CHAPTER XXIX.

THE CHURCH FOUND.

THE rest of the story may be soon told. A voyage I would not make again for a universe of gold was now at an end. I would not be again among those rocks, again upon those shoals which reason is allowed to fathom, again in those currents that glide rapidly but imperceptibly along, again perilled in those collisions with barks as well-constructed and well-manned as mine, again lost in the ice of chilling speculation, again circling in the verge of the German maelstrom, again steering by the lights of wandering stars, again trusting to the reckonings of my private judgment for my place and bearings, again in the vessel which had been split in a hundred storms, and had lent its fragments to be reconstructed into things more frail and perishable still-again in such a bark, on such a sea, at such a time, for all the wealth omnipotence could create. On this sea I was born; but the voyage was now over. Land spread out its wide, bright coasts before me. Land! Land! Columbus and his men knew nothing of the joy! And I had now but to leap from a sea of uncertainty, and division, and chaos, and change, upon the terra firma of unities and harmonies, of certainties and perpetuities.

But duties involving principles and results of any mag nitude, are nearly always, in Christian experience, embarrassed with influences seemingly intended to delay or defeat

their accomplishment; although, in fact, only permitted to confirm the genuineness of a true and earnest conviction. So it was in the present instance. Considerations innumerable now sought a final hearing, to hold me back from acting under the light which God had been pleased to throw into my path. It was a conflict I cannot describe. I only know it was terrific. I can hardly imagine that it would have cost him, who boasted that he would, alone, overthrow the religion that it required twelve men to establish; or him, who labored to impose upon the world the sophism that no amount of testimony could establish the truth of a miracle; a greater sacrifice of intellectual pride, to have made, with the Ephesians, a bonfire of his books, and to have done homage to the majesty of revelation: than it cost me to publish my adhesion to the faith which I had pitied as superannuated, by virtue of the very antiquity of which it boasted; and which I had despised for its unaccommodating temper, by virtue of the petrified, unbending form in which it gloried as the perpetual representative of "the everlasting gospel." Fast as my hours went by, reasons on reasons crowded to my thoughts, why it would be better to abandon, or at least delay, the final step. The fountains of the deep within me were broken up, and the billows went over my soul. But He, whose goodness is equal to His power, comforted my heart, as He covered my head, in the day of battle.

Something called "flesh and blood" said in my ear, "The mother that bare thee fell asleep, after a blameless life, in the assurance of a blessed resurrection: and thou wouldst cast dishonor on her dust, and suspicion on her faith!" Not So, I said; I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel. But if Catholicity be true, the dead know it; and my departed ones behold it in the order of the heavenly hierarchies, and the unities and harmonies of the material and moral universe; and it is joining myself again to their company, to embrace

the convictions that they have reached, and the hierarchy on the earth ordained first in the Mosaic tabernacle “after the pattern of the heavenly."

"Go," said this voice again, "go first, and bury thy father, and do not, by abandoning his faith, bring down his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave." I do not abandon his faith, I said, but the securities on which it rests I abandon; for, although my father has stood so far from the precipice as hardly to discern it, yet a thousand thousand of his brethren have ventured to the verge and fallen. No, I abandon not the faith of my fathers; but the schism that has been almost everywhere fatal to that faith, I abandon and abhor. I do not abandon that faith; but where that faith has turned to reason, and is no more faith, I give it to the winds. I do not abandon that faith; but the vacancies around it and the sands beneath it, I replace and fill with the foundations and proportions of antiquity. "You are about," said a private letter from an eminent divine well known to the Episcopal church, “You are about to unchurch and give over to a sort of surreptitious, left-handed mercy of God, your father, your former brethren, and the largest portion of Protestant Christendom." The very day this letter was received, my venerable father, three hundred miles away, wrote in a letter intended for my eye, "With regard to — -'s removal to another branch of Christ's Church, it has no objection from me, but on the contrary my cordial acquiescence; as I trust and believe he is acting in the matter according to his best judgment, and the dictates of his conscience; and I sincerely pray that he may be eminently useful in the new ecclesiastical connection.”

"But why," said a strong man armed who came to me, 'why do you leave a body which even scribes and priests of Episcopacy acknowledge, with a slight qualification, to be a true branch of Christ's Church?" I answered, "If Esau despise his birthright, then shall I be the Jacob to inherit his

blessing; and if the children loathe their bread, then shall I be the dog to eat the crumbs from their table."

Besides the great and real conflict that was passing within me, one, who loved me once, suggested that it could not surely be the gewgaws of a ritual worship that had drawn me over. Even the letter from the divine who expressed his solicitude for my father's fate, acknowledged "If your change were a mere matter of taste, a mere preference for forms and robes, &c., &c., while I might lament over the weakness which such a change would betray, I would be far from charging it with the arrogance and heresy of the fashionable high-church, papistical Oxfordisms of the day."

Another, who was my fellow and my friend, was afraid that some in the church would suspect me of having left my "evangelicalism" behind me, and others of having brought my puritanism with me, and that, between the fires, I should be subjected to a roasting. And to another who hoped, with a patronizing air, that I would not be a high-churchman, I said, If I be a churchman at all, I must cease to be a Puritan ; I have been a high-church Presbyterian; I shall probably be a high-church Episcopalian; else why should I not continue as I am? Whatever system I embrace, I must hold it in its highest conservatism, as the truth and institution of Christ. To instance a single fact:-as a Presbyterian, I had many a time said, that I could never have been satisfied with Congregational ordination, nor did I ever allow a minister so ordained to aid me in the ministration of the sacraments, nor did I ever receive communion from a person so ordained; and it was the Congregational admixture, and consequent corruption of a Presbyterian ordination (delivered, as I had held, by succession from the apostles) that first shook my confidence in Presbyterian orders in general, long before I doubted the validity of my own; for my own I could trace through a Presbyterial succession.

And, yet once more, it was suggested by a friend, that I could not expect to reach, in the Episcopal Church, the position I had earned in the Presbyterian. I already occupied a post sufficiently lucrative. A new pastoral situation was offered me, with emoluments not exceeded by any in the Presbyterian church. And yet another office, of Missionary supervision over the southern portion of the church, was within my reach; and yet another, that would have given me easy duty, and opportunity of travel in every corner of Europe and the East, besides the probable acquisition of a post of repose and dignity in a literary institution. Some one of these proposals I should certainly have accepted, but for a sense of honor that would not suffer me to do so, until my mind should be settled on the questions that disturbed it. It was the same feeling that prevented my acceptance of a considerable sum of money, most kindly presented me during my above-mentioned illness, by my former companion and brethren. Things such as these I should long ago have forgotten, except that I know there are minds weak enough and censorious enough (for the two infirmities go commonly together) to suppose that loaves and fishes can influence the faith of a truth-loving mind. As a Presbyterian, I was never in the receipt of less than two thousand a year; as a Churchman, I have been sometimes content with four hundred, and have never sought or desired emolument or power.

Meanwhile the truth was mighty. Magna est veritas had been, before, a rhetorical or philosophical flourish: but now I felt its power. Intellectual pride; hereditary prejudices; local and personal influences without number; friends, foes, earth, time, fame, family, all were compelled to do it homage. I could no more arrest the progress of conviction, than I could stay the marches of the sun in heaven. Having rid myself of all other relations and ties in the Presbyterian communion, that I might glide out of it as inoffensively as possible, I re