CHAPTER XIV.

A UNITY POSSIBLE.

STILL I sighed for unity. And I could sometimes see the bosom of my brethren swelling with the same emotion. A deep-seated conscience will cling to an idol that hath horns and hoofs, rather than be driven from its dim ideas of a God and of His worship. The inborn love of immortality, in the absence of the true idea, will picture its elysiums and its sensual harems sooner than quench the spark that thus flies upward from the heart. The heaven-born aspiration after Unity may be excused for seeking, in like manner, in the absence of the holy reality, to make up its loss by Articles, Associations, Alliances, Societies, Anniversaries, and Platforms, covering up with gauze the ugly disagreements of a hundred schisms;— the hearts of all parties appearing to warm and melt toward each other on a certain day in the year, as the blood of Saint Januarius is said to warm and liquefy in the vial before the eyes of the believers in Naples, as often as the martyr's anniversary returns. But it is no more like the beauty of Unity, than the ugly caricature which children draw of shadows on the wall is like the human face divine. As Frederick the First is said to have amused himself, during fits of the gout, in painting likenesses of his grenadiers; and if the picture did not happen to resemble the grenadier, Frederick painted the grenadier to the colors of the picture: so the sects, unable to pre

sent the world with a portrait of Unity," that the world may believe," first disfigure the idea of Unity, and then paint over the face of schism, with its rents and scars more numerous than grenadier of a hundred fights could count, and ask the world to behold and admire the likeness! No, no; a temperance society, or tract society, was not the Unity for which my heart was breaking! I could see under the platform that there was a vacancy and hollowness; and the shout of an anniversary could not cause me to forget that it was a truce, and not a peace; a farce, and not a fact.* And as these got-up substitutes do not fill the heart, the resolution of Unity into an ethereal, invisible, spiritual, vaporous feeling, only serves to tantalize: like dissolving views under the combined agencies of magic lanterns, which amuse for the hour and pass away for ever. The invention is the invention of a camera obscura, and is resorted to only where the lights are extin guished, and the soul is dark.

"Now, noble dame, perchance you ask,
How these two hostile armies met,
Deeming it were no easy task

To keep the truce which here was set,
Where martial spirits all on fire,
Breathed only blood and mortal ire.
By mutual inroads, mutual blows,

By habit and by conscience foes,
They met on Teviot's strand;

They met, and sate them mingled down,
Without a threat, without a frown,

As brothers meet in foreign land.

The hands, the spear that lately grasped,

Still in the mailed gauntlet clasped,

Were interchanged in greetings dear.
Yet be it known,

Had bugles blown,

Or signs of war been seen,

Those bands so fair together ranged,

Had dyed with gore the green.

"Twixt truce and war such sudden change

Was not unfrequent, nor deemed strange
In the old Border-day."

Lay of the Last Minstrel.

I confess that on this great subject my soul was dark. For years of my Presbyterian ministry, like many of my brethren, I would have nothing to do with anniversaries and platforms. Are you opposed to these societies? Why do we never see you on the platform? or hear you among the speakers? or find you preaching in their cause ?-were questions that gave me pain for years. I could not bear to tread over the hollow sepulchre that a platform covered ;-beautiful without, but full within of hypocrisy and strife. I avoided the unions, because I contended for Unity. To me all this was like throwing so much dust into the ocean, to restore the Atlantis that may once have bound the continents together. The Atlantis of the ancients is gone! And until it be restored, the floating seaweed will not tempt prudent men to tread upon the treacherous flooring.

I panted for a Unity-real, manly, visible, efficient-a unity that the world might see; in order, as the Mediator prays, "that the world might believe." I asked the watchmen that went about the city: "Can you tell me where unity dwelleth? and which is the way to the house thereof? Rome saith, It is not with me; and Geneva saith, It is not with me. Is it then hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air?" This I could not believe; for the idea of Unity shadowed on my heart, like that of God and Immortality and Heaven, must be referable to a substance or reality somewhere to be found: and Scripture and Antiquity said, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears. God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them." In the times of old, the Church was One; her creed was One; her government was One. We have seen who violated this unity: first Rome, then Geneva. But who has preserved the deposit intact? Is there anywhere a Church, still clinging to the creed and the discipline

of those happy times, and beckoning the world back to unity again? O thou Guide of the wandering, show me the way!

Now Presbyterians, and even ingenuous Romanists, admit that the orders and sacraments of the Episcopal Church are at least so far valid as to be of themselves no barrier to Unity. If Pius the Ninth were of the same disposition with Pius the Fifth, he would acknowledge that Church to-morrow, with her creeds, her liturgies, her ministry, and her sacraments, as they are provided only that she would bow her neck to his supremacy. Yet Romanism and Presbyterianism are agreed in getting rid of the restraints of the Episcopacy: the former, by the usurpation of the Popes; the latter, by the usurpation of the Presbyters. Both agree in nullifying the Episcopacy, while both concede the validity of its functions. Both acknowledge the creed of the Episcopal Church, while both have. as singularly added the local adjudications of Trent and Westminster.

What is the creed of the Episcopal Church? "I believe in God, the Father Almighty," &c. It may all be written in less than twenty such lines as are now passing under the reader's eyes. It is called, and has been called from the be ginning, "THE APOSTLES' CREED.". There are reasons to think that it came from the Apostles' hands. It bears internal evidence that its framers were under a restraint of inspiration. It can hardly be imagined as within the range of possibility, that uninspired men should have been content with making such a creed as that. It can scarcely be conceived that the Apostles, while the New Testament was not yet written, would have left their converts in all lands without a summary or outline of their faith. Besides, the earliest fathers ascribe it to the Apostles. And wherever the Apostles or their helpers travelled, from Syria in the East, to England in the West, and away in Africa itself, this creed was known as the faith transmitted from the Apostles "from the beginning." It was

known in Churches where the Bible itself was not known. It existed, in fact, more than two centuries before the books of the New Testament were collected, examined, and received. Irenæus, the companion of Polycarp the disciple of St. John, after quoting this creed, declares: "This preaching and this faith the Church, scattered throughout the whole world, guards as carefully as if she dwelt in one house, believes as if she had but one soul, and proclaims, teaches, and perpetuates, as if she had but one mouth." The fathers that quote the New Testament as a collected and acknowledged symbol, belong to the fourth and the subsequent centuries; but the fathers that quote the Apostles' Creed belong to the second, and were born even in the first. And even then it was spoken of as the faith that they had been taught in childhood, and as the faith from the beginning. The Church hands it down to us, and tells us it is the faith dictated by the Apostles; just as it hands us the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles, and tells us that, although not written by Apostles, they were written under the eyes and dictation of Apostles. If we reject one, we may reject all. There was, then, a creed in the second century, known as universal, found everywhere, recited alike in all subsequent time, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and even in the earliest age spoken of as the faith from the beginning; and it kept the Church at unity, through all its storms of fire and of blood, three hundred years.

Where is the heavenly pearl? Is it lost or mislaid in the archives of the Vatican? Is it so buried under the rubbish of centuries that it cannot be found? No; there is a Church in America and England, on both the continents, and in a hundred isles, that can say with Irenæus in the second century, "This preaching and this faith the Church, scattered throughout the whole world, guards as carefully as if she dwelt in one house, believes as if she had but one soul, and proclaims, teaches, and perpetuates, as if she had but one mouth."