence as their real sovereign, was not disapproved of by Jehovah. Nay, it was not only commended, but the expression of the pious purpose was made the occasion of a special promise, that the throne should be hereditary in his family, and of a new revelation, through Nathan the Prophet, in advance of all preceding revelations in its distinctness, touching the coming Messiah,-namely that He should come in the royal line of David, and be the founder of a community, His everlasting rule over which, should be typified by the Dynasty of which David was the head.

And yet the era of the complete execution of this purpose of David by his son-in the building of that magnificent temple, whose fame filled the world, and the complete establishment in connection with it, of the most gorgeous and imposing rites of worship—whilst in some aspects of it the golden era of Israel-was marked not only by the subversion of that constitutional liberty, which was the peculiar glory of the political institutions of Moses, but also for a remarkable corruption of the faith of God's covenant people. The very King who in his early manhood, with such piety and zeal, engaged in the execution of David's purpose-perhaps the very head which devised, and the the very hands which executed the magnificent palace and altars of Jehovah, in more advanced life, were engaged in devising and executing, as if in derision of their own former piety, altars on every hill that surrounded the temple, for the insane and beastly rites of Chemosh and Moloch, which the puritanic horror of their fathers had well named "the abominations of Moab and Ammon." Thus the magnificent temple, which the earnest and loving faith of David projected, and the consecrated genius of the youthful Solomon executed, stood forth to the old age of the same generation which witnessed and marvelled at its rising glory, no longer a testimony to the love that burned in the hearts that reared it, but rather as a magnificent sepulchral monument in memory of the early death of the faith that had once reigned in the heart of Israel.

This fact, very significant in itself, has additional significance, when contemplated as testifying, that God permitted even the pious design of "the man after God's own heart," and the work which He had himself given permission to be done in his name, thus, in its outworking and results, to conform to a general law which all history points out as governing every such attempt of men under the impulse of their religious nature, to honor the God whom they worship, by costly and gorgeous external display of their devotion. For it seems to be an almost invariable law of all forms of religionPagan and Christian alike-that the era distinguished by the gorgeousness and splendor of their erections for purposes of worship,

whether of false gods or of the true God, is the era which marks the decay of the power of their faith over their hearts and lives.

Thus the Parthenon at Athens rose in all its beauty just at the period when the superstitious worship, which it was designed to promote and to honor, had already lost its hold upon the minds of the people, and its power to nerve them to deeds of wild and savage heroism. The temple of Diana at Ephesus, that world's wonder for its magnitude and costliness-was reared by the united genius of Chersiphon and Praxiteles, and wealth of all Asia Minor during the very hundred years in which the superstition which it represented was slowly dying out, and with it dying the liberty of the people. The magnificent temple of Jupiter in Rome, dated its foundation in the age of Augustus-and represented a theoretic faith, which had no longer any other than a purely imaginary existence-and a practical life whose horrors the Apostle so graphically depicts in the 1st Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. And the same general law will be found to continue in its manifestations in the history of the Christian Religion. The Basilica, the first St. Peter's at Rome, the St. Sophia at Constantinople, stood forth as so many sepulchral monuments reared under Constantine to the memory of the burning love, and all-conquering faith of the Apostolic Church. The modern St. Peter's at Rome, singularly enough again, had its finishing touches from the hand of Raphael at the opening of the sixteenth century, which marked the utter and final Apostasy of Rome, shamelessly announced by herself to the world in the decrees of Trent. And though a more partial instance, yet not less remarkable as illustrating the general law,-the ambitious St. Paul's in London, engaged all the powers of Sir Christopher Wren, during that most shameful and shameless period in all the history of the Anglican Church, when the restored Stuarts celebrated their triumph with Bacchanalian revels over the grave of English liberty, and sycophantic Bishops crawled at their feet and cried amen! to all their curses upon God's faithful children.

These illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. They are all to the one point that architectural splendor in the temple outwardly, is the mark of decay of faith inwardly. And that therefore the splendid temple is reared in fact to be monumental of an age of faith passed away; they have their explanation in that singular paradox in the soul of fallen man, that while from the original constitution of his moral nature, he is impelled to worship God in some manner, yet from the alienation of his heart from God, he seeks ever some form and mode of worship, which shall satisfy the instinctive fears of his soul, without requiring him to worship God, who is a Spirit, in spirit and in truth And, therefore, just in proportion as he fails in heart earnestness, and is conscious of his deficiency of real faith and reverence as a worshipper, he seeks to substitute for the spiritual worship of the heart an external worship of the imagination or of the passions. No one who has diligently considered the proneness of human nature to this error, will wonder any longer, that in that very comprehensive sum

mary of duties to God, the first table of the law, so large a space as one-half should be occupied with the requirement that not only shall men worship the one living God alone, but they shall worship the one living God only in the exact way which He himself has pointed out in his word. And that throughout that word, there should be line upon line-to enforce a simple, pure, spiritual worship. It was their deeper insight into these truths of human nature, and of the Divine Word, and not their savage, coarse ferocity, and their ignorant bigotry as dilettanti poets, novelists and historians would have the world believe, that fired the zeal of our Puritan and Covenanting forefathers in their architectural and ceremonial iconoclasm. Their deeper experience and diligent study of the subtle treacheries of the carnal heart, led them to see only more clearly than others, that all these pleas for an appeal to the imagination in worship-all this aiding the soul with wings to soar in its devotions, by the association of all that is grand in architecture, and all that is lovely in taste with worship, in order to draw men, is one of the grand delusions of the devil. That so far from drawing men to the specific duty which God enjoins-namely, spiritual communion of the soul with God, it puts a veil between the soul and God; keeps out of the view of the soul the idea of God, as "glorious in holiness, fearful in praises," yet at the same time satisfies the uneasiness of the soul which impels to some sort of worship, with a form that ministers to the pleasures of imagination, and to the pride of the worshipper.

Understanding fully this propensity of human nature, they regarded with no special admiration, or even approbation an ostentatious display of costly devotion. To them this was but the indication of the utter decay of all spiritual affections, and the consequent zeal to build and garnish temples, which should be the sepulchral monuments of a faith of the heart already passed away, rather than the erection of true spiritual temples of the Holy Ghost in the souls of men.

Even though the carnality of the formalistic philosophic wits, and historians who have denounced and ridiculed the Puritans, incapacitated them for comprehending the motives and views of that sturdy race of men; it is somewhat strange that it never occurred to them that at least in so far as relates to the philosophy of worship, those Puritans, so ignorant, coarse, and fanatical in their esteem, displayed a far profounder philosophy, than the ablest of their revilers. In the first place, even granting that true worship were nothing more than the effort of the soul to rise to the contemplation of the natural attributes of God, as gathered from His works, it is not easy to perceive how the contemplation of the works of man-architecture, sculpture, music, should be the chosen means of such worship. But if it is the real aim of true worship to bring the soul into communion with a moral God, whose law speaks to the conscience, it is still more difficult to understand how the plain place of worship, the simple and devout prayer, and praise, and meditation upon the truth, with nothing to distract the attention, is not a more appropriate

means than all the appliances of architecture and sculpture. Whatever importance we may please to assign to the cultivation of the imagination and the taste in devotion, still it is not easy to see how splendid architecture and gorgeous ritual of man's device, are the most appropriate method of approach into the presence of the Almighty. If imposing architecture in the church is supposed to rouse the soul to devotion, then so far from going on the Sabbath to contemplate the tinsel grandeur of man's device in some ostentatious Cathedral, let us turn away our feet from the temple made with hands, and rather spend the hallowed hours in wandering through the great temple that God has reared. If imagination is to be captivated with scenes of imposing grandeur, bursting upon the eyethen we turn our back upon the sham grandeur of men's altar shows, and go forth to witness the simple, but awful grandeur of mountains raising their heads to heaven, or the ever rolling waves of the ocean, or the thunder cloud gathering its blackness, or the lightning writing "Jehovah" across the veiled heavens. If music rolling through "long drawn aisle and fretted vault," and the mysterious shadows of the "dim religious light," be a means of raising the soul spiritually to God; then awy with all half way devices, and cunning counterfeits! We will go forth in the early night-fall, and gaze upon the heavens as their "hosts" begin to kindle their camp fires; and listen to the whisper of the evening breeze, symbol of the Holy Spirit that whispers to the soul, and the many voiced lullaby, wherewith maternal Nature soothes to sleep her myriad children; to the deep bass of ocean, or of the rising tempest, compared with which as soul elevators, your blowing bellows and screaming pipes, are but a soul mocking Charivari!

No! with a profounder philosophy, Puritanism decrees, let the very simplicity of the place of worship, be our confession of its inadequacy to lead the soul up to God; and let no ambitious architecture, nor garish decoration of ceremonial, draw away to the work of man, the soul desiring to draw near to God. The thought that "surely God is in this place," is in itself too all absorbing, to admit of any incidental impressions taking root in the soul.

Such is the Philosophy of the old Covenanter and Puritan theory. It is not more profound than true. But better than all philosophy in the matter they learned from the oracles of God, the vanity of all attempts to substitute for the spiritual worship of a deep religious faith, a mere external show of reverence for God, in costly architecture and gorgeous ritual. All of which their children will understand fully, if it shall turn out that the reigning taste for magnificent houses of worship, be but the rearing of monuments in memory of a faith once living and earnest, but now passed away.