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affecting, the pastors themselves cannot endure it-they cannot live. They are not only constantly fluctuating-literally afloat on the wide surface of the community-but their health is undermined-their spirits are sinking—and they are fast treading upon each others' heels to the grave, their only land of rest.

"Never, since the days of the apostles, was a country blessed with so enlightened, pious, orthodox, faithful, willing clergy, as the United States of America at this moment; and never did a ministry, so worthy of trust, have so little independence to act according to their conscience and best discretion. They are literally the victims of a spiritual tyranny that has started up and burst upon the world in a new form—as least, with an extent of sway that has never been known. It is an influence which comes up from the lowest conditions of life, which is vested in the most ignorant minds, and, therefore, the more unbending and uncontrollable. It is an influence which has been fostered and blown

into a wide-spread flame by a class of itinerating ministers, who have suddenly started up and overrun the land, decrying and denouncing all that have not yielded at once to their sway; by direct and open efforts shaking and destroying public confidence in the settled and more permanent ministry, leaving old paths and striking out new ones, demolishing old systems and substituting others, and disturbing and deranging the whole order of society as it had existed before. And it is to this new state of things, so harassing, so destructive to health and life, that the regular ministry of this country (the best qualified, most pious, most faithful, and in all respects the most worthy Christian ministry that the church has ever enjoyed in any age) are made the victims. They cannot resist it, they are overwhelmned by it."

The fact is, that there is litte or no healthy religion in their most numerous and influential churches; it is all excitement. Twenty or thirty back the Methodists were considered as ex

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travagantly frantic, but the Congregationists and Presbyterians in the United States have gone far a-head of them, and the Methodist church in America has become to a degree Episcopal, and softened down into, perhaps, the most pure, most mild, and most simple of all the creeds professed.

I have said that in these two churches the religious feeling was that of excitement: I believe it to be more or less the case in all religion in America; for the Americans are a people who are prone to excitement, not only from their climate but constitutionally, and it is the caviare of their existence. If it were not so, why is it necessary that revivals should be so continually called forth-a species of stimulus, common, I believe, to almost every sect and creed, promoted and practised in all their colleges, and considered as most important and salutary in their results. Let it not be supposed that I am depreciating that which is to be understood by a revival in the true sense of the word; not those

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revivals which were formerly held for the benefit of all and for the salvation of many: I am raising my voice against the modern system, which has been so universally substituted for the reality; such as has been so fully exposed by Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont, and by Mr. Colton, who says——

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Religious excitements, called revivals of religion, have been a prominent feature in the history of this country from its earliest periods, more particularly within a hundred years; and the agency of man has always had more or less to do in their management, or in their origination, or in both. Formerly in theory (for man is naturally a philosopher, and will always have his theory for every event and every fact), they were regarded as Pentecostal seasons, as showers from heaven, with which this world below had nothing to do but to receive and be refreshed by them as they came. A whole community, or the great majority of them, absorbed in serious thoughts about eter

nal things, inquiring the way to heaven, and seeming intent on the attainment of that high and glorious condition, presents a spectacle as solemn as it is interesting to contemplate. Such, doubtless, has been the condition of many communities in the early and later history of American revivals; and it is no less true that the fruits have been the turning of many to God and his ways.

"The revivals of the present day are of a very different nature.* There are but two ways by which the mind of man can be brought to a pro

* The American clergymen are supported in their opinion on the present revivals and their consequences by Doctors Reid and Matheson, who, otherwise favourable to them, observe, "These revival preachers have denounced pastors with whom they could not compare, as 'dumb dogs, hypocrites, and formalists, leading their people to hell.' The consequences have been most disastrous. Churches have become the sport of derision, distraction, and disorder. Pastors have been made unhappy in their dearest connections. So extensive has been this evil that, in one presbytery of nineteen churches, there were only three who had settled pastors; and in one synod, in 1832, of a hundred and three churches, only fiftytwo had pastors."

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