Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by

WARREN F. DRAPER,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

THE

PRACTICAL ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY.

DIVINE revelation may be regarded either as a body of truths for intellectual inquiry and admiration, or as a collection of rules and motives for the guidance of human life. These two aspects run into each other, but may be properly conceived of and spoken of separately. For its contemplative uses, religion cannot be too greatly esteemed and respected. Its lessons and influences, however, for this real, acting world, where we spend the preparatory portion of our being, are more immediately important and indispensable.

It is the happy feature of our time, that religion, like science, has left her cloistered retreats and her abstruse speculations, and passed into the earnest, matter-of-fact concerns of mankind. This decided assumption of the practical on the part of religion, marks the present as a signal era, in her aggressive movements toward the conquest of the world. This was to have been unhesitatingly looked for by all the pious students of the Divine character. A visible and effective industry is a distinguishing attribute of the great Author of Christianity. Said Christ: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” This, that is, the Divine ex

ample, is the great principle of the universe. Christianity without practical bearings would have been an anomaly and a contradiction in the Divine dispensations.

We proceed to consider the fact and the advantages of a practical character in Christianity.

I. First, the fact of such a practical character.

One proof of this may be found in the mission itself which religion is to fulfil in the world. That mission is, in brief terms, to carry light, purity, happiness, to the entire family of man. Its great work in this universal sphere is to wake all the immense tract of intellect that slumbers in the nations; to purify all the moral spirit that heaves and glows underneath it; to effect an intellectual and moral creation striking and illustrious like that of the six days of Omnipotence in the beginning. There is included, it is perceived, in such an immense accomplishment, a mission into every heart of a thousand millions, a mission into every such heart, as a place of evil spirits to cast them out, as a place of death to raise the dead, as a place vacant of all moral goodness to settle a family of affections fit for heaven. Such a mission to all that dwell on the face of the earth, a mission charged with such social, intellectual, and moral regenerations, leaves no doubt of the character of religion being that of a great practical instrumentality.

A glance at the almost insuperable difficulties to be overcome in effecting the meliorating religious changes indicated, will serve further to establish the practical nature of Christianity. The contentedness of ignorance with its own darkness; the depth of moral corruption; the inveteracy of human prejudice; the tendency of men to fatal forms of error; - these present obstacles and resistances which nothing but an agency most practical can remove. What pains and prayers and incessant persuasions are required to

train one child to virtue! What practical power, then, is wanted to enter a world and cleanse all human thought, all human feeling, all human action! It is to be remembered that the world, besides being purified, is to be kept clean. Each thirty years presents another thousand millions for the action of Christianity. It has the same great regenerations to effect for each successive generation down to the end of the world. Religion, in order to such a vast and continued accomplishment, must be a perpetual as well as an immense activity.

The practical element in the system of Divine ethics appears in the prominence which it gives to the individual as a responsible actor.

Pantheism absorbs man in the Deity. God, according to this form of atheism, is the immense ocean including all existence; man is a single drop of the grand universal mass, undistinguishable and irresponsible. Other forms of infidelity extinguish all but a single point of man's existence, by cutting off all of it lying beyond death, thus robbing him of immortality. To a being thus narrowed to a hand-breadth, action or inaction, industry or indolence, have but a slender importance. The Socialists are in danger of sinking and paralyzing the individual by lodging in a community nearly all his independent motives and responsibilities.

In all society constructed under despotisms, monarchies, titled aristocracies, the individual is generalized and much obscured in a great amalgamation known as the national character, will, government. In respect to all private interests, as well as public, the visible organ of authority, the representative of the empire, speaks, arranges, decides; the individual is scarcely known, consulted, cared for. Like one of the boxes or packages of a ship's cargo, he goes VOL. XXVI. - NO. 286.

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with the rest and partakes of the general destiny, not of his own will or wisdom, but simply because he chanced to be stowed away in the hold along with the common mass. Religion contemplates specially our. individuality. It clusters upon man a large family of individual duties. It does not overlook his relations to society, nor remit or diminish one claim resting upon him to mingle and move with the mass of the community. But here, in this his social position, where he is wont to be counted, not as a whole, but as a small augmentation of a whole, as an infinitesimal of the common mass of public feeling, public opinion, public influence, even here religion follows out her element, her commingled drop, arrests it, and legislates for it as a unit, an isolation! She invests her individual with full, undivided responsibility. She never permits him to merge himself with his fellows, corporate or non-corporate; she never permits a single particle of his conscience to be yielded up on his entering any fraternity; she never permits one item of service to be withheld on the plea that copartners are under equal obligation to perform it; she proposes to bestow her full glorious rewards on him singly, if he singly be worthy; she proposes all her woes to him singly, if singly he be unworthy. By thus separating men from masses and amalgamations, by thus setting down each man apart and constituting him an entirety accountably to breathe, to think, to desire, to will, to act, to attain, religion holds an influence in producing human activity of vast and incalculable power. Left with none to depend on but himself, he must act, or gain nothing, he must act, or lose every thing. No man has an oarsman to push him while he is asleep. He must up and strike for himself; lustily and alone must stem the tide, or be swept on hopelessly into uselessness, ruin, and oblivion. The associated fact, ever recognized in the Scrip