bind the
soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from family, from
friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which hovers before
him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him, not to crime, but
to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and self-sacrifice, to the
freedom which is won only by surrender of the will. Christianity has never
been concession, never 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 whom 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,