RELIGIOUS FORMS AND OBSERVANCES. THERE are two views of religious forms and observances entertained among us at the present time, both of which, it is believed, extend to an unreasonable extreme. Both of them express a truth, but both exaggerate a truth. The one regards forms as essential; the other rejects them as useless. The one identifies them with religion; the other disjoins them from it even as needed helps. The one renders them an almost idolatrous homage; the other pours upon them a proud contempt. And they both unite in this, certainly, that they bear testimony to the imperfection of the human mind; to that weakness which allows it to be repelled by a distasteful and obnoxious error to the outward confines of the opposing truth, where it also becomes error, as really and dangerously. It is far from desirable, in itself, to come between those who embrace opposite views, and assume the intermediate ground as the only true one. They who do so gain no favor from either class. There is nothing popular, now-a-days, in a moderate, midway position. Yet it is the part of wisdom, surely, to be willing to modify previous conclusions; and we may well suspect the soundness of these conclusions to which we have been driven, by disgust at the extravagance of error. Men Forms, we know, have been abused. They have been rested in as ends, instead of being employed as means. They have been regarded as religion itself, instead of the temporary garment that enwraped her; as the substantial edifice, instead of the scaffolding by which it rose. have supposed themselves the better for a mere heartless observance of them; have held themselves on this account to be saints, and as entitled to a place in heaven. Ever has it been so, and it is so now. The class of formalists is by no means extinct. It ranges on Christian ground. Beneath the shadow of a religion that is spirit and life; whose essential requirements are righteousness, purity, godliness, holiness of living, with love to God and man its, source and spring, there are those, and they are many, who substitute for these, the observance of days, and rites, and forms. As in the times of Christ, there were those who thought it sufficient to make the outside clean, to fast often and pray long, to frequent temples and synagogues, and wear disfigured countenances, to observe the injunctions of the law relating to what was merely ritual and external, while its weightier requirements were left unfulfilled, and their fulfilment unsought for, and undesired; so in these later days are there those whose all of religion is a bodily attendance upon its public services, an observance of the two great ordinances of the Christian church, the daily tracing of the eye over a certain number of the pages of the Bible, and the uttering of certain words expressive of a devotional sensibility. Their hearts unloving and impure, their lives dishonest and selfish, they yet deem themselves, by virtue of these things which they do, to be in the way of acceptance with God, and claim to be included among the religious. There are those of another character, who, while they make the externals of religion minister to their inward growth, do yet regard them with a sort of superstitious reverence, as if they were something more than mere externals, and entered somewhat into the very essence of that which they help to cherish. They are sensitively tenacious of them in the precise shape and circumstance in which they have been familiar to them, and seem to consider a deviation from such familiar usage, as threatening the prosperity, almost the existence, of Christianity in the community; thus, not only regarding forms as essential, but even the form of forms. Surely, it is but with an ill grace that we bestow all our reproving wonder upon the superstition of the Pharisees of old, when we have among us an increasing sect, whose peculiarity, insisted upon continually and earnestly,is no more nor less than the employment of one mode of baptism rather than another; who win their converts solely on this ground; who, though all things were the same, not in doctrine only, but in disposition and character, before and after the reception of baptism in this mode, would celebrate the fact of such reception as constituting an important change in the individual's prospects and hopes of acceptance with God and entrance into heaven:- when, again, there are others among us who wait before they accord to another the Christian name, to know whether or not he be a stated observer of that other rite of our religion; which, however beautiful it No. 185. VOL. XVI. 1* may be, and touching, and impressive, and hallowed by most precious associations, is yet in itself but a form, and of no meaning save as it is an expression of an inward fact, and of no value save in its tendency to the increase of that which it expresses. And it is not strange that a disgust at this bigoted attachment to forms and observances should have forced others to the length of expressing for them, in speech and practice, an utter disregard; that the assertion of their essentialness should rebound in that of their unimportance. But the error of the former assertion does not make true the latter. The truth, as I have said, is between them. There is a superstitious bondage to forms and observances, and there is an unbelieving rejection of them; and there is, also, and this alone I would advocate, a free and intelligent use of them. Religious forms, institutions, ordinances, are not unimportant. They are needed helps to the developement of the religious life. They are not religion, but they connect themselves with it as means to an end. They are not the living spirit, but they are the organs through which it breathes, and, by breathing, is expanded to a larger life. They are not practical goodness, nor is the most punctilious observance of them to be accounted as in any measure its substitute, but they may prove the instrumentality through which it is upheld. The spiritualism that rejects them as useless, may be true, in so doing, to itself, but I am sure it is not to the condition and wants of the vast majority of the Christian world. The time is not yet, when the soul in blest and buoyant freedom, can wing its own unaided flight. The time is no yet, when its inborn sentiment of religion, expanded to a |