lead careless inquirers into the conclusion that the Congregationalism of the seventeenth century is fully represented by the Congregationalism of the nineteenth. It would be in many respects a service to the churches, if some skillful and unshrinking hand would portray the ancient system as Cotton left it, and would set the true meaning of the Cambridge Platform, point by point, in contrast with that incongruous mass of ancient principles and modern usages by which the churches are now governed. We will not here enter upon such a task. It is enough for us to say, that whatever there is of purity and religious prosperity, and of strength and effective influence, in the churches of New England at this day, is due rather to what they have held fast of the ancient system wrought out by Cotton and his compeers, than to the ideas and usages which, in the progress of two centuries, they have unconsciously borrowed from other systems.

We have spoken of Cotton as the father of Congregationalism. Among his printed works, those which are now most frequently mentioned in connection with his name, are the tracts which he published in explanation and defense of the New England church polity. The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven," republished six years ago, one hundred and ninety-nine years after its first appearance, was his first contribution to aid the English people in the settlement of their then disorganized ecclesiastical system. His "Way of the Churches in New England" is perhaps the most valuable commentary on the Cambridge Platform which has come down to us-a commentary, not in form, for it is older than the Platform, but in effect, for it describes as matter of fact the system which the Platform prescribes theoretically. His "Way of the Churches Cleared," is a vindication of himself and of New England against the aspersions of an anonymous author, and of Bailie and Rutherford, two Scotch Presbyterians, who had thought that abusive assaults on the good name of individuals and of churches would answer the purpose of argument. Another work of his is often named to his reproach by those who know little of what is in it. "The Bloody Tenent Washed," is an elaborate reply to a fierce attack which "that fiery Welchman," Roger Williams, had made upon him personally. The book is thoroughly conservative of the grand error which the Puritanism of that day held in common with the Church of England and the Church of Rome, and which the New England Congregationalists held fast even when their brethren in Old England were rejecting it-the doctrine that it belongs to the state as such, to investigate and determine questions of religious doctrine, to uphold and guard the true religion, and within certain bounds to suppress the propagation of such opinions as tend to the destruction of souls. The erratic Williams had caught a mighty truth with something of a prophet's intuition, and he asserted it with

heedless and denunciatory zeal beyond a prophet's vehemence. The sedate, judicious Cotton, calmly throwing off the aspersions of his adversary's bitterness, defended the old error with logic that would have triumphed in the schools. But truth is weightier than logic; and sometimes the intuitions even of enthusiasm happen to be right, and the most skillful array of argument is wrong. The name of Roger Williams, with all his extravagances, is a greater name in the history of human progress than the name of John Cotton with all his practical wisdom.

His published works sufficiently explain the high reputation which he had among his contemporaries as a dialectician, sagacious and skillful, yet cool and courteous. Who could be more prompt than he to discern each flaw in his adversary's argument? Who more completely cased in impenetrable armor whenever he entered the lists? Who could repel the personal aspersions which abounded in the controversies of that day, with so much of mingled meekness and dignity? Who so gentle in his diction while rebuking, most effectively, the ungentleness of some impetuous assailant? At the same time, we must confess that our reading of his works, even of those which were preached as sermons before they were reduced into the form of books, does not so easily explain to us his unquestionable power in the pulpit. He had a power that commanded the attention not of scholars only but of the promiscuous congregation, and that carried his hearers along in the current of his opinions. What the Boston teacher propounded from the pulpit concerning right and wrong in the commonwealth, was law; what he propounded concerning Christian doctrine, was very sure to have the suffrages of the church if not the synod. In the old Boston and the new, he made full proof of his ministry, and had the most authentic testimonies to his power as a preacher. Notwithstanding his quaint and whimsical expositions of Scripture, and his far-fetched deduction of doctrine from the sacred text-notwithstanding his manifest tendency to the most wire drawn method of discourse with divisions and subdivisions numbered till they are almost numberless-notwithstanding his style warmed by no apparent glow of passion and illuminated by no flashes of imagination, there can be no doubt that in the pulpit he was eloquent. Something there must have been in the preaching, that has escaped in the process of writing and printing.

Just at the close of his 67th year, while preaching a lecture at Cambridge, he was seized in the pulpit with a sudden and painful disease. This he accepted as an admonition to put his house in order. Soon afterwards, at his Thursday lecture, on the 18th of Nov., 1652, in his regular course of preaching from the second epistle to Timothy, he took for his subject the last four verses, and apologized for the unusual length of his text by saying that

otherwise he should not live to finish his exposition of that epistle. It was observed that he dwelt particularly on the closing benediction, "Grace be with you." On the next Lord's Day, he preached his last sermon from John i, 14, on the glory of the Incarnate Word. Then it remained for him to spend, in the retirement of his study, one day of special spiritual preparation for his last change; and he was ready. "When he could no more be seen abroad, all sorts, magistrates, ministers, neighbors, and friends far off and those near at hand, especially his own people, resorted to him daily as to a public father." As death came nearer, "he sent for the elders of the Church of Boston to pray over him; which last solemn duty being performed not without much affection and many tears," he gave them his dying testimony, bearing witness for God's faithfulness to him, and exhorting them to take heed to themselves and to all the flock. Afterwards, as "his ultimate solemn transaction with man in this world," he called his wife and children around his bed, and gave them his farewell. Then, "his work finished with all men," he demanded to be left to those "divine soliloquies between God and his soul" in which he desired to occupy the last moments of mortal consciousness. On the 23d of December, between eleven and twelve o'clock, just at the hour of his own Thursday lecture, he expired. So methodical, so business-like yet devout, was this good man's dying. All the New England that then was, mourned under the bereavement.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

By JOHN RUSKIN, author of "Modern Painters." New York: John Wiley, 1849.

ARCHITECTURE rightly conceived is intimately connected, and at many different points, with the general life of man. The mass are probably little aware of this, and live oftentimes surrounded and acted upon by the influences of this truly creative art, while hardly suspecting how much they owe to it or what a power in the world it is and is yet destined to be. The comparatively few look upon it with different eyes and are awake to its value and use. And comparatively fewer still are ready to give this art its true place and acknowledge its importance in the fullest extent. Such men indeed, though few, there have been, perhaps in all ages, with whom architecture has been something more than either the study or the sport of an hour, something more than the execution of a sudden whim or fancy, something more than a mere display of strength or perseverance in toil, even the outward exhibition and embodiment of inward

feelings, of the deepest springs of life, the dearest joys of existence. Men who have built the St. Paul's cathedrals, the Doge's palaces, the Parthenons, and other like structures, and those also who have been able to take into their souls the beauty and meaning of them, have been men to whom architecture has been something more than the piling up of walls and the spanning them with roofs. Such men have had their very souls almost vitally connected with these edifices. They have discoursed in, or drawn lessons from, these piles of stone and timbers hewed and fitted into a forest of art and becoming a language for all time.

Nor is it only with these greater structures that architecture is chiefly or most appropriately concerned. The most elaborate piece of architecture in all Venice, we are told, is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with two stories above, three windows in the first and two in the second. The hearts and the homes of a people are indeed most intimately connected, and what has to do with the one deals also, and almost necessarily, with the other. We are aware also that while we claim for the word 'home' a meaning, a sacredness even, which makes it peculiarly an English word, we can not use it as signifying the mere edifices in which we are enclosed, be they never so elaborate and perfect as architectural works. We know it is the hearts emphatically that make the homes, far more so than the stone and wood, the bricks and mortar. Nevertheless these act and react upon each other, giving each other shape and tone, and therefore there is that in the mere house, which can give tone to the feelings of the heart, elevating, warming, purifying and chastening, or debasing and debauching them. Happily, within a few years past, this matter of architecture has begun to have a new interest in the minds of the many, especially in our own country. Ours is a new country, and such is not the place to look for any art in a state of perfection or even that which is a very close approach to it. When the foundations alike of the social and civil state are all to be laid anew, little is to be expected in the way of art and especially of the fine arts. To be able to live in tolerable safety and comfort, is the all important thing under such circumstances. An enclosure of logs, with a stick chimney, or perhaps only a hole for the escape of smoke, divided off into no rooms adapted to the different purposes of life, this is the beginning of things in a new country, and this gives place to a different state only by a slow and gradual process. Then it is to be considered in respect to ourselves that we are peculiarly a migratory people. The circumstances in which we took our origin, and the place where we have been planted, have both contributed their part to beget this character in us. Fugitives from an old and stable condition of life, we have disembarked upon a shore from which a fertile soil and salubrious climate beckon the advancing steps until our feet are

bathed in the calm waters of the Pacific. A "whole boundless continent is ours;" and this operates to keep us restless, and incites us to a renewed emigration towards the setting sun as often as we are weary of our present abode or fancy we may find a better elsewhere. So we go on, like an army of locusts, the rear ones constantly flying over to the front, to find themselves soon again in the rear and so urged to another flight. All is motion with us in comparison with older nations.

It is no more than what might be expected therefore, that the arts should be comparatively unknown among us. Arts, of the higher and finer order at least, do not grow so freely in a state of such constant motion as in one of more repose. The inventive powers indeed act as vigorously among us, in certain directions, as anywhere else. Machines and contrivances to economize labor and increase material production, are by no means lacking. But the fine arts, those arts which have to do not so much with outward and physical life as with the interior feelings and perceptions of the soul-all that is deepest and most valuable within us -these are as yet for the most part in their infancy, feeble and misshapen. And in respect to no art is this more apparent than that of architecture. In fact we have hardly any such thing as architecture as yet. Buildings, boxes in which human beings eat and sleep we have, but very little that merits the name architecture. Certain philosophers tell us that we come to the knowledge of material objects around us by an inference from our prior knowledge of our interior selves, first being conscious of the me and then perceiving them as the not me. So only reversing the order of sequence, we in this country are likely to know what architecture is by first knowing what it is not. We are a great people, as we are fond of telling each other, and consider ourselves not a whit behind Rome or Athens in their palmiest days, as, in respect to what is best and most vital, we are not. Republicans too, we naturally turn for our examples and patterns to the shores of the Mediterranean, rather than to those of more northern waters. Hence our architecture has hitherto pointed to those warmer latitudes. So we have our parthenons all over the country. Sometimes they are for the use of officers of government; sometimes they are custom houses and smell of imports; and sometimes again they are meat markets and smell of blood and what besides might be expected. And what parthenons? Mere stucco work for the most part, and this not the best, needing to be replastered from time to time or kept in countenance by diligent applications of oil and lead! In our churches we have done somewhat better. This however can hardly be said unless we confine attention to here and there a structure in some of our older and larger places, where we have reached a state of comparative rest so that the arts have scope for their growth. Sometimes in such cases there will be found what is really worthy of notice