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��THE PULPIT IN N. H. DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY
��incredible by a travesty of christian truth."
Fifty years ago the controversies were very active between Universalists and Unitarians, and " evangelical" denomi- nations. Those new denominations were literally subject to a theologi- cal hatred; and most young disci- ples, fresh from the seminary, were ex- pected to slay these dragons before at- tempting the cure of souls. I remember that a young candidate for the ministry preached at Gilmanton, when I was about fifteen years of age. He preached from Rev. 6 : 16 : " And they said to the mountains and the rocks fall on us and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the lamb." He depicted the last judg- ment with all the accumulated horrors of the picture of Michael Angelo repre- senting the same scene to the eye. When I found, two years later, on reading " Langdon on the Prophecies," that those words applied to a scene enacted on earth, and long since past, I felt that the young preacher had deceived me. Another young man from Andover preached from Rev. 14:11, "And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for- ever and ever." He first attempted to give some notion of eternity; he suppos- ed a little bird to come from the sun and carry back a grain of sand, from the earth, and so continue to do till the whole earth were removed, then eternity would only be begun. He proceeded to show that by reason of the growth of sin, in hell, the period would come, in eternity, when a single sinner would suf- fer more, from eternal burnings, than all the fallen angels since the war in Heav- en, and all lost sinners since the fall of Adam have suffered. In conclusion, he assured us that the redeemed in glory, when they looked down over the battle- ments of Heaven into the burning lake, and saw the smoke of the torment of their own relatives rising upward, would be so impressed with the justice of God, that they would shout, in rapture, and cry: u Alleleuia, for the Lord God om- nipotent reigneth." Dives, in hell, was more considerate about the welfare of his brethren. Soon after, while teach-
��ing a school in Deerfield, I asked the venerable Rev. Nathaniel Wells if that view of the lost was biblical ; he replied that he could come to no other conclu- sion than that the torment of the damned resulted from material fire. I doubted, and my heart was then hardened. The pulpits of that day flamed like Sinai, and the spiritual vision of men was blasted. The preachers built on authority as much as the Catholics did. The creed had been, unalterably, settled by Calvin. He went far beyond the English reformers and martyrs of the 16th century. John Hales, an eminent Doctor, in the time of James I., (b. 1584)advised men to trust to themselves in religious matters, to leave nothing for authority, or antiquity, or the majority ; to use their own reason in believing as they use their own legs in walking; to act and be men in mind as well as in the rest ; and to regard as cow- ardly and impious the borrowing of doc- trine and sloth of thought. Cliilling- worth, the greatest controversialist of that age, who was first Protestant, then Catholic, then Protestant, forever, clinch- ing his last position by his great work entitled " Protestantism a safe way of Salvation," maintains that Reason ap- plied to Scripture alone ought to per- suade men ; that authority has no claim to it; that nothing is more against re- ligion than to force religion ; that the great principle of the Reformation is liberty of conscience; and that if the doctrines of the different Protestant sects are not absolutely true, at least, they are free from all impiety, and from all error damnable in itself or destructive of sal- vation. Jeremy Taylor, " the Cicero of the English pulpit," during the civil war, published his great work on " The Lib- erty of Prophesying," and preached free thought and free speech even when per- secuted and impi'isoned. All the great and wise theologians of the Reformation, in England, appealed to Reason against authority in all their theological contro- versies. No one mind was allowed to dictate to any sect. Somewhat later in the history of Protestantism, the creeds that had been compiled by great Doc- tors were made half-way houses between reason and revelation, at which all Pil-
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