grace and misfortune.

The noblemen and gentlemen who are giving their time and support to the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the constant publicity given by the Secretary, Mr. Grove, to the reports he receives from Jerusalem, are ample proof of the honest and true application of the sums subscribed. It will be an honour to those churches that profess more especially to look for Divine light in the private and individual study of Scripture, their pastors, elders, and members to come forward with ready and sustained aid to forward the completion of the most valuable commentary that was ever attempted on the sacred writings, the only one which, acceptable alike to Christians of every communion, is incapable of even unconscious bias, and will shed on the words of Prophet and of Apostle, no less than on the writings of the great Jewish Historian, the light of Truth.

OUR WORK.

"FREE Churches in a Free State" is the formula which embodies the convictions and aims of the leading liberal statesmen and thinkers of Europe. To obtain the freedom of the Churches and to prepare them for its use is the great work set before Christians now. The Episcopal Church in England has to be emancipated from the bondage and no less mischievous patronage of the State. The Nonconformist Churches, too, have yet many things from which they must seek to be freed-from elaborate ecclesiastical organizations-from customs and notions, merely conventional-from the narrowness and dogmatism produced by their constant though unwilling position of antagonism, and protest against the assumptions of a State Church. In freedom only can the Christian life expand to its full beauty and vigour from freedom come charity, earnestness, unity. These, in few words, are the governing principles of the FREE CHURCHMAN, and in their exposition lies its chief work.

THE

FREE CHURCHMAN.

FEBRUARY, 1868.

LAODICEAN YOUNG MEN.

DANTE, in his Inferno, pictures the condition of those

departed souls who had lived cowardly lives, earning neither infamy nor praise. The heavens expel them as unworthy, and the nether regions reject them as useless. They hang in mid air and in such misery, that they envy every other fate. Mercy and justice alike despise them. Their names have sunk into everlasting oblivion. They are miserable wretches, hateful to God and hardly less hateful to the enemies. of God. They were never more than half alive. Their doom is to be kept in perpetual animation by the stings of gad-flies and of hornets, so that they may no more experience that indolent and selfish ease which they recreantly chose on earth. They are depraved souls, and because they were neither cold nor hot, it is their dolorous fate to alternate evermore between the tortures of burning heat and freezing cold. Other horrors, more than we can quote, are marshalled by the poet as he describes the limbo of souls in whom earnestness has no place. How far his terrific picture has any correspondence with fact, we shall not inquire; but it is quite certain that the sin of

indifference, of selfish neutrality, which he held as meriting so fearful a doom, is one that no considerations derived from earth, hell, or heaven, have yet destroyed. To speak only of young men, and of those whose leisure, education, and ability, give them the opportunity of forwarding the march of liberty and of truth, is it not a painful fact that vast crowds of them care little and do less for human welfare? We are not referring to the immoral or the profane, but to those who observe the proprieties of life, who are steady in business, who are to be found once a week in our places of worship, but who never heartily connect themselves with any good enterprise. When Pericles gazed upon the lifeless forms of many young Athenians, strewn on the field of battle, he exclaimed, "the year hath lost its spring," but it were better to die on the battlefield and bear no ripe autumnal fruit, than become a moral suicide, and by a cold indifference make the life empty and useless. Warm-hearted philanthropy, identifying itself cordially with any attempt, social, political, or religious, to benefit mankind, is more the exception than the rule. The hand is there, and the head, but the vis vivida is wanting. In the material world the amount of waste is exorbitant, but it is hardly more evident than in the moral world. If men made a wise use of the gifts Providence has placed at their disposal in nature, there could be no such thing as poverty on this wealthy earth, and if they did the same in the world of mind, society would go forward with a bound that might almost give immediate promise of the millennium. The sum of latent

power in the ranks of the virtuous around us is incalculable. It is as though there were the fear of repeating the sin of Prometheus; as though the drawing down of any fire from heaven would only render the soul ever afterwards food for the vulture of remorse. We may echo one of the lamentations of Jeremiah: "How is the gold become dim! ***The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter."

Certainly, there is no lack of subjects of the deepest interest, which might well enlist the active sympathy of intelligent young men. Notwithstanding the tendency there always is to

magnify the events of one's own time, and thus often to mistake historical molehills for mountains, or, like the Knight of La Mancha, windmills for giants, we venture to say that at the present hour, questions are lying on the surface of society of the utmost importance to future ages. The mode in which they shall be determined will mainly depend upon the attention they now receive from men who will not be old for thirty years to come. Whether, for example, those who, a third of a century hence, when they have reached the autumn of life, shall be able to look out from the retirement of a well-earned leisure, upon a nation from which the reproach of popular ignorance, now cast with too much truth, has been removed; or whether, as compared with other nations, our country shall still be disgracefully in the rear; is a matter for the present generation of young men to determine. By the time they have taken to substantial walking-sticks, and still more substantial grandchildren, they may not only have contributed to the lifting the whole people to a high and creditable level of knowledge, but they may enjoy the satisfaction of seeing all great social questions advanced, and many of them happily determined. Serious disputes between the pocket and the hand, capital and labour, need adjusting, and they cannot be adjusted with any hope of permanent peace unless they receive a careful and candid attention. If a man will see clearly, and determine intelligently, if he will even perceive the real difficulties of the subject, he must do more than view it through an occasional article in a newspaper. It is difficult to repress a feeling of contempt when we hear young men who have never given as much as a day's steady reading or an hour's patient thought to the matter, flippantly uttering the most sweeping dogmas, and either launching wholesale condemnation against nine-tenths of the population, or raving against capitalists, as though every employer of labour were an incarnation of all that is bad. To hear a youth, totally unacquainted with the first principles of political economy, and inaccurately informed as to facts, decisively dismissing the opinions of the most thoughtful writers, reminds one of Jerrold's witticism, that "Dogmatism is but full-grown puppyism." So with international questions. The hatred of war is, doubt

less, on the increase, but if an earnest Christian sentiment on the subject were to take hold of our young men, we might confidently hope that in half a century a war in which England should be engaged would be almost an impossibility, and a settlement of differences with the United States by arms would be scouted as an anachronism as great as duelling, or as the walking over red-hot ploughshares for the detection of guilt. The perversion of patriotism, under which crimes without number have been committed, would be superseded by philanthropy, and the name of national honour would give place to the thing. So, again, there are social questions almost without end, and full of interest to a mind with any ardour, and which every man may promote, without great genius or great wealth. Poverty produces vice, and vice produces poverty; and to try in any direction to break the deadly circle, is an enterprise worthy of the loftiest, and at the same time quite within the range of the humblest powers. Intemperance, commercial immorality, and a host of other evils raging at our doors, have to be met and conquered. Ecclesiastical problems too, of which the importance can hardly be over-rated, are pressing their claims upon us. The decision of such questions will have an immense effect on social and on spiritual progress. A happy and final settlement might soon be reached, if the tide of public opinion were increased by the deliberate convictions of those who are now contented ignominiously to hold aloof. Religious questions, which it is still more perilous to neglect, invite the deepest attention of earnest minds. the Scriptures to be levelled to Shakespeare or Bacon? revelation opposed to science, or, rather, is science the only revelation? Is priestly rule to be restored in this country, with all the material, moral, and spiritual consequences it has invariably produced? We do not want any Protean versatility, but with so many objects of grave practical import soliciting us from every point of the horizon, his mind must be strangely constituted who can find no interest in any. There is a choice sufficiently varied to every taste. A man contributes next to nothing to the progress of a good cause who does but faintly re-echo opinions that he could neither explain nor defend. Like the shouting of the guide in the crypt of the

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