their office instead of being called the pastoral charge, or episcopate (supervision,) is termed, a living, or that which will enable the incumbent to live; a benefice, beneficium, a thing for his advantage; and a preferment, a thing to advance him in the world." These terms betray the prevalent feeling in the Establishment; and true Christians in that institution can never hope for other than a worldly ministry, in general, while the system continues to exist. But the root of the whole evil is, at last, the point which the Scottish Church has made prominent in all her controversies and struggles with the State; the interference with the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ, and his sole authority in the church. And with a quotation from Mr. Noel's work, on that point, we will close our reference to him. "Christ has condescended to represent the church in Scripture as his bride, and himself as the husband of the church. And because the Church of Rome has given to others the honor due to him, it is termed in the Word of God, a harlot, and every church in communion with that corrupt church, is termed a harlot too. (Rev. xviii. 1, 2, 5.) Whenever, therefore, any church allows one who is without Christ's authority to rule over it, it is acting as a wife who should allow a stranger to rule over her in her husband's absence. That church would be guilty of adultery as Rome has been. And all this is what the Church of England has done. It is of no avail for an advocate of the union to allege that the king is only head of the church under Christ. Where is Christ's appointment? Did our Lord appoint the profligate Charles II., or the Romanist James II., to be his vicegerent?" Having extended these remarks already so far, we may not trespass farther by referring to the third part of Mr. Noel's work, which is virtually an appendix most naturally affixed by a godly man to whom the question is supreme, How shall true religion be revived in our country, even while the Establishment remains? Nor can we now present the case of Mr. Frederic Monod, who occupies an equally prominent position in relation to the church in France, and who has already commenced the formation of a Free Church. It is said, that our American churches will hear from both these gentlemen, in person, their own account of this great enterprize. Most welcome will they be to our sanctuaries, and our dwellings. GOD KNOWN BY HIS JUDGMENTS. THE judgments of God upon the heathen, whether found in guilty Babylon or rebellious Moab, among the polluted Canaanites or elsewhere, are all just; and are as far proportioned to the different degrees of guilt, as ought to be expected in a world where perfect retribution does not exist. Through these judg ments, Jehovah is more and more manifested in the earth, not only in the times when the judgments are experienced, but in all subsequent time. What instructive lessons of wisdom are found in the dealings of God with the heathen for centuries past! What moral degradation has abounded in the earth on account of idolatry! What pollution and crime! What wrath and contention! What desolation and wo! These things are too well known to need description. Infanticide, abandonment and exposure of the sick and aged, self-immolations, offerings of human beings to idol gods with various circumstances of cruelty and horror, the widow expiring upon the funeral pile of her deceased husband, the horrid pleasure of eating the bodies of enemies slain in battle; these, and other things of like character, have been the accompaniments and results of heathenism, in large portions of the world, and for a long succession of ages. The judgments of God upon the heathen, have been in forms as various as their crimes and abominations. Among these, desolating wars have occupied a conspicuous place. Nations have risen up against nations, and gone forth to the murderous conflict; little aware that in the desolations they have made, they have been executing the divine displeasure against their idolatries and attendant vices. We may never be able to enter into the reasons in the Divine Mind, why God has suffered the nations so long to remain without the light and blessings of the gospel. But we know that all they have suffered has come upon them justly. Let us rejoice that He who is able to make all things, even the wrath of man to praise him, is more and more known by the judgments which He has been for centuries executing upon the heathen. The display of his perfections through these judgments has not instructed the heathen alone, but all people and tongues where his truth has been revealed. Oftentimes the convulsions among the nations, by which the divine indignation against their sins has been manifested, have opened the way for the entrance of the light of life. Even where ambition and cupidity have been employed to make inroads upon idolatrous nations, they have been overruled for the purpose of making Jehovah known. The thunder of the British cannon, though uttered at the call of avarice, has yet been the voice of the Lord, saying to the heathen in India and China, "I am God alone." The human instruments of these judgments are themselves accountable for all the wrongs they have done in the exercise of covetousness, and the lust of power. But they have inflicted no greater judgments than the idolaters deserved; and by means of those judgments the Lord is making himself known to thousands upon thousands, as a just God and a Saviour. There is not a spot on heathen soil, where the missionary of the cross is now preaching salvation through a crucified Saviour, where the way was not first prepared by the judgments of the Lord. Perhaps the most signal instance which has made the Lord known by his judgments upon the heathen, is found in the African race. Although the crime of enslaving men has extensively prevailed in almost all ages and countries, yet the ill-fated African has been its greatest victim. There is no plausibility in that interpretation of the Bible, which refers all the sufferings of the negroes to the curse pronounced upon Canaan; - for the very good reason, that the descendants of Canaan settled in Palestine, and there committed the crimes, and experienced the judgments, of which we have already spoken.* Those who find in the woes of Africa the verification of the Patriarch's malediction,"Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be," have about as much reason to authorize their conclusions as the Poet Burns had, when he made the candidate for ordination tell: "How graceless Ham laughed at his dad Which made Canaan a niger." But whatever may be the solution of the Providence, the Africans have been great sufferers in bondage. Millions of their race have been torn from their homes, and doomed to hopeless servitude, involving in the dreadful calamity, their children and children's children. Facts in relation to their unparalleled afflictions See Page 377 of the current volume of this work. are too notorious to need a particular notice here. The attention of the whole civilized world is so much roused to the consideration of them, as to preclude the danger of their being either forgotten or neglected. In such a state of the public mind, it is important to inculcate the true principles of the divine administration, which are concerned in the fortunes of the negro. Those who may have oppressed and wronged the African, from motives of avarice, are no more to be justified, than was the Assyrian who laid waste Judea, to gratify his ambition. All oppressors, though they are rods in the hand of God for the chastisement of rebellious man, shall themselves answer for their crimes to the Judge of all the earth. But the Africans themselves, who have suffered so dreadfully at the hands of man, have they received any injustice at the hands of God? By no means. No such imputations can be thrown upon the government of the all-wise and benevolent God. The Africans, as a race, have been sinners exceedingly in the sight of the Lord, and have deserved all the pains, and griefs, and toils, through which from generation to generation they have passed. They have been heathens of the most degraded and polluted kind. They have come within the range of all the tremendous judgments threatened against those who refuse the knowledge and worship of God, and serve their own lusts. The impre cation of Jeremiah lies heavy upon them. "Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name." It is true, that idolatry among the Africans has not existed in such systematic form as in India, and some of the islands of the sea. But it has existed in reality, and in its most odious features. The abominations that have usually cursed every society rejecting the light that leads to heaven, have been found in Africa,- not even excluding cannibalism. The very crime in whose giant embrace they themselves have been crushed for centuries, has been, from the earliest records of its existence, practised by the Africans. Not only among themselves have been traced marks of the most ignominious bondage, but of friend as well as foe, of their nearest kindred, of their helpless children, have they furnished slaves for the markets of foreign nations. All this they have done when they have had not only the light of nature, but frequent glimmerings of the lamp of revelation to teach them otherwise. And shall not God visit the nations for such aggravated sins and abominations? If He chooses to employ wicked men as his instruments of vengeance, like Sennacherib of old, who shall resist his will? And if the mode of his punishment be involuntary servitude, instead of famine and pestilence, or the destroying sword, or the engulphing earthquake, or the overwhelming eruptions of the volcano; has he not a right to make his own selection? Cannot his wisdom foresee as much good to his creation from his judgments upon guilty men written upon the cottonfields of America, as when they are traced in Lisbon laid low, or Herculaneum buried? In his boundless knowledge, our adorable Maker is not confined to any one method of making himself known by the judgments which he executes. Bancroft, in his History of the United States, speaking of the wholesale operations of the slave-trade, by which Great Britain supplied the colonies after the treaty of Utrecht, says: "The purchases in Africa were made in part of convicts punished with slavery, or mulcted in a fine, which was discharged by their sale; of debtors sold, though but rarely, into foreign bondage; of children sold by their parents; of kidnapped villagers; of captives taken in war. Hence the sea-coasts and the confines of hostile nations were laid waste. But the chief source of supply was from swarms of those born in a state of slavery; for the despotisms, the superstitions, and the usages of Africa had multiplied bondage. In some parts of the continent, three fourths of the popula tion were slaves, and the slave's master was absolute lord of the slave's children. Humanity did not respect itself in any of its forms, in the individual, in the family, or in the nation." - such Such was the state of Africa a century and a half ago, substantially is it now, suffering the judgments of God at home, for long continued heathenism, with its attendant crime and pollution; and sending forth her children to suffer elsewhere for the same causes, and on a gigantic scale. The suffering of the whole race, generation after generation, helpless children for the crimes of others, involves the same mystery in the dealings of God, which has been spoken of before. On a vast theatre is this mystery presented, but equally grand is that one whereon Jehovah is yet to be made known by means of his long continued judgments upon Africa. Is He not already spreading the knowledge of himself through these judgments? Have not the nations long |
