end of freedom in the development, so honorable to man, so evidently the choice of the Most High, has redounded to the praise of God and the benefit of man, in imparting to Christianity a bloom, a buoyancy and a vigor of movement, which no other human activity has ever equaled.

But the end is not yet. The grand consummation will come, of course, when the contents of Scripture are wholly emptied into history, and the Church has wholly appropriated to herself the treasures of her Redeemer's grace and truth. This, however, cannot be realized perfectly on earth. It awaits the trumpet of the Resurrection, when the last enemy of man is vanquished, and the Church, militant for ages, becomes the Church triumphant and jubilant for evermore.

Unhappily for us, this shining reward and issue of all her struggles has faded, in a measure, from the vision of the Church. It was otherwise in the apostolic and earlier ages. An intense faith in the resurrection of the body, as introductory to the full blessedness of the life eternal, was one of the warmest and most rousing stimulants to martyrdom. It ran, indeed, into the grossest Millenarian extravagance; but it raised up a noble army of confessors and heroes. And the time is again coming, when, through a better acquaintance with the now neglected department of Eschatology, and a better appreciation of the whole enterprise of Redemption, as worked by incarnate forces, the earlier experience shall be repeated, though in purer and better forms.

That Christianity is ever perfectly to triumph in this world, either subduing all men to its banner, or any man entirely to its sanctity, we are not permitted to believe. We shall never know fully what the Gospel is, from the partial sway it obtains over earthly believers. The Millennium itself shall end in conflicts and explosions unparalleled before. All that we can realize on earth, and in time, will be an onward movement towards the appointed goal; a gradual taking up into her bosom, on the part of the Church, of the spirit and the doctrine of her Lord. An onward movement, we say; but not necessarily unbroken and without recoil. Not necessarily onward in every moment, and at every point; but onward in the long run and at large. None can tell but that Russia shall be as England, and England

as Rome and Carthage. But this we know, that the banner of the Church shall never trail in the dust for want of some grand and gallant race, be it Teutonic or be it Slavic, to grasp that banner, and bear it aloft, and bear it onward.

This also seems to be clear, that our own land, so long held in reserve, concealed from sight behind the western horizon, is to be the principal theatre of the coming history of the Church, and the citadel from which her mightiest energies shall radiate to conquer the globe. The banner of the Cross, from its first unfolding in Asia, has been moving steadily westward, till at length it has reached the Pacific shore, and now rustles again in the face of Asia upon its eastern side. Here on a continent gigantically fashioned, and jealously guarded for centuries from military or commercial intrusion, Christianity has planted her foot, and lifted her sinewy arm. The gates of the continent, it is true, have in these later days been opened as widely to what is worst, or to what is best, seeking an asylum here from beyond the sea. Commerce has made us prosperous. Prosperity has made us reckless and grasping. The greed of gain has tainted our chivalry; and the wrongs we have done, or winked at, are crying against us to the heavens. And yet there is something imposing in that sense of destiny so characteristic of us as a people; something remarkable in these overrulings of Providence, which have brought us again and again so safely out of all our perils. We cannot, of course, be quite sure in regard to the ultimate purposes of God concerning us. It may be that He will dash us to pieces against our mountains, as a vessel that has failed to answer its gracious end, even as He dashed in pieces the empire of the Cæsars. But the laws of history, and the omens of Providence, are more for us than against us; and, by every token but that of our present ingratitude and blindness, which we may hope will be seasonably corrected. He who is king in Zion doth certainly appear to have elected us for the achievement of his crowning victories.

What the Church of the Future is to be, we may not prognosticate with confidence, but must wait to see. Two points, however, are as clear as anything short of an explicit revelation can render them. One is, that history will not repeat herself by restoring to us the Church of any previous period. No

*

Church behind us is worthy to be restored; neither the Apostolic, nor the Nicene, nor the Medieval, nor the Church of the Reformation. And yet each one of these has something to be commended, suggesting the other point, which is this, that history will be as slow to contradict, as she is to repeat, herself, but will wisely treasure up every harvest, whether of saintly living, or of solid doctrine, which she has ever reaped and garnered.

That a united Christendom is yet in store for us, Greek, Romish, Protestant and every other divisive and partial communion, all overborne and blended into one, can scarcely be doubted, if we but consider the urgency of our Lord's last prayer for his disciples: "That they may all be one, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." That this unity will be not merely of the spirit, but put forth some outward token of itself in visible form, is no carnal dream, but simply a necessity of life itself, which ever unfolds and utters itself incarnate. That this unity will be either Greek, Romish, or Lutheran, finding its rallying centre and nucleus in any existing communion, the laws of history forbid us to believe. Christendom. will not reinstate her early Patriarchs. The sway of the Pope, cast off in the East eight hundred years ago by Constantinople, cast off by Wittemberg three hundred years ago, can never be restored. That any single sect of Protestants, not claiming a jus divinum authority for its faith and order, will mount to this coveted supremacy and leadership, no one of them, we would hope, is quite arrogant enough to dream. And yet the present divisions cry aloud for some reconciling power to make itself felt in Christendom. We honor Calvin for saying, that he would willingly cross seven oceans to bring about the union of the Protestant Churches. Somehow, in God's own hour and way, now hidden from us behind the clouds of a stormy springtime, this glorious summer of Sacred History shall be ushered in. The day is coming when Christian Baptism shall be a

By this is meant, not the Apostles themselves, who were inspired, and consequently are above our criticism, but the Christian communities they gathered, as at Corinth or Colosse, which, in some points, would be very poor models for us.

passport to the Christian Supper in any quarter of the globe; when all who have named the name of Christ shall take each other by the hand, girdling the earth, and filling the heavens with the pealing anthems of their praise.

What precisely will be the polity of this Church of the coming time, we would not be precipitate in saying, or thinking. But if in civil history, as Gervinus has so finely demonstrated, Republics stand at the end of the historic course, the final polity of the Church can hardly be otherwise than Republican; a polity which finds its best expression in the government of the Church by an elective eldership.

As to the theology of the future, while, in its shaping, it cannot be wholly old, in its substance, it cannot be wholly new. The brain of Christendom has not been working these eighteen hundred years in vain. Settlements have been made, and verdicts rendered, which can neither be reversed, nor ignored. The great periods of theological debate have made deposits of doctrine as permanent and solid as the successive strata of geology. There is a doctrine of God in Christ; a doctrine of man apostate; a doctrine of justification by faith alone: these three great triumphs of sacred science, represented by the three great names of Athanasius, Augustine and Calvin, which can never be set aside, or materially modified. Their roots are in God's word, and they have had a growth of centuries in the consciousness of the Universal Church. They answer, if any doctrines ever can, to the famous test of Vincentius Lirinensis:* Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus traditum est.

The points which remain to be debated, are the Church, the Millennium, the Intermediate State, the Resurrection, and the Life Eternal in the New Jerusalem. These points are but lightly touched upon in the New Testament, and have never been adjudicated in the theology of Christendom. They bide their time, and are coming up in their turn. They are, indeed, subordinate points, but not therefore trivial. The doctrines here involved, and eventually to be developed, have hidings of power in them, which are to recruit and animate the Church for her millennial victories.

* A monk on Lirinum, a little island near the S. E. coast of France. He died 450, A. D. His only extant work is the "Commonitorium adversos Haereticos."

Finally, this Church of the Future must, of course, be reformatory; realizing in beneficent acts and institutions the kingdom of God upon earth. Much evil yet remains, if not wholly unrecognized and unrebuked, certainly unsubdued. And something of disorder and evil there must always be. But when we compare India with England; the ninth century with the nineteenth; when we see Western Europe wiped clean of its mediæval slavery, and dotted all over with institutions and agencies of benevolence; and when we feel, on every side of us, the swelling of a tide of moral sentiment, which can tolerate no wrong against any race of men on any continent of the globe, it is plain, that Christianity has already achieved great things in history, and will not rest till the nations are all redeemed.

ARTICLE V.

THE WRITINGS OF NICHOLAS DE CLEMENGIS.

Nicolai de Clemangiis Catalaunensis, Opera Omnia. Lugduni Batavorum. Anno CIC., IC., CXIII.

AMONG the writers, little known and less read, who in the early part of the fifteenth century uttered their protest against the prevalent evils of the Church, and labored assiduously for its reform, historic justice requires that Nicholas de Clemengis, the compeer of Gerson and D'Ailly in the University of Paris, should be allowed an eminent and conspicuous position. As Rector of the University, as Secretary of Benedict XIII., and as a familiar correspondent and intimate friend of many of the most distinguished men of his time, the range of his observation was most extensive, and his acquaintance with the condition of the Church renders him an invaluable witness for those facts in regard to it, which he narrates, and whose sad significance no one better understood or more deeply deplored than himself. Although he lived and died in the communion of the Roman Catholic Church, the writings of John Huss cannot exceed those