never struck me before it ought to be looked into ; indeed it ought." This was enough; the Methodist preacher was a man of some influence in his denomination, and the prospect of having a member of Congress who would advocate their claims to the same distinction as other religious denominations had enjoyed, secured for Mr. Livingston all the Methodist votes, in addition to those he had had before, and enabled him to carry the election. When a Baptist preacher, however, presuming on the number and influence of the Baptists in one of the Western States, proposed himself either as governor of the State or as member of Congress, his own denomination, perceiving the incongruity of the thing, set their faces against him. In short, although Church and State are separated in the United States, it is nevertheless the fact, that the Church has a still more direct and powerful influence upon the State in America than it has even in England. In such circumstances, it is evidently desirable for both Church and State that there should be a balance of power preserved throughout the Union, and that no one denomination should absorb all the rest.

According to the American Almanac for 1840 the whole number of the ministers of religion, of all denominations, in the United States, amounts to 15,763. From my own knowledge, however, as to particular denominations, I have reason to believe that this statement is considerably under the truth; and that, taking into account those really efficient bodies of men, the local preachers of the Methodists, the preaching elders of the Baptists, and the evangelists of other denominations, the whole number of men employed at this moment throughout the United States, in preaching the gospel, is not fewer than 20,000. This, however, is not my estimate, but that of the Rev. Dr. Robert Breckinridge, of Baltimore. This number, for a population of 17,500,000, the estimated amount of the

whole population of the United States at the present moment, would give one preacher for every 875 persons in the Union; but taking the number of ministers of religion even at 15,000, which is certainly under the truth, the proportion is one minister for every 1166 persons in the United States. This is surely no scanty allowance for the Voluntary System. It must be confessed, indeed, that the proportion of these ministers in the Far West is still much too scanty for the thinly scattered population; but what established Church, I ask, in Christendom, could make adequate provision for the religious instruction of not fewer than five millions of people rising up, as if from the earth, in the course of a single life-time, over a country as extensive as the half of all Europe? In such circumstances the wonder is not that so little, but that so much, has been already accomplished.

CHAPTER VIII.

UNITARIANISM IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE Rev. Dr. Witherspoon, President of New Jersey College during the first American war, observes in the Preface to his Characteristics-a work which was written about seventy years after the Revolution of 1688, and was intended as a picture of the church in North Britain in the middle of last century-that there is no instance in the history of the Christian church since the apostolic age, in which it ever enjoyed so long a period as seventy years of outward peace, without becoming either exceedingly corrupt on the one hand, or heretical on the other. It is not my intention to inquire whether the additional period of seventy years of outward peace, which the British churches have experienced since the days of Dr. Witherspoon, has either increased or diminished their corruption; although it must be confessed that the feeling of satisfaction with their own condition, which universally pervades the British churches of the present day, and is uniformly exhibited at all Religious Meetings, whether of Churchmen or Dissenters, is but a questionable indication of their real state, and has something in it of a Laodicean aspect.

After the famous revival in New England, so minutely described by the celebrated Jonathan Edwards, there appears to have been a strong re-action in that part of America, accompanied with a gradual relaxation of the

ancient discipline of the Puritans.* The Revolutionary War succeeded, opening the way for the influx of French men and French principles into the United States; and the preaching of the celebrated Dr. Priestley, at Philadelphia, at length planted Unitarianism in the Middle States of America. The congregation formed by Dr. Priestley was small, and consisted chiefly of literary men and philosophers; and it is a singular fact, that it has never increased much beyond its original number to the present day. I have already observed that the King's Chapel, an Episcopal Church in Boston, was the first church of any communion that openly avowed Unitarianism in the United States. This event took place in the year 1785, immediately after the War. The heresy was in the meantime taking root in various quarters, and particularly in Harvard University, which was then the principal college both for general literature and for divinity in New England. The fountain being thus poisoned, it was a necessary consequence that the streams it supplied should diffuse that poison over the land ; and we find accordingly that it was principally in the State of Massachusetts, in which Harvard University is situated, and of which the clergy were almost universally educated in that Institution, that the heresy was diffused.

As water may be cooled down in a still atmosphere many degrees below the freezing point before it passes into the state of ice, so may Christian theology be gradually cooled down, in a peaceful and undisturbed state of the Christian church, many degrees below the freezing point, before it becomes congealed into the solid ice of Unitarianism. The first appointment in

*In the churches of Salem-one of the present strongholds of Unitarianism in America-an arrangement, significantly designated The Half-way Covenant, was introduced before the middle of last century, by which church-privileges were granted to those who were unwilling to go the whole way of the old discipline.

the University of Harvard that aroused the attention of the Christian public in New England, was that of the Rev. Dr. Ware to the professorship of divinity, in the year 1804. On that occasion, the late Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D., a distinguished New England clergyman of his day, and the author of several literary works of merit, broadly accused Dr. Ware of holding heretical opinions relative to the person and office of Christ, and accordingly reprobated his appointment in the strongest terms. This charge was indignantly repelled by the Unitarians of the day as a slanderous and most unfounded accusation; the orthodox Trinitarian standards, which Dr. Ware and all the rest of them had signed, were triumphantly appealed to as a convincing proof of their soundness in the faith-for it is a grand absurdity to suppose that the mere orthodoxy of its standards can preserve a church from heresy—and the hue and cry of bigotry, fanaticism, and persecution was raised against Dr. Morse, and proved successful for the time in putting him down.

It will, doubtless, be alleged, that it is a serious charge to prefer against Dr. Ware and his coadjutors, that they had been guilty of subscribing articles of faith which they did not believe. But as the modern Unitarians of the United States claim Dr. Ware and his brethren, and various others who had gone before them in Harvard University, as the apostles and patriarchs of Unitarianism in America, I merely receive the fact on their authority; believing they are perfectly in the right in the catalogue they give of their worthies, and leaving it with themselves to reconcile this fact as they best can with the solemn professions and reiterated subscriptions of Dr. Ware and his brethren. In short, the whole history of Unitarianism in America is a history of intrigue and concealment; the Unitarian minister never spoke out till, by gradually cooling down the theology of his church to the freezing point, he had gained over