nation stir those deeps, can bear aloft a rescued race in its regenerating arms! Call that a tradition, a superstition of the past, which is alive with all the forces of the present to reform evil, to renovate man, to reconstruct society upon the basis of justice, of freedom, and of virtue!

Well enough, will some say, down there at the low level of the African mind, with a sensuous imagination to be wrought upon by its legends and its symbols; but outgrown by the maturity of the Anglo-Saxon with his arts and inventions, his physical science and his political philosophy? But what if the old master of the South had, to-day, that faith in God and that love to Jesus which characterize the just emancipated slave? What if his belief in a just God and an overruling Providence should leaven our political action and our entire social condition? Have we yet outgrown the need of such a virtue and such a justice as the gospel inculcates and provides?

A religion that can inspire the lowliest with hope by inspiring the loftiest with the sentiment of justice; that can teach the weak and suffering to be patient, and the strong to be magnanimous; that can restore humanity from the inbruting degradation of slavery, and reconstruct society from the chaos of war, -a religion that can solve all social, moral, political, and humanitary questions that the wrongs of the past have transmitted, or the spirit of the age has raised, is the religion for this age and for all ages—is the religion for man, and is given him of God.

(4) Christianity alone can meet those spiritual wants of man which are as vital as the soul and as lasting as the race. Science, philanthropy, politics, paramount as they seem to those who make either a specialty, are, after all, but secondary and superficial in view of the compound nature of man, and of the inner and higher life of the soul. These concern themselves with the organization and details of man's outward condition, and with the development of intelligence and sensibility for wise and useful ends, with respect to life as it is. But religion addresses itself to the soul as a

spiritual substance and life, the central part of the man himself, the central force of all material and social organization, and also an integral part in that vast spiritual system, whose centre is God, and whose cycle is eternity. Your mere physicist cries aloud his facts-hard, stubborn facts; your positivist boasts his laws--immutable and inevitable laws; and each would have us bound the universe of thought and being by his discoveries in physical fact, or his determinations of phenomenal laws. But God's universe is not a mere bundle of facts and laws; there are POWERS as well; and the soul is a power over nature, and a maker as well as a subject of law.

"For though the giant ages heave the hill

And break the shore, and evermore

Make and break and work their will;

Though worlds on worlds in myriad myriads roll

Round us, each with different powers,

And other forms of life than ours

What know we greater than the soul?" 1

The facts of consciousness and the laws of moral action are as real as are the mountains, and as much more grand than they as the soul is greater than a stone.

Laboulaye has finely said, that "while physicists, shut up within the material universe, have failed to find God, and have not recognized his. presence in the living laws that govern all things, Moses, in a few words, makes us acquainted with the divine liberty, and with our own; a truth that science does not give, but which our souls feel, and which is the very foundation of religion." 2

Christianity alone fitly recognizes the moral condition and needs of the human soul. No law of development in human nature has outgrown the fearful fact of sin, or antiquated that aboriginal decree of death, that hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Be it that the stars were compressed into shining spheroids by the slow rota

1 Tennyson.

2 Etudes Morales et Politiques, p. 98.

tion of impalpable nebulous rings; my conscience gets no cover from the clouds; it wins no hope from the stars. Be it that man is only the latest development from some primitive monad of existence; still he has that which no antecedent link in the series of being has known - the consciousness of personal guilt. Be it that man had his age of iron, his age of bronze, his age of stone, in a far antiquity; he lives now in an age of sin, and traces that damning mark over all the history of his race. And that fact no physical science, nor metaphysical speculation, nor social philosophy can alter, remove, or even palliate. Christianity alone provides for this one baleful yet characteristic fact of human nature a philosophical and a sufficient remedy. Science, which vainly attempts to evolve from its own facts the mysteries that lie behind them, is utterly helpless and speechless when summoned to the work of restoration in the human soul, where sin has wrecked peace, happiness, hope. Not progress, nor education, nor development is the key to that mystery. Redemption, Redemption is the mys tic word that alone can reach it; and that is not a word or fact of human origin, but is born into the language and the history of the race from above. This makes Christianity as permanent as the race itself.

It stands, then, as true to-day as when Paul uttered it amid Greek philosophy and art, and Roman prowess, letters, and luxury, that a true civilization is to be attained, a true humanity developed, a golden age of light and love to be restored, through the preaching of Jesus Christ to all nations "for the obedience of faith." They who are called to preach the Gospel should have the utmost confidence in its efficaciousness for overcoming all evil, and ensuring all good, while the world shall stand. They should learn not to fear philosophy, but to frame it to their use; not to shrink from the criticism of the Bible, but to employ this for the exposition and the defense of the Christian faith; not to stand aghast at science as a foe to revelation, but to wring from science new proofs of a personal God, to whom

that which for us is supernatural in the government of the world, is but the natural outgoing of his power and love. And being thus trained to an intelligent freedom under the laws of systematic truth, instead of running behind the breastworks at every alarm, the preacher of the gospel will rightly measure the strength and resources of the enemy, and will meet and rout him upon every field.

It is time that we had done with the apologetics of Christianity and had better proved its dynamics. Believing in the gospel as the divine religion for all time, the Christian church should go forth to the conquest of the world, and "fight it out on this line." Abandoning the defensive for the aggressive, holding ever to the right and the duty of a world-conquest for Christ, she should turn the very fortresses of error into pivots for the truth to swing round upon, while "by the left flank forward," she marches to the final victory. In the confidence of this gospel, and in the living faith and love of it, she should preach it in centres of culture and of criticism, of a sceptical sensualism, and a scientific pantheism. In the confidence of this gospel the church should seek to re-create society in the disorganized wastes of the Sonth, to establish a Christian order and beauty in the growing empire of the West. In the confi dence of this gospel she should go to humanize the barba rian tribes of Africa; and to purify and ennoble the traditional civilization of the East; go to elevate and save mankind by subduing them to the cross of Christ, and cease not from labor or from hope till God shall bring all nations unto the obedience of faith. And "to Him that is of power to establish us according to his gospel, to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen."

ARTICLE IV.

HISTORICAL STUDIES IN COLLEGE,

THEIR DEGREE OF IMPORTANCE, AND THE BEST WAY OF CONDUCTING THEM.1

BY REV. B. SEARS, D.D., PRESIDENT OF BROWN UNIVERSITY.

By history we understand a faithful record of the progress of society, or of the course of events affecting society, viewed in their relation to each other as causes and effects. Facts taken out of their relation to each other, and represented as so many units, are untrue to nature, and consequently are untrue to history. Chronicles merely furnish the materials of history. Descriptive history, though destitute of the philosophical element pertaining to this study, if it be a faithful narrative of events in their natural order, may give lessons of political wisdom, and be justly entitled to the dignity it claims; but it is not the most instructive form of history. Its object is entertainment rather than instruction; and it may be very useful to the young, by attracting them to the study, and preparing them for more solid productions when their minds shall become mature, or to the uneducated in general, by giving for their leisure hours a healthier recreation than is furnished by popular writers of fiction.

As has been already intimated, a nation that makes no progress has no history. When a barbarous people, like the ancient Germans. emerge from obscurity, and step into the rank of civilized nations, there is a history that can be recorded. They have permanent abodes. They begin the arts of life. Society is organized. There is a division of labor. The different orders of society enter into complex relations with each other, in which their interests are har

1 The outlines of this Article were read before the Association of College Officers at their meeting held in New Haven, Nov. 1 and 2, 1864.