times, could not long dwell among an uncouth and ignorant people. The standard writers upon Jewish antiquities lead us to conclude that the cities of the Levites were seats of learning, and that the schools of the Prophets were not unlike the schools of Grecian philosophy, where the young men associated with their teachers, and were qualified to be the teachers of the nation. The Jewish priests are declared to have been set apart to their office, that they "might teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the Lord had spoken unto them by the hand of Moses." They must have been men of no inconsiderable learning in order to have performed this service. If it is a fair supposition that the Jewish priesthood understood their own religious laws, as well as they were understood by Witsius, Warberton, Graves, and Michaelis, they must have exerted no humble influence on the literature of this people.

There are strong sympathies, and a most natural alliance, between religion and learning, Christianity and every department of human science. In the brightest periods of the church and of literature, this alliance has been seen and felt. It cannot be otherwise than that a class of men, to whom is committed the religious instruction of the people, should exert an influence upon their literature, if it were only in liberating

the mind from bondage, imparting an impression of personal responsibility, and stimulating to intellectual effort. Every competent teacher of a Sabbath school knows that the alliance of which we are speaking, is the most natural thing in the world. Were the Bible made a text-book in our common schools, our acade mies and colleges, as this book of God ought to be in every one of them; there is no department which, from the varied learning it requires, it would be so difficult to supply with an accomplished professor; nor is there one in which so much general information of every kind might be communicated. The mere facts recorded in the sacred writings require extensive research, in almost every department of human knowledge. Chronology, history, the natural sciences, the science of law and government, and political economy, to say nothing of the laws of language, are important auxiliaries to just and enlarged views of the divine oracles. Nowhere is there a finer field for such researches than in the five books of Moses, the geater Prophets, and the Acts of the Apostles. The book of Genesis alone is the source of all knowledge. It is a mountain where lofty cedars, the cedars of God, strike their roots deep; in whose recesses there is golden ore; on whose surface there is a wilderness of native flowers and fruit; through whose ravines run

mighty rivers, and where ancient nations dwelt that were many and strong. Men of learning have traversed it; imagination has culled its purest flowers; curious research has traced out its time-worn channels; and patient and discriminating toil has dug about its roots; and they are all found fresh and pure, and the soil inexhaustible.

It is no presumption to say that human learning is under obligations to the pulpit. To say nothing of the present age, what a host of names has it furnished, in days past, that are inscribed on the temple of learning and science, throughout the Continent of Europe and the British islands! It were a chasm to be felt, were the pulpit no longer to have a place in the University of the literary world.

These and other incidental influences of the pulpit are so obvious, that it is a fact which deserves to be noticed, that historians have found in impracticable to separate the profane from the sacred. Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Sully, could not give an impartial account of the civil without presenting the ecclesiastical. Oral traditions, historical poems, laws, archives of state, monuments, coins, medals, books of heraldry and sepulchral stones, are not more important sources of history than the pulpit. That were a lame history of France, in which the names of Petavius, Beza, Lorraine, Bossuet,

and Pascal had no place. And what would be the history of Germany, where the reader did not find the portraits of Luther, Melancthon, and Bucer? Who that desired to do justice to his theme, would write the history of England, and suppress the deeds of Wickliffe, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, Jewel, Leighton, and Baxter? Or what scholar would give to the world a history of Scotland, and keep out of sight such men as Patrick Hamilton, Wishart, Knox, Henderson, Gillespie, and Rutherford ? Or who would risk his reputation as the historian of New England, without recurring to the name of Robertson, and the pulpits of Hooker, Davenport, Cotton, and Mather? Or where shall we look for any valuable historical sketch of the Middle States, without being introduced into the "Log College," and to such men as Tennent, Blair, Burr, Dickenson, and Davies?

We may not pursue this prolific thought. It would be a pleasant service to us to enter into some specifications, and direct the attention of the reader, with more minuteness, to several portions of the Christian world, where the pulpit has exerted this incidental influence. We may perhaps be allowed to direct his attention to the little state of New Jersey, and to the states of New England. Look at New Jersey. What a beautiful commonwealth spreads itself between the bay of New York and the Dela

ware bay and river! Christian seminaries of learning, a Christian bench and bar, a Christian legislature, a Christian pulpit,--what an adornment to the land! My own preferences for New England, as one of her native sons, may be supposed to disqualify me to speak impartially of that fair land; but I will use the language of one who has never been accused of any such partialities.* “Two centuries have elapsed,” says this well known and able writer, "since the first persecuted settlers of New England set their feet on these shores, to rear a church in all the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. The population of that section of country has increased from a few individuals to eighteen hundred thousand, and there is now one minister to every thousand souls; a proportion greater than in some of the oldest countries of Europe; and there is doubtless no equal population upon earth to whom the Gospel is administered with greater purity and fidelity." What would New England have been without her pulpit? With it, what is she, and where is not her influence felt? not simply in her own civil organizations, but in those of other states of this Union. There is no part of Christendom that has not acknowledged these incidental influences of the pulpit, in forming its habits and

* Introductory lecture delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, N. J., Nov. 1818, by Charles Hodge, D. D.