2. In basing itself as it does, the Sunday-school movement loses, to an alarming extent, that grasp upon childhood, which, in order to be truly successful, it ought to have. Any one who enters into the spirit of the New Testament Epistles, will perceive that their instructions, admonitions and exhortations derive their altogether peculiar power and force from the fact that those to whom they are addressed, are regarded and treated continually as being already, all of them, Christians. This is the tenor of all the apostolic exhortations: Ye are " in the Spirit," live therefore, in the Spirit; ye are "dead unto sin,' "let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body;" ye are children of God; be ye therefore followers of Him as dear children; "Ye were sometime darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord, walk as children of light;" Ye have received the grace of God, see to it that your having received it be not in vain. It is easy to see that the strength of the exhortation here lies in the fact of the grace already received. Now, these are the types of all Christian appeals and exhortations. What a powerful sweep and force the appeals of the Christian teacher possess, when there is upon the part of the taught, such a recognized and felt relation to the world of grace, as brings home to him the necessity of the holy obedience to which he is exhorted. But, where this is not the case, there these admonitions and appeals are shorn of almost all their strength; there the mighty leverage is wanting; there the strong grasp upon the heart and conscience of childhood is gone. And, that this is not the case with the Sunday-school movement, we have, alas, seen too plainly. Indeed, prior to the "conversion" which it aims at, there seems to be no room at all for the use of such apostolic exhortations; whereas, it needs their strong and powerful grasp for the very purpose of bringing that conversion about.

3. This movement, or the type of religion with which we have seen it to be identified, has indirectly done much to retard the cause of true religion, by making it a strange, foreign and repugnant thing to the young. Nothing is more thoroughly human than religion; and it is of the greatest importance for the progress of religion that this truly human character should

be preserved. But where it is denied that grace is capable of coming with earliest infancy, and of being, under proper nurture, the element in which, from the beginning, the child lives and moves, and has its being; where it is practically taught, that there is no possibility of being truly religious, until after the peculiar experiences of a conversion, indefinitely located as to time, but sharply defined as to character; there one inevitable consequence is that religion assumes, for the young, an unnatural, spectral and ghastly aspect. It becomes an unearthly thing of "protracted meetings" and "revivals," rather than of the daily life; and loses altogether that familiar and home-like character, which, according to its very nature, it ought to wear. One reason, unquestionably, why religion has so little hold upon the young, is the un-human guise in which it is made to confront them. And that it bears this character is one direct consequence of the method which this type of religion pursues with the young. The Sundayschool system, it is true, makes special efforts to make the young feel "at home with Jesus," but, alas, the difficulty lies in its very stand-point, and will not be removed till this is surmounted. 4. The movement is crippled by a want of thorough harmony with the Church. The Sunday-school can have no significance or power apart from the Church. This is, to some extent, felt by the movement itself. In opposition to a strong disposition to look upon the Sunday-school as "the child's Church," there are some who justly say, "This is a dangerous. error, and one which we must frown down." Nevertheless, from its very nature, the system involves a tendency to regard itself as an independent work, and thus to stand, to its own great injury, in more or less disjunction from the church. Where the Church is felt to be the institution by which people, both old and young, are to be built up in the faith and hope of the Gospel, containing the sacraments and means of grace for that purpose; and where, on the other hand, the Sunday-school is carried on in the spirit of the S. S. movement, as represented by its Conventions; there will always be felt to exist a painful and embarrassing dualism, between the Sunday-school

and the Church. It is a trite saying, indeed, and one which has come to be accepted as true, without being at all looked into, that "the Sunday-school is the nursery of the Church." But we appeal to any pastor, whose church and Sunday-school stand in such relation as we have described, to know whether he has found this to be the case, in any such degree as the saying would seem to imply. This side of the movement, indeed, constitutes by itself an important and interesting theme, upon the discussion of which, however, we cannot enter now.

In what has been said, it will be perceived that we have chosen to take for granted, the baptized condition of the children of the Sunday-schools, notwithstanding the well known fact, that many of them are not baptized. This will give rise to an objection, to which it is necessary for us, before concluding, to reply. It will be objected, namely, that such a plan of educational religion as we have indirectly been advocating, is manifestly impracticable, seeing it supposes the baptism of those who are thus to be trained, while a large proportion of the Sunday-school children are unbaptized. To this we reply, that the argument is not affected by this fact. For, supposing this to be the real objection in the case, it would apply only to the unbaptized, and could not possibly extend to those who are baptized. We reply further, that the present unbaptized condition of many children, is a state of affairs which has itself grown out of the loss of faith in the reality of baptismal grace; and that, as such, it cannot be used as an argument, where the question is as to the truth and validity of a system of religion which grounds itself in that reality. The real objection to educational religion lies not here but elsewhere; and elsewhere we deem that it has been answered. The true difficulty is, not that the Sunday-Schools contain many unbaptized children, but the fact which is the cause of this, that there is no belief at all in the grace-conferring nature of baptism. Baptismal grace is that with which educational religion stands or falls; and, where this is denied, any attempt to realize the idea of such religion must be, in so far, but a "catching at the shadow of the truth."

ART. VII.-CONSCIENCE AND THE VATICAN.

An Address on the Origin of the Present Revolt in the Catholic Church, Delivered March 20th, 1872, in the Guerzenich Hall of Cologne by Prof. Reinkens.

TRANSLATED BY PROF. J. 8. STAHR.

THE present reform movement in the Catholic Church touches the entire culture of humanity. For this reason it is possible to consider it from so many different points of observation. I shall endeavor to-day to prove that it originated in the conscience of individual Catholics. For our reform movement is nothing else than the effect of the voice of God raising itself in man against the voice of the tempter from without, who appears clothed as an angel of light; the war we wage is the war of conscience against compulsion in matters of religion.

The system of church polity adopted by the Roman Curia, which has now been developed to its extreme and most repulsive consequences, endeavored centuries ago to force itself upon the Christian nations under the shield of divine authority, and the result has been that now nearly one half of Christendom, i. e., about one hundred and sixty-eight millions of Christians, are no longer in church communion with the Pope at Rome. But why have so many millions remained in external communion with him?-about one hundred and seventy millions, for the common estimate of two hundred millions is much too high; no one can obtain that number from reliable statistics. Previous to July 18th, 1870, it was still possible for the individual to save his conscience, the Catholic could still respect himself. This, however, is not generally admitted. The advocates of infallibility maintain, that even previous to that time, the individual believer had no right of conscience as opposed to the conscience of the entire episcopate; and as

they now make the Pope to be the Church, they also refer to him the general conscience of the episcopate, and find this just as natural as convenient. Some Protestants also tell us, that before July 18th, 1870, the conscience of Catholics had been already actually bound and silenced, inasmuch as the Pope had exercised the functions of universal bishop and infallible teacher since the Council of Trent without meeting with any persistent opposition.

I will first answer the latter objection. It is true, as in recent times the index-deeretals and papal briefs against Hermes and Guenther found most willing and inexorable executors in the Archbishop of Geissel and the Prince-bishop Foerster, so also were the earlier papal constitutions against Bajus, Jansen, Quesnel and the Synod of Pistoja executed by the bishops without examination. Yes, as in the year 1864 the bishops in general made themselves pliant tools for the execution of the Church polity of the Roman Curia in the syllabus, by which not only the modern state, but also a peaceful condition of society on the basis of brotherly love, was condemned, and even destroyed so far as papal power reaches, so also the episcopate succeeded as early as in the last century in forcing upon the faithful the immoral bull Unigenitus, (published by Clement XI in 1713) as a moral norm, with the single exception of the Church of Utrecht, to which the Jesuits gave a bad name for this reason. This bull insinuates the doctrine (Nos. 91, 92) that the Catholic, if the hierarchy should endeavor by threatening a manifestly and flagrantly unjust excommunication to keep him from the discharge of his duty, and move him to betray and give up the truth, must yield to the threat, neglect the performance of duty and betray the truth. In this way undoubtedly faith and morality are torn from the conscience root and branch, and all truly pious and righteous life is destroyed in the Church. And thus it would seem, judging even from these few examples, that the objection to the effect that the conscience of Catholics had been bound and silenced previous to the 18th of July, 1870, was fully justified; but this is not the case.