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will give it you"-John xvi. 23. And he himself set them the example. "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth:""even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight"-Mat. xi. 25, 26, and Luke x. 21. "Father, I thank thee, that Thou hast heard me"-John xi. 41. "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt"Mat. xxvi. 39 and 42. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—Mat. xxvii. 46, and Mark xv. 34. "Father, into thine hands I commend my spirit"—Luke xxiii. 46. Read, too, the whole of the 17th chapter of John's Gospel, and then say, whether he that prayed thus, could be the very and eternal God. See, also, Mat. xxiii. 9, 10; vii. 21; x. 40; xi. 27; xii. 50; xiv. 23; xvi. 27; xxvi. 53; xxviii. 18, 19. Mark ix. 37. Luke x. 16; xxii. 29. John iii. 16 to 36; iv. 34; v. 19 to 43; vi. 38 to 40; viii. 42 to 54; ix. 4; x. 25 to 38; xi. 22 and 42; xii. 44: xiv. 10 to 31; xv. 16; xvi. 5; xviii. 11; xx. 21; xxvi. 27, &c. All these are the words of Jesus Christ himself, who surely would not have used such strong expressions, as the preceding passages contain, of his inferiority and submission to the Father, if he had been equal with him. In short, "If there be any meaning in human language-if there be any weight in the most solemn and repeated declarations-if there be any authority in the commands, or any force in the example of Jesus Christ, then it is, I think, a certain truth, that Jehovah alone, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the only God, the only proper object of religious worship."

I shall, in my next paper, produce the testimony of the Apostles to the Supremacy of Jehovah, and shall examine the doctrine of the Trinity as opposed to it.

(To be Continued.)

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Γαμμα.

Additional Remarks on the Character of Napoleon Bonaparte, by Dr. Channing of Boston, North America. (Continued from Vol. II. page 412.)

WE have spoken of the inferiority and worthlessness of that dominion over others, which has been coveted so greedily in all ages. We should rejoice could we convey some just idea of its moral turpitude. Of all injuries and crimes, the most flagrant is chargeable on him, who aims to establish dominion over his brethren. He wars with what is more precious than life. He

would rob men of their chief prerogative and glory; we mean of self-dominion, of that empire which is given to a rational and moral being over his own soul and his own life. Such a being is framed to find honour and happiness in forming and swaying himself, in adopting as his supreme standard, his convictions of truth and duty, in unfolding his powers by free exertion, in acting from a principle within, from his growing conscience. His proper and noblest attributes are self-government, self-reverence, energy of thought, energy in choosing the right and the good, energy in casting off all other dominion. He was created for

empire in his own breast, and wo, wo to them who would pluck from him this sceptre. A mind, inspired by God with reason and conscience, and capable, through these endowments, of progress in truth and duty, is a sacred thing; more sacred than temples made with hands, or even than this outward universe. It is of nobler lineage than that of which human aristocracy makes its boast. It bears the lineaments of a Divine Parent. It has not only a physical, but moral connexion with the Supreme Being. Through its self-determining power, it is accountable for its deeds, and for whatever it becomes. Responsibility, that which above all things makes existence solemn, is laid upon it. Its great end is to conform itself, by its own energy, and by spiritual succours which its own prayers and faithfulness secure, to that perfection of wisdom and goodness, of which God is the original and source, which shines upon us from the whole outward world, but of which the intelligent soul is a truer recipient and a brighter image, even than the sun with all his splendours. From these views we learn, that no outrage, no injury, can equal that, which is perpetrated by him, who would break down and subjugate the human mind; who would rob men of self-reverence; who would bring them to stand more in awe of outward authority, than of reason and conscience in their own souls; who would make himself a standard and law for his race, and shape, by force or terror, the free spirits of others after his own judgment and will.

All excellence, whether intellectual or moral, involves, as its essential elements, freedom, energy, and moral independence, so that the invader of these, whether from the throne or the pulpit, invades the most sacred interest of the human race. Intellectual excellence implies and requires these. This does not consist in passive assent even to the highest truths; or in the most extensive stores of knowledge acquired by an implicit faith, and lodged in the inert memory. It lies in force, freshness, and independence of thought; and is most conspicuously manifested by him, who, loving truth supremely, seeks it resolutely, follows the light without fear, and modifies the views of others by the patient, strenuous, exercise of his own faculties. To a man thus intellectually free, truth is not, what it is to passive multitudes, a foreign substance, dormant, lifeless, fruitless, bnt penetrating, prolific, full of vitality, and ministering to the health and expansion of the soul. And what we have said of intellectual excellence is still more true of moral. This has its foundation and root in freedom, and cannot exist a moment without it. The very idea of virtue is, that

it is a free act, the product or result of the mind's self-determining power. It is not good feeling, infused by nature or caught by sympathy; nor is it good conduct into which we have slidden through imitation, or which has been forced upon us by another's will. We ourselves are its authors in a high and peculiar sense. We indeed depend on God for virtue. Our capacity for it is wholly his gift and inspiration, and without his perpetual aid, this capacity would avail nothing. But his aid is not compulsion. He respects he cannot violate that moral freedom which is his richest gift. To the individual, the decision of his own character is left. He has more than kingly power in his own soul. him never resign it. Let none dare to interfere with it. Virtue is self-dominion, or what is the same thing, it is self-subjection to the principle of duty, that highest law in the soul. If these views of intellectual and moral excellence be just, then to invade men's freedom is to aim the deadliest blow at their honour and happiness; and their worst foe is he who fetters their reason, who makes his will their law, who makes them tools, echoes, copies of himself.

Let

Perhaps it may be objected to the representation of virtue as consisting of self-dominion, that the Scriptures speak of it as consisting in obedience to God. But these are perfectly compatible and harmonious views; for genuine obedience to God is the free choice and adoption of a law, the great principles of which our own minds approve, and our own consciences bind on us; which is not an arbitrary injunction, but an emanation and expression of the Divine mind; and which is intended throughout to give energy, dignity, and enlargement, to our best powers. He, and he only, obeys God virtuously and acceptably, who reverences right, not power; who has chosen rectitude as his supreme rule; who sees and reveres in God the fulness and brightness of moral excellence, and who sees in obedience the progress and perfection of his own nature. That subjection to the Deity, which, we fear, is too common, in which the mind surrenders itself to mere power and will, is any thing but virtue. We fear that it is disloyalty to that moral principle, which is ever to be reverenced as God's vicegerent in the rational soul.

Perhaps some may fear, that in our zeal for the freedom and independence of the individual mind, we unsettle government, and almost imply that it is a wrong. Far from it. We hold govern

ment to be an essential means of our intellectual and moral education, and would strengthen it by pointing out its legitimate functions. Government, as far as it is rightful, is the guardian and friend of freedom, so that in exalting the one we enforce the other. The highest aim of all authority is to confer liberty. This is true of domestic rule. The great, we may say the single object of parental government, of a wise and virtuous education, is, to give the child the fullest use of his own powers; to give him inward force; to train him up to govern himself. The same is true of the authority of Jesus Christ. He came, indeed, to rule mankind; but to rule them, not by arbitrary statutes, not by force and menace, not by mere will, but by setting before them,

in precept and life, those everlasting rules of rectitude, which Heaven obeys, and of which every soul contains the living germs. He came to exert a moral power; to reign by the manifestation of celestial virtues; to awaken the energy of holy purpose in the free mind. He came to publish liberty to the captives; to open the prison door; to break the power of the passions; to break the yoke of a ceremonial religion which had been imposed in the childhood of the race; to exalt us to a manly homage and obedience of our Creator. Of civil government, too, the great end is to secure freedom. Its proper, and highest function is, to watch over the liberties of each and all, and to open to a community the widest field for all its powers. Its very chains and prisons have the general freedom for their aim. They are just, only when used to curb oppression and wrong; to disarm him who has a tyrant's heart, if not a tyrant's power, who wars against others' rights, who, by invading property or life, would substitute force for the reign of equal laws. Freedom, we repeat it, is the end of govTo exalt men to self-rule, is the end of all other rule, and he who would fasten on them his arbitrary will, is their worst foe.

ernment.

We have aimed to show the guilt of the love of power and dominion, by showing the ruin which it brings on the mind, by enlarging on the preciousness of that inward freedom which it invades and destroys. To us, this view is the most impressive; but the guilt of this passion may also be discerned, and by some more clearly, in its outward influences; in the desolation, bloodshed, and woe, of which it is the perpetual cause. We owe to it almost all the miseries of war. To spread the sway of one or a few, thousands and millions have been turned into machines, under the name of soldiers, armed with instruments of destruction, and then sent to reduce others to their own lot, by fear and pain, by fire and sword, by butchery and pillage. And is it light guilt, to array man against his brother; to make murder the trade of thousands; to drench the earth with human blood; to turn it into a desert; to scatter families like chaff; to make mothers widows, and children orphans; and to do all this for the purpose of spreading a still gloomier desolation, for the purpose of subjugating men's souls, turning them into base parasites, extorting from them a degrading homage, humbling them in their own eyes, and breaking them to servility as the chief duty of life? When the passion for power succeeds, as it generally has done, in establishing despotism, it seems to make even civilization a doubtful good. Whilst the monarch and his court are abandoned to a wasteful luxury, the peasantry, rooted to the soil, and doomed to a perpetual round of labours, are raised but little above the brute. There are parts of Europe, Christian Europe, in which the peasant, through whose sweat kings and nobles riot in plenty, seems to enjoy less, on the whole, than the untamed Indian of our forests. Chained to one spot, living on the cheapest vegetables, sometimes unable to buy salt to season his coarse fare, seldom or never tasting animal food, having for his shelter a mud-walled hut, floored with earth or stone, and subjected equally with the brute to the

rule of a superior, he seems to us to partake less of animal, intellectual, and moral pleasures, than the free wanderer of the woods, whose steps no man fetters; whose wigwam no tyrant violates; whose chief toil is hunting, that noblest of sports; who feasts on the deer, that most luxurious of viands; to whom streams as well as woods, pay tribute; whose adventurous life gives sagacity; and and in whom peril nourishes courage and self-command. We are no advocates for savage life. We know that its boasted freedom is a delusion. The single fact that human nature in this wild state makes no progress, is proof enough that it wants true liberty. We mean only to say, that man, in the hands of despotism, is sometimes degraded below the savage; that it were better for him to be lawless, than to live under lawless sway.

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It is the part of Christians to look on the passion for power and dominion with strong abhorrence; for it is singularly hostile to the genius of their religion. Jesus Christ always condemned it. One of the striking marks of his moral greatness, and of the originality of his character, was, that he held no fellowship and made no compromise with this universal spirit of his age, but withstood it in every form. He found the Jews intoxicating themselves with dreams of empire. Of the prophecies relating to the Messiah, the most familiar and dear to them, were those which announced him as a conqueror, and which were construed by their worldliness into a promise of triumphs to the people, from whom he was to spring. Even the chosen disciples of Jesus looked to him for this good. "To sit on his right hand and on his left," or, in other words, to hold the most commanding stations in his kingdom, was not only their lurking wish, but their open and importunate request. But there was no passion on which Jesus frowned more severely than on this. He taught, that to be great in his kingdom, men must serve, instead of ruling their brethren. He placed among them a child as an emblem of the humility of his religion. His most terrible rebukes fell on the lordly, aspiring, Pharisee. In his own person, he was mild and condescending, exacting no personal service, living with his disciples as a friend, sharing their wants, sleeping in their fishing-boat, and even washing their feet; and in all this, he expressly proposed himself to them as a pattern, knowing well, that the last triumph of disinterestedness is to forget our own superiority, in our sympathy, solicitude, tenderness, respect, and self-denying zeal, for those who are below us. cannot, indeed, wonder that the lust of power should be encountered by the sternest rebukes and menace of Christianity, because it wages open war with the great end of this religion, which is the elevation of the human mind. No ccrruption of this religion is more palpable and more enormous, than that which turns it into an instrument of dominion, and which makes it teach, that man's primary duty is to give himself a passive material into the hands of his minister, priest, or king.

We

The subject which we now discuss, is one in which all nations have an interest, and especially our own; and we should fail of our main purpose, were we not to lead our readers to apply it to ourselves. The passion for ruling, though most completely