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who are least predisposed to favor her votaries. arousing public attention, and turning the full tide of gushing, irrepressible sympathy in favor of truth's suffering witnesses,-by repressing envy, which success in other spheres of a more ostentatious character so naturally engenders,-and finally, by erecting, as does its very nature, barriers so mighty, against the abuse, the perversion of the truth thus established,-it manifests its fitness to be the great moral fulcrum, on which benevolence may act, to elevate a fallen world.

These deductions from its nature are abundantly confirmed by the history of its achievements. We pass over, as too sacred for analysis in this connection, the testimony of suffering evinced by the founder of Christianity, in his own person. It will not be forgotten, that from his own lips fell the declaration, in circumstances of solemn and affecting interest, on his arraignment before Pilate, "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." That witness he voluntarily sealed with his blood. The same reason need not prevent a fuller reference to the history of his followers. For the first 300 years, they preserved, with almost inviolate sanctity, those principles of peace, and of unresisting sufferings, which, by an example so endeared, and by precepts so authoritative, had been made obligatory upon them. And can any other period of equal prosperity be pointed out, in the whole record of Christian achievement? Without wealth or power, and, for the most part, without learning or eloquence, the leaven of truth, by the influence of this suffering testimony, was more rapidly extended, and made to affect more deeply and thoroughly the whole mass of mind, than at any later period.

Gibbon, while acknowledging the fact of this rapid extension, does not fail also to perceive and admit the efficiency of this agency, while, at the same time, he most unphilosophically seeks to derogate from its just claims. While admitting the effect, and assigning its true and adequate cause, he would suicidally depreciate that same efficiency. This is only one of the innumerable illustrations of the difficulty of making error consistent with itself.

The same historian again complains of the peaceful

and unwarlike disposition so extensively diffused by Christianity; and attributes to this, in no small degree, the facility with which the Goths and Vandals overran the Roman empire. But it would surely seem but the part of candor, to inquire, "what was the result?" The meck and unoffending disciples of Christ excited no prejudice, nor fear, nor suspicion, in the minds of those invaders; who soon laid aside the aspect and bearing of masters, and became learners. They quickly imbibed the spirit, and partook of the blessings which Christianity had spread before them. Conquerors, indeed, they were, by arms and in name; but, in truth, they were conquered. They rapidly became incorporated with those whom they came to pillage and lay waste. As beasts of prey, they rushed forth from their lair, to raven and destroy;-but, changed to lambs, they fed and lay down with the flock which they had purposed to devour.

How different was the result, when the same empire, some centuries afterward, was invaded by the Saracens. Christianity had now become so corrupted, by alliance with, and dependence upon the state, as no longer to evince its original distinguishing spirit. She met these invaders, not with peace and love, but with arms less congenial to her heavenly character; and her experience verified the striking prediction of her Lord, "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."

Christianity received the former as the furrowed field of summer receives the copious showers;-imbibes, incorporates them, and thus makes them conducive to her greater fruitfulness. But she received the latter as the frozen earth meets, but resists with rigid stubbornness the rain of heaven, till its accumulating torrents, in swollen, turbid rage, burst these congealed obstructions, and spread wide, wasteful, terrific destruction around them.

How strikingly manifest, in these instances, is that ordering of Providence, which, rightly improved, shows the wrath of man subordinated to purposes in perfect harmony with the benevolence of the great Ruler of all things, and the happiness of his intelligent creatures,shows how he,

"From seeming evil still educing good;"

and, better still, in infinite progression, deserves the

homage and the love of those whom he has endowed with powers to appreciate these beginnings of infinite wisdom. And we see, too, how consonant with the wisdom of his ordering, is the invariable result, that distrust in him, and reliance on forbidden efforts and methods of our own, clothe their authors with misery and shame.

The track of all authentic history, ancient and modern, though its great purpose has seemed but to chronicle the deeds of war and violence, presents an occasional gleam, -a bright and cheering and warming ray,—of that spirit which is here contemplated. We may not now linger, to gather them from the distant past, since the remaining space but meagrely suffices to glance at some of its more recent fruits.

The martyr spirit may be exemplified in various degrees; and, though the occasions for its most obvious and distinct manifestation have happily passed away from us, we trust for ever, still its exercise will continue to be required while truth has to struggle for the mastery, and while power remains in hands disposed to abuse it. degree it may be found in the domestic circle, and all associations and communities will more or less give occasion for its exercise. To this very hour, woman, throughout two-thirds of the world, is a suffering witness, and bears her martyr testimony to the wrongs which her sex is forced to endure, and the baseness of those who inflict them.

There have been martyrs in the cause of benevolence. Such was Howard. The truth, in reference to one great branch of human reform and melioration, shone upon his mind, and with the true spirit, he gave himself up to the great duty of bearing a suffering, self-denying testimony to that truth. With what benign effect upon the wide field of human happiness, the doomed prisoner of almost every civilized country can already testify. Such, also, was Clarkson. The iniquity and cruel baseness of the slave-trade, stood out as a truth, before his view, in characters so bright, that misapprehension or indifference was impossible. For more than twenty years, through toils and reproaches, sacrifices and privations, of which it is scarcely possible to form an adequate conception, he persevered in bearing a testimony of sufferings, which in the end triumphantly prevailed.

VOL. IV.-NO. XIII.

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The Christian missionary, also, who goes forth unarmed, on his divinely appointed errand of love, and lies down to rest in the hut of the cannibal, and, by that very act of unconscious heroism, bears witness to his purity and benevolence of purpose, and thereby wins the savage heart to confidence, and hope, and heaven, is another exemplification.*

Such, also, was the disposition evinced by the Puritan settlers of New England. In the spirit of suffering witnesses for the truth, they tore themselves from their beloved homes, the place of their fathers' sepulchres, for a hundred generations;-they braved the rigors of the icy shores of Plymouth, the fury of unknown savages, and grappled with hunger, disease, poverty, death, that they might show their estimate of the peerless value of that great culminating truth, around which their affections had so long, so closely entwined,-"freedom to worship God."

And when, subsequently, a portion of these same Pilgrims, forgetful of the errand on which they came, or blinded by the prevailing spirit of the age, became persecutors and oppressors in their turn,—when Roger Williams was banished, and, in the depth of winter, was compelled to take his cheerless way through an untrodden wilderness, and, in his own significant and graphic words, "was sorely tossed, for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean," he laid the foundations of a state, holding forth the lively example of entire liberty of conscience in religious concerns. Nor were his days of martyrdom then completed. His perse

*How deeply it is to be deplored, that all protestant evangelical missionaries have not invariably evinced the martyr spirit! It is very doubtful whether bearing weapons of offence has in any instance been promotive of their personal safety; nor will it fail to be remembered, that, in one melancholy instance, beloved missionary brethren, yielding to bad advisers, were left to die, with arms in their hands. Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect so superior a manifestation of Christian principle and practice, in missionaries, to what is ordinarily exhibited by professed Christians at home. But if the light of their consistent example, in this respect, should be reflected back upon us with a lustre which the blindness of prejudice and perversion on our part can no longer resist, it would be another of the blessed triumphs of the benign results of missions. The disciples in the South Sea Islands, when they first received the gospel, believing the testimony which it bore against rendering evil for evil, immediately converted their fighting spears into some useful appendages to their chapel. The missionaries, seeing them cutting their spears in pieces for this purpose, began to expostulate with them. With surprise, they asked, "Did not the Lord Jesus mean what he said? Resist not the evil, but if smitten on one cheek, turn the other.'" What a lesson was here! The Rev. Mr. Ellis confesses that these simple disciples converted him to the principles of peace. Is it wonderful that God has not given larger measure of success to the efforts of churches for evangelizing the heathen, when these very churches are but beginning to free themselves from the incubus of intemperance, in its many protean forms; and have scarcely begun, as yet, to cast off the unholy panoply of war?

cutors were endangered by the attempt of a coalition among several of the powerful tribes of Indians around them. When it came to his knowledge, instead of yielding to the bitter spirit of retaliation, he exposed his life for those who had treated him with such unmerited severity. He thus describes his personal agency in this business:

"Upon letters received from the Governor and Council at Boston, requesting me to use my utmost and speediest endeavors to break and hinder the league labored for by the Pequods and Mohegans against the English, the Lord helped me immediately to put my life into my hand, and, scarce acquainting my wife, to ship myself alone in a poor canoe, and to cut through a stormy wind, with great seas, every minute in hazard of life, to the sachem's house. Three days and nights my business forced me to lodge. and mix with the bloody Pequods' ambassadors, whose hands and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also. God wondrously preserved me, and helped me to break to pieces the Pequods' negotiation and design."

Following onward the current of events, we may trace the prevalence of this same spirit, in those wary and far-seeing determinations of the Colonists not to yield themselves up to the caprice and injustice of a lawless despotism. The matters in dispute between them and the parent country were small in amount, but imineasurably great, in the principles involved. While they cautiously abstained from all violations of law, and held forth the language of firm and dignified remonstrance, while they cheerfully submitted to privations, and ingeniously evaded both collision and the abandonment of rights dearer to them than life, they were evidently and rapidly gaining ground against their unjust oppressors,-were so clearly putting them in the wrong, and showing their own position to be defensible and irreproachable, that it only seemed requisite for a few months more of determined and unyielding consistency, to work their complete effect, and change the counsels of the parent state. fortunately, or, as the ultra peace advocates would say, wickedly, an act of violence (the destruction of three cargoes of tea, in Boston harbor), committed by them

Un