ward adjustments, and lead to immediate social convulsions. We can imagine, for example, what violence and disorder Christianity would have introduced into the commonest relations of Life, if, with a cold and hard exclusiveness, it had insisted on an immediate and complete harmony in all outward things with the final results of its own principles; if, instead of planting a new sentiment in the heart, the seed of future change, and leaving it to work outwards, as it acquired fulness and strength within, it had commenced by enforcing the external Reformation; if it had openly denounced consecrated observances, instead of gradually purifying the inward feelings from which their life was derived; if it had commanded the Slave to assert his Freedom, and by physical resistance make good the spiritual claim;- if it had entered into the delicate and intricate relations of domestic life, and, regardless of the sacredness of existing bonds and affections, however theoretically imperfect, insisted on an immediate and forcible adjustment of all private connections in harmony with the purest realizations of Christian sentiment. God had provided, indeed, against the confusion that would in this way have been created, by bringing the various nations of the world. nearly to a moral level, when the Fulness of Time was come, so that the divine light of the Gospel fell with a remarkable uniformity of impression on the varied heart of Man,—and by meeting the diversities and conflicts of moral sentiment that were produced by that suddenness of illumination, even within the Church itself, with the healing spirit, the large

wisdom, that flowed out of the heart of Christ, and that so eminently guided the administration of the great Apostle who was the principal agent in the establishment of his Kingdom. In more modern times, the history of Christianity has not been without exemplifications of the disorder created by violent attempts to remodel the outward life, before the Christian sentiment had taken possession of the inward springs of action. By the operation of Christian Missionaries a state of circumstances has been produced, that has no parallel in the times of the primitive Church: the highest and the lowest grades of civilization have been brought suddenly into moral intercourse,—and, instead of the patient heart, and spiritual eye, of Christ and Paul, there have too often been the formalism, the outward exactingness, of a precisian and a zealot. No cause of failure appears more prominent in the still noble history of Missionary effort, than an unyielding demand for violent changes in the habits of social life, a hard enforcement of the outward realizations of Christianity before they could be the natural fruits of Christian sentiment,*- an attempt to subdue the sacredness of Nature in the savage heart by the power of

* A horrid, yet ludicrous, instance presents itself in the Paper of the day on which I was revising the MS. of this page:

Polygamy prevails in New Zealand, and a Chief with ten wives was told that he could not be baptized, unless he confined himself to one. At the end of about two months he repaired to the nearest Missionary, and stated that he had got rid of nine. 'What have you done with them?' was the natural interrogatory. 'I have eaten them,' was the unhesitating reply."-LECTURE by Lord JOHN MANNERS, Inquirer Newspaper, Feb. 1, 1851.

an outward Law, a cause of failure that could never have come into operation, if the spiritual and catholic mind of Christ, his supreme regard for the smallest seeds of Life in the soul, the grains of living Faith, had been more profoundly sympathized with, or if the example had been followed, of "the Planting and Training of the Christian Church" by the great Apostle.

We have in these chapters remarkable examples of the practical wisdom of St. Paul;- and that not the wisdom of tact, nor of skilful address in the management of difficulties, but the wisdom of a large and noble Nature, careful only that the principles of the Christian life should take root in the heart of the world, and undisturbed by small and unspiritual uneasiness about the external diversities, in which the Individuality of our nature manifests its infinite Variety. There was, in fact, a truthfulness in Paul's mind, that made him very patient of the slow and imperfect developments of Christian principles. He would not have accepted outward realizations of the Christian spirit, unless they had been forced into life by the genuine demands of the heart; and the broken surface of the Christian world when the Light of Christ's mind first penetrated the moralities of Heathen and Jewish sentiment, the differences of form and degree in which it rent men from their old usages, in proportion to their moral susceptibility, showed the genuine truth and energy of the new Influence, and that the Christian spirit had kindled its own fire in each separate breast.

We are presented here with the nearest approach

that the early records of Christianity contain, to a history of the unavoidable collisions between the new modes of Life required by the Gospel, and the old usages which affection, and even conscience, had long hallowed and endeared. We find ourselves

We find

Ideas: - Light from

in the midst of a warfare of God has suddenly fallen on the confirmed habits of a people, - and the forms of a higher civilization and of a spiritual worship are slowly, and with many inconsistencies, developing themselves, as the results of a contest between fresh sentiment and long established usage. We must reproduce this state of things, with some little energy of the imagination, in order to look upon this Epistle from the Apostle's point of view. All is disorder, inconsistency, incompleteness. The new influence is partially disengaging some elements, and combining imperfectly with others, but as yet has produced no crystallized forms. The Christian spirit, introduced like leaven into the mass of heathen and Jewish ideas, has thrown them into violent fermentation, and an incongruous union of the old and the new Life is for a time the genuine and the right result of these mixing agencies. Nothing could have proved so fatal to the safe establishment of Christianity, as that, in such a crisis, a man of a conventional and narrow spirit, a rigid exacter of external consistency and symmetry, had taken the lead in the administration of the Church, and made it his first object to impress the Ideals of his own mind, the final results of Christian principles, on the natural and healthy disorder of the times. Here was the spiritual equal

ity of all mankind the doctrine of individual responsibility, and of course of an unlimited right over our own limbs and souls, that we may obey our own conscience — proclaimed in the midst of a civilization of which Slavery was a fundamental institution; a doctrine which could not instantly be realized without, not only a revolution in the inward sentiment, but a total derangement in the daily life of a whole people, - such a derangement as, if immediately enforced, must have reduced Society to its first elements, and led to a direct collision of conflicting interests. Here, the pure sentiment of Christian Love, and a sense of the union of all spirits in holy relation to one Heavenly Father, was penetrating the bosom of Heathen families, and separating some wedded heart from a partner who still revelled in the worship and the license of Idolatry. Here were the very household usages of a People determined by the daily sacrifices to the gods, and interwoven with all the observances of Polytheism; and to stand aloof from all contact with Idolatry would have been to renounce the World. Now it greatly increases the feeling of reality with which we conceive of Christianity coming as a new Influence into the world, when we thus historically find it engaged in collision with the modes of common Life created by a spirit so different from its own, and can trace the moral inconsistencies, the first incomplete workings, of the partial penetration of its energy into the bosom of the Heathen and Jewish civilizations. And when we consider that the Authenticity of these Epistles of St. Paul has never been disputed