g in the millions of the race, it will be
seen that a new Christian movement also begins with it. Call it
reformation, or formation, or by whatever name, it is irresistible
because it is intangible. In one view it is only destruction. The State
is loosened from the Church. The Church crumbles down into fragments.
Superstition is eaten away by the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual
despotism flies affrighted from the broken loyalty of its metropolis.
Protestantism also, divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels,
falls into the finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid.
The new order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner
is the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than
the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to appear
in the solution. Repugnances melt away. Thought grows catholic. Men look
for good in each other as well as evil. The crossings of opinion by
travel and books, and the intermixture of races and religions, issue in
freer, broader views of the Christian truth; and so the "Church of the
Future," as it has been called, gravitates inwardly towards those terms
of brotherhood in which it may coalesce and rest. I say not or believe
that Christendom will be Puritanized or Protestantized; but what is
better than either, it will be Christianized. It will settle thus into a
unity, probably not of form, but of practical assent and love--a
Commonwealth of the Spirit, as much stronger in its unity than the old
satrapy of priestly despotism, as our republic is stronger than any
other government of the world.

RELIGIOUS MUSIC

From 'Work and Play'

As we are wont to argue the invisible things of God, even his eternal
power and Godhead, from the things that are seen, finding them all
images of thought and vehicles of intelligence, so we have an argument
for God more impressive, in one view, because the matter of it is
so deep and mysterious, from the fact that a grand, harmonic,
soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material
creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys
and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and
toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart. It is as if God had
made the world about us to be a grand organ of music, so that our
feelings might have play in it, as our understanding has in the light of
the sun and the outward colors and forms