pirit to join them; for every
Christian has a longing to do something for God's kingdom on earth,
and to employ usefully time and talents which he feels are running to
waste. Why, then, with so much to do through a living agency, and with
a great army of living agents yet unemployed, is there so little
done? We reply again, from want of congregational organisation. Our
congregations want order, method, arrangement. There is not yet a
sufficiently clear apprehension of what their calling is in the world,
or of the work given them to do; nor is there found that wise and
authoritative congregational or church direction and government, which
could at least suggest, if not assign, fitting work for each member,
and a fitting member for each work. Hence little, comparatively, is
accomplished. The most willing church-member gazes over a great city,
and asks in despair, "What am I to do here?" And what would the
bravest soldiers accomplish in the day of battle, if they asked the
same question in vain? What would a thousand of our best workmen do in
a large factory, if they entered it with willing hands, yet having
no place or work assigned to them? And thus it is with many really
self-denying Christians; because a practicable and definite field of
labour is not pointed out, the necessary result is idleness--unwilling
idleness; or self-organised and self-governed "associations,"
"committees," "societies," spring up to accomplish what the Christian
society itself was designed to, and could accomplish in a much more
efficient and orderly manner; or, as it more frequently happens, those
energies and ardent feelings, and love of excitement even, which could
have found sufficient scope for healthy exercise in such practical
labours of faith and love as we have alluded to, are soon engrossed by
merely speculative questions about "the church," or about "religion,"
and the stream which, had it been directed into a right channel, and
to a right point, would have been made a power for immense good, soon
rushes over the land a wide-spread, muddy, devastating flood, oozes
out into stagnant marshes, full of miasma and fever, or evaporates
into thin air!

THE CURE FOR SCHISM.

"Schisms" are not peculiar to the Church of the present day, nor
are they "the result of Protestantism," as some allege, unless
Protestantism is understood to represent that doctrine which is termed
"the right of private judgment," but which might be described