The Hatchet Buried

Hen the other day the New School and Old School Churches kissed each other at Pittsburg, some one said, “Now, Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!” We felt just the other way. We want to live now more than ever to see how matters will come out. It is wrone to want to die in such a time as this, when the armies are wheeling into line, and the batteries of earth and hell and heaven are being unlimbered for the contest which will decide who shall have the supremacy of this world.

We have spent too much time in ecclesiastical pugilism. We have lost about a hundred years in gunning for Methodists, and drowning Baptists, and beating Presbyterians to death With the decrees, and pommelling Episcopalians with the butt-end of the liturgy. As at Bothwell Bridge the Scotch army quarrelled amonof themselves, eiehteen ministers, with eighteen different opinions, contending most fiercely, until Lord Claverhouse came down with disciplined troops and swept the field; so in the time when hosts of darkness in mail of hell were coming upon us, we were contending, Old School against New School, Free-will Baptists against close communionists, Methodist Church North against Methodist Church South, and we have been routed on a hundred fields, when, forgetting everything but the one-starred banner under which we fought, and the Captain who led us on, wejnight have shouted the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thank God that so many ‘of the rams of the Church have had their horns sawed off, and that the ecclesiastical chanticleers have lost their spurs. The books of controversialists will be on the shelves of college and State libraries, old and yellow and cobwebbed, until even the book -worms will get tired of the slumbrous literature, and depart from old leather-backs, and some day the books will be cast into the fire, and just before the last flame goes out, the world will see in the consuming scrolls the imacre of two reliorious combatants with their hands in each other’s hair, combing it the wrong way. Bigotry is an owl that cannot see in the daytime; on black and spectral wing it flits through the midnight heavens, and roosts in the belfries of ruined churches.

The millennium has already begun. The Episcopalian lion is eating straw like a Presbyterian ox: and Baptist and Pedo-Baptist, while lovingly discussing their differences, are first sprinkled, and then immersed, by a baptism of the Holy Ghost. Peace! If you, the Methodist, want an anxious seat, long as from Mulberry street to the Golden Horn, have it, and may it be crowded with repentant sinners. And if it shall be found out that all our Presbyterian brethren have been fore-oj’dained to eternal life. Bishops Simpson and Janes will rejoice with us in the fore-ordinadon. If this brother will preach in gown and bands, and the Western pioneer shall proclaim the Gospel in his shirt-sleeves, may the blessing come down upon both the preachers. Life is too short, and the work too great, to allow disputation about non-essentials. If a drowning man is to be pulled out of the floods, it makes but little difference whether the hand you reach out to him has on it buckskin mitten or kid glove.

Let us all go to preaching. Send polished Paul up to Athens, and plain Bartholomew down ‘among the fishing- smacks by the sea. Do not look so anxiously into your pockets for your diploma from Yale, or your license from presbytery. If the Lord does not send you ‘into the ministry, no canon of the Church can shoot you into it. But if He has put His hand on your head, you are ordained, and your working apron shall be the robe, and the anvil your pulpit; and while you are smiting the iron, the hammer of God’s truth will break the flinty heart in pieces. Peter was never a sophomore, nor John a freshman. Harlan Page never heard that a tangent to the parabola bisects the angle formed at the point of contact by a perpendicular to the directrix and a line drawn to the focus. If George MuUer should attempt chemical experiments in a philosopher’s laboratory, he would soon blow himself up. And hundreds oi men. grandly useful, were never struck on commencement stage by a bouquet flunof from die ladies’ eaJlers*.

Quick! Let us find our work. J T>;/ preach a sermon — you give a tract — you hand a flower — you sing a song — you give a crutch to a lame man — you teach die Sabbath class their A, B, C — you knit a pair of socks’ for a foundling — you pick a splinter from a child’s finder. Do somethino; I Do it now J We will be dead soon!