Lord's Supper, those whose piety they admit, but who want these qualifications. Others exhibit a more catholic spirit and decline to impose these tests. Thus the Particular Baptists are again divided into the advocates of free and open communion. Hall wrote several treatises against Fuller, Booth, and Kinghorn, in defence of free communion. Apart from the question itself, they are of great value as specimens of cogent reasoning, clothed in graceful words; and to them we must refer the reader who may be desirous to pursue the subject. Forster, as an essayist, seems deficient in those graces which, in general, are necessary to secure the attention of the public. He appears to have written, what the reader at first peruses with great difficulty. The style has to be learned before we can follow the author. At length, however, we begin to confess his power, and feel the magic of his thoughts. Few readers of his essays perhaps begin to study the volume without being conscious of an effort; still fewer have laid it down unfinished, or finally closed it, without regret. Of living writers we do not speak, nor of the periodical literature of the Baptists, though both claim respect. Their missions have long held a distinguished place amongst those benevolent institutions. The Serampore mission, conducted for many years by Carey and Marshman, is renowned for its contributions to oriental literature. In 1842 the Baptist Missionary Society had translated the Scriptures, wholly or in part, into forty-four languages or dialects of India; and printed, of the Scriptures alone in foreign languages, nearly half a million.

The tenets of the Baptists were introduced into America by Roger Williams, the founder of the state of Rhode Island. He was one of the first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts, from whence he was expelled by the Presbyterians on account of his obnoxious principles. He founded the first Baptist Church at Providence in 1639. It was long before his followers made much progress beyond Rhode Island. In the other colonies they were a proscribed people; there, as at home, the discipline of persecution fell heavily upon them. In Massachusetts they were whipped, fined, and imprisoned. In Virginia their ministers often preached through the grated windows of the gaol. When freedom of conscience was allowed they made but few converts for a century. At the commencement of the revolutionary war in 1770 they had but eighteen Churches. From this period their progress has been

one of marvellous success.

In 1812 they had, in the United

States, two thousand Churches; in 1832 upwards of five thousand ; in 1840 seven thousand seven hundred and sixty-six. Above three millions of souls, or about a sixth of the whole population, were in connexion with the regular Baptists. In 1847 they had established missions in every quarter of the globe; besides a home mission, a Bible translation society, several colleges, and other religious institutions. In 1850 the number of congregations was nine thousand three hundred and seventy-five. In the slaveholding States many of the slaves are members of the Church, and not unfrequently the minister himself is a slave-owner.

A general convention of the Baptist Churches meets every three years. It held its first meeting in 1814; but it is restricted by its constitution to matters connected with foreign missions. There are also Baptist conventions in some of the States. That of the State of New Hampshire recently adopted a form of Church government and a declaration of faith. But like the "Unions" in England it possesses no authority, and can only recommend the adoption of its resolutions to its own constituents. The American Baptist form of Church government is purely congregational.

Both in England and America there are several small sects of Baptists, seceders from the larger communities. The chief of these are

1. The Seventh-day Baptists, who differ from the orthodox Baptists only in observing the seventh and not the first day of the week. In England they have but two chapels; in America about fifty, with a population of nearly 30,000 beneath in

struction.

In

2. The Scotch Baptists, who originated in 1765. Their doctrinal views are those of the Particular Baptists, from whom they differ in a more strict observance of what they consider apostolic usages, such as agapæ, or love-feasts, a plurality of pastors, washing each other's feet, and great plainness of attire. England they have but fifteen congregations; nor are they numerous in Scotland. In America, a Scotch Baptist communion was formed in 1812, by Mr. Campbell, whose name they sometimes bear; they do not, however, belong to the same body. They profess to reject all creeds and confessions of faith, and hold "that everyone who believes what the evangelists and

apostles have testified concerning Jesus of Nazareth, is a proper subject for immersion." They are stated to number 200,000.

3. The Free-will Baptists, who date their rise from New Hampshire, America, in 1780. They appear to differ from the evangelical section of the General Baptists in England only upon certain points of Church government. Like that of all the Baptists, their government is vested primarily in each congregation. These send delegates to quarterly meetings, these to yearly meetings, and these, again, to a general conference. Their ministers are elders and deacons; the former being ordained jointly by the Church to which they belong and the quarterly meeting acting by its council. There is an annual conference, which assists the general one, and these regulate the affairs of the ministry. Thus, their ecclesiastical polity is peculiar, resembling that of Wesley more nearly than Congrega

tionalism.

The following account of a religious service, attended and conducted entirely by negroes, will be read with interest. It is extracted from Sir Charles Lyell's "Second Visit to the United States," 1849:-"I attended afternoon service in a Baptist church at Savannah, in which I found that I was the only white man, the congregation consisting of about six hundred negroes, of various shades, most of them very dark. As soon as I entered I was shown to a seat reserved for strangers, near the preacher. First the congregation all joined, both men and women, very harmoniously, in a hymn, most of them having evidently good ears for music, and good voices. The singing was followed by prayers, not read, but delivered without notes, by an African of pure blood, a grey-headed, venerable-looking man, with a fine sonorous voice. He, as I learnt afterwards, has the reputation of being one of their best preachers; and he concluded with a sermon, almost without notes, in good style, and for the most part in good English, so much so as to make me doubt whether a few ungrammatical phrases in the negro idiom, might not have been purposely introduced for the sake of bringing the subject home to their familiar thoughts.

Nothing in my whole travels gave me a higher idea of the capabilities of the negroes and the actual progress which they have made, even in a part of a slave State where they outnumber the whites, than this Baptist meeting. To see a body, of African

origin, who had joined one of the denominations of Christians, and built a church for themselves, who had elected a pastor of their own race, and secured him an annual salary, from whom they were listening to a good sermon, scarcely, if at all, below the average standard of the composition of white ministers,-to hear the whole service respectably, and the singing admirably, performed, surely marks an astonishing step in civilization."

From the seventh census of the United States, it appears that in 1850 there were in the Union 8,791 churches; affording accommodation for 3,130,000; and possessing Church property to the amount of about 11,000,000 dollars.

BEHMENITES.-These were a religious sect that flourished

in the seventeenth century; their founder was Jacob Behmen, or Böhm, of Görlitz, in Germany. Except his own followers, theologians of every class have, till very lately, agreed to speak with great contempt of Behmen and his doctrines. He was a mystic, and his writings are obscure, and often to a cursory reader, perfectly unintelligible; but there is at present, amongst metaphysical writers of the highest class, a disposition to treat Behmen with more respect. The author of the very able article on Metaphysics, in the "Encyclopædia Metropolitana,” even assigns him a place beside Descartes, as one of the great precursors of the modern system of philosophy, and attributes his obscurity to Behmen's want of acquaintance with the language of philosophy rather than to any confusion of thought, or the incoherence that arises from an imperfect apprehension in the writer's mind of that which he undertakes to explain to others. We are disposed to take this view of the subject, only we would add, that it seems to us that Behmen, no less than the illustrious Descartes, mistook, to a great extent, the nature of true philosophy, both with regard to its methods and its objects. It is not denied that he was a man of piety, integrity, and virtue; or that amongst his followers were numbered some wise and eminent men, of his own countrymen, whose conduct was blameless; but others are said to have acted like delirious fanatics; and two of these were burnt at Moscow, in 1684, for their heresy.

Behmen was termed by his admirers the German Theosophist. He speculated much on the Divine nature, and upon the method

in which spirits commune with one another, and God with man. His followers became mystical, and were, in the true sense of the term, enthusiasts. They described their inward feelings in unintelligible terms, and professed to hold sensible communion with invisible spirits; but, beyond this, we do not learn that their doctrines were immoral. Their opponents blame their understandings rather than their lives. Mosheim writes thus:"Never did there reign such obscurity and confusion in the writings of any mortal as in the miserable productions of Jacob Behmen, which exhibit a motley mixture of chemical terms, crude visions, and mystic jargon. Among other dreams of a disturbed and eccentric fancy, he entertained the following chimerical notion, 'That the Divine Grace operates by the same rules, and follows the same methods, which the Divine Providence observes in the natural world; and that the minds of men are purged from their vices and corruptions in the same way that metals are purified from their dross;' and this maxim was the principle of his fire theology." The truth is, that he traces out a parallelism between the visible and the spiritual world; and illustrates God's doings in the latter from his known conduct in the former.

During the Commonwealth in England, the Behmenites appeared in great numbers, much to the annoyance of the Puritan clergy. Richard Baxter describes them, in his Autobiography, as men of greater meekness and more self-control than any of the other sectaries. Their doctrine, he says, is to be seen "in Jacob Behmen's books, by him that hath nothing else to do than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombastic words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms." Some of the party were, however, men of education; a Doctor Pordage and his family are mentioned by Baxter as pretending to hold visible and sensible communion with angels; whom they professed sometimes to see, and sometimes to discover by the sense of smell. He believed that his house was also molested by evil spirits, one of which assumed the shape of a fiery dragon. He was formally accused before the "Committee for the trial of Scandalous Ministers" for these and similar absurdities; he also denied the doctrine of Christ's imputed righteousness, dissuaded from marriage, and