either Republic, that the characteristics of the overgrown, ill-compacted old Federation were making themselves felt through the Church, which aped the civil organization in its constitution. In the General Convention of 1859, when a proposal for a general Court of Appeal was brought forward, the measure was rejected, not on its intrinsic merits which seem to have been admitted, but because the members of the Convention, both North, and South, foresaw the results which might have endangered the still existing unity of the Church which even then hung on a fragile thread. We are accordingly convinced, that there is better hope for the truth in two homogeneous National Churches, keeping each other in check, and stimulating each other to exertion, than in a body which would, in each successive reunion of the triennial Convention, have had to swallow world-wide differences of social feeling, reflected, whether the Bishops and delegates wished it or not, in its ecclesiastical action, or else be ever standing on the brink of a dissolution in most admired disorder.
It is a fact, however much we may wish to blind our eyes to it, that although the Church may be stronger in New York than in any other city of the ex-Union, all the powers of evil are also preponderatingly more strong in that colluvies gentium. We could fill pages with proofs of the vice, the luxury, the infidelity, the materialism, and the rowdyism of that degraded city, but the painful recital would carry us away too far from our immediate object. It is sufficient to say, in one word, that everything which is disgraceful to the great capitals of the Old World, is found reproduced in a deteriorated form on Manhattan Island. The ill influence of New York spreads over the entire Union, as that of Paris pervades all France. The preternatural mendacity which has come to the surface in all which the North has said and written on the present war, finds its head-quarters in that 'sensation' town of turmoil and cabal. The unblessed attempt of New York to erect itself into the artificial condition of being the commercial capital of all the New, if not of the Old World also, was, as we have indicated, a great motive cause of disruption, and its defeat, we trust for ever, would in itself stamp the secession as a blessing to all civilized nations. Boston, the Northern city next in influence though not in population, differs widely from New York in every respect, and not the least in its far greater outward respectability. How far the real advantage equals the outside show, is a question we had rather not solve. Materialism is the palpable form of evil in New York. The Church there, as we have shown, is powerful comparatively, and yet seems impotent to grapple with the rampant vice about it. In respectable Boston the Church is weak
