and ecclesiastical governments are Christ's ordinance, and civil and ecclesiastical rulers are his ministers. So far as they conform to his law, they represent his authority, and to speak evil of them is to blaspheme Christ. But that any form of civil government, no matter how it is administered, is Christ's ordinance, is a prevalent but pestilent heresy. To affirm that Franklin Pierce is Christ's minister, in any other sense than the Devil and all wicked men are his ministers, is to our mind a most monstrous and impious proposition. He possesses not a single qualification which God requires of the civil ruler. The Government under his administration contravenes and tramples down God's law in every important act. God's civil ruler is a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that do well. Franklin Pierce, so far as he has the power, is a terror to well doers, and a praise to them that do evil. To crush the poor, to burn defenseless villages and render hundreds of women and children homeless, to break down the barriers, that the overflowing scourge of slavery might pass over vast territories of free soil, are the important and characteristic acts of his administration. The idea that God Almighty regards the man and his government with any other feelings than those of intense loathing and profoundest contempt, is to our mind horribly blasphemous. And we know not by what authority we are required to express reverence for that which God abhors.

The same is true of corrupt ecclesiastic rulers. Jesus Christ certainly did not commit the sin of "speaking evil of dignities," when he denounced such as serpents and vipers. According to the prevalent notion of our times, this language was very wrong and irreverent. But he was holy and harmless, neither was guile found in his mouth. The Bible everywhere teaches that it is a duty to call things by their right names; and when a ruler in Church or State is base and mean and cruel, in his public acts, it is right to say so, and to hold him up to the scorn of all the good. When we come to entertain correct views of the character of God's rulers in Church and State, and to have proper ideas of the true func tions of civil and ecclesiastical government, we will not blaspheme these Divine ordinances by supposing that they are found in our covenant-breaking President, in our slave trading Government, or in any of the corrupt pro-slavery ecclesiastical organizations of the land.

THE NEW PRO-SLAVERY CHURCH.

By the proceedings we published last week, our readers will have learned that the Southern seceders from the N. S. Presbyterian Church, have perfected their schism by giving it organic form. The salient point of this whole affair is that the new church has really and avowedly but one distinctive principle, and that is, the sanctity of American slavery. The seceders allege no other ground of difference with their brethren from whom they have separated. They profess to agree with them on all points of Christian doctrine, and church order. The sole offense laid to the charge of their former associates is, that they will not recognize slavery as approvingly ordained of God, and as in all circumstances a holy and desirable institution. We say in all circumstances, because the N. S. General Assembly have always admitted. that in some circumstances slavery is innocent. In the Detroit resolutions they specify three circumstances which, in their judgment, justify the holding of men as property by the members of the church, and their last Assembly enacted nothing inconsistent with this. But because they hold that slavery, under other circumstances, is evil, Dr. Ross and his schismatical adherents, have withdrawn, and organized what they call a church, on the ground that slavery is always and only good, and shall enjoy the fullest and most undisturbed fellowship and sanction. Slavery is therefore their corner-stone, their sure foundation, their bond of union. The right of the master to buy, sell, work, scourge, and kill his fellow-men, to separate them from wives and children, parents, brothers, and sisters, is the sole right, for the maintenance of which the new organization has been formed.

It is difficult to find words to adequately characterize the moral enormity of this whole proceeding. Slavery, in the abstract, and in the concrete, and under all circumstances, is a crime that stands alone in unapproachable atrocity. It is literally the "sum of all villainies." There is not a crime on the catalogue of human guilt-sacrilege, blasphemy, idolatry, murder, incest, adultery, robbery, rape-which slavery does not license; and all of these crimes are perpetrated from time to time by masters upon their slaves. Some of them are perpetrated habitually, from the very nature of the case, others of them occasionally. All of them may be perpetrated with perfect impunity by masters on slaves, at any time and at all

times. Yet here we have a convention of professed ministers and members of Jesus Christ, in his name, and ostensibly by his authority, separating from those with whom they have long associated, on the sole ground that this atrocious system shall not be discussed, and shall not be condemned. And after separation they proceed to form an organization, and call it a church, on the avowed principle that God sanctions this concentration and embodiment of all conceivable guilt and infamy.

And these men have the terrible effrontery and blasphemy to call themselves Christians, and Christian ministers! Christians indeed! What possible point of affinity can be traced between them and the meek and holy Jesus? Behold that Divine Saviour, as seated on the mountain side, with his mild eye all burdened with the weight of human sympathy, he proclaims, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye also to them, for this is the law and the prophets." Behold him again in the synagogue with the book of the law open before him, proclaiming, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." The very soul of love and pity for the poor and oppressed breathes in his words and acts. "All bore him witness," we are told, "and wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth." Their souls were lost in delightful wonder at the more than human love, that, like a halo of heavenly light, pervaded his presence, and breathed around him. His distinguishing mark of his own divinity and Messiahship, was his love for the poor, and his zeal to preach to them the gospel. Wherever a human heart lies crushed under oppression, there yearns his bowels of mercy. Wherever a soul toils wearily under the weight of sin and sorrow, there sounds his voice of love, bidding the weary and heavy laden come to him and be at rest.

Turn we now to the other side of the picture. In the city of Richmond, where day by day the hammer of the auctioneer falls heavily on the crushed and broken hearts of the scattered and peeled poor ones of this land, assembles a convocation of the nominal disciples of this blessed and compassionate Saviour. Do they, like him, feel that their mission is to "preach deliverance to the captives, and the opening of the

prison to the bound?" Nay verily. Their open and avowed, and only object is, to perpetuate the captivity, and bar more securely the prison doors of the oppressed. Under the shadow of the lofty temple where they meet, the Saviour, in the person of some of his poor, heart-broken disciples, lies chained and bruised in the loathsome slave-den. These professed embassadors of that very Saviour, meet for the sole purpose of organizing a nominal church, in which those who buy, and sell, and chain, and lacerate Jesus Christ, may be fellowshiped as good Christian brethren. In that fetid slave-pen lies the wife and mother. She has been ruthlessly parted forever from her husband, and from her arms has been cruelly torn the babe, over whose little form her heart yearns with all the deathless love that the mother only knows. As she lies there in chains, memory brings back the image of the little one. She sees the sweet smile upon its innocent face. She feels its warm breath, and the pressure of the dimpled hand upon her bosom; and then, as she recalls the dreadful truth that she will see it no more in this world, she sobs as if her very heart-strings would burst asunder. And there, almost within hearing of her wail, those professed ministers of the loving Jesus are ordaining that the fiend in the shape of man, who inflicted all this terrible weight of woe, does nothing whatever inconsistent with the character of the Christian! And these men preach, and pray, and talk pious cant, and then, like the adulterous woman, wipe their mouths and say, "We have done no wickedness."

Let these men fill up their cup of iniquity, and, by all means, let them be consistent, and open wide the doors of the sanctuary they are founding. Let them send one delegation. to the leprous saints of the Salt Lake Valley, another to the seething brothels of the Five Points of New York, and a third to the Thugs of India, bidding the Mormon adulterer, the New York prostitute, and the Indian assassin come to their fold, and aid them in celebrating this marriage of death and hell. We can conceive of but one reason why they might not thus greatly increase their somewhat meager number, and that is, that the Mormon, the prostitute, and the Thug, might spurn the invitation, and resent as an insult the attempt to place them on a level with Dr. Ross and his adherents. We can hardly say that they would not have just cause so to do.

MOVEMENTS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

The appointment of John Hughes to the rank of Archbishop of New York, and the delivery of a lecture by that high functionary, soon after, On the Decline of Protestant. ism, are facts with which our readers are already acquainted. Nearly cotemporaneously with these events, the Pope of Rome (Pio Nono) issued a bull, appointing an English Archbishop, and dividing the country into twelve dioceses, and appointing bishops to several of them, accompanied with a promise of a full supply. This was done without respect to, or leave of the English Hierarchy, and the Queen, the Head of the Church, "by the grace of God, defender of the faith," etc. These several movements of "His Holiness" have severally excited quite a commotion, both in this country and in Eng land-much greater in the latter country than in this, however. The excitement in this country exhibits itself in lectures, sermons, newspaper comments, etc. In England not only these weapons are used, but meetings are being held through the kingdom, resolutions and addresses are adopted, invoking the interference of the Queen and Parliament, to arrest the threatened subjugation of the country to the See of Rome.

We do not apprehend serious danger to the Protestant cause, from these or any other popish demonstrations. What ever injury may result from them will be owing, not to the inherent strength of the papacy, but to the inconsistencies, and consequent weakness of some of the leading sects of Protestants. It is the leaven of popery working in the Protestant churches, not its outward assaults, that endangers the citadel of truth. The most prominent and violent opposers of the recent pretensions of the Papal See, are the Pusey ites, of England, and the pro-slavery Protestants of the United States-the very sects that embody most of the errors of popery. The proclivity of the first of these toward the embrace of "Holy Mother" is a matter of notoriety through out Christendom. Hence their opposition to the pretensions of the papal bull is not founded on religious convictions-not the offspring of an honest, conscientious persuasion of the errors and corruptions of the Catholic Church. They have embraced and propagated some of the most dangerous and wicked dogmas of the Vatican. That the Bishop of London, "Pepe Henry of Exeter" (as the bishop of that diocese is