municants to partake of the eucharist till their twenty-fifth year

of age.

Their churches are usually built on hills, and in a small, round, conical form, and are decorated with pictures. Worshippers are required to stand, as in the Greek churches, during divine service. They leave their shoes at the door, and persons on horses, in passing, are required to dismount. Their service consists principally in selections from the Bible, and in prayers, and is similar to that of the Greeks.

The clergy are allowed to marry, and the patriarch, called Abuna, father, is generally taken from the Coptic priests. They have monks, who profess to be of the order of St. Augustine, and are of two classes: 1. The married monks, living in convents. 2. Married religionists, living with their wives and children, around the churches, and subsisting principally by agriculture and other secular employments. Their nuns, also, are numerous. The Abyssinian clergy have no clerical dress.

Great efforts have been made to reduce the Abyssinian church to subjection to the Roman Papacy; but without effect.

The Abyssinians are more numerous and in better circumstances than the Copts; but they depend on the patriarch of Alexandria, and allow him to appoint their patriarch. This has been a constant usage ever since the founding of this church, about A. D. 450, when the first bishop of the Abyssinians received consecration from Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. - Murdock's Mosheim. Encyclopedia Americana.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INEFFICIENCY OF EASTERN CHRISTIANITY, AND ITS RADICAL

VICES.

ALL the patriarchal churches are monuments of the past, and wrecks and remnants of its glory and power. They are stereotype systems of church polity, that have been experimented upon incessantly, for more than a thousand years, with no grand beneficial result. There is doubtless some piety among them, but their subjects are not generally wise and good; neither are they prosperous, powerful and happy. No great light of the world has risen among them. They have produced no long list of benefactors of the human race; no great discoveries in science, no great world-instructing artists, no great improvers of the arts of life. Where their fathers were a thousand years ago, there their sons are now; no wiser, no greater, no better; but rather less wise, less good, and less influential in the world's great affairs.

Europe has been awakened to new life, and her swarming millions are abroad, on every land and every sea, trying to improve their conditions, and multiply their enjoyments. New continents have been discovered, new arts invented, and new sciences constructed; but the subjects of the Eastern patriarchal and priestly despotisms are still slumbering under the night of ages, without any participation whatever in the mighty movements which are going on around them. What more decisive evidence can exist of the radical corruption of these systems? Their religion does not save its votaries. The glory of God is departed from them.

The cradle of the human race is a moral desert, and the scene of the early triumphs of Christianity, and of some of its most

glorious achievements, has become the theatre of its corruption and debasement, till the salt has entirely lost its savor, and is henceforth good for nothing but to be cast away and trodden under foot.

How dark has been their night of ages, and how comfortless! The way of transgressors is indeed hard. They that hate me, says divine wisdom, love death.

The Eastern patriarchal religions do not meet the exigences of weak, erring and suffering humanity. They do not make men holy, industrious, enterprising, prosperous and happy, to the extent which is imperatively demanded. Their votaries are ignorant and superstitious, and the subjects of numerous destructive vices. They are tyrannical masters, and ignoble slaves. They have originated no great ideas; they have accomplished no great works. The descendants of the ancient Greeks, who were almost the demi-gods of the human race in elder time, they have fallen from their proud eminence, and have been, for many centuries, the slaves of Mohammedan despotism and semi-barbarism, superimposed on their own domestic burdens.

In the West, fallen and corrupted as religion was, it retained sufficient power, on the overthrow of the Roman empire, to conquer its conquerors, and become the controlling principle of their civilization. It did not make them all they might have been, nor exalt them to the eminent holiness they might have attained; but it vastly improved them. And many of them it illuminated with that divine light which crowns this life with unspeakable glory, and is our proper and adequate preparation for the life to come. The conquerors of the West adopted the principles and usages of the conquered, and became as good and zealous Christians as they were. In a short time all were assimilated together, and enjoyed the blessings of the state, whatever they were, in common.

But in the East it was not so. Not only was the corruption of religion so thorough and complete that the Eastern Christians could not stand against their Mohammedan neighbors, and repel

their incursions; when the overflowing scourge passed over, they had no power of moral conquest and assimilation, with which to subdue them. Bad as the Mohammedan principles were, defective and inadequate as they were to work out the highest possible improvement and happiness of society, the Eastern church principles were no better, and, in some respects, they were worse. They led to more effeminacy and imbecility. They were more slavish, and afforded a better discipline to prepare its subjects for slavery.

When the light of the Byzantine empire went out, under the rule of Mohammedan conquerors, the world was very little darker than before. Mohammedan rule met the necessities of human society nearly as well as the corrupt Christian rule had done that preceded it. The Eastern Christians could not convert their conquerors, because they could not exhibit any great practical benefits which their Christianity could confer upon them. The two systems pursued their career side by side. They went on together, and were transmitted to the descendants of their respective supporters from generation to generation; but the good and evil of both were so nearly equal, that it was impossible for either to make much impression on the other. Their excellences were different, their evils were different; but their practical working did not give any results by which either could gain a decided advantage over the other.

This experiment has been prosecuted from the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, four hundred years, till the present time, and both religions, Mohammedan superstition and Greek Christianity, have been found utterly ineffectual for the exaltation of their subjects, and each incapable of subduing and overpowering the other by the force of its beneficent results.

In the mean time, reörganizations of the church on better principles in Western Europe and America have produced vast improvements in the moral and social condition of their subjects, and new impulses have been given to all the great interests of society originating in this source.

One of the great improvements growing out of this revolu tionary religious movement in the West is the reëstablishment of religious liberty in the church, and the promotion of corresponding liberty and equality in the state. Already have these changes begun to act on the spiritual and political despotisms of the East, to restrict their operation, and to weaken their power. Great organic changes for the better have been effected in Turkey and Persia, within the last few years; not through the elevating and ennobling influence either of Mohammedanism or Eastern Christianity, but through the influence of the religion and liberty of Western Europe and America. Still greater changes are to come from the same source.

That which blesses and benefits will make its way, be sought after and pursued, and be cherished and cultivated. That which debases, and otherwise depresses and injures, will be abandoned and rejected. An injurious and depressing religion cannot always impose on the credulity of mankind; nor can an elevating and ennobling one always be unappreciated. Religions not only may be judged by their fruits; they must be judged by their fruits, and must be chosen or rejected ultimately by the human race, as their fruits are beneficial or injurious.

The great fundamental and damning error of the Eastern church is its spiritual despotism. The hierarchy lords it over God's heritage, and reduces his subjects to ignoble bondage. The slavery of Egypt under taskmasters, in making bricks without straw, was not so bad as the slavery of Eastern Christians under their hierarchies. The bondage of Egypt related to the body, but left the mind unshackled; the bondage of the Eastern churches lays violent hands and imposes shackles on the mind. It guides faith by authority, and never allows its children to walk alone. They, consequently, never can generally be men.

The ministry is debased by the hierarchical system, and is made an instrument of the systematic debasement of the people. Some of the church of England divines, who have been sent