doctrine, two or three hundred feasted at the King's table upon bread and wine; all of them having previously had their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and their bodies washed with pure water. I believe we had no sectarianism among us. Not a discordant note was heard in the house or among the trees. Brother Rains was with Our exercises were resumed and terminated pleasantly in the evening. Upon the whole, I believe, such a meeting is rarely us. held. Week before last, I attended Todd's Fork Association, where I received encouraging news from Indiana. We had a very interesting meeting. It was resolved, with but one dissentient vote, that the association request the churches to consider this question, "Shall we dissolve our association, and as a substitute, hold an annual meeting for worship and acquaintance?” and disclose the result of their deliberations at their next session. From a letter of your father's which I have seen, I learn that the old gospel is very successful with you.* Remember me to him. Yours in Christ, DAVID S. BURNET. FOR THE CHRISTIAN BAPTIST. BESIDE the unfounded imputation of want of plainness, which its pretended advocates, the clergy, have brough against God's address to perishing sinners, and out of which, false as the imputation is, they have extracted more gold than was ever dug from the mines of Peru, and more homage than was ever paid to crowned heads from Nimrod to the present hour: besides impious and vain attempts to remove from the divine message, such obscurities or silence as the communicating Spirit has thought proper to introduce into his original phraseology; or has suffered, in the course of his allwise providence, to creep into the sacred pages, and, of course, to force the divine oracles to impart more information than God intended or fitted them to convey: besides a vast mass of dubious tales which a presumptuous priesthood have either incorporated with or stuck to the divine text, a mass entirely conjectural, and totally useless: besides gross insults offered to the God of truth by audacious attempts to augment the credibility of his information by human researches or the exhibition of repeated declarations: besides, I say, these atrocious wrongs done to divine intelligence, our heavenly visitant has just cause to complain aloud of another gross indignity offered to her hallowed person, by the rude hands of ungodly men. By them her fair celestial robe has been torn into fragments; the integrity of her sacred form has been violated; her graceful limbs have been dislocated or broken to pieces; and her very bones, stripped of their natural * We have much_reason to be thankful for the success attendant upon the proclamation of the ancient gospel every where. Although I devote but little of my time, except the first day of every week, to the oral teaching and preaching of Jesus Christ, I have had the pleasure of im mersing more than thirty disciples in my own immediate neighborhood, within a few months back, into the faith of the apostolic gospel.-Ed. covering and made bare, have been deprived of every original tie. Upon her beautiful form every daring anatomist, learned and unlearned, has exercised his dissecting knife; and, after mangling it into such slices as suited his perverted taste, locked them together again, in such ludicrous combinations as best comported with his wayward fancy. By this barbarous treatment the loveliness of her heavenly image has been destroyed, her power to cultivate the human heart annihilated, and her graceful form distorted and disfigured by artificial and unnatural deformities; so that, instead of a visage possessed of irresistible charms, she is compelled to exhibit a mangled carcase, a haggard skeleton of naked bones hung together by human, wires. Christian reader, there is no misrepresentation, there is no exaggeration here: there is but a faint outline of the indignity offer. ed to God's gracious message, by a self-created order of men, who have had the address to procure to themselves unlimited human confidence, with the title, the honor, and the sanctity of God's lot.. But to use plain language, the outrage committed on the order, connexion, beauty, and power of the divine message, by profane sinners who have broken it into chapters, frittered it into verses, ground it into catechisms, and after flaying, picking, and completely disjointing it, have sent it forth in the true skeleton guise of confessions and creeds, calls aloud for the severest reprobation of every real friend of Jesus Christ. Shall it be asked, Is not God's intelligence, a most hallowed object? Has it not come from the sovereign Lord of all? What mortal, then, will dare to alter, or derange, or displace even a jot or tittle found therein? Does not God know infinitely better than man the arrangement, both in respect to time, words, and matter, which it is proper for him to adopt, and which the benefit of his creature man requires him to observe? Is it then within the daring effrontery of miserable sinners to impugn, to to deny this knowledge? Will they tell the infinitely wise God to his face, that he knows not how to arrange and connect the materials of his communication to the best advantage, nor how to render them as beneficial to the human race as they might be made, or as that race could themselves render them; and that therefore, his arrangement, connexion, and diction must be changed, and the whole message new-modelled? Is there nothing horrible, nothing awfully profane in this impudent interference? Surely we ought to remember that all God's ways are perfect, and that to his work nothing can be added, or change performed on it, without manifest impairment of its fitness to answer its purpose. And we ought also to remember that God is a great economist, a very summary agent, who accomplishes in an instant, by a single exertion of his will, simultaneously, many objects; and that no where is this truth more illustriously displayed, than in the operations of sacred writ on the human mind.By every new idea which God conveys into the soul of man, he not only enlightens the understanding but electrifies his heart. By him light and heat are imparted together. He does not as human teachers usually do, first propose in technical forms and language, cold as polar ice, rules of action, and then discharge red hot bullets, glowing motives, to drive the enlightened into motion. God's precepts and motives as they stand in scriptural array come simultaneously on the Vol. VII conscience with all the light, authority and power of a God. On the whole soul they act at once. At the same instant do they inform the mind and move the heart. But by the chilling, ludicrous operaAtions of the frittering, crumbling, dislocating, distorting and newmoddelling system, is God's message completely divested of this ineffable power. By its malign influence, the fitness of God's word to direct the understanding, and impress and impel the heart at once, or in other words to excite such feelings and emotions there, as the ideas presented in the divine message, are calculated to excite, is entirely destroyed; and no doubt, to this paralising process, to this impious, uncommanded, unauthorized interference of daring sinners with the order, arrangement and connexion in which God has judged it most proper and useful to send his instruction to perishing men, is its astonishing inefficacy to be ascribed. Did mankind do as the Saviour not only recommends, but peremptorily enjoins, and as David and other pious men constantly did; did they diligently and attentively ly read God's message just as it appears in sacred writ, unmixed, unaltered by man, and seriously reflect or meditate on its infinitely important information, it is impossible that the human mind could remain in that listless, careless, cold, unmoved state in which we generally behold it, even among those who loudly boast religion. But when God's address to sinners is stript of all the power and energy, of all the beauty and loveliness which it possesses, when presented to them unaltered, undanged, unadulterated, undiluted; and is exhibited in the form of a string of metaphysical questions or abstract propositions, is it any wonder that its energy should evaporate during the process of such an enfeebling transformation, and that the mortal torpor, so alarining to reflecting observers should ensue? Aut the annua ipity and enfeebling effect of this daring interfe rence with God's word, are but two of the many sad evils, which this unhallowed practice has produced. Of these evils, however, I shall at present take no notice. A. STRAITH. SOME months since we published a critique from the pen of Dr. Straith on the import of the Greek terms, expressive of the Christian institution, called immersion. This article appeared in the ninth number of the 6th volume of this work, and was headed thus:-"Immersion and not spinkling, another Presbyterian doctor testifies."Some weeks ago, I saw an article in the Richmond Herald, alleging that this was not fact, or, in other words that Mr. Straith was not then, nor ever was a Presbyterian Doctor or teacher. This contradiction from some anonymous writer, apparently a clergyman himself, caused me to request from Dr. Straith, some account of his former standing, with the Presbyterian church. A few days since he had the goodness to write me as follows:-I would only add, that we are very scrupulous in publishing any thing purporting to be a fuct unless upon such evidence as warrants our own faith.-It is possible, wę know, to be imposed upon sometimes; but when imposed upon, it is our duty, (and one which we have always discharged,) to correct any mistatements, which, through inadvertence or incorrect representation, may appear in our pages. In this instance, however, as it almost universally happens, we did not mislead the public. We hope the gentleman who so bluntly contradicted our former statement, will have the justice to retract his insinuations through the same columns which presented his calumny to the public.-Ed. Dear Sir, AN outline of my religious history is this. About thirty years ago I determined to carry into effect a purpose, which had been occasionally visiting my mind from my boyhood, of investigating the two important questions, Has God indeed spoken to the human family; and if he has, what has he said? Upon forming this resolution, I determined to consult none of those productions called evidences of christianity, no sermons, no commentaries, no bodies of divinity, &c. but the volume alone which purported it. self, and was generally admitted, to be a divine communication. This volume I consulted in the original Hebrew and Greek. . After it was perceived, that I was seriously disposed, I was induced by my Presbyterian acquaintances to unite myself to that society, and after some time, though I had never seen the inside of a theological school, and knew nothing of the drilling of a preacher, I was induced to accept a licence to preach, which I continued to do for two or three years as it suited me, but without fee or reward. At last I found the arbitrary spirit of my party did not suit the independence of my mind, nor their views qnadrate with the views that were daily opening to my inquiries; and, on the 20th day of April, 1811, I sent the Presbytery the following note. "It is my desire and request, after much deliberation, and for a variety of reasons not necessary to be stated in detail, that the Presbytery enter on their records a minute, purporting my voluntary separation;-it being my intention as soon as opportunity may present, to unite with that body of christians known in the United States by the denomination of Independents; their principles of association being more congenial to my sentiments than any other."The result of this movement was a bitter and unrelenting persecution, attended with the excitement of such prejudices, and outpourings of abuse, that I resolved to suspend my endeavors to communicate what little I knew, or thought I knew, of the Divine message, and since that time I have seldom heard those foolish and unprofitable harangues called sermons. On the 9th instant, however, at Harper's ferry, I heard one from a Presbyterian orator, two thirds of which consisted of circumstances, which if they did exist, were certainly considered by the Holy Spirit too insignificant to merit his notice, and a considerable portion of it, of matters that related to the orator's dear self; so that, these superfluities being deducted, the residue was pretty nearly reduced to the diction of the Holy Spirit. On the same day I exhibited to a large collection of people the evidences which had satisfied me that immersion was the action enjoined by Christ on all his followers, and accordingly submitted to it. I have been requested to suffer the address to be published, and perhaps after some consideration I may consent to it. A. S. VOL. VII. 5* NOTE. I neglected to annex the Presbytery's entry. "Therefore Dr. Straith is no longer considered under the care of this Presbytery." I am, with respect, Your ob't. serv't. ALEX. STRAITH. ESSAYS ON THE PATRIARCHAL, JEWISH, AND CHRIS- NEXT to the constitution or national compact at Sinai was the institution of the symbolic worship. The Jewish religion is a wonderful display of Divine wisdom, goodness, and condescension to the wants and circumstances of mankind. No infidel ever understood it, no man can understand it and doubt the Divine truth of christianity. To lay down a diagram in figures, which should one thousand five hundred years afterwards, and not before, be read and understood, by millions of human beings as plain as a literal description could be, containing a whole volume in the compass of a single sheet, exhibits such an insight into futurity, as no human being ever did, or ever could possess. Suppose that some person were to pretend to be divinely inspired and commissioned, and, in the mean time, would afford to the living indubitable proofs of his mission by a stupendous display of Almighty power, but designing to have the same credit with posterity a thousand years hence, that he has with the living, how would he most likely obtain that credit? The evidences, which, when living, he presents, he cannot present when dead. Let him, however, leave behind him any work which when examined shall be found to contain a knowledge of future events and developements, which no human being could possess, this knowledge being as supernatural as a power which could lift the mountains, must afford equal proof to all who examine it, as the miraculous display of physical energy. Could any man have written in symbols, or laid down a diagram in figures and numbers presenting a full description of America before Columbus discovered it, and a history of all the changes which have taken place since its discovery till the present year; I say, could such a work have been executed and deposited in the archives of the Spanish government, well attested as the genuine work of a Spanish prophet, who had died at any time, say a hundred years, before Christopher Columbus was born, no person could rationally doubt the inspiration of the author, nor the certainty of the yet future and unaccomplished part of it. Such a work is the symbolic worship of the Jews' religion in all its prominent characteristics and import, in reference to the institution of Jesus Christ. On the doctrine of chances it would be more than two billion to one, that any fifty incidents could all happen in any one character to live a thousand years after the incidents detailed were recorded. Now, more than one hundred distinct incidents are found in the Jews' religion and history detailed concerning the Messiah, all of *The last Essay on this head was incorrectly numbered 30. |