as far beneath what she was before the revolution of 1688. The literature and religion of England during the eighteenth century were sadly decayed. All scholars still regard the seventeenth century as England's golden age in these respects. Dr. Bushnell speaks of the earlier inhabitants of New England, as though "their clumsy-handed thoughts" could grasp hold of nothing but "the great iron pillars of election, reprobation and decrees." He depicts them as "taking hold of the iron pillars that held up the theologic heavens, and climbing and heaving in huge surges of might," by way of "keeping their gross faculties in exercise." He has here fallen into a vulgar error. When he has read as many scores of the sermons of Cotton, Shepard, Norton, the Mathers, and others of that line, as he ought to read hundreds, he will laugh at his own fancy-sketch. Their sermons were chiefly taken up with religious experience and practice; and are not more occupied with those "iron pillars," than were the discourses which were thundered in the ears of our immediate parents by Dr. Griffin at Boston, or by Dr. Strong at Hartford.

THEATRICALS.Along with the growth of population and wealth in our cities, there is even a more rapid growth of the theatrical taste. The innumerable secular papers, however discordant among themselves in other matters, are pretty much all of one party in this respect. Their columns are devoted to the interests of play-wrights, play-actors and play-goers. By a vast system of voluntary taxation, an immense revenue is raised and squandered to increase the allurements of these flowery gate-ways to pollution and the pit. So strong has the swelling current become, that many unsted fast professors have been swept off into the Stygian stream. They have gone to feast on the gilded and smiling sorrows of a troop of wretched and enslaved - dancing-children, or to drink in the luscious strains of the profligate Italian opera. Ought not such persons to be afraid, lest they be found "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God?" Tertullian gives us a legend of a Christian woman who went to the theatre, and came back possessed of the devil. The priest, who was seeking to cast out the devil, demanded of the intruder, how he dared to take possession of a believer who, by holy baptism, had been redeemed out of his kingdom. The devil showed that he was no fool, and understood his rights, by replying: "I have done nothing but what is proper, for I found her on my territory!" This is a better legend than common, for it is a legend with a moral to it. The Greek and Latin fathers abound with invectives against the theatre and its abettors; and it is to this that D'Israeli ascribes the "puritanical spleen" against this sort of amusement. But this time, the ancient fathers are in the right; and this is reason enough why Puritans, and all others, should execrate the stage as a hot-bed of luxuriant vices.

VACANCY IN THE HOLLIS PROFESSORSHIP. While looking over the proof of the article in this number, which exposes and corrects expresident Quincy's misstatements in reference to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, it occurred to us to ask, Why do not the Corporation.

proceed, in common honesty, to fulfil their trust by appointing to the vacant chair a man of "sound and orthodox " principles? Many such there are, who are capable of filling that seat with honor to themselves and the University. Then, if there be any Unitarians whose zeal for what they regard as truth is equal to that of Hollis, let them provide a "professor extraordinary" of their own stamp. Let the two labor side by side, as they do in the Protestant Universities of Germany. It is true, that some breezes might occasionally arise; but this is just what is wanted to dispel the stagnation which broods over Cambridge, and spreads a torpor through the minds and hearts of the students. Several years ago we attended a literary festival at that ancient seminary, in which a young sophister maintained, though rather languidly, the strange position, that moral turpitude is better than moral apathy! On expressing our surprise to a companion, himself an honored graduate of Harvard, he replied: "It is not so very strange. His soul is weighed down with the moral deadness which reigns here; and with a natural impatience he struggles under the feeling that any change, even to turpitude, must be more hopeful than this fatal apathy." Why not place a "sound and orthodox" divine in the vacant chair, as faith and honor demand? Surrounded, as he would be, with tenfold influences on the side of Unitarianism, why not venture it? Is it so, that the vaunting champions of "liberal Christianity," of "religious liberty" and "free inquiry," dare not deal honestly with the living and the dead? Are they afraid to let orthodoxy be heard through its own rightful organ? Are they conscious, that one such teacher as they ought to have, with the truth and the God of truth on his side, would be too much for the whole of them? Is it "conscience makes cowards of them all?”

WAR VERSUS RELIGION. It is a humiliating proof of the low state of religion, and of the little influence it exerts upon the affairs of this nation, that the Mexican war goes on with increasing force and fury, notwithstanding that almost the whole religious sentiment of the land is arrayed against it. The great body of the ministers and members of every evangelical church remonstrate solemnly and earnestly against that work of devastation and death, which is so contrary to the mission of the Son of Man, who came "not to destroy men's lives, but to save them." Who does not feel, that as religion revives, the spirit of war must die away. Cicero derives bellum, the Latin word for war, from bellua, a beast. It is indeed a brutal business, and can only last so long as the animal part of our nature can keep the ascendancy over all that is spiritual. Let the Christian people of our country learn, that they have a moral conflict to wage at home, a conflict in which they must call all the hosts of heaven to the rescue, and obtain the all-powerful aid of the Captain of our salvation, ere the spirit of the gospel can triumph over the lusts of wealth, and power, and glory. There must be millions of sinners converted unto the rule and reign of the Prince of peace, ere the public sentiment of the nation will be able to rebuke and disarm the demon of war, and to expel his legions from the land.

THE

CHRISTIAN OBSERVATORY.

VOL. I.

DECEMBER, 1847.

No. 12.

MORAL COURAGE AND THE MEXICAN WAR.

If there is one thing more alarming than any other, in the prospects of our country, it is the want of a manly and Christian. courage in our leading men. We see it every where, in statesmen and scholars, in ministers and Christians, in teachers and pupils, in hosts and guests, in employers and employed, in the more common and the more unusual relations of life. Take, by way of illustration, the wicked and disgraceful war, into which, to the amazement of so large a majority of the people, we were suddenly plunged some eighteen months ago. Never was there a war more clearly offensive. With the exception of a few matters of complaint, and those indeed having nothing to do with the commencement of the war, the aggression has all been on our side. Even admitting that Texas was ours by right, an admission to which the most elastic conscience can scarcely be stretched, still Texas, as a Mexican province or state, never extended beyond the Nueces, either in right or in fact.

The valley of the Nueces was the western limit of Yankee population. The population beyond that valley did not join the Texians in their revolt from Mexico, and never were represented in the Texian Congress. And the Texian armies never set foot in that region without being slaughtered or repulsed. The reader will observe, that this is said of the valley of the Nueces, not of the river; for it is conceded, that the Texians held a few towns west of the river. But west of the valley, not a town, or hamlet, or district, ever joined them, or was annexed to them, or belonged to them in any way, except by an empty, arrogant and unexecuted

vote of their Congress, till the eagle of the United States was humbled and enforced to spread her conquering wings over the territory. For the truth of this declaration, we refer to the speeches of Senator Benton; to the correspondence of General Taylor and Colonel Donelson, the agents of our own government, with that government; and to the other documents which were laid on the table at the last session of Congress by the President himself. And yet the same President, in his annual message to the same Congress, enters into an extended argument to disprove a truth which is manifest on the face of these documents. Because, forsooth, Corpus Christi and one or two other places on the right bank of the Nueces were held by the Texians, he would have us believe that they had a right to claim all the other towns between those and the Rio Grande. And yet some of these, as for instance Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, were hundreds of miles farther west; and all of them were separated, not only by difference of blood and race, but also by a wide and barren desert, from all social and political connection with the excellent people of Texas.

The government of the United States, up to the commencement of hostilities, virtually conceded that the boundary was unsettled; since, in its diplomatic intercourse with Mexico, it always professed its readiness to settle the boundary by negociation. But at last, that question was suddenly decided by the American authorities. Our troops, breaking up all at once their encampment on the Nueces, marched a hundred miles farther west, to the Rio Grande, which flows through the heart of several Mexican States; and encamped within gun-shot of an important Mexican city. It is disputed, who fired the first gun. But that is a question of trifling importance. Must I wait till he fire the first shot, when the robber or assassin stands within my door with pistol levelled at the breasts of my wife and children? And if I repel the invader, must I be charged with commencing hostilities? If Great Britain were first to re-anner Maine to her dominions, and then, claiming that the Merrimack, and not the Piscataquis, is the boundary of Maine, should march her troops into the valley of the former, and we should there open our batteries upon them, would we be chargeable with beginning the war? No matter who fired the first gun. It was fired. Hostilities commenced. And forthwith the President sends in a message to Congress, declaring that war exists by the act of Mexico!

Every man in the United States knows perfectly well, that the war would not then have existed but for the marching of our troops to the bank of the Rio Grande. And the annual message, at the opening of the next session of Congress, betrays the President's consciousness of his own responsibility for it; for that message is chiefly taken up with an elaborate argument to show, that we had ample cause for making war upon Mexico. But if Mexico had already made war on us, what need is there of all this array of argument. It is very difficult, if not quite impossible, to divine the real motive for taking that step, which all candid men must consider to be the immediate cause or occasion of the war. If it were taken, as some suppose, with the tacit hope and purpose of bringing on a war, and thus securing past acquisitions and opening the way for further conquests of slave territory, it surely was not wanting in a certain kind of courage. The father of our country and the heroes of the Revolution, were brave men. But they never would have dared to rush into open warfare with all the attributes of God and all the best sentiments of mankind. And if the courage of our rulers had had a little more of the moral and religious element in it, they would have gone to the stake before they would have taken the responsibility of such measures. If, on the other hand, these measures, as others suppose, were entered upon with a blind confidence that they would not lead to war, then is our government as chargeable with unparalleled folly, as, on the other supposition, it must have been guilty of unprecedented knavery. Such are the horns of the dilemma between which it is thrown; and in the agony of tossing to and fro between them, it is not perhaps surprising, that its policy has assumed so many Protean forms and so many crooked shapes.

But let us pass to the legislative department. The subject was laid before Congress. Both houses voted by an overwhelming majority, that war existed by the act of Mexico. They knew it was not so. Many of them said it was untrue; and yet voted it. Nine tenths of them, if they had been left to their own unbiassed action, would have rejected the dishonest preamble, and perhaps withheld also the supplies. But they did not dare to do so. It was inexpedient. It would be misconstrued. It would be called unpatriotic. We must go for our country, right or wrong. It is policy to let the administration carry on their own war in their own way. Such were the considerations which produced that almost