who ministered to Christ, and who are incessantly alluded to in the Acts and the Epistles as helpers of the apostles-the deaconesses and prophetesses of the New Dispensation. The New Dispensation recognizes them in the common priesthood. They should be the vestal priestesses at its altars. Do they complain of the limitations on their Christian usefulness, the neverending drudgery and toil of their homes? Let them remember that every Christian household should be a church; every nursery a sanctuary; every cradle a shrine at which the maternal priestess may kneel with prayers for the young immortal who, if trained for heaven, shall, in the language of Christ, be equal unto the angels. What if an infant cherub, winged and radiant, should accidentally drop from heaven into a Christian matron's home; would she not deem its care a divine and blessed responsibility? How would she love and nurture it, till some kindred messenger from the skies should come to reclaim it! How would its presence honor her house! All the streets leading thither would be thronged with wondering and reverent multitudes, eager to behold the celestial sight. All the world would report and discuss the marvelous fact. But such homes have already as high and holy an honor; many of them have whole groups of young angels, as immortal as any in higher worlds. They "have entertained angels unawares." No priesthood on earth is higher or more capable than that of Christian maternity. Its ministry extends at last into the "holiest of holies" of the very heavens.

Has God endowed a Christian woman with special gifts for usefulness in the Church? The gifts themselves are the warrant of her right to use them. "Let all things be done decently and in order," is indeed a divine maxim, and woman's heart will instinctively recognize it; but an extreme construction of St. Paul's views of female decorum in the congregation is, we think, a general fault of our modern Church-life. A large portion of our Church-life consists of social religious services. What would any other form of social life, any other social gatherings, be if the women present were required to be mute spectators? Would not such a conventionalism absolutely spoil our social life generally? Paul did not allow women to speak in the "ecclesia," but why apply this to the familiar social assemblies of Christians, even if it were applicable to

more public occasions? Paul, as we have seen, recognizes the saintly services of women, of " deaconesses " and "prophetesses.' And even if he advised their non-interference in the "ecclesia," yet he did not institute the interdiction as perpetual. It was evidently a matter of conventional decorum, a concession to the peculiar oriental or pagan manners of the age, in countries in which women were extremely restricted. It was prudence in the Church not to outrage in such things the long-established customs of the East. Primitive Christianity was eminently prudent, though in all essential matters heroic. Certainly the Oriental conventionalism regarding women, requiring them, in some sections, to be always vailed when abroad, (as to-day in the Levant generally,) to sit apart and behind screens in religious congregations even among the Jews, were not matters of divine morality, but merely of local custom. Christianity in such cases, as in the more important one of slavery, did not declare direct war, but chose rather to put in operation general principles of moral training, which should, sooner or later, uproot the evil. Assuredly Paul's concession to his times, on female decorum in the Christian assembly, has been essentially modified by our different civilization. Methodism, then, we think, is right in the freedom it accords the sex in its Church-life. It has found, with Quakerism, that a degree of feminine activity in religious life, which would have been entirely inadmissible in the ancient East, is perfectly compatible with the decorum of social, and even public, worship, and can give a gentle and hallowed dignity to the offices of the sanctuary. Good order, directed by good sense, must control this matter in the Churches; but nothing can ever invalidate the claim of woman, as a member of the Christian communion, to the right of the common " priesthood of the people."

Thirdly. May we not infer from this review of the subject that there is still much of popery to be purged away from our Protestantism? Do not its "fag ends" cling to nearly the whole apparel of the Church? The two principal characteristics of popery are its hierarchical distinctions and its abject. subjection to authority. Thence have come its chief corruptions and its imperious uncharitableness, and thence also its present calamities and decadence. We have seen how simple

and democratic was original Christianity. We look in vain in the New Testament for the official distinctions and powers of the medieval Church; but do we not find traces of them today in nearly all our Church polities? If they stifled the religious life of the laity in that Church, do they not shackle it, at least, in most of our Protestant communions? And can our faith ever have its free and full activity in the world till we break off and throw from us these fetters? Does not also authority" still dominate over us, giving undue importance to secondary matters, restricting the free action of the Christian. conscience, or forcing it to break away into eccentric and perilous liberties, into sectarian divisions, and then again binding it with fetters of opinionativeness and bigotry within the sects? Have we ever pondered well the grand facts that the primitive Church was without an authoritatively defined Creed for three hundred years, and still longer without an authoritatively determined Canon, and that these were the years of its saintliest purity, of its most glorious army of martyrs, and of its sublimest territorial triumphs? In this ante-Nicene period it marched victoriously over most of the known world. In the purity and freedom of its spirit it recognized the apostolic writings, though it read innumerable apocryphal books; it held faithfully the essential doctrinal truth, forming it by gradual accretions into what was called the Apostles' Creed, (not as written by the apostles, but as expressing their fundamental teachings,) though the symbol differed in form in different lands. It preserved its spiritual life not by its "orthodoxy," but its orthodoxy by its spiritual life. The later Church has reversed the process. Functional distinctions are good, creeds are good; as matters of expediency they may be necessary in some cases; but as obligative instead of indicative, as authoritative rather than convenient, they are destructive of the liberty wherewith Christ makes us free. They have converted Christianity into hierarchism and dogmatism. Designed for the preservation of orthodoxy, they have become provocatives of heresy. Aiming at the unity of the Church, they have rent it into universal factions. But, most fatal of all their effects, by impairing its catholicity and charity they have impaired its spiritual life, and to a great extent paralyzed its beneficent working power.

Finally, from the vantage ground which we have reached in this discussion, we think we may catch some glimpses of “ the Church of the future"-that ideal so eagerly sought in our day. The Methodists, with their growing hosts, the Baptists, with their zeal and their missionary expansion, the "Liberalists," with their "free thought," dream of that glory as their own. We dare not share their illusions. We see a better fate coming for the Church and the world—an era in which good men will look back to our weaknesses and petty and petulant sectarianisms with something of the wonder with which we contemplate the follies of the medieval Church. God will purify us as by fire, fusing and blending us, and bringing us forth a transformed "Church of the future." One thing only are we sure of, that the Church which attains the most individual purity of life, the most charity, and the most working energy, will have the best prestige for the future. Ever still, as of old, is the sublime declaration true that "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."

ART. III. PETER CARTWRIGHT, AND PREACHING IN THE WEST.

[SECOND ARTICLE.]

IN 1856, after a ministry of fifty-three years, Cartwright, yielding to long-continued importunities, decided to publish his autobiography. In his earlier ministry Cartwright kept a journal of his travels, that he might thus record the progress of Methodism; but finding that several of his co-laborers were doing the same, he concluded there was too much writing on the same subject, and abandoned his manuscript to mice and maggots, not troubling himself to make another note.

We cannot too much deplore this decision, and his preface expresses his own regret at it, since it has prevented his giving just order and precision to the existing work. Cartwright's journal would have been far preferable to the book we now have. It would have shown us the preacher in his every-day life, brought us to the scene of his labors, his joys, and sorrows, and would at the same time have presented a picture, taken on FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXV.-5

the spot, of the material and moral life of the West at the opening of the century. But now, as Cartwright takes up the pen in later life, he is rather intent upon giving us an edifying book than upon recounting the details of his own life. He, indeed, puts these as much as possible out of view, purposing only to glorify his God and his Church. He loves with a true filial affection this Methodist Church, which awakened in his youthful heart the desire for salvation, and which has made a poor pioneer the instrument of so many conversions. He rejoices in all its successes, and laments all the dissensions which embarrass or the defections which weaken it. He gives us a register of the yearly accessions to the Lord's flock, and furnishes a minute account of the labors of the Conferences and of their discussions, to which he listens as if the fate of the universe depended on the movements which agitate a sect of the American Church. With the intent of moral edification, his pen abounds in anecdotes. He makes record of obdurate sinners suddenly converted, of saints backslidden and recovered, of wicked men stricken by the judgments of God, hypocrites unmasked, heretics or atheists confounded.

Every sect has its store of pious narratives where Satan and the rival sects are well abused, and it is specially a book of this order that Cartwright has given us to glorify American Methodism. But here, as might well be expected in a narrative of his own life, while making war against the demon, the Baptists, Unitarians, and Universalists, he cannot avoid sometimes putting himself upon the scene; and so amid the monotony, more moral than amusing, of the narrative, his own powerful and original personality stands forth presented in vivid and piquant traits.

Peter Cartwright was born September 1, 1785, on the banks of the River James, in Virginia. His parents were poor; and his father, who had borne arms during the war of Independence, resolved when peace was made to emigrate to Kentucky with all his family. Having remained some time in Lincoln. County, he pushed further on and established himself permanently in Logan County, quite at the outer limits of European settlements, and close upon the present borders of Tennessee. Peter Cartwright therefore knew no other life than that of the pioneers; he grew up in the midst of the woods, and for his