able doctrines, they have no reason to complain, if other men call them in question. If the doctrines are sound, discussion will only make their soundness more apparent, and give them greater efficiency, by removing from their solid foundation in truth the rubbish which may have occasioned them to be suspected. If, on the other hand, they are false and pernicious, no reverence for their antiquity, or regard for the assumed interests of the few against the many, ought to shield them from exposure and reprehension. Charles I. declared the doctrine of predestination to be "too big for the people," and therefore that it must not be preached. The real difficulty was, that, as involving the sovereignty of God and the rights of conscience, it was too big for the monstrous prerogative of the king, and for his arrogant assumptions of spiritual power to lord it over God's heritage.

The right to inquire after truth, is inherent in the human mind. It is the guarantee, as truth is the element, of its freedom. "The truth shall make you free!" It is an inalienable right. No man can divest himself of it. No man can be divested of it. It is the gift of God to him, the original endowment of his immortal nature. That its use may be subject to circumstantial limitations, we deny not. But, as there is no man or class of men from whom it is derived, so there is none to whom it may be surrendered. In this, all are equal; and in this, all are equally bound to "stand fast in the liberty" wherewith they are made free. Despots may league together for its extinction, but they cannot destroy it. Crowned heads may combine, in so-called "Holy Alliance," to crush out the vital spark, which "cannot, but by annihilating, die;" but they combine in vain. Repressed and smothered for a time, it may be; as it has been, by the bandages of ancient vassalage, and as it now is in the caves of Islamism and the Tartarean abode of the man of sin. Its suppression is the only means of inducing a general imbecility from which can be extorted that servile homage, which is the only security for usurped power, the only prop for despotism.

But the day of deliverance, foretold by the prophets, seems to have come, when fugitive oppressors, shaken from their crumbling thrones, begin to hide themselves from the avenger. Like the owl and the bat, they haste to the clefts of the rocks, to hide from the light which betokens the advance of free thoughts and free speech. The condition of the larger part of continental Europe, at

this moment, is our proof and our illustration. In the half-suppressed whisperings of discontent, stealthily breathed out against an oppressive absolutism in Spain and Russia; in the divine. retribution upon tyranny and spiritual usurpation just witnessed at Vienna and at Rome; in the sudden upheavings of wrath under the complicated fabric of despotism artfully superinduced upon the French people by Louis Phillippe, there is clearly visible. the up-rising of long cramped and down-trodden, but indignant humanity. The contest is mainly a moral contest, in which free mind is seen mocking in its sovereignty, the pride and trappings of royalty, and bidding defiance to the prowess of armies and of navies. It is a gallant struggle of free thought for the rescue of her younger sister, free speech, from a long and disgraceful bondage. It is a struggle, in which oppressors and despots are awe-stricken by the sudden boldness of the belligerents, and the sublimity of their position. The people are asserting their claim to think for themselves. Their right to do so, they demand shall be embodied in constitutional government. This govern ment they insist shall be guaranteed and guarded by a free press, the natural and legitimate sentinel to guard the citadel of liberty. Let them take one step more, and base the whole upon the life giving power of the Word of God, and bring the movement into agreement with its ordinances, and more fully within the beneficent sweep of divine providence, and they will be free indeed. Divergency from these, leads them into the only gloom that beclouds their prospects, the only region of real danger.

It is no valid objection to the progress of free principles, that it is sometimes attended with political convulsions. These indicate the weight of oppression under which abused humanity has been laboring, as well as the temporary aberration of wise men whom it has made mad. But the "liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely," the want of which occasions such eruptive activity of the public mind, is the only remedy.

Nor is it to be alleged against the moral and political progress consequent upon such mental freedom, that the ancient prerogatives of crowned heads and the time-honored privileges of spiritual despots and their mercenary minions, will be invaded by it. It is only when these are arrayed against the rights of humanity, and are antagonistical to divine providence, that they will receive material detriment from religious and political freedom. And

when these are clearly so arrayed and antagonistical, have they been so harmless to the interests of mankind, as to give them claim to entire immunity from the spoliations of the victors? Shall they be held to no indemnification to those whom they have injured and crushed? Must the Mahommedan and Papal, the Pagan and Infidel Antichrist be permitted to insist that the world stop in its search after truth, and that the rays of living light from the gospel, which are gilding the hill-tops of India and China, and are descending into the dark nooks of France, and Germany, and Italy, be turned back and locked up within convent-walls, lest the poor victims of their cupidity, rapacity, and ambition, should escape from their iron grasp ? Shall they demand that the world be turned backward in the cycle of ages, to a point of ignorance where oppression would lose its disgrace and terror, because men would lose the light in which it had been revealed, and the sensibility by which it had been felt?

No; this cannot be. Prophecy is against it. The providence and promises of God are against it. History is against it. These all point to a consummation, which none have occasion to dread, but those "kings of the earth who set themselves, and the rulers who take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed." "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the

Lord shall have them in derision."

THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST.

IT is hardly necessary to recite many out of that multitude of Scriptures, which speak of Jesus as a king, and ascribe to him an eternal sovereignty and a celestial kingdom. His throne, says the Psalmist," is forever and ever, and his sceptre is a sceptre of righteousness." "He shall reign," said the angel Gabriel to Christ's virgin-mother, "he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end." The church. is often spoken of as a body politic, of which Christ is the head, or supreme and ruling member. "And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in all things he might have the preeminence." And 6*

VOL. III.

again it is written with apostolical sublimity, that "the Father of glory," hath raised Christ from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come; and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." Believers are declared to be "complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.' great is this king, and so great is the dignity of serving him, that all his subjects are ennobled into monarchs and princes. He rules over no common people. Having crowned and enthroned them every one, they are a "royal nation," a nation of kings; and so he is fitly styled "King of kings, and Lord of lords."

So

To him the mightiest minds have done the profoundest homage. Unquestionably and incomparably the mightiest mind which has manifested itself in our day, was the emperor Napoleon, who expired, a captive, at St. Helena, in 1821. The illustrious. prisoner, who in the days of his triumph had displayed powers so colossal and so various as to seem almost superhuman, during the later years of his confinement in that dreary isle of the ocean, devoted himself very much to the reading of the Bible, and to serious contemplation. There, like the huge cliffs of his impris oning islet looking down upon their image in the waters which bathe their feet, Napoleon saw his own features reflected from the waves of time, once so stormy, and now so still. He gazed on the bright mirror,

"As the broad-breasted rock

Glasses his rugged forehead in the sea."

Here he became an ardent admirer of Christ as King in Zion. Many of his remarkable expressions are recorded even by the pens of his infidel attendants. Thus to Marshal Bertrand he said at different times: "What a proof it is of the divinity of Christ, that, with so absolute an empire, his single aim is the spiritual melioration of individuals, their purity of conscience, their union to the truth, their holiness of soul." "Christ con

structs his worship with his own' hands, not with stones, but with men. You are amazed at the conquests of Alexander. But here is a conqueror who appropriates to his own advantage, who

incorporates with himself, not a nation, but the human race. Wonderful! the human soul with all its faculties becomes blended with the existence of Christ. And how? by a prodigy surpassing all other prodigies, he seeks the love of men, the most difficult thing in the world to obtain; he seeks what a wise man would fain have from a few friends, a father from his children, a wife from her husband, a brother from a brother; in a word, the heart. This he seeks, this he absolutely requires, and he gains his object. Hence I infer his divinity. Alexander, Cæsar, Hannibal, Louis XIV., with all their genius, failed here. They conquered the world, and had not a friend." "Christ speaks, and at once generations become his by stricter, closer ties than those of blood, by the most sacred, most indispensable, of all unions. He lights up the flame of a love which consumes selflove, which prevails over every other love. In this wonderful power of his will, we recognize the Word that created the world. The founders of other religions, never conceived of this mystical love, which is the essence of Christianity, and is beautifully called charity. Christ's greatest miracle undoubtedly is the reign of charity." At another time, the ex-emperor said to his faithful follower, the Count de Montholon: "Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him."*

From these striking expressions, it it manifest, that the capacious mind which had held in its grasp the immense political relations of Europe, and the world, and had wielded them as with the arm of destiny, that capacious mind had fully taken in the grand conception of the kingly office of Christ! Oh, had this glorious conception but entered and occupied his soul at the time when his dominion stretched from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and from the Vistula to the Channel Seas, how different now would be the lot of the oppressed millions of Europe. They

These extracts are taken from many others of a similar character, contained in a tract translated from the French, and published by the American Tract Society, under special endorsement by the Rev. Dr. G. de Felice, Professor in the Theological Seminary at Montauban, France. It has been before the public for several years, and its statements, so far as we can learn, have never been controverted.