reciprocal support of the church is hardly to be expected from them. But there is no sacred law which withholds from kings, lawgivers, and magistrates, the privilege of being sincere disciples of Christ, and members of the one apostolical church. And if such they are, they have, by their profession, subjected themselves to the positive laws of the Gospel, which commands all Christians alike, each in his station, and according to the power which God hath given him, to maintain the faith, the order, and the good discipline, of this church.

Here all ranks are subjected to one common 'rule of mutual dependance and cooperation. We are all members of one body, and every member has its appropriate office, in promoting the general good. The eye cannot say unto the hand, Fhave no need of thee; nor, again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you. It is so ordered, that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members SHOULD HAVE THE SAME CARE one for another. (1 Cor. xii. 21—25.)

How, then, can it be maintained, that the Gospel does not authorise an alliance between church and state, when it views

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the governors and the governed as dependent members of one individual body; and prescribes to each member his relative duties in the promotion of one general cause— the edification of the undivided body of Christ? With his Gospel, such a doctrine can never be made to harmonise.

Whatever, therefore, our modern luminaries may hold forth, it is not consistent with the logic of the New Testament to affirm, that those kings, magistrates, and legislators, who are constituent members of the church of Christ, can have no right to promote the welfare and guard the safety of that church; that the ministers of the Gospel, who are members of the state, are not in duty bound to support the state; and, that the same body cannot exhibit its due symmetry, and maintain its own integrity, till its several members be utterly disjointed from one another, and each set apart as an independent mass.

The language of the Gospel is by far more simple and intelligible. It enjoins unity, harmony, and co-operation, amongst all the members of the church of Christ, whether they be civil or spiritual officers, whether

they be nobles or peasants; and declares that-Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand. (Matt. xii. 25.)

In vain, then, shall the civil magistrate aim to hold an even balance between Christ and Belial. Christ will not accept of a divided heart; and if the smallest portion be given to his adversary, he will soon engross

the whole.

To those who still insist upon the argument drawn from our Lord's renunciation of an earthly kingdom, I would beg leave to propose two plain questions-Did Christ mean, by those words, that none of the princes and governors of the earth should ever embrace his religion? Or did he mean that, if they should embrace it, they were to be tacitly released from the great duty of maintaining, to the utmost of their power, the general principle of union in the church, the purity of the faith, and the laws of good order, which he publicly prescribed to all his disciples?

If these questions cannot be answered in the affirmative, we must still be allowed to

maintain that, as the allegiance of the subject to the government of the state is an indispensable duty of the Gospel, so the patronage and protection which Christian governors afford the church are agreeable to the laws of Christ; and the alliance between church, and state, as far as it obtains in our land, is sacred and evangelical.

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In what has been said above, I have partly answered the third great objection to the condition of our national church; namely, that the acknowledgement of any ecclesiastical establishment at all is detrimental to the general interests of religion: but it may be proper to bestow upon it a more particular attention. How far the rejection of that law of good order, which God has appointed in his church, may conduce to promote the general interests of religion, is a circumstance which we may learn from the history of the same people of Israel. This favoured race, as worthy patterns to some of our modern Christians, thought meet to set aside the divine ordinance, and do, every man, that which was right in his own eyes. They forsook the place which the Lord had chosen to put his name

there; and, for the professed worship of God, but in direct opposition to his commands, set up their separate altars in every city, in the high places and in the groves, These altars being founded in rebellion, their erection could not be justified without the gross perversion and the consequent rejection of the divine law. They were seryed by an irregular and self-constituted priesthood, whose ministry originated in fanatical or impious presumption. This presumption was indulged to the gradual introduction of idols, and every abominable rite; so that those erections which some thought proper to describe as altars of the Lord, became, at length, the avowed altars of false gods, the creatures of human imagination.

The corruption of religion was accom panied, in its progress, with the corruption of morals. As men advanced in the wild schemes of fanaticism, they made correspondent improvements in the perpetration of every crime, till God was provoked to remove his church and his people out of the good land which he had given their fathers. So much did it prove to the general interests of religion, or of civil govern