ulous agency of Deity. And in this sense we now administer this ordinance. I say to the parent who presents his children at the baptismal font, "By this act you engage to educate your child in a knowledge of the one true God, the universal Father; in a knowledge of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Most High, the Saviour of the world; in a knowledge of those miracles which God wrought in confirmation of the divine mission of Jesus, and in all the truths of his well authenticated religion." I conclude, therefore, by saying, that this verse affords no direct evidence of the Trinity; and, when properly understood, is one of the strongest proofs against the doctrine. This is my serious and solemn conviction; but you must judge for yourselves. Matthew, xxviii. 18, 19.

These are all the passages which any divine of respectability would quote in defence of the Trinity. I know that several other texts are sometimes mentioned by the young and inexperienced. I will quote one, and show you that no better evidence is wanted to destroy the doctrine. "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the holy Ghost." Now suppose I give a Trinitarian meaning to this sentence. I must alter it, thus: By the word God is meant the Father, the first person in the Trinity. This first person anointed Jesus, the second person, a being of the same substance with himself, and equal in power and glory. The first person anointed the second person with the holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, of the same substance of the other two, and equal in power and glory. Now I certainly intend no ridicule. If this explanation appear like a burlesque, you must blame the person who quoted the verse to prove the Trinity, and not my exposition. See others of a similar character, in "Remarks on the Unitarian Belief, by Nehemiah Adams,’ pp. 79, 80.

Thus, christian brethren, have I given the subject of the Trinity as full a discussion as my present limits permit. I have stated some of the reasons why I reject this doctrine. In my next, I shall give the arguments for my belief in the simple unity of God.

3*

B. WHITMAN.

Christianity and Reform.

THOUSANDS assure us that we live in a wonder-working age, and refer us for proof to man's conquests over the material world. We are told that man has attacked the elements and subdued them,-made the most hurtful comparatively harmless, and the most stubborn ministers to his wants or his pleasures.

But man's moral conquests are far more striking proofs of his power, and are infinitely more encouraging to the philanthropist. Moral events, which are to influence all coming generations, have succeeded, and are succeeding, each other with astonishing rapidity. It would seem that, in these latter days, a new spirit had been breathed into the moral world. Mind breaks its long slumber and begins to exert its energies. Men begin to feel the workings of a nobler nature, and to indulge, and labour to embody, visions of a higher and lovelier destiny for the human race.

A war rages a war of opinion-between the past and the future, between the advocates of the old order of things, and those who demand new and better institutions for time to come. It extends to every thing. Nothing is too sacred to be attacked. Nothing in politics, in morals, or in religion, is too venerable for its age, too well established by experience, to escape the hand of the ruthless soldier of the movement party in this new and fearful war. Blows are struck at the very foundation of the existing social order, and the ruins of all once held sacred are exposed to the idle gaze of the multitude.

All over

All over the world the war has commenced. the world the demand for reform is uttered; in some places, in sounds half suppressed and scarcely audible; but in others, in tones loud, determined, and startling. In all communities there is a deep feeling, there are full hearts, there are quickened spirits, that will dare improvements in man's moral and social condition, with the hero's courage, with the saint's singleness of purpose, and with the martyr's firmness. The millions awake. They begin to perceive, or imagine they perceive, that they have been trifled with, that they have tamely submitted to an order of things which a little well directed exertion on their part would have exchanged for one immeasurably better. Ürged on by a sense of real

or fancied wrongs, they are collecting their forces and nerving their souls to the battle.

Such is the rising spirit of the times. We may deny or seek to disguise it, but proofs meet the eye at every glance. We may denounce it, declaim or reason against it, call it dangerous, impious, blasphemous, or what we will; its course is onward, and no power on earth can stay its progress or scatter its gathering forces. It may pass over the earth with desolation and death, may sweep off everything well established in government, pure in morals, or venerable in religion, but it must and will have its course. Of this we may be assured, great and lasting changes will be effected. The day has gone by to prevent it. The work is too far advanced to be arrested. Will the changes to be introduced settle down into salutary reforms, or will they prove only mischievous innovations? This is no trifling question. The wise and the good ask it with solicitude, if not with alarm. What answer shall be returned?

It may be answered, that the results of the impending struggle will be good or bad, according to the alliances which may be formed. If the spirit at work ally itself to infidelity, nothing valuable will be gained; if to religion, the most satisfactory consequences may be predicted. This article will therefore labour to prove that no salutary reform can be effected by infidelity, and that the spirit of reform is, in fact, the very spirit of the gospel.

Those who are acquainted with man's whole nature require no proof of the first position here assumed. But these are not many. Enough has been witnessed, for a few years past, in our own country as well as in other countries, to convince us that those are not wanting who think they must commence reformers by making war upon the church, declaiming against the clergy, and breaking men loose from the restraints of religion. When the French reformer undertook to remodel society and to base his government on the rights of man,' he judged it necessary to reject religion. In England, at the present moment, many of the publications addressed to the labouring classes, publications which are the boldest and most popular advocates of reform, are either avowedly infidel, or else, under the pretence of opposing the Church Establishment, use arguments which strike at the foundation of religion itself. In our own country, within a few years, we have seen start up a large number of publications professedly advocating a radical reform in the social institutions of all coun

tries, and, without a single exception, all have openly or covertly, attacked religion. Almost every young man, who learns, for the first time, that all, which is, is not right, charges the wrong he thinks he has discovered to the clergy, and believes himself aiding a reform by opposing them, and, too often, the cause they were set apart to defend. It is true, that he is soon cured of this folly, but seldom without the loss of those generous feelings by which he was governed. These are facts not without meaning. They admonish us that it is no work of supererogation to prove that infidelity can effect no real reform.

To effect any real reform, the individual man must be improved. The mass of mankind is made up of individuals. There is no such thing as reforming the mass without reforming the individuals who compose it. The mass of mankind is often spoken of as if it were a real individual; but in itself it is nothing. It has no head, no heart, no soul, no character, but as these exist in its individual members. Each member of the great whole has a separate existence, will, powers, duties of his own, and which cannot be merged in the mass. The reformer's concern is with the individual. That which gives to the individual a free mind, a pure heart, and full scope for just and beneficial action, is that which will reform the many. When the majority of any community are fitted for better institutions, for a more advanced state of society, that state will be introduced and those institutions will be secured. What the reformer, then, wants is the power to elevate the individual, to quicken in his soul the love of the highest excellence, and to urge him forward towards perfection with new and stronger impulses.

Will infidelity supply this power? Does infidelity seek to reform individual character? It is folly to pretend that it does. It attacks institutions. It deals only with some of the forms under which the errors of individual character may have been manifested, while it leaves the errors themselves untouched. It pronounces religion false, and its action on man's social relations mischievous. It declaims against government, but it does not propose a remedy for those depravities of individual character which render government necessary. Viewed in the most favourable light, it is powerless. Separated from what it often borrows from religion, it can present no motive to action. It has no power to kindle up a moral energy in the soul, and to arm it for a long and vigorous struggle for lofty and abiding virtue. The highest stand

ard of morality it can recognise is expediency, and expediency for this short and transitory life.

Till within a few years, the unbeliever dreamed of no social reform, advocated no moral progress, imagined nothing better for man than the long train of existing abuses, unless, indeed, it were, that he should go back to the condition of the "untutored savage." What visions of a higher and better social existence than that they found already sustained, ever flitted across the minds of such men as Hobbes, Mandeville, Hume and Gibbon? What inward thirst, what promptings of the soul, had they for a purer virtue, a greater amount of human happiness they, who seem to have had not the least sympathy with their fellow-beings? Indeed, what inducement can he who believes merely that he is to-day, and tomorrow will not be, what inducement can he have to struggle with "the powers that be," to risk ease, property, reputation, perhaps life, to benefit those of whom he knows nothing, for whom he cares nothing, and who, like him, are only for a day, destined to flourish in the morning, to wither at noon, and to die ere it is night? Indeed, after the novelty of his disbelief has worn off, the unbeliever seldom troubles himself much about anything except his own immediate interests. He wraps himself up in his selfishness, looks in scorn upon the world, and bids it take care of itself. You often find him the loudest and most inveterate opponent of all useful changes. Where religion is popular, you may not unfrequently see him in the garb of the church, consoling himself for his hypocrisy by saying, Every man is selfish, following only his own selfish purposes, and that he must take the same course in self-defence. Long would reform sleep undisturbed, were it entrusted to the care of such as he !

It is true that infidelity, in these days, pretends to be a reformer. It speaks much of the debasement of the human mind, of the degradation of human nature, and makes loud and frequent demands for improvement; but, usually, without any clear conceptions of what would be an improvement, without any knowledge of what lies at the bottom of existing abuses, of man's wants and capabilities, or of what would supply the one or fully develope the other. One attributes all the wrong which exists to a mischievous government, another to the malign influence of certain indefinable, constantly varying external circumstances, another to the prevalence of religious belief, another to the priesthood, even where no priesthood exists, and so on to the end of the chapter. But in all their