CHAPTER V.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

I ADD a single thought more. It may present a vivid impression of the power of the pulpit, to suppose it actually abolished throughout the world. What if the dream of some modern reformers could be realized, and the expressed wishes of a well-known class of men among us were gratified; and every minister in God's Zion were silenced, and exiled, and every sanctuary in Christendom razed to its foundation! Can any one doubt, if this reckless experiment were fully made, that the moral, the social, the civil condition of the world would be melancholy to the last degree? What an immensity of wickedness would be found to exist among men! What "mighty labor of human depravity!" and what a stupendous amount of crimes!

Nor is this altogether hypothesis; for we have several classes of facts to go upon in our illustration of this idea. Take, for example, several instances in the history of Papal kingdoms, where they have been placed under in

terdict by the reigning Pope. When, in the thirteenth century, King John of England had incurred the displeasure of Pope Innocent III., and his kingdom was laid under interdict; when Otho, the Emperor of Germany, was for a similar cause, put under interdict by the same Pope; the result was calamitous beyond the endurance of the people. So it was, when Philip the Fair, of France, became involved in a quarrel with his Holiness, and was laid under interdict by Pope Boniface IX.; and when in the fourteenth century, Pope Clement V. dispatched a nuncio to Venice, and on the rejection of his demands, excommunicated the Doge, and put his dominions under interdict. The immediate effect of this sentence, as you well know, was, that every church in these kingdoms was closed; every priest forbidden to exercise his office; and all religious services of every kind indefinitely suspended. The Sabbath bell was unhung: the voice of prayer and praise was heard only in retirement; the living teacher spoke not; baptism was denied to the newly born, religious consolation to the dying, and Christian burial to the dead. The clergy avoided the land groaning under the malediction of the Pope; the people were excited against their own princes, because they were so slow to become reconciled to Rome.

Conspiracy sprung up after conspiracy, till the

ruling powers were constrained to submission to the Papal authority, through the fear of open insurrection. In some of these instances, the distress of the people is described as verging on madness;--it was the madness of despair, because their religious privileges were denied them. Have them they would, even at the expense of revolt and massacre.

Let us suppose such a state of things realized among Protestants, and that the countries of England or Scotland, or the United States, were placed under the ban of some governmental interdict, and their ministers banished, and their churches closed. The time was when this supposition was in part realized, even in Protestant England, and by the barbarous "Act of Uniformity," in the year 1662, under the reign of the treacherous Charles II. And as the fatal day of St. Bartholomew approached, when the non-conformist ministers were to relinquish their pulpits, or sign articles which they could not in conscience subscribe to, two thousand pulpits were put under interdict, and two thousand of God's faithful servants were virtually driven into exile. Prelacy triumphed for a while, as her elder sister had done before her; and such men as Calamy and Baxter. Manton, Bates, and Mead, instead of resisting unto blood, wept in silence. It was a dark day in England. There was great

mourning. The land mourned “every family apart; the family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart; the family of the house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart; and the family of the house of Levi apart, and their wives apart! All the families that remained, every family apart, and their wives apart."

There was another scene of this same kind, though of more terrific aspect. During the reign of Louis XIV. of France, the spirit of persecution against Protestants, and especially Protestant ministers, was extended to such unrelenting severity, that on the revocation of the Edict of Nantz, the Protestant pulpit was annihilated, and its ministers slain and mutilated, with every species of barbarity. It was the jubilee of Rome; but it was the funeralday of the people of God. No, it was not their funeral-day; for so many of them died without burial, that the inhabitants of some cities were obliged to remove from them to an atmosphere less corrupted by the bodies of the slain. Those who could escape this scene of horror fled; they fled to other lands. Two hundred thousand of them fled; and not a few of the descendants of these noble men are here among ourselves, where the sword of persecution does not smite them, and where they perish not by "a famine of the word of the Lord."

There is a still more affecting exemplification

of the truth we are illustrating, and one that is fresh in the memory of some who are living. The writer of these pages remembers it well, when in the days of his childhood, the church bell of his native parish tolled for the downfall of Christianity in France. By one sweeping and atheistic law, the French people decided that there was no God. Her pulpits were silenced, Papal and Protestant. God's day of holy rest was annihilated, and the Decade instituted in its room. And what was the consequence? Instructive, beyond exaggeration, instructive, to a degree which language is too poor to express. Subsequent events tell what it was. The guillotine proclaims it. The murderous band stationed at the prison doors proclaims it. A voice from one vast slaughterhouse of men proclaims it. France herself, infatuated as she was, could not endure the destitution. Infidelity could not endure it. Atheism staggered and fell under the weight of its own wickedness. Every thing human tottered, because every thing perished that was divine. Infidelity, atheism, and France, were obliged to fall back upon institutions which they had scorned, seek the law at the lips of God's ministers, and at altars which they had so shamelessly desecrated and profaned.

But let us return to the fiction of our hypothesis. What if the pulpits of this land were