peace; it is
continual aggression; one province of wrong conquered, its pioneers are
already in the heart of another. The mile-stones of its onward march
down the ages have not been monuments of material power, but the
blackened stakes of martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to
conviction. For it is the only religion which is superior to all
endowment, to all authority,--which has a bishopric and a cathedral
wherever a single human soul has surrendered itself to God. That very
spirit of doubt, inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment, with
which Romanists reproach Protestantism, is its stamp and token of
authenticity,--the seal of Christ, and not of the Fisherman.

We do not wonder at the division which has taken place in the Tract
Society, nor do we regret it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible
to very few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach to it in those
who associate together to disseminate the doctrines which they believe
to be its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies
of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct
and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the
wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the
hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a
Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of
families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling
Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a
system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the
minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it
condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was
there ever a simony like this,--that does not sell, but withholds, the
gift of God for a price?

The world naturally holds the Society to a stricter accountability than
it would insist upon in ordinary cases. Were they only a club of
gentlemen associated for their own amusement, it would be very natural
and proper that they should exclude all questions which would introduce
controversy, and that, however individually interested in certain
reforms, they should not force them upon others who would consider them
a bore. But a society of professing Christians, united for the express
purpose of carrying both the theory and the practice of the New
Testament into every ho