land." True, abiding freedom can be attained only as men are instructed into the knowledge of that wherein true freedom lies; only as they are roused to the intelligent, hearty adoption of those maxims of industry, frugality and integrity through which alone law ceases to be compulsion by passing into selfcontrol.

And, lastly, this far-reaching declaration of Christ gives us the true conception and method of religious freedom. Everywhere we see men chafing against restraint; against just limitations of human reason and human pride. Everywhere we see restless desire and determined effort to break bands and cast away cords. "Are we slaves," demand many, “that we must be chained down forever by menacing prohibitions, under which the generations have groaned from the beginning? Are we never to outgrow the narrow dogmas, hampering superstitions and craven fears of ignorance and childishness? Never to be done with the rusty, antiquated creeds of our forefathers? Must we ever gasp in the atmosphere of old and smothering bigotry? Is it not time that we assert our majority and break loose from the tyranny of the past?"

There is to be progress. There is to be enlargement of privilege. There is to be increase of spiritual liberty. But this is not to come in the manner which many conceive. There is to be a passing away of prohibition, restraint, dogmas; but this is not to be by annihilation of any just obligation, nor of any truth. Christ, the animating, guiding spirit of all true enlightenment and progress, has purposed that better future when men shall be free from galling yokes. But he it is who "verily" assures us that the ends of law are not to be secured through mere destruction of its outward forms; he is not deceived, and will not be mocked by that pretended superiority to the letter which only veils a lack of its spirit. That independence of restraint for which many sigh, is not born of radi cal resolutions, free-love conventions, nor of hackneyed wholesale denunciations of Calvinism and Puritanism. It comes, and can come, only as the great underlying, ever-abiding principles of civil order, moral precept and spiritual worship are incorporated into the soul; only as men become free in the love of right and of order, in perfected love towards God and man. "In all its sacred constitution," says Huntingdon,*"society

*Aspects of Human Society.

preaches the sacredness of law, and so points with reverent finger from human law to the divine, and to Him in whose breast both have their seat at last. By being servants we become children and heirs. By law we gain liberty. By waiting at the foot of Sinai we are taken up into Olivet and Tabor. The tables of stone lean against the cross. Moses is followed by the Messiah. Beyond the valleys of subjection rise the eternal hills of peace. The years of unquestioning and obedient toil ended, there is proclaimed the great Sabbatic festival, where law is love,, and order is choice, and government is Fatherhood, and the Ruler's will is the impulse of every heart."

Art. IV. PRESBYTERIAnism on the frontiers.*

BY REV. JOSEPH F. TUTTLE, President of Wabash College.

THE Presbytery of Philadelphia, formed "about the beginning of the year 1705," "consisted of seven ministers" and a score of churches. This germ in half a century had grown into two Synods, which included ninety-four ministers, and a still greater number of churches. From that time "to the commencement of the Revolutionary War the growth of the church had been rapid and almost uninterrupted."

When the differences between the Colonies and the mother country were "submitted to the arbitrament of war," the Presbyterian Church had become a commanding power in the Middle and Southern States. Although Mr. Jefferson, in his autobiography, did not name the Presbyterian clergy in his account of the means adopted "to fire the heart of the country," we know from other sources that they were prominent in the movement. He says: "We were under the conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen, as to passing events, and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention.

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*The Synod of Indiana was formally organized on the 18th of October, 1826. On the fiftieth anniversary of that event the Synods of Indiana South, and Indiana North, met in the First Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, which occasioned the preparation of this historical sketch.

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We cooked up a resolution somewhat modernizing the phrases of the Puritans-for appointing the 1st day of June, 1774, on which the Port bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice. This was in

May, 1774.

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* We returned home, and in our several counties invited the clergy to meet assemblies of the people on the 1st of June, to perform the ceremonies of the day, and to address to them discourses suited to the occasion."-(Jefferson's Works, I., 7.)

It is sufficient to remark that none responded with greater zeal to this invitation than the Presbyterian ministers of the Middle and Southern States. Until the war began our church had shown great vigor, and was rapidly spreading in all the States south of New England; but with the war came disastrous changes. The ministers were scattered, churches enfeebled, some houses of worship were burned, others desecrated by the enemy, and the community at large seemed unusually afflicted with an extraordinary increase of impiety and infidelity. And hence it was not strange that when the war closed, our church was much weaker than when it began.

From the beginning it had been a missionary church. Its early preachers had been famous for their extensive journeys to preach the gospel in destitute regions. They were not content to visit the regions that could be safely and easily reached, but many of them, with rare courage, went to the very frontiers, which were often rendered dangerous by the incursions of the Indians.

As already intimated, the immediate effect of the war on the church was disastrous, but no sooner was it ended than new life began to show itself. Decayed churches were resuscitated, new ones planted, pastors installed, missionaries sent out, young men of promise educated for the ministry; in a word, the church once more became aggressive.

All this was preparing the way for the more perfect organization of the church in 1788, with the General Assembly as its highest judicatory. And now we reach a period of the greatest interest, both from the positive opposition encountered, and the

positive encroachments which our missionaries made on the world. In the older States the French infidelity had obtained a powerful hold on the minds of multitudes who did not hesitate to denounce "religion as mere priestcraft." It was commonly reported that Mr. Jefferson himself had said, "that in fifty years the Bible would be no more consulted than an old almanac !"

After the war was over infidel clubs were formed, which included large numbers of wealthy and intelligent men. These were formed in different States. The late Mr. Israel Crane of Bloomfield, N. J., once named the societies of this sort, which formed a cordon from Paulus Hook through New Jersey, to Newburg on the Hudson, and many of their prominent members. He stated that they were violent in their opposition to religion; and also the remarkable fact that many of these men came to a violent death. The late Rev. Peter Kanouse, of Sussex County, N. J., a very intelligent witness, also made the The purpose seemed to be to uproot Chris

same statement.

tianity.

some

Nor was this hostility confined to words and sneers, but in cases showed itself in such sports as horse-races on the Sabbath, and even in defiling the hated meeting-houses outside, and covering the walls within with obscene and blasphemous caricatures. At least one of the Presbyterian churches in Morris County, N. J., in the immediate neighborhood of one of the most violent of these infidel clubs, was so daubed over with filth and caricatures as to be unfit for use, the desecration not having been discovered until Sabbath morning. Nor was this the only case. Besides this the ministers were sometimes subjected to violence, and often were treated in the rudest manner by these drunken and bitter opposers.

It would be easy to multiply statements of this sort, showing the condition of the country when our church, beginning to recover itself from the distressing demoralization of the war, renewed its consecration to the great work of preaching the gospel, not merely in the older regions, but in the new and distant sections, both at the South and West. It is not meant to assert that the difficulty was one entirely arising from the widespread infidelity. It originated in other causes also, as in the illiteracy of vast numbers in the remote regions,

where schools were few and usually poor, and also in the alarming lack of the English Scriptures--a lack so remarkable that the New England clergy were impelled to call the attention of the Presbyterians to it. There were whole counties in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee in which there was not a church of any sort, and it was alleged that there were multitudes of American people who had never attended a religious service or heard a religious discourse. In some cases, where a traveling minister had preached and then gone away, persons convicted of sin by this means absolutely did not know of a Christian man or woman anywhere within many miles, of whom they could go and ask the question, "What shall we do to be saved?"

If now we recur to the year 1788, when our General Assembly was formed, we shall find the beginning of great changes. The printing of the Holy Scriptures in English had been started only six years before; although against the law of England, two editions of the English Bible had been previously printed in this country, and the circulation of the Scriptures was carried forward to some extent in the destitute regions.

The condition of things in the "Old Redstone Country"—as Western Pennsylvania was called-had become very interesting, as also in Western New York. Soon after the Revolutionary War the pioneers began to push westward up the Mohawk, toward the valley of the Genesee and the shores of Lake Erie. In like manner the bold frontiermen left the valleys of the Susquehanna and Juniata, and, crossing the Alleghenies, settled in the valleys of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Of the most thoroughly Presbyterian stock, these last made the "Old Redstone Country" scarcely less famous than Scotland itself for its devotion to Presbyterianism.

It is affecting to note the alarm of the General Assembly near the close of the last century, in view of "the profligacy and corruption of public morals, profaneness, pride, luxury, injustice, intemperance, lewdness, and every species of debauchery and loose indulgence," which prevailed in the older sections of the country, as also "the formality and deadness" of the churches. And yet the church was getting ready for those glorious revivals which make up so marked a part of her history, during the latter part of the last century and the first third of the present.