true one, is a form of sophistry into which our best educated theologians not unfrequently fall. We have a very striking illustration of a refined species of this sophism in the following extracts from a very interesting writer and tourist, George B. Cheever, D. D., an author of deserved reputation. He gives to a second cause what is really due to the first. The union of Church and State with him appears to be the entire cause of religious persecution. But who pleads for and institutes the union of Church and State? In other words, what is the cause of this union? Pedobaptism!—I affirm PEDOBAPTISM. The Pedobaptists, one and all, unite the Church and the State. They would, if they could, bring the whole world into the church by the sheer force of natural birth, without a second birth. Hence, so far as their influence goes, the Church and State are united. In Roman Catholic countries it is all Church and no State. The Jewish commonwealth is their beau ideal of a Christian Church State. The whole nation sealed as soon as born with the seal of God's covenant. Hence every Pedobaptist church has persecuted in the ratio of its power. The formal union of Church and State is but the natural operation of infant baptism. Whatever, then, we now cite from Dr. Cheever as the fruit of a Church and State institution, is to be ascribed not to this effect, but to its cause, Pedobaptism. With this in mind, we shall now read a few extracts from the Doctor, taken from his Wanderings of a Pilgrim in the Shadow of Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau Alp:

"The history of Geneva is singular as containing within itself a demonstration that under every form both of truth and error, the State and Church united are intolerant. The State oppresses the Church-the Church, in her turn, tempted by the State, oppresses those who differ from her, and so the work goes on. At first it was the State and Romanism-the fruit, intolerance; the next, it was the State and Unitarianism-the fruit, intolerance; next, it was the State and Calvinism-the fruit, intolerance; in the canton de Vaud, it is the State and democratic infidelity-the fruit, intolerance. The demonstration is such that no man can resist its power. Inoculate the Church, so to speak, with the State, and the same plague invariably follows; no constitution, not the most heavenly, is proof against the virus.

"John Knox, escaping from the castle of St. Andrews in Scotland, and compelled to flee the kingdom for his life, found security in Geneva, because there his religion was the religion of the State. If it had not been, he would merely have gone out from one fire for another fire to devour him. Servetus, escaping in like manner from

a Roman Catholic prison in France, where he would otherwise have been burned in person, as he was in effigy, fled also to Geneva; but his religion not being the religion of the State, the evangelical republic burned him. And thus the grand error of the Reformers in the union of Church and State occasioned what perhaps is the darkest crime that stains the annals of the Reformation. The burning of Servetus in Roman Catholic fires would have added but an imperceptible shade to the blackness of darkness in a system which invariably has been one of intolerance and cruelty. But the man was permitted by divine providence to escape, and come to Geneva to be burned alive there, by a State allied to a system of faith and mercy, to show to all the world that even that system cannot be trusted with human power; that the State, in connexion with the Church, though it be the purest church in the world, will bring forth intolerance and murder. The union is adulterous, the progeny is sinful works, even though the mother be the embodied profession of justification by faith. God's mercy becomes changed into man's cruelty. So in the brightest spot of piety then on the face of the earth, amidst the out-shining glory of the great doctrine of the gospel, justification by faith, God permitted the smoke and the cry of torture by fire to go up to heaven, to teach the nations that even purity of doctrine, if enforced by the State, will produce the bitterest fruits of a corrupt gospel and an infidel apostacy; that is the lesson read in the smoke of the funeral pyre of Servetus, as it rolls up black against the stars of heaven, that the union of Church and State, even of a pure Church in a free State, is the destruction of religious liberty.

"It was this pestiferous evil that at one time banished from the Genevese State its greatest benefactor, Calvin himself; the working of the same poison excludes now from the pulpit of the State some of the brightest ornaments of the ministry of modern times-such men as Malan, D'Aubigne, and Gaussen. It is true that it is the corruption of doctrine and hatred of divine truth that have produced this last step; but it could not have been taken had the church of Christ in Geneva been, as she should be, independent of the State. Such measures as these are, however, compelling the church of Christ to assume an independent attitude, which, under the influ ence of past habit and example, she would not have taken. Thus it is that God brings light of darkness and good out of evil.

"These are the views of great men in Switzerland-Vinet and Burnier, D'Aubigne and Gaussen; and in this movement it may be hoped that the evangelical church in Geneva will yet take the fore

most place in all Europe. But as yet, says Merle D'Aubigne, "we are small and weak. Placed by the hand of God in the centre of Europe, surrounded with Popish darkness, we have much to do, and we are weak. We have worked in Geneva; and we maintain there the evangelical truth on one side against Unitarian Rationalism, and on the other side against Papistical Despotism. The importance of the Christian doctrine is beginning to be again felt in GeOur canton is become a mixed one, and we are assailed by many Roman Catholics coming to our country to establish themselves there." Nevertheless, our hope is strong in the interposition of God by his good Spirit, which will yet take the elements of evil and change their very nature into good."

neva.

"Dr. Gaussen, the able coadjutor of D'Aubigne, and author of the admirable work on Inspiration, entitled Theopneustia, was pastor of the parish of Santigny, in the canton of Geneva, in the year 1815. It was about this time that he likewise became a Christian, and preached the way of salvation through faith in Christ crucified. In his teachings among his flock, Dr. Gaussen, becoming dissatisfied with the Catechism imposed for instruction by the national church, principally because it had no acknowledgment of the great fundamental truths of the gospel, laid it aside, and proceeded to teach the children and candidates for communion in his own way. For this he was brought before the "Venerable Company of Pastors," and finally was by them censured, and suspended for a year from his right to sit in the Company.

"But Dr. Gaussen and his friends, D'Aubigne and others, nothing terrified by their adversaries, proceeded still farther. They framed the Evangelical Society of Geneva, took measures for the preaching of the gospel in the city, and established, though in weakness and fear and in much trembling, yet in reliance upon God, the Evangelical Theological Seminary. Finding that all efforts and threatenings to prevent or stay their career was in vain, the Venerable Company proceeded, in 1831, to reject Mr. Gaussen from the functions of pastor of Santigny, and to interdict Messrs. Gaussen, Galland, and Merle, from all the functions of the pulpit in the churches and chapels of the canton. What a spectacle was this! It recalls to mind the action of the Genevese republic three hundred years before, in the banishment of Calvin and Farel from the city. The result has been happy in the highest degree. Forced out of the national church, these men have been made to feel what at first it is so difficult to be convinced of, that the church of Christ belongs to Christ, and not to any nation. They see that there is a

new transfiguration, a new approximating step of glory for the reformed church in Europe, in which she shall become free in Christ— shall assume her true catholicity, her supremacy, her independence; becoming for ever and every where a church in the spirit, the truth, and the liberty of Christ.

"In Geneva the church is in subjection. The people cannot choose their pastors; their pastors are compelled to receive every man to Christian communion as an indiscriminate right of citizenship. At a certain age every young man comes into the church by law,* no matter how depraved, and declares in the most solemn manner that he believes, from the bottom of his heart, the dogmas in which his pastor has instructed him; that he will still hold to them, and renounce the world and its pomps. For entering the army, for becoming an apprentice, for obtaining any employ, the young man must take the communicant's oath. Have you been to the communion is the test question-first and implacable. Hence, if a pastor should refuse the communion to a young libertine, the candidate and the whole family would regard it as the highest insult and injustice, debarring the young man from rights sacred to him as a citizen, shutting indeed the door of all civil advancement against him. To say nothing of piety, how can even morality itself be preserved in a church in such degrading subjection to the civil power!

"The constitution of Geneva is such, that by its provisions there is no liberty of instruction or congregation but only by authority of the Council of State. The ninth and tenth articles provide that liberty of instruction shall be guarantied to all Genevese, only under the reserve of dispositions prescribed by the laws for the interest of public order and good manners; and also that no corporation or congregation can be established without the authority of the Council of State. It is easy to see that with such a constitution of Church and State, the Romanists have every thing made easy to their hand in Geneva, and only need a civil majority, when, by appointing their own Council of State, they can put every heretical congregation to the torture, and forbid, by law, any school or assembly of instruction or worship other than pleases them, under whatever severity of penalty they may choose to impose. No wonder that the cry of every Christian patriot in Geneva should be, Separate Church and State! Separate Church and State! May God help them in their struggle after liberty!"

So, then, whether in connexion with Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy, Papalism, Protestantism, High Church, or Low Church, Trinitarianism or Unitarianism, Pedobaptism becomes Church and State, and, as such, persecutes to confiscation of goods, banishment, and death. A. C.

* Do not all come into the church by baptism-infant baptism, though 'in the flesh,' and 'naturally depraved'!!

A. C.

REFORMATION-No. IX.

WHEN man forfeits the favor and fellowship of God, he seems to lose also that just sense of his own position, and that proper feeling of self-respect, which must ever be among the most powerful influences in his reformation. When abandoned of God, he abandons also himself, and takes no longer any proper interest in his own character or destiny. The follies and the worst crimes of men may, for the most part, be readily traced either to that reckless and debased condition of soul which inevitably follows a merited loss of reputation, or to the desire of avoiding this result, by committing a greater crime to conceal a less one; but the guilt which first occasions public reprobation is seldom traced to its proper fountain—a previous sense of similar degradation in the sight of heaven. Thus Cain, smarting under the consciousness of the withdrawal of the divine favor and acceptance, became the very first criminal and outcast of human society by the death of Abel. No one, indeed, will sin against society unless he have first sinned against God. Hence the strongest safeguard of every community consists in vital godliness; and hence, too, a conscience without offence towards God, will necessarily be so also in respect to man.

Nothing exhibits more clearly the debasing influence of conscious disgrace than the power of exaltation which a contrary sentiment possesses. It is, indeed, as we have before remarked, the sense of what we seem to others that moulds and fashions us through life. How often a casual remark; a few words of encouragement, spoken, perhaps, at random, will be fixed upon the memory of another, and continue to glow like a living spark within the soul, until the whole man is fired with the emulation and energy which surmount every obstacle, and enable the individual to be what he would appear! He begins by assimilating a part of the character ascribed to him, and ends by leavening and transforming his whole nature by its influence. As the rising tide lifts from the slimy ooze the vessel which had remained motionless and useless at the shore, so popular favor gives activity, elevation, and conspicuity, to those who had otherwise remained inert, depressed, and undistinguished. It is this which fans the flame of emulation, and inspires the mind with lofty aspirations and resolves. But wo betide the unfortunate wretch who is branded with ignominy, and condemned to be a vagabond in the earth, deprived at once of the respect of others, and of his own, and left without one hope to encourage, or one friendly voice to cheer him!