Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/470

Rh I have heard genial ministers among the Calvinists, the Unitarians, the Baptists, who all open the church of Christ to the wide world. Especially so in the old Presbyterian congregational church, which I will also call the Church of the Pilgrims, and in which every layman takes part in the affairs of the church. This Presbyterian church seems to be possessed of a strong, growing, and expansive life, i.e. in the Free States; in the Slave States this church is in general enslaved and bigoted in character. In the Free States it stands fixed on the Rock of Ages, but opens itself thence to embrace the whole world. Even nature, art, industry, and science are baptised to the service of God.

The so-called “Revivals” belong to the phenomena which are common to all the Protestant churches of the United States, and which are indications of their vitalising principle. These Revivals are times when persons, possessed of unusual gifts and impelled by burning zeal, go about as missionaries into the cities and the country, uttering afresh the cry of John the Baptist, “Be ye converted!” Such times and seasons permeate the life of the church like deep, fresh respiration from the sphere of religious life, and thousands of individuals date from such their new and better life.

One of the most beautiful circumstances of the general church in the United States appears to me to be the great institution for the diffusion of popular literature of a moral and religious tendency, but without any sectarian spirit, which was established in New York about twenty years ago, and to which the adherents of many different sects equally extended support, continuing to work amicably and powerfully together to the present time. Twenty steam-presses work off twenty-five thousand sheets daily, three thousand volumes, calculated to diffuse the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the redeemer of sinners, and to promote living piety and sound morality,