peace offered them by their nominal Christian. invaders and conquerors. And whole regiments of troops were self-baptized and admitted to the church, standing in rivers where the water was breast deep, some priest or bishop reading the appropriate ceremonial service on the bank. The religion of peace and good will was nominally extended through central Europe at the point of the sword. Large numbers of Jews in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries received the faith of the Gospel as the only alternative except death. In Spain and Gaul multitudes were dragged into the churches and baptized by compulsion and violence. Our Saxon ancestors were converted by Charlemagne, when, exhausted and overborne by his victorious. arms, they chose to confess Christ rather than be made slaves, as was proposed; and for this wonderful service to the church this blood-thirsty marauder was canonized and enrolled in the category of renowned saints. For hundreds of years this work went on; this involuntary, compelled admission into the so-called Christian church of men who knew nothing and cared nothing for the pure religion of the Master, being addicted to all manner of iniquity and corruption; monsters oftentimes of cruelty and shamelessness. By fear and force were incalculable numbers brought into the so-called fold of the good Shepherd; by fear and force was every form of free, intelligent, humane thought, outside of the established confessions, suppressed and kept in abeyance. Anathemas, pains, and penalties; the racks and tortures of the inquisition; the dungeon, the gibbet,

and the stake; the horrid accouterments, enginery, and ferocious blood-hounds of war; threats of purgatorial and endless burnings in the world to come ; all these representatives and instrumentalities of terror and violence were marshalled for service and employed to promote the strength, growth, permanency, and triumph of the church - pretensedly to extend, establish, and glorify the kingdom of the meek and lowly Jesus on the earth.

The Protestant Reformation, notwithstanding all the good it had in its keeping for mankind, did not wholly disenchant the minds of its devotees of the sophistry with which Romanized Christendom in the previous centuries had been beguiled in this regard. The degrading sentiment of fear has been made to play an important part in the development and diffusion of Protestant principles and ideas, and especially in gaining accessions to church membership and in multiplying and extending church activities in different portions of the globe; notably the fear of divine vengeance and of everlasting torments in a future state of being. By an appeal to this sentiment, good in its place and of great value when rightly used, has religious liberty often been smothered or greatly circumscribed, the deductions of reason have been disparaged or ignored, the purest, noblest intuitions of the immortal mind and the divinest impulses of the undying human soul been discredited and disallowed, and the human will itself, the God-endowed rudder of man's life and the arbiter of his fate, put under unwholesome restraint or diverted from its chosen purpose.

Nor is the church of Protestantdom by any means delivered from the homage of brute force, as represented in military establishments and in civil government based on the war power, to be called into exercise in extreme cases. Even in countries like

our own, where church and state have been legally divorced, the church feels hardly secure in its rights and prerogatives, and hardly competent to carry on its work and execute its plans, without placing itself under the sheltering care of the body politic and claiming the privilege of falling back on the state and its reserved martial force to enable it to obtain money for its maintenance, to punish more contumacious offenders, and protect its sanctuaries, its altars, and its communion plate from all invasion. And not infrequently does the church lend its hearty sanction and support, its eulogies and its prayers to the civil government, as a return for favors received, in its preservation of barbarous customs and vindictive punishments, and in its prosecution of wars waged ostensibly in the interests of humanity and for the extension of the realm of Christian (?) civilization. But we may rejoice that the reign of fear and force is essentially weakened, that the unholy league between church and state has been measurably dissolved, and that present tendencies seem to furnish ground for hope that a century more of progress will probably either bring the great body of the church back to the personal freedom and voluntary policy of the time of Christ or cause a considerable portion of that body to organize anew on a basis which shall be pre-eminently

distinguished by that most important and Christlike characteristic.

3. The approaching regenerate church fashioned after the pattern given us in the New Testament will not only be free from the compulsory features just noticed-free from the domination of fear and force and from the embarrassments and hindrances growing out of ecclesiastical complicity with swordsustained governments, but also free from all traditionary notions of birthright membership on the one hand and of vindictive, damnatory excommunication on the other. The voluntary system as a system founded in wisdom and commended to the favor and support of intelligent people implies. power of reflection, of reasoning, of deliberate judgment, as well as of uncompelled choice on the part of those to whom it makes its appeal and by whom it is to be adopted as a method of organized activity or form of associate life. Now an infant or a child of immature years is clearly incapable of intelligent thought, of careful reasoning, of sound judgment, and therefore unfitted both on intellectual and moral grounds for full-fledged and responsible membership in the Christian church. The enrollment of such on its register is only nominal, a matter of numbers, and not vital, adding to the real growth and effective power of the body ecclesiastic. It is rather a source of weakness than of strength to that body; it makes it seem in appearance what it is not in fact. A church made up entirely of such members would be of no account as a living, working body, as an institution having

in itself inherent and reserved power to resist and overcome the evil of the world, or to promote and perpetuate the good. The unwisdom of incorporating such elements into it is therefore manifest.

And on the other hand persons within the pale of church membership finding themselves out of accord with the mass of their associates, either in opinion, in moral attainment, or in spiritual experience, and so realizing that they are not in their proper place and sphere, should be permitted to withdraw without alienation of feeling or bitterness of spirit on the part of any one concerned. And certainly any one departing who bears no taint of immorality and displays no evidences of an unchristian spirit or purpose should not be followed by denunciation, contumely, and abuse, but be allowed to go in peace and all kindliness; obeying the dictates of his own judgment and conscience, forming such alliances as may please him, and serving his Maker and his fellowmen in ways and by methods and under auspices which he honestly. thinks and believes promise more and better than those he leaves behind for the advancement of divine truth, of the cause of Christ, of the kingdom of God.

In this way a wholesome and adequate discipline can be maintained within the membership without offence to Christian principles and the Christian spirit, while individual independence, liberty, and responsibility, freedom of opinion and of speech, will be respected and encouraged and the realm of knowledge upon sacred themes and interests will