Still there is a leaven silently at work within the Establishment. We have before us a private letter from a clergyman of that same Establishment, who has, so far as we are aware, no special sympathy with Mr. Noel, which says; "I consider that both in dogma and discipline it [the Establishment] is not cominensurate with the wants of the age, an opinion similar to that which I entertain with respect to most churches. I believe that the seeds of the future church are warm with the vitality of religion, but that they are prevented from bursting into life, by the oppression of the old worn out machinery which alternately cools and cramps all energetic struggle at development. I think that the Church (using the word in its widest sense) is suffering now from the influence of one of those transition periods in which its power is in a state of suspended animation. Such periods, however, have always preceded the epochs when the Church has manifested its energy most triumphantly and has succeeded in developing and extending its principles. There are phenomena of religious life which appear to me to indicate the promise of a better state of things."

Upon the religious public of England, and through them upon the House of Commons, and thence upon the Establishment itself as a state corporation, the effect of Mr. Noel's book will be powerful. No man can compute its influence. That book is read in every town and village in England; and though its price puts it beyond the reach of the masses, it is brought to their ears by public readings in chapels and lecture-rooms morning and evening, two or three times a week with all the regularity of church services in Lent. These readings are advertised after the manner of Mrs. Butler's readings of Shakespeare-"the same, morning and evening"-and are no less popular, and we presume no less instructive and profitable. Thus the mind of the English nation will be aroused to the enormous evils of the Establishment. The "voluntaries"-dissenters not themselves contaminated with the regium donum, and the anti-state-and-church societies will take fresh courage. Petitions and remonstrances will pour in upon Parliament. The people, burdened with taxation, will struggle to throw off the incubus of lordly prelates, and idle, pleasure-loving rectors. They will demand also the repeal of all restraints upon liberty of conscience. Parliament must yield. A regard to common decency will lead them to attempt the thorough reform of the Establishment; and where corruption is so inwrought into the system, that which begins in reform must end in revolution. This book may be the lever in the hands of God for overturning that "venerable Establishment" which has grown heavy with the iniquity and oppression of three centuries. The words with which Mr. Noel concludes his argument are prophetic. "The union of the churches with the state is doomed.

Condemned by reason and religion, by Scripture and by experience, how can it be allowed to injure the nation much longer?" And when it shall fall, the way will be open for the full and free evangelization of England, and its fall in England will be the signal for its fall in Germany, in France, throughout the Christian world. Then shall the word of God having free course be every where glorified, and Christianity disenthralled shall go forth. to retrieve the disaster and reproach of worldly alliances, and to renovate society by truth and love. "But for poor, old, rickety, blind, withered and pampered priestcraft, how will that fare? When the state withdraws from its paralytic and trembling limbs the couch on which it has been reclining, with royalty for its nurse, nothing will remain for it but the grave."

A word as to the effect of Mr. Noel's book in our own country. We predict that it will not be popular with Episcopalians. Highchurchmen who love the prestige of the English Establishment, and bishops who aspire to be called lords, will of course denounce the book and its author; but that which will make the volume unacceptable to the great body of Episcopalians is, that the author argues with great force against the union of church and state from the fact that the unscriptural and pernicious dogmas retained in the prayer-book as relics of a corrupt and superstitious age, are thereby enforced and perpetuated. We have seen that Mr. Noel finds no diocesan Episcopacy in the New Testament, no prelates, no national or provincial churches. This of itself would be sufficient to condemn him. But he has sinned more grievously. He thus exposes the gross and revolting incongruities of one of the most solemn offices of the Anglican prayer-book.

"When the parish minister has thus permitted persons of all sorts to make their children members of his church, and themselves, if they will, to participate in the Lord's Supper, he is at length called to commit their bodies to the grave when they are removed by death. Many of them grieved his heart by their open irreligion: they were covetous, they were quarrelsome, they were drunken; they broke the Sabbath, they neglected public and social worship, they were profane in their language, they died as they lived, testifying neither repentance nor faith; and over each who is brought to the grave, he, by order of the state, must say, "It hath pleased Almighty God, of his great mercy, to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed. . . . Almighty God, we give thee hearty thanks, for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world." The lost soul is gone to perdition, and the minister thanks God that it has gone to God. If the bystanders infer from this that they also shall go to God when they die, and that death will be their release also from misery, whose fault is this? If they perish in their sins, is the minister without blame whose words deceived and hardened them?"-pp. 346, 347.

Though the phraseology of the burial service has been modified in the liturgy of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, it is still felt to be sometimes painfully incongruous with the occasions on which it must be used. The frank

and glaring exposure of this incongruity by Mr. Noel will be unwelcome to Episcopalians.

Even more offensive will be his statement of the contradictions between the prayer-book and the articles, and of the conflicting interpretations put upon each by different parties. "AngloCatholics and evangelicals, holding the most opposite views, grow on together in the Establishment. Each party accuses the other of bad faith, violations of vows, and treachery to the church ; each declaring that the other should be expelled from its fold. Both maintain the exact orthodoxy of the same vast compilation of doctrines; both appeal to the prayer-book. New recruits are added daily to both armies, and the new levies, fiercely opposed to each other, continue to subscribe to the same articles, and to declare their assent to the same prayer-book. Either the prayerbook must be utterly obscure, or one party must be dishonest." p. 234.

Yet all good men in the Episcopal church and all good men everywhere must be attracted by the spirit of Mr. Noel's book, and profited by communion with such a mind. Congregationalists will of course be pleased with his principles of church polity. But they will be far more pleased with those principles of religious liberty and of pure evangelical Christianity, in which the work abounds.

And will not every true American heart rejoice that the attempt to extend over the American colonies the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of that corrupt and tyrannous Establishment-a conspiracy which precipitated the war of the Revolution, and hastened the declaration and vindication of our independent nationality-was frustrated by the wisdom and the valor of our fathers.

These free and happy American churches, of every form and name, owe to mankind a debt of usefulness, and to God a debt of gratitude, which has been hitherto but poorly discharged. Upon them preeminently devolves the work of diffusing the principles of religious liberty throughout the world. But we can not now enter upon the most important practical subject suggested by the book before us. While the providence of God is overturning systems of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, let the descendants of the Puritans be forward to complete "the work which their martyred forefathers began in the face of the dungeon and the stake," and rest not till liberty of conscience has been universally secured. And let all the churches pray, in the words of the Homily for Whitsunday: "The Lord of heaven and earth defend us from the tyranny and pride [of popes and prelates and of all ecclesiastical dominions,] that they never enter into his vineyard again, to the disturbance of his silly poor flock; but that they may be utterly confounded and put to flight in all parts of the world; and he of his great mercy so work in all men's hearts, by

the mighty power of the Holy Ghost, that the comfortable gospel of his son Christ may be truly preached, truly received, and truly followed in all places, to the beating down of sin, death, the pope, the devil, and all the kingdom of Antichrist, that like scattered and dispersed sheep, being at length gathered into one fold, we may in the end rest altogether in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, there to be partakers of eternal and everlasting life, through the merits and death of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen."

ART. VII. THE AMERICAN BOARD AND SLAVERY.

Thirty-ninth Annual Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Correspondence with the Cherokee and Choctaw Missions. pp. 80-113.

AT the thirty-sixth annual meeting of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, held in Brooklyn, Sept. 1845, there was, for the first time before that body, a free and full discussion of its relations to slavery. That discussion, and the report which was adopted at its close by the unanimous vote of the corporate members, gave general, though not universal, satisfaction to those who had been accustomed to sustain the Board by their contributions. It would have been better for the Board and for the cause of Missions; it would have saved for the Board some valuable friends and not inconsiderable pecuniary aid, if that discussion had taken place, (perhaps we should say if that discussion had been permitted to take place,) several years earlier. That report declared, on the one hand that slaveholding is sinful, and on the other hand that it does not, in all cases, involve guilt on the part of the individual slaveholder, to such a degree, as to preclude evidence of his Christian character, or rightfully to debar him from Christian fellowship. Its language is :-"The unrighteousness of the principles on which the whole system (of slavery) is based, and the violation of the natural rights of man, the debasement, wickedness, and misery it involves, and which are in fact witnessed, to a greater or less extent, wherever it exists, must call forth the hearty condemnation of all possessed of Christian feeling and sense of right, and make its entire and speedy removal an object of earnest and prayerful desire to every true friend of God and man." "Strongly as your committee are convinced of the wrongfulness and evil tendencies of slaveholding, and ardently as they desire its speedy and universal termination; still they can not think that, in all cases, it involves individual guilt in such a manner, that every person implicated

in it can, on scriptural grounds, be excluded from Christian fellowship."

In conformity with the views of the Board as thus expressed, Mr. Greene, one of the Secretaries, by direction of the Prudential Committee, addressed a letter to the missionaries among the Southwestern Indians, dated November 19, 1845. In that communication he said: "It seems specially important to train your church members to act out, in an exemplary manner, the spirit of the gospel toward the enslaved, emancipating them where duty to them admits of that; and where it does not, taking special pains to promote their social and religious welfare, and prepare them as moral and accountable beings, hastening forward to the retributions of the eternal world, for the holiness and blessedness of heaven." "You should do whatever you can, as discreet Christian men and missionaries of the Lord Jesus, to give the Indians correct views on this subject, and to induce them to take measures, as speedily as possible, to bring this system of wrong and oppression to an end." Nearly ten years before this, in 1836, the Prudential Committee instructed the missionaries to enter into no more contracts of any kind for the purchase of slaves, and also not to hire slaves, but to dispense altogether with slave labor.

At the next annual meeting of the Board, in 1846, the subject of slavery was barely introduced. It was not discussed. There seemed to be a general acquiescence in the position in which it was placed by the discussion and report at Brooklyn, and by the letter of instructions to the missionaries by Mr. Greene.

At the annual meeting in 1847, it was apparent that there was an impression on some minds that the letter of instructions by Mr. Greene had not been regarded, and that the patrons of the Board needed more information concerning their relations to slavery through the Cherokee and Choctaw Missions; and a resolution was offered, "that a committee be appointed to inquire and report to this body, whether any further action is required of this Board in reference to our relations to slavery in the Cherokee and Choctaw Missions; and if so, to propose such action as they may judge best." This resolution was referred to the business. committee, who reported that it was inexpedient that the attention of the Board should be occupied with the discussion of that subject at that meeting: because Mr. Greene, the Secretary who had charge of the Indian correspondence, and who alone was in possession of the facts to give the necessary explanations to the Board, or to a committee, was absent on account of ill health ; and because the Prudential Committee proposed to send Mr. Greene to visit those missions before the next annual meeting, so that he might be prepared to give all the necessary explanations which should then be required in relation to the actual state of those missionary churches.