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demands that our clergy should share in the highest culture of the times. Especially is it indispensable that our young men preparing themselves for the ministry of the reconciliation, should enjoy the best advantages in our power to confer. A theological education fitting them for the work must be attained, and without a seminary, in the present state of things, this seems impossible."

We give to this work our heartiest co-operation. We would invite, most earnestly, the attention of our people to it; and we humbly submit to our denominational editors, whether our condition does not require large effort on their part, to induce able writers to bring the claims, benefits, and relations of a theological school more before their readers. Our people must be educated to give; and a part of this education is to be imparted by a judicious press in presenting the many-sided argument for the uses of a theological school, as it will and must be managed by souls of the greatest hope. Thousands dread the influence of such an institution, because they remain uninformed of the peculiarities of modern progress in reference to these agencies; and new thoughts will touch and open new springs of liberality. The location of this institution will not affect in the least its connection with the entire denomination; and we count it a pleasure to consider the reciprocal action of the college in Massachusetts, and the theological school in New York. To both, the generosity of the denomination, without limit of State or territory, should freely flow. Both will be symbols of our existence; both will speak of our regard for culture; both will solicit the attention of the liberally disposed; and both will help us, by their issues, we trust, to magnify that office which is given to us by our greater faith in that divine educative process-which shall result in the emancipation of humanity, not merely from ignorance, but from the bondage of sin. May it be ever the pleasant vision of our heart to look upon the prospective influence of these institutions as aiding, through ministerial culture, the great ends of the Christian ministry, as where

"the sacred river ran,

Thro' caverns measureless to man,
Down to the sunlit sea."

H. B-N.

ART. XXIV.

Records of Bubbleton Parish.

Records of the Bubbleton Parish; or Papers from the Experience of an American Minister. With Illustrations by Billings. Boston: A. Tompkins, and B. B. Mussey & Co. 1854.

ONE of the most significant topics of thought and discussion at the present time, is that of the true connection and co-operation of the Christian pastor and his people. That the Christian ministry is an indispensable institution, is everywhere admitted among Christians. It is an instrumentality made highly prominent in the New Testament, and which has been one of the chief agencies in promoting Christian truth, in all lands and in every age. Its utility and indispensableness are not now to be argued on most of New England ground; and throughout most of our country, its claims, in a greater or lesser degree, are admitted and respected.

During quite a number of the years now just past, however, the claims of the ministry and the answering of these claims on the part of churches and societies, have been variously presented, and changes have appeared in strange contrast with what was once known as the permanent relation of pastor and people; changes which, from various causes, have so come to nearly all our sects, as to waken serious inquiry, not as to what shall be done for the encouragement of candidates for the ministry, but whether we are to have in the future a sufficient number of candidates to supply the places of those passing from the stage of action, or to preserve the ministry from being reduced to the smallest numbers. In many Christian sects this lack of ministerial supply is acknowledged and lamented.

There are various reasons for this declension, which, however, it is not our purpose here to consider. Among others, we may just allude, first to the increase and variety of secular and material interests and pursuits, in these days, calling away our young men into new fields of ambition and exertion: secondly, a lack of pecuniary compensation, discouraging to those who would enter the minVOL. XI. 31

istry, and leading some already there into such embarrassment with other interests, as to lessen their usefulness, and induce them, perhaps, to abandon the profession; (in either instance, an effort of nature at self-preservation): thirdly, want of permanency in the pastoral relation, forbidding the minister to calculate for any considerable time upon a home or "settled rest" with his people fourthly, the inordinate mental and other labor required of a settled pastor, and the demonstration in many an instance, that such requirement cannot be met and endured: fifthly, a dislike to encounter the trials arising from the various conflicting temperaments, tastes, personal inclinations and disinclinations with which the faithful pastor is called upon to deal. These are some of the reasons for this declension in the ministry, of which we speak. They furnish "heads" which any minister is welcome to use in the hearing of his people, and from which we could wish that there might be some profitable discoursings throughout our parishes, generally.

In view of this evident need of true sympathy of pastor and people, such as there must be in order to warrant both ministry and churches a permanent existence, there have appeared within a few years past, some very timely publications setting forth the interior life of certain churches and societies, mainly real, if somewhat imaginary, and tending, we think, in some good degree, to remedy the evil in question. Such are "Sunny Side," and a "Peep at Number Five," by the accomplished and lamented Mrs. Phelps, the much read "Shady Side," "Our Parish," "The Rector of St. Bardolph's," an admirable work in an Episcopalian dress, and last, though not least, a volume now before us, on which we would speak more at length, entitled "Records of the Bubbleton Parish." The last named issue first appeared in chapters, weekly, in one of our denominational journals. It soon elicited a very general attention, and became a favorite with all the readers of the journal, so that its popularity warranted its appearance at once in book form, such as we have before us;as handsome an embodiment of an author's brain-work, as any issued from the prolific press of our American Athens. We say this with a little diminution of our interest in the illustrations, which, we think, are not all so

well conceived as they should have been for so popular a book. The name of the author of the "Records" does not appear. He is said to be a minister, and has doubtless known some service in that particular life which it is the design of his work to unfold.

The parish of Bubbleton, of which the autobiographer in this volume is represented as pastor, is one of those fields of labor apparently designed for the special trial of ministerial faithfulness; having the various instrumentalities to that end, and proving itself, in this particular instance, abundantly able to use them. Mr. Chester, the minister, comes here from an obscure country parish, at the earnest recommendation of one of the prominent members of the Bubbleton Society; and giving satisfaction for a brief time to the people, he is invited to the new pastorate, and enters upon his work with strong hope of being useful in a vocation which he has chosen as the one of all others in which he could find most gratification and delight. His first Sunday of ministerial settlement does not pass, however, without giving very direct information to him from different sources, that he has various tastes and dispositions to meet in his new connection, and that it is quite likely he will make enemies as well as friends, whatever course he may take. The extremes of conservatism and radicalism come up before him in the characters of the cool man of policy, Mr. Arlington, and the hot reformer, Mr. Peppery,-Scylla and Charybdis; "and how to pilot my course safely," writes the minister, "between the rock of offence and the furious whirlpool, was the problem which it became me to study with all seriousness and devotion." He is, moreover, informed of the trials of his predecessor, Rev. Mr. Stringent, and of the agencies which worked a dissolution of the ties which bound him to his charge; the conservatives deeming him an obstinate and vehement advocate of certain inconvenient reforms, and the radicals as one hated only for his adherence to the legitimate work of his ministry. Such information, although it causes him heaviness of heart, does not turn him from the line of duty which he has marked out for himself, and which, it seems to us, is one of admirable consistency, a consistency making one of the chief excellencies of the book Bubbleton. Its hero is neither a time

server nor man-server. He affronts the blazing Mr. Peppery because he cannot preach reformatory isms to suit his morbid appetite, and causes Mr. Arlington for a while to withdraw friendship from him for his faithfulness in rebuking sins which were working evident destruction within the bounds of his parish. Mr. Fiscal turns his back upon him because he will faithfully warn him against the evils of the liquor traffic, in which he is engaged, and because he does not choose to accept a gift at his hands, through the apprehension that it may lessen his sense of obligation to deal justly with the donor. And Harry Hanson, a whole-souled blacksmith of the place, is drawn to him as "the only minister in Bubbleton he cares a fig for, and the only one whose preaching does him any good." And so he seeks to "make full proof of his ministry" with this people, encountering various trials, and perceiving, as the months run on, that a crisis must come in which it will be decided whether he can be upheld in his ministerial course, or advised to ask a dismission. To heighten these trials, it seems that he has a competitor near him, in the Rev. Hyperion Downy, pastor of the Plush street Church in Bubbleton, a clergyman who is in the enjoyment of a very significant popularity among his people, and who, among other proofs of his ministerial discrimination in meeting the demands of the times, is "filling up Plush street Church by a course of lectures on the Depravity and Doom of Babylon." Mr. Chester having different conceptions as to what a true reformatory minister should be, has the singularity to come nearer to his own time and home, in his dealings with wrong deeds, habits, and institutions, and so becomes less popular with a certain class of church-patrons, and more strongly entrenched in the good will and affections of others. The crisis, however, comes. The conflicting forces at work in his parish_dishearten the Bubbleton pastor; the ground seems too hard for him to occupy with any reasonable prospect of its Christian cultivation; and in sadness of soul he at length tenders his resignation. The effect of this act is wholly unexpected to him. The parish meeting is called, and the elements composing it are so brought into unity of spirit, that the eyes of the convened parishioners are opened, and they at last unanimously urge their minister to withdraw his

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