in that day. At any rate, Tillotson's so far exceeded all others in many respects, that they were the sermons of the Church. In the Church of Virginia none appear to have been used by the lay readers but Tillotson's. In many old vestry-books I have met with, a sufficient number of his sermons were ordered to supply the lay readers; and there were probably two lay readers to each clergyman in the diocese. They were indeed better and longer than the brief and most unimpressive sermons of the clergy, (judging from a number of the latter which I have read,) but still they are not calculated to rouse lost sinners to a sense of their condition and lead them to a Saviour, notwithstanding all that is so excellent in them. Tillotson's sermons, abridged into moral essays and dry reasonings on the doctrines of religion, were, I fear, the general type of sermonizing among the clergy who came over to America for the last seventy or eighty years before the War of the Revolution.

I fear that many of the publications of the Christian Knowledge Society were somewhat wanting in that pressing of evangelical principles upon the hearts and consciences of men in the way that has been found so effective to their conversion since the days of Venn, Newton, Simeon, and others. Soon after entering the ministry, I was desirous to publish a volume of sermons and tracts for servants, and, being unable to find any such in this country, I addressed a letter to Mr. Wilberforce, the warm friend of the negro race, and made known to him my wishes,-not without acknowledging my indebtedness to his book, under God, for much of that which I considered a true view of our holy religion. In reply, he sent me all the tracts of the Christian Knowledge Society,—perhaps all that then had been published in England for the poor. I confess I was disappointed in them; not that they had any of that false doctrine which, at a later period, was surreptitiously introduced into some of them by altering certain words, but that they did not press with sufficient force and earnestness certain truths upon the minds of the poor.

About this time my attention was called to some sermons of the Rev. Mr. Bacon, a minister of our Church in Maryland, addressed expressly to masters and servants. They were preached and pub. lished in 1743. Their style is plain and forcible, and all that is said is well said; but still there is the deficiency of the age in them. They do not present Christ to men as poor lost sinners, in the way they ought to do. They recognise the doctrine and declare it in few words, but do not emphasize and press it. They were the best I could get, however, and I published them. In an abridgment of

*

two of them afterward, I sought to supply this deficiency. Let me add, that I think there may seem this same error in one of the directions for the conduct and preaching of the first missionaries of this Society when sent to South Carolina. The directions, with this one exception, are most wise and pious. Nothing could be better. The defective passage, as I think, is this:-"That, in instructing heathens and infidels, they begin with the principles of natural religion, appealing to their reason and conscience, and thence proceed to show the necessity of revelation," &e. Now, this is precisely the method attempted at first by the Moravian. missionaries in the North, and which they found so fruitless, and therefore abandoned, choosing the more evangelical one with success. (See Dalcho's History of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina, p. 46.) The fault of the Tillotson school was too much reasoning, too much appeal to natural religion, which, though, like Butler's Analogy, it might be very effective with some for a certain purpose, could not answer for the multitudes. Had our Lord preached thus, the common people would not have heard him gladly. Nor would the wise and mighty have been converted by the Apostles, if such had been their preaching. In what I have said of the successors of the Tillotson school, there has been of late a general agreement of our divines, whether called High or Low Churchmen, all admitting that the moralizing system will not avail, though differing much as to other things. I would not be misunderstood on this subject. I do not deny to Tillotson most admirable method and valuable matter in his sermons; for I have read many of them with great pleasure, and not, I hope, without profit. But I must regard him and his imitators as false models of preaching, as comparatively ignoring the deep corruption of human nature, so that God in his good providence saw fit to raise up not only the Whitefields and Wesleys, who took an erratic course, but the Venns, the Newtons, and the Simeons in the bosom of the Church, to preach a simpler and fuller Gospel to the millions of lost ones in our mother-country. This failing to set forth the desperate wickedness of the human heart, calling for a Saviour,

*Bishop Horsley, in his charge of 1790, exposes the plan of beginning with natural religion, affirming that the difficulty of understanding the principles of natural religion is as great as that of understanding revealed; that the true way is to preach the plain Gospel of redemption to sinners, as that which God has provided for them, and look up to him to open the hearts of the hearers to receive what he has sent them. Such has been the experience of all who preach to the benighted heathen, or to the poorest and most illiterate in Christian lands.

a new birth, has, from my first entrance on the ministry, seemed to me the great defect of our old clergy. I remember to have preached before one of the oldest, most venerable and eminent of them, on the text, "The carnal mind is enmity toward God," and in the sermon to have quoted many of those Scriptures which represent us as "hating God," "being his enemies in our minds," "being children of the devil," and having quite grieved him by it. He said that he did not like such a mode of preaching. It was in vain that I adduced Scripture as my warrant and example. He did not like it. And yet I was not wont to speak the doctrine harshly, but tenderly and in pity.

Having presented this general view of the American Church, let me proceed to mention some things which will show that I have, from an early period, had opportunity of forming a correct estimate of some things occurring within it during the last forty or fifty years. At the age of seventeen I went to Princeton College. In going from and returning to Virginia during my collegiate course, I became a temporary inmate in the hospitable house of Dr. Abercrombie, the associate minister with Bishop White in the churches under his care. Several of the sisters of Mrs. Abercrombie, having lived for a long time in the family of one of my uncles of Virginia and received much kindness from him, became the means of my introduction to this very kind and agreeable household. The daughters were most interesting young women. On Good Friday, 1807, I heard Dr. Abercrombie, who was regarded as one of the pulpit orators of the day, preach on the Passion of Christ. A strong impression was made on my mind and memory by his action in the pulpit, as well as by his language. After describing some of the sufferings of Christ, he came to the crucifixion, and, erect ing his tall form to the highest point, he stretched out his arms in a horizontal direction, and, standing motionless for a time, presented the figure of a cross. I have never entered St. Peter's since, without having the scene renewed. Nor has the impression made by the kindness of himself and family ever been effaced. At the close of my collegiate course, I formed some acquaintance with the Rev. Dr. Beasley, associate minister with Dr. Hobart in Trinity Church, New York; and with Dr. Montgomery, of Grace Church, New York. That acquaintance was increased into considerable intimacy afterward with Dr. Beasley, while he lived both in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and with Dr. Montgomery in the latter place, whom I often saw, for many years, at my home in the family of old Commodore Dale, that good man and true Christian, who

married Dr. Montgomery's aunt. From these two ministers I necessarily learned many things about the Church of that day. In the year 1811, I was ordained, and soon after received from Bishop Hobart, by the hand of his old college friend, Charles Fenton Mercer, of Virginia, a large assortment of books, tracts, and pamphlets, most of them written by himself, on points of controversy with other denominations, and on some matters of internal trouble. in the diocese of New York, and also some Episcopal devotional works. I read them all, and remember to have sympathized with him in his personal difficulties. I admired the ability displayed by him in his contest with Dr. Mason, and entirely agreed with him in his argument for the Apostolic origin of Episcopacy, though unable to follow when he proceeded to claim exclusive divine right for it. By means of these publications, I became tolerably well acquainted with the politics of the Church, and under circumstances quite favourable to an impartial judgment. About six years after this, (and before I attended any General Convention, though twice elected, being prevented by unavoidable circumstances,) I went on a painful errand to the South, bearing to its milder climate a sick and, as the result proved, a dying wife. During my stay in Charleston, South Carolina, myself and wife received every kind attention. which brother ministers and Christian ladies could have shown us. It was during the last year of good Bishop Dehon's life, whose praise was on every tongue. Dr. Gadsden was then in the laborious discharge of his duties to bond and free. I saw him in the place of his greatest honour,-in the Sunday-school, teaching the coloured ones, both old and young. I preached in several of the churches in Charleston. In one of them-either St. Philip's or St. Michael's-I witnessed what surely would have gladdened the heart of the most prejudiced opponent of slavery. I saw what I was told were the last fruits of the labours of the old missionaries of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts,—old negro men and women with some of their children sitting on benches along the side-aisles, and around the chancel and near the pulpit, which was advanced some distance into the middle aisle.* Spec

The structure of this building was nearly the same with that of most of the old large English churches, which is, I believe, the best that can be. The chancel is against the wall, behind the pulpit, that being advanced some distance into the middle aisle, which is always large enough to admit of benches for the poor. The poor also sit around the chancel, on the place where the communicants kneel, and on chairs and stools between that and the pulpit, and on the stair-steps leading up

tacles aided their aged vision, and, with Prayer-Books in their hands, they read the responses aloud in the midst of their owners. The missionaries were not prevented from teaching them to read, but rather encouraged so to do. Nor have masters and mistresses ever been prevented from doing it themselves, or having it done at home; though public schools are forbidden. On the contrary, there have, I believe, always been more well-instructed and intelligent coloured persons, bond and free, in Charleston than in any other city in the Union. I had occasion, two years after this, to take the gauge and dimensions of the condition of the coloured people in all the Atlantic States, and think that I am qualified to judge on the subject.

It was at this time that I became acquainted with Dr. Percy, and his excellent son-in-law, the Rev. Mr. Campbell, of South Carolina; both of whom agreed in their views of experimental piety, and that mode of presenting the Gospel to men for which we are pleading. Dr. Percy was a bold, impressive, and faithful preacher of the doctrines of grace. He was one of those who, under the auspices of Lady Huntington, felt called on to preach an almost-forgotten Gospel in England, though in a somewhat irregular way. He was a graduate of Oxford, and was ordained by an English Bishop in 1767. He came over to America as one of Lady Huntington's preachers. Here he took part with the Revolutionists, and preached to the American troops. At the fall of Charleston, he was ordered by Colonel Balfour to desist from preaching, on pain of confineWhen Lady Huntington in her old age proposed to secede from the Church of England, and wished Dr. Percy to ordain some preachers for her, he positively and indignantly refused, and then connected himself more closely with the Episcopal Church. In 1805, he became assistant minister in St. Philip's and St. Michael's Churches, Charleston, South Carolina. A few years after this, St. Paul's Church in that city was built for him. He died in the year 1817. Dr. Gadsden preached his funeral-sermon in St. Philip's Church, at the request of the Bible Society, of which he had been

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to the pulpit. A door at the upper part of the church allows an easy ingress and egress to the poor. The minister is thus more in the midst of his people, and has them all so near to him that he can see their countenances and be seen and heard by them much better than on the more modern plan, where the preacher is either thrown against the wall, perhaps in a recess, or else is on one side of the congregation, before some little quasi pulpit where, what with the high-pitched roof and great distance of the congregation, the voice is almost lost.