stated, in those societies where unhappy difficulties may have arisen. And if, in any part of his district, dissatisfaction with him, or opposition to his ministries, should arise, they would certainly not spring out of any thing wrong in this trinal order and its just subordinations which we here recommend, but from one of these two sources-either the appointment of an unsuitable person for so high a ministry by the general church, or the inevitable reactions of unregenerate natural men upon the pure spiritual principles which he was instrumental in bringing to bear upon them. As far as the true church, or as far as the true receivers of her doctrines and the genuine manifesters of her faith, are concerned, there can never be any serious objection to the Lord's apostolic order, or any difficulty in the way of their subordination in love to those who, by their fruits, shall show themselves to be trees of his right hand's planting-apostles really chosen and truly sent by Him. We, therefore, feel more rational confidence in recommending to the adoption of our church in this country now, the trinal order of the first christian church in its infancy, and therefore in the state of its ecclesiastical innocency-the order of apostles, pastors and teachers. We believe the vastly great and important uses of the firmer establishment and wider extension of our heavenly church in this beloved country of ours, imperatively demand, for their effectual development, such a trine of priestly functionaries. And as we, in our inmost souls, believe, that this is the order of heaven' and the whole spiritual world, and that the natural world cannot be made to correspond to heaven for the descent of the true church from thence to earth without its adoption in the external church's arrangements, we do most affectionately intreat our whole visible church in this country now to consider this matter with prayerful hearts and dispassionate minds, so that, under the divine auspices of our Common Lord and Master, all may now come, with enlightened eyes, to see this to be the true order, and harmoniously, because freely and rationally, to arrange themselves in it as a body under him as their Great

Head.

Such is the trinal order which, in the abstract, we think should be that of our new-church ministry in this country. But we have no idea that this or any other abstract general order should be hastily introduced. The church, like nature, is abhorrent to all sudden changes. Therefore, should this be generally deemed the true order, we have no idea that it ought to be introduced by any sudden or violent rupturing of previous usages. It ought to be looked to as an architectural plan of a structure which is to stand where other buildings now do, and which can only be reared when those other buildings have been previously, carefully, and cautiously removed. We ourselves very much doubt whether the human instruments of such an order as this here proposed have yet in the Lord's providence been provided. But as the internal of man must first be regenerated, and through this his external; so must the general mind of the church be first well made up in respect to this general order, before any attempts are made to carry it out in external arrangements. Let us first see and know what just order is, and what it requires, and then let us set

to work in providing the instruments requisite to carry it into effect. All we could ask, and all we should expect, therefore, is, that the general church should consider this order; and, if it deems it just and right, should now simply declare it to be true, and propose it for future adoption. Yet, if judged and declared to be true, preparatory measures, also, should now be set on foot to lead the way for a gradual, safe, and lastingly effective adoption of it hereafter. And first among such preparatory measures, we rank such a provision for general education as we have recommended. For this and other most general uses, we think a bona fide general body of the whole church in our whole country should be constituted. And for the constitution of such a body, in what we have in this report shown to be the right way, and for the support of such a body when so constituted, we here declare, and give our solemn pledge. We are now, and have ever been, the advocates of union, and not of division, in the church; and if we have taken part in the divisions which the erroneous and arbitrary proceedings of our general conventions have made necessary for the church's good, it has only been to seek and promote a general union of our whole church on a truer, wider, deeper, and more lasting basis.

X. CONCLUDING REMARKS.

More than fifteen months have elapsed since this report was commenced. Little did we imagine then that we should now inflict upon the church such a book as this! About fifty pages in manuscript were completed with Mr. Powell's co-operation and concurrence, with the view of submitting them as our report to the seventh annual meeting of our convention in October, 1847. But learning that two of the members of our council would not concur with us in this report, had not attempted to perform their tasks in the division of our labor in getting it out, and were actually engaged (at least one of them) in elaborating one of a contrary tenor, we concluded to withhold ours, and avoid any thing like further collisions in our conventional meetings. On this account we neither presented our report, nor attended the seventh annual meeting and had not that meeting required us to furnish our report for publication with its journal, it would have been thrown aside, and the church, most probably, would never have heard from us again on this or any other subject. But feeling it our duty to go on, in compliance with that requisition, we sent our manuscript to the printer, and took up our pen again to add a few pages more to what we had already written, when the difficulty occurred with the publishing committee of our convention which is mentioned in the note on page. 21 of the report as here published. Our report being excluded from the Journal and printed in the Newchurchman-Extra alone, we altered entirely our original plan, and determined to give a more extended history of the new church in this country, as well as to introduce other topics, and much more matter, than was at first intended. Being a member of a standing committee "for preparing a history of the causes which have led to the establishment of the Central Convention," and being, as we believe, the only person now

living who, from his own knowledge and documents in his possession, could give such a history truly, we felt it our duty to incorporate that matter in this report, where it might incidentally and very well come. This required a pretty voluminous appendix of documents, and much discursiveness in the body of the report. We also enlarged greatly on the subject of representatives, introduced one or two other heads which would not have appeared at all, and expanded much that would have appeared in a condensed form, if the report had been published with the Journal. But, in a repeated review of the work as it has advanced, we have felt deeply impressed with a conviction, that the change of plan has been ordered by Divine Providence for the greater use and, therefore, we do not now regret, or feel at all hurt at, the difficulty, above alluded to, which occasioned this change. We have, in consequence, been favored with the able, instructive and convincing papers of Messrs. Cabell and Powell. And we do hope, and trust, that enough has now been advanced, to enable any and all to make up their minds and come to a definitive settlement of this long agitated question in our church. At any rates, we feel that we have done our duty, and, with the pleasing inward consciousness of this, can now retire from all conspicuous station in the general church, as we shall most certainly avoid any thing like further controversy in it.

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To complete our plan, there yet remains a Postscriptum, that was to contain three reviews. But our work has swelled to such a size,having, in fact, already exceeded greatly the boundaries at first marked out for it, that this cannot now be given. Such an extended historical sketch of the rise, progress and present state of the Western Convention as we intended to have given, together with the documents necessary to illustrate it, would itself have required a good deal of space. We must let this go entirely by. The reviews of Mr. Wilks's report and Mr. Mason's letter, we should much like to let go by too. But, considering how much both of these, but especially the former, have been vaunted in our borders, we fear that our failure to notice them would be misconstrued. And, as extended reviews of them are now out of the question, we will take leave to conclude our report with a few brief and cursory remarks upon those kindred productions.

THE REV. THOMAS WILKS'S REPORT.

"Reasons and Principles," prefixed to Volume I. of the Journals of the Central Convention, display in clear light the origin of that body. It is not necessary to repeat here any thing that is there said. But it must be obvious, from the stand which the Central Convention took in relation to the General Convention, that the movers in it must have been solicitous not to be found in any false position. The subject of the trine in the ministry had not only agitated the general church in this country for years, but had particularly provoked the opposition of some who took part at first in the Middle Convention, and who left it when our constitution adopted that principle. The question of a ministerial trine seemed, indeed, to have been very

generally settled at that time; but the fact that the trinal principle was strongly opposed in the forming of our constitution, shows that it was still an open question in some minds, and that it was not likely our body should have come into existence without the ministers who engaged in it having had their minds drawn to, and their opinions made up, on this subject. We are not aware that there was a single minister among us who was in any degree opposed to the trine; and we do know that both of the ordaining ministers would have avoided any of the responsibility of setting on foot a co-ordinate general body of the new church in these middle states, if Article XVII. of the Constitution had not been inserted. They both regarded the trine as an essential principle of all order, and a trine in the ministry as a fundamental principle of the church, without which it could not exist in its order or subsist in its integrity. And if the article of the constitution which acknowledges this order had not been inserted, they would then have withdrawn from the body, as they would have done at any subsequent period, whenever it should have been called in question. Why Mr. Doughty's article in the original draft of the constitution defining the trine in our ministry was expunged, has been stated in the beginning of this report. But that was thrown up to us in reproach in a communication from some members of the New York society to the sixth annual meeting of our convention in 1846. The ecclesiastical council or committee of our convention had failed to do their duty in determining from the Word and our church's writings what should be the special form of the trine in our ministry, and were deemed new, since the decease of Mr. Doughty, to be incompetent to this task, so that these five lay members of the New York society feel themselves in duty bound to essay the performance of their task for them. They actually prescribe to the convention a precise determination of "the grades in the ministry," which would have restored the old and exploded order of the mere licentiate as a minister of the first grade; and they ask ordination into the new-church ministry, with almost its entire powers at once, for an old-church minister, who had been a reader of our writings or receiver of our doctrines for only some two years. Thus these leading members of the New York society, in 1846, not only acknowledge the trinal order, and reproach us for having expunged Mr. Doughty's translation of the General Convention's determination of it into his draft of our constitution, but they as laymen actually prescribe a precise determination of it for our body, on the ground that it has not "an experienced ecclesiastical board, that will impart confidence, and whose decisions may be regarded with authority." It was exactly to avoid any such authoritative decisions of the question, that Mr. Doughty's insertion of the General Convention's decision of it had, on our motion, been expunged. We wanted the authorities of the Word and of Swedenborg's writings for our order whenever it should be adopted; and we were quite as much opposed to this prescription of it by a resolution of the New York society without these authorities, as we were to the General Convention's prescription of it without them. We had moved the expunging of Mr. Doughty's determination

of the trine, and had caused the insertion of an article of our constitution making it the duty of our ecclesiastical council to determine it from the Word and the writings of Swedenborg, merely for the purpose of enabling him to give us those authorities on which he and others had founded that determination in the General Convention itself. We thought that all who opposed the trine in our connection did so because they imagined it was not taught in the writings of our church, nor in the Word, but was authoritatively prescribed by our conventions; and we imagined that all they as honest men needed to make them freely and rationally adopt the trinal order, was to have the light of the Word and the new church reflected to their minds truly. We did not imagine that they were men whose old-church prejudices had so encircled their heads with its mists, that the clearest new-church light would appear hazy to them, and make new-church truths look like frightful spectres instead of substantial and beautiful heavenly realities. We felt sure that they would as readily embrace the trinal order when they saw what the new church does indeed teach concerning it, as we would have certainly rejected it, if our views of it had remained like theirs; for we too had been among them in opposition to it, while we were ignorant of its true nature, and were unenlightened by true new-church light on the subject. But ill health, or other causes, and at length his death, prevented Mr. Doughty's giving us his authorities. The other members of the council would not act, notwithstanding they were pressed by the weightiest importunities. They assigned to us the task of a scribe, but they gave us nothing to write. At the same time, they reproached us for not doing the whole work-from even the attempting of which we shrunk with instinctive diffidence of our competency, and with appalling dread of its responsibilities. Still our convention was hampered in all of its ecclesiastical action by the want of the determination of its ministerial trine. We felt that we had no right to exercise the ordaining powers of a general church before this order was determined; and we felt greatly reluctant to exercise the powers of another general body, although the right to exercise them was still accorded to us by it, while we remained in so conspicuous an attitude of opposition to its leaders. Thus the matter stood, when application was made for the ordination of Mr. Powell, into the second degree, by the Danby society, through Dr. Beers. The exigency was so clear in his case, that he was ordained under the authority of the whole church in the United States. When Mr. Benade came into our church, the New York society were for having him ordained into our ministry at once, without his acting on the preparatory plane of a licentiate and student of our ministry. This order had been established in our convention on the authority of Universal Theology, number 106. And it is easy to see, that self-willed reaction upon this order, as it was advocated by Mr. Burnham, then minister of the New York society, in the Fifth Annual Meeting, of 1845, (see Journal, No. VII., p. 29,) lies at the root of the opposition to it which is manifested in the communication from the five members of that society to the Sixth Annual Meeting mentioned above. Yet the New York society