The Pulpit.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 209, 11 September 1875, Page 5

The Pulpit.

Mr. Sankey (the Revivalist) is the son of the Hon. David Sankey, of West Newcastle, Pennsylvania, and the Democrat of that place says:—“ Whatever may he said of him, no one can accuse him of ever having attempted to mix politics with religion. He is an intelligent Christian gentleman, a singer of the highest excellence, and in point of mental culture far superior to Mr. Moody." Object teaching is favored very much for Sunday-schools, but is not often adopted in the pulpit. The Baptist WccU // reports a recent case of a minister using it with great effect in New Jersey. The Rev. W. V. Wilson, the earnest pastor of the New Monmouth Baptist Church, lately preached a sermon on dishonesties in trade, and especially condemned farmers who topped their barrels with large potatoes and put exceeding small one below. In illustration, he drew from his pocket four diminutive potatoes, and exhibited them to tile astonished gaze of his congregation. That small-potato sermon will not soon be forgotten, and probably the customers of the transgressors, whose offence elicited it, will be greatly benefited.

The Chi; ucn and Dissent. —The Standard maintains that the Church of England is at this day the great bulwark against Popery ; and were it possible to break down her strength, Dissent would find itself face to face with a power against whose art, knowledge, and wisdom, it would contend in vain. On the other side it would be sapped by infidelity against which it has neither the knowledge nor the high intellectual capacity to make a defence adequate to the needs of the present age, and which would gain a great hold on the educated classes from the day when they could no longer enjoy the blessings of religious administrations as a legal right, in a Church the conditions of whose communion are fixed by law. Tens of thousands of the very flower of our educated classes would be driven out of any communion that was free to impose tests and conditions, or to inquire into the stateof their souls, cither after the Roman or the Puritan fashion ; and the loss to English Christianity would be irreparable if not fatal. It is the Established Church of England that has given us the religious freedom we enjoy. Destroy that Church, and Dissent, which breathes only in the atmosphere of hatred and antagonism, will wither away, and the battle will be left to be fought out between Romanism on the one side and Scepticism on the other. And this risk we are to run that a Dissenting preacher may not lie mortified by seeing in the pulpit of the parish church a man superior to himself in legal status and in education.

Coon-BYE to Consistency. —The Rode says that Archdeacon Denison’s arrogance increases with his years. In his recent charge, as reported in the Bristol Times, he sets himself to rebut what we thought was an acknowledged truism—viz., that so-called “high churchism” leads to Rome. Not a bit of it ! On the contrary, the archdeacon, who “ has had a long and wide experience,” is doubtful whether a single ca<e of a consistent and genuine high churchman becoming a Roman Catholic can be adduced. Now this—especially where Ritualism is concerned—recalls, remarks the Westminster (la zettc, the case of treason, which we are told can ne'er succeed :

“ And what’s the reason?— Tf it succeed, then none dare call it treason." And so with perversions to Rome. In the endless list of seceders Mr. Denison does not remember to have seen the name of a “single high churchman” entitled to the credit of “consistency.” Perhaps not—at least if the matter lie regarded from the Taunton point of view, according to which the moment “a high churchman becomes a Roman Catholic” lie ceases to be consistent. An Anglican dignitary may place himself under the patronage of the Virgin—is it not so, Archdeacon —without any detriment to his character ; but should he act upon his convictions, and betake himself to llame—which is the proper place for all Mariolaters—then good-bye to his consistency ! So, at least, Mr. Denison says ; but most of his fellow-countrymen weigh consistency in very different scales. MR. GLADSTONE ON THE CHURCH OF ROME. M. Emile do Laveleye's essay on “ Protestantism and Catholicism in their Bearing upon the Liberty and Prosperity of Nations” has been translated into English and issued by Mr. Murray. It is introduced by a letter from Mr. Gladstone, at whose request M. Laveleyc has permitted the translation, and who expresses his opinion that “within a compass wonderfully brief” the essay “initiates, in a very vivid manner, and has even advanced a point, the discussion of a question which hitherto van hardly be said to have presented itself to the pulili c mind, and which, it seems to me, high time to examine. That question is whether experience has now supplied data sufficient for a trustworthy comparison of results in the several spheres of political liberty, social advancement, mental intelligence, and general morality, between the Church of L"me on the one hand, and the religious communities cast off by or separated from her on the other. Mr. Hallam stated many years ago the difficulty of arriving at a conclusion on the ethical section of this question, but much which in his day remained obscure has been considerably elucidated liv recent experience. And I trust that the brief but significant and weighty indications of your pamphlet, especially if they should not lie followed by a fuller treatment from your own pen, may turn the thoughts of other students of history and observers of life to a thorough examination of this wide and most fruitful field. There are other features in Jour mode of handling the case from which England in particular may derive much instruction. With reference to the political and social fruits of religion, we have been accus-

tomed to regard Belgium as the one choice garden of the Roman Church, and it has afforded a ready answer to many who entertained strong suspicion of her workings. It will be well for us to have a few words on this subject from a Belgian of known liberality and tolerance, who knows what and under what difficulties the wisdom of two successive kings has done for Belgium, and who is too acute either to undervalue the power and fixed intentions of the Ultramontane conspiracy, or to find comfort in the visionary action that any security is afforded to European society against that conspiracy by any system of mere negations in religion. This last named error is widely prevalent in England. There is an impression, which is not worthy to be called a conviction, but which holds the place of one, that the indifferentism, scepticism, materialism, and Pantheism which for the moment are so fashionable, afford among them an effectual defence against Vaticanism. But one has truly said that the votaries of that system have three elements of real strength—namely, faith, self-sacrifice, and the spirit of continuity. None of the three are to be found in any of the negative systems, and you have justly and forcibly pointed out that these systems, through the feelings of repugnance and alarm which they excite in many religious minds, are effectual allies of the Romanism of the day. The Romanism of the day in a measure repays its obligation by making its censure of these evils, sincere no doubt, hut only light and rare in comparison with the anathemas which it bestows upon liberty and its guarantees, most of all when any tendency to claim them is detected within its own precincts.” THE BROOKLYN TRIAL. The following is the close of a review filling four pages of the supplement to Harper's Wcck/p for June 5, which contains the best review of this remarkable trial that has yet appeared in print : Two aspects of the case which we have passed over in silence have occupied a great proportion of the time of the judge, jury, and the op] losing counsel. These are Mr. Beecher’s alleged confessions, verbal and written. We have passed them by because the historian must necessarily dismiss them in a few words. Messrs. Moulton and Tilton swear to repeated confessions of adultery made by Mr. Beecher in language so grossly vulgar that we shall not repeat it here. Mr. Beecher explicitly and indignantly denies the language attributed to him. Charity cannot impute this conflict of testimony to misapprehension, nor all of it to even an intentional misconstruction. Either Mr. Beecher is a liar and a perjurer, or Messrs. Moulton and Tilton are. I hat the latter were liars they now frankly confess ; for that they both again and again asserted Mr. Beecher’s innocence of the crime now charged against him is testified to by many witnesses, and acknowledged, as indeed it could not be denied, by themselves. That the former has ever varied from the truth there is no evidence but theirs except the evidence of Mrs. Moulton.

She swears to a confession by Mr. Beecher not less shamelessly explicit. She fixes the date of this interview by a letter ; and it has been proved by the testimony of several independent and disinterested witnesses that Mr. Beecher was not and could not have been with her at the time which she had specified, and he denies that the confession thus imputed to him was ever uttered to her at any time. Denied no loss vigorously than the other confessions, with them it must stand or fall. The letters of Mr. Beecher abound in expressions, some of them eloquent in their pathos of remorse. The authorship of these letters, except that penned by Mr. Moulton on .January 1, IS7I, is not in dispute. Their analysis would transcend our limits. It must suffice to say that Mr. Beecher in a protracted examination went over them one by one, and essayed to explain every word and phrase which they contained. The reader who, from the history of the case, believes Mr. Beecher guilty of the crime attributed to him will, of course, interpret these letters in the liirht of that conclusion ; but he who thinks Iris innocence consonant with the indisputable facts of the case, will find no difficulty in comprehending his poignant remorse, when made to believe that he had unwittingly suffered a wife to transfer to himself her affections, had unconsciously broken up a household which he loved and in which he had found almost a second home, and had, by harboring suspicions which he was subsequently'induced to believe unjust, aided to despoil aud destroy a young man of noble possibilities, whom he regarded almost as an adopted son. For the same reason that we have not attempted to analyse Mr. Beecher’s correspondence, we have not referred to that of Mr. Tilton and Mr. Moulton. If the former are more easily reconcilable with the theory of Mr. Beecher’s guilt, the latter are not easily reconcilable with any other theory than that «f his innocence.

Thus far we have endeavored simply to tell the story of the case without interjectin'' into the narrative our own personal sympathies, prejudices, or judgement, Those sympathies are nevertheless very strong, that judgment is very clear. Under a careful analysis the evidence against Beecher utterly fails. It would not suffice against a man much less strongly intrenched in public esteem than he : against his pure life and noble character it breaks in vain, as the foam of the angry ocean against the cliff which it can obscure but cannot destroy. The case is one of conspiracy against a good and great, though careless, man, but a conspiracy which grew rather than was formed, which was the natural product of the jealousy of self-conceit rather than the deliberate contrivance of greed. On the one side is a man the greatness of whose heart aiul the credulity of whose sympathies are at once his genius and his weakness ; on the other is a man whose insane jealously is the natural though deadly fruit of an insane selfconceit, embittered by a spirit of personal and

fell revenge. He is aided unconsciously by the idolatrous affection and the too implicit obedience of a weak, morbid, anti suffering wife, and by the shrewd devices of a “ heathen” friend.*

1 lie key to. the comprehension of this whole case is Mr. Tilton’s frank declaration, “ I resolved to smite Mr. Beecher to the heart.” The arrow was well fashioned, the bow well bent, but the destroyer has failed of his purpose ; and when posterity, wiser than we, reads the history of this case, it will honor, not less than the noble achievements of Henry Ward Beecher’s noble life, the no less noble failure of the patience aud magnanimity of his only too eliivalric and unhappily unsuccessful endeavor to shield “all the other hearts that would ache” from the publication of the famous Brooklyn scandal.