The Same Subject Continued

These rites and sacrifices are no more; “neither is there any more prophet.” The sacred fire is extinguished on their altars; the Shekinah has disappeared; and the glory is departed from the temple. The tribe of Levi cannot now be distinguished from the tribe of Judah or of Naphtali; every line of demarcation is obliterated in uncircumcised confusion; Judaism is merged in Christianity, and the Jewish priesthood in the Christian ministry.

The greatest of all Christian teachers was the Divine Founder of Christianity, himself. There was an immeasurable distance between him and all who preceded, and all who came after him. None have equalled, or can equal him, in his perfect intelligence of the truth; in his firm conviction of its magnitude and importance; in simplicity and directness; in the pure and glowing affections with which he dispensed it; or in the authority with which he spake, — the authority of truth, of goodness. There are no* such pow erful and sweet words on the records of earth, — words bathed in the fountain of eternal love, — as those which dropped like the rain, and distilled like the dew from his unearthly lips. “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” Inspired men, and vminspired, in thousands, have preached the same truths which he preached; yet “never man spake like this man.” It was indeed during his humiliation that he exercised the prophetic office; they were days of the “hiding of his power;” the “Spirit was not given, because Jesus was not yet glorified;” yet never before, nor since, did the Gospel exhibit so much of its native beauty and glory, as when uttered by the lips that tasted the wormwood and the gall.

The power of the pulpit during the apostolic age, is ascertained mainly from that beautiful compend of ecclesiastical history, which is contained in the Acts of the Apostles. They had some peculiar facilities for their work, and difficulties and discouragements that were peculiar. Everywhere they preached Jesus and the resurrection; in the temple, in the synagogues of the Jews, in the forum, in the market-place, in the school-room, in the streets, and in their own private lodgings; “beginning at Jerusalem,” and extending their labors throughout Asia and parts of Europe. Imbued with the Spirit of their Master, nobly did these pioneers of the Christian faith “do the work of evangelists, and make full proof of their ministry.” They put their divine armor to the test, and tried the excellency of its power. And what were its conquests? Here we read of three thousand subdued under a single sermon; soon after, and elsewhere, o{ Jive thousand more; and then of other thousands, till the kingdom of darkness shook “from turret to foundation stone,” and Satan seemed about to “fall like liijhtninsr from heaven.” It were no easy matter to measure the influence they exerted; nor can it be measured by mortal man. Never were there such exemplifications of the power of the pulpit, as during the apostolic age. With no human helper, and no meretricious adornment, without wealth, standing alone as God’s messenger to guilty men, the pulpit of that single age gave the new religion to the world, grounded it upon a firm basis, and established “a kingdom which cannot be moved.” Wondrous scenes were they amid which these holy men stood; wondrous words which they spake; wondrous effects which they produced; and which we, at the distance of eighteen centuries, look back upon, when the “rod of God’s strength” first went forth out of Zion.

Even a brief historical sketch of the one hundred and fifty years after the ascension of our Divine Lord, is forbidden us in these observations. It was the beginning, rich in promise, of that great moral transformation, which was destined to make the wilderness like Eden, and the desert as the garden of God. The emblems of power might be exhausted in the triumphs of the first Christian pulpit. The great deceiver of the nations received a check in his usurpation, never to be forgotten. “He that sat on the pale horse, whose name was Death, and Hell followed with him,” was arrested in the very frenzy of his course. A magnetic light was thrown forth in its concentrated power upon the nations; and that mighty crowd that were treading their way so quietly to the pit, fell to the earth and exclaimed, “Lord, what wilt thou have us to do?” A new world sprung into being at the voice which preached a crucified Saviour, and told of redemption through the blood of Calvary.

Pulpits there have been since, and still are, which speak for God and his Christ. More especially from the fifteenth century to the present hour, has their influence been directly felt in the conversion and sanctification of men. The remarkable revival of pure and undefiled religion, at the beginning, and during the progress of the great Protestant Reformation, is an event which speaks volumes in favor of a truly Christian ministry. Among the millions of Christendom, and amid all the ignorance and unblushing profligacy of the church of Rome, some few there were who could read the Scriptures; who did read them; whose bosoms responded to their soul-transforming and transporting truths; and who could not disobey the command, “Come out .of her, my people, lest ye be partakers of her plagues!” They dared not throw aside their commission as preachers of the Gospel, because the more thorough their inquiries, the more thorough and solemn was their conviction, that never till then had they known what the true Gospel was. They did preach it. They were mighty in the Scriptures; and terrible was the struggle: but they were valiant men, and God was with them. It was a new era in the history of preaching; men of that age had never heard any thing like this kind of preaching before. It was not the indulgencies of the Augustinian friar that they preached; it was not the crucifix; it was the cross of Christ contending with sin in every form, and lifted up in earnest. It was no longer the age of forms and homilies, but of scriptural exposition and instructive discourses; and the results were glorious to God, and honorable to his chosen servants. The pulpit sent forth its rays in every direction, and “men started as from the slumbers of a dream.” Its object was not so much to make them anti-Romanists, as Christians; men born of God; and they were abundantly honored in so doing. Christianity was once more recognized in her native loveliness, coming forth from the smothering vapor and mists of ages, in her heavenly radiance. It was the 7*e-e mancipation of the world. It was the Sun of righteousness bursting forth from almost total eclipse.

There were deep and melancholy declensions in the pulpit after the Reformation. In England, it vacillated from Protestantism to Popery, and from Popery back again to Protestantism. The reign of Elizabeth was illustrious for men distinguished in the sanctuary, as well as men distinguished in the cabinet and the forum; yet with all its advances, it was a dark reign. Under James there was a false theology, which, for the most part, was far from magnifying the grace of God in the Gospel of his Son: and which prepared the way for that laxity both in faith and in morals, which mark with such indelible infamy the reign of the second Charles. A few there were, like Tillotson and Barrow, in the Established Church, but they were cold and savored little of evansrelical doctrine; more there were among the Dissenters, like Watts and Doddridge, who breathed the spirit of a purer and more fervid Christianity; but it was not until that sacred band sent forth from the University of Oxford, arose, consisting of such men as Whitfield, Wesley, Ingham, and Hervey, patronized by the rank, and piety, and resources of that most devoted and remarkable of all Christian women, Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon, that the pulpit once more entered upon its appropriate work of winning souls to the Divine Redeemer.* Treading closely in their steps, we find Fletcher and Haime, Romaine and Venn, Berridge and Hill, Toplady and Grimshaw, De Courcy and Madan, Howel, Harris and Shirley, Cadogan and Winter, Waugh, Bogue, and Simeon, and others not a few, who, notwithstanding the variety of their views, had an unction from the Holy One, and gave an impulse to the pulpit which it

* The dissenting ministers of England ever have been a noble class of men. During a discussion in Parliament, some time, if I mistake not, between the years 1775 and 1780, upon the Bill favorable to religious liberty, the celebrated Dr. Drummond, the Archbishop of York, attacked the Dissenters with great virulence, stigmatizing them as men of “close ambition.” In reply to this attack, the elder Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, made the following remarks: “This is judging uncharitably, and whoever brings here a charge without proof, defames. The dissenting ministers are represented as men of close ambition. They are so, my lords; and their ambition is to keep close to the college of fishermen, not of cardinals; and to the doctrine of inspired apostles, not to the decrees of interested and aspiring bishops. Theij contend for a scriptural creed and a scriptural worship; xoe have a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy. The Reformation lias laid open the Scriptures to all; let not the bishops shut them again. Laws in support of ecclesiastical power are pleaded, which it would shock humanity to execute. It is said that religious sects have done great mischief when they were not kept under restraint; but history offers no proof that sects have ever been mischievous when they were not oppressed and persecuted by the ruling church.”

had not felt since the days of the Reformation. These were great days for Britain. Then it was that dukes and duchesses bowed before the cross; and such men as Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, Mr. Pitt and Lord North, the Duke of Grafton and Mr. Fox, and Garrick and Shuter, and the flower of the aristocracy, writhed under the burning rays of “the Tabernacle.” Of all men since the days of the Apostles, George IVJiitJield is the man who gave the pulpit its true power. John Newton says of him, “He was the original of popular preaching, and all our popular ministers are only his copies.” By popular preaching, he ineans, preaching most effectively addressed to the popular mind. He relates the remarkable fact, tRat “at the time of Mr. Whitfield’s greatest persecution, when obliged to preach in the streets, he received, in one week, not fewer than a thousand letters from persons distressed in their consciences by the energy of his preaching.”

The two most remarkable revivals of true religion since the days of the Apostles, were probably those which took place at the Protestant Reformation, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and under Whitfield and his coadjutors and followers in the eighteenth. It would be too much, perhaps, to say, that the results of the pulpit at these particular periods have not been duly appreciated. But they were days of power. Human instrumentality was most truly abundantly honored. God himself was there. It was the Spirit of God poured from on high. It was a cloud of heavenly mercy, which, with the exception of Spain, refreshed the nations of Europe. Nor did it it stop in its course, hut sailed across the ocean, watered the iields of this New World, and as it melted away, left the bow of promise spanning the whole heavens. Millions and millions have been born of the Spirit, since Wicklifle, Huss, Jerome, and Luther, and Whit — field first lifted up their voices to the infatuated nations. Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland, the united kingdoms of Great Britain, and these American States, together with those distant lands in the remoter eastern hemisphere, and those islands of the sea which have come under the influence of Gospel truth, all stand forth before the world as illustrations of its power. Its trophies are in almost every land: its song of triumph is echoed from pole to pole.