Not only new, but old things also; not bending his diligence only to amuse “itching ears” and Athenian searchers after “some new thing,” but producing old truths, and thus laying a firm foundation; building up with those massive principles which know no change.

Yet not only old things, but new also; adapting himself to the times—so as to make the old fundamental truths practical guides to present conduct, and in present circumstances— erecting upon the fixed and unchangeable foundations, a superstructure to suit the season—teaching not only the great principles of the Truth, but also the lessons of the Hour.

Such was our Saviour's estimate of a wise Scribe. The Scribes were the appointed Teachers of the Church. They represented the Church, in that department of her work.

We may generalize the text and apply it to the Church and her Teachers now.

When, as on this day, our Saviour ascended up on high, it is recorded by S. Paul (2nd evening lesson: Eph. IV) that he “gave gifts unto men.” When the King of Glory entered the eternal gates and took possession of His throne, He distributed largess to his subjects.

And what gift was worthy of such a King and of such an occasion? Not gold, dug from the dirty mine; nor jewels; bright daughters though they be of base earth; but, beyond all gold or rubies, the means of heavenly wisdom for His Church—the agencies of sanctification and pardon and Eternal Salvation. It is written, “He gave some, Apostles; and some, Prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.”

Thus when Christ would bestow upon His people a gift worthy of Himself, He gave them Teachers. And, that their instruction might be thorough and reliable, He made their teaching two fold; giving them, first, a permanent code of instruction, in the Holy Scriptures; wherein to represent and hold, as it were, in stereotype, the great fixed, unchanging, principles of His Truth and Law—a teacher impersonal, inanimate, of necessity as ignorant of all of us now present upon earth, however accurately meeting our cases by analogy, as were the Stone tables of the earlier Law, but infallible, and always and everywhere essentially the same: secondly, His Church—fallible, as made up of men—liable to change and to some degree of error, but endued with the advantage of being living—able to take cognizance of present circumstances, however peculiar, and to adapt her instructions to the necessities of individual, or local, or temporary cases—to bring forth things new as well as old—able, therefore, to teach, the lessons of the Hour—enabled to do so, by teaching through a living ministry who, dwelling in the hour themselves, can see what are its lessons.

And the Church is bound to teach “the Lessons of the Hour.” Else is she no faithful guide to her children; else are her watchmen, like those rebuked by Isaiah, “dumb dogs that cannot bark.” But not with frivolous haste: perpetually hunting novelties, and degrading the dignity of the pulpit, and seeking to catch the attention of a giddy world to its solemn lessons, by weaving into their fabric all the petty excitements of the day. Nor yet with laggard indifference, or stiff disregard of the actual, daily, moral and spiritual necessities of her hearers—with a dry and dull propriety, handling only universally recognized truths, and old facts—walking the ramparts of Zion in formal round—making no sallies upon the actual, present assailants. Adopting neither of these modes, but teaching with the dignity and yet the earnestness becoming the Bride of Christ—refusing, on the one hand, to turn aside to “vain janglings,” or to make her pulpits the show places of all the straw floating by upon the human current; but on the other hand, teaching the Lessons of the Hour; dwelling in living sympathy with her children; helping them grapple with their local trials; in their sunshine, warning them against the seductions of the Tempter; and when dark clouds gather over them, and their path becomes dim and perilous, guiding them through the gloom, and comforting and strengthening them for the moment of distress and danger.

And how shall the Church now guide her children aright, if she looks not around her at the actual horizon; if she perceives not the circle of lurid flame that engirdles her; if she sees not the heavens black and still gathering blackness; if she feels not the earth as it rocks to the tread of armies and the roll of artillery; if she sees not the burning homes and trampled harvests of her children; or her widows and helpless infants and aged women, driven forth at one moment with a view to swell the supposed ravages of famine, and at another compelled by the invaders to remain as a breastwork for themselves; if she hears not the groans of the wounded and dying or the moans of the widow and fatherless, as, not one by one, but in great sheaves, the dread mower reaps down on the red field of battle, husband and father and brother and son? How shall God's Church teach faithfully the lessons of the hour, if she fails to see that War is in the land—or, seeing it, thinks it beneath her dignity to take notice of it in her pulpits? Far be it from her to sound the dread tocsin; to excite war, or stimulate bloodthirstiness. We may congratulate ourselves that in the South, at least, this war has not been brought on by harangues from the pulpit; nor when it burst, was the emblem of secular power permitted to shroud the sacred desk or flaunt from the spires of God's house. The Church of the South has not attempted to declare war, or lash on the hesitating politician to his bloody work; nor have her great religious conclaves, of various names, been degraded into arenas for denunciation, or the venting of bitterness towards those she hopes to conquer. It is a condition of things which she cannot help. I do not mean to intimate that on such questions the Church must surrender her conscience, or do implicitly the bidding of the State. I do not hesitate to say that were this war both unjust and offensive upon our part, we could as Christians have nothing whatever to do with it. No earthly authority would have the right to force us into it. The Church would be bound so far as she could do so, to thunder her denunciations; and though the consequences were imprisonment or a felon's death, there would be no choice for us, as Christians, between such a fate, and the enormous crime of carrying fire and sword into the territory of an innocent neighbor.

But happily we are placed in no such alternative. The Church of the South can with a clear conscience, take her stand by the side of her battling children. She can send her soldier to the field, as to a part of God's work for him, in this present strait; she can teach him his duties there— the duties of subordination and discipline—of temperance and regularity; she can teach him to restrain his temper from outbursts of animal ferocity—to be chivalrous as well as brave—while he wars with the armed man, to respect the aged, the woman and the child—to endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. And she can teach him true courage and rational confidence; she can point his faith to an Almighty Protector, who is with him as truly in all the terrible storm of the battle-field, as in the quiet of his home. She can remind him that even to escape death in battle is not to escape it long, but that, in fact, he is “immortal till his work is done”—that he is immortal even in death—that for the Christian, death upon an honorable battle-field is but one great pathway to eternal glory. And though she draw not the sword herself, nor descend to the dust of the field of strife, yet can she take her stand with God upon the Mountain, and by prayer uphold her warrior's hands.

And she has lessons of the hour for the citizen also; lessons of caution, lest led by avarice, he forget his duty to his country and his kind, and fatten himself upon his neighbor's wasting flesh, to his own life-long, his eternal infamy—lessons of hospitality, which, due at all times, from the Christian, is now specially due from those whom a kind Providence has thus far permitted to remain under their own vines and fig trees, towards brethren who have lost their all to the enemy and so in the common cause. How sad their lot! Exiles from the homes of their fathers, they have wandered forth, too often to be inhospitably repelled by their own brethren. Cut off from the temples of their childhood and from the worship of their reason and of their affections—by distant waters, they “weep when they remember Zion.”

But the Hour has its lessons not only for individuals and individual interests, but for communities also—lessons not only to circumscribed localities, but for the Church throughout the world, and to the world itself—lessons which are peculiarly and emphatically, the great lessons of the hour, taught by the Providence of God, and with a force unattainable without that special Providence, which makes them the Lessons of the Hour.

It is a momentous hour for the Church;—an hour of rampant fanaticism—of forgetfulness of first principles and of the most familiar and fundamental truths—of bitterness of feeling obliterating principle and overruling conscience —an hour of division—an hour of depressed finances—of zeal cooled down—of forgotten work—of the smoking embers of many a neglected or trampled religious enterprise. God is teaching us some things with peculiar emphasis;— vindicating His Church and His truth by a broad and bloody experience—warning that Church of some unexpected dangers, and establishing for her some new and most important responsibilities. And these lessons He expects her to teach her children—like the well-instructed scribe, bringing forth from her treasury, things new and old.

Among the lessons of the hour, and especially appropriate to this occasion, is the testimony, which God in His providence is giving to the adaptation of the Church, as we understand and define it, to the work of God and the wants of men.

Let me not be misunderstood. I bear cheerful testimony to the personal piety and excellence of many who differ from us as to the nature of the Church. They may be much better men than I am. But neither my membership of any religious body, nor my father's before me, nor my neighbor's, can determine its claims as God's appointed instrument for His own work or for the greatest good to men. In our human fallibility, we and all ours, may for generations have been connected with an incomplete, erroneous, or even injurious system. The true question is not one of persons, or one in which our feelings should be allowed to influence us. It is a question of systems. So let us regard it.

The national contest in which we are involved, is in great part a religious war; and that, both as to its origin, and as respects the persons who are our principal enemies. We need not deny, that other and great political causes have been at work. The vast extent of our territory, and the conflict of interests, commercial, manufacturing and agricultural, thereby resulting, had doubtless done much to unsettle us. But fanaticism—religious fanaticism—was the lever. Abolitionism was the LEVER used by those who drove us into the conflict. And abolitionism found—certainly at the first—no fulcrum in the Episcopal Church, either North or South.

True, her congregations and her Clergy at the North have yielded to the pressure, and have sided with our enemies, to a degree mortifying to us. They have suffered themselves to be upheaved with the rest. But they constituted no appreciable part of the upheaving influence. Abolitionists there were within her ranks; we know them well. But we could almost have counted them upon our fingers. That noxious plant found in her no genial soil. Year after year she repelled the question from her Conventions, both Diocesan and General; and that by immense, overwhelming majorities. And so far as the Northern Dioceses have arrayed themselves against us, it has not been primarily through the power or influence of fanaticism, but because of the disposition of the Church to uphold the powers that be—the civil government under which she dwells. This was characteristic of her course in the revolutionary war, and while constituting, perhaps, a guaranty for her stability and conservatism, is for that very reason, no evidence—but to the contrary—of any liability to the influence of fanaticism.

I do not say how far this war may or may not abolitionize her Northern Dioceses, or may or may not have done so already. What I say is this:—that her part in the war was not, in the first instance, due to any sympathy felt by her for the fanatics who built their circles of fire around us, and drove us into the dissolution of our union with them. The Northern Episcopal Dioceses had nothing to do with bringing about this contest. They accepted it as a fact—joined more zealously than we could have wished with our enemies; but did so, we maintain, actuated by a notion—a false one we think it—but still a notion of loyalty, and not by fanaticism.

And even since that whirlwind at the North has arisen in its fury, and gathered into its tempestuous movement all things and nearly all men, how has the action of the Episcopal Conventions there, both Diocesan and General, contrasted with that of some other religious bodies!* Where else at the North will you find the comparative moderation which has marked her assemblies? And where, in all her assemblies, will you find the counterpart of such a meeting as was held in Democratic New York, in April, and reported in our papers—tumultuously affirming the incompatibility of slavery with Christianity; and where professed ministers of Jesus Christ proposed to treat those who among themselves were of opponent politics, by hanging them, or by stamping them under their heels?

I venture to think that, when this war is over and the truth is discoverable, it will be ascertained, that among our strongest friends and allies have been many of the Churchmen of the North; and further, that the main body of Churchmen will be found to have been either averse to this war altogether, or in favor of a moderate mode of conducting it. That they support the government under which they live, and condemn our secession, may be true. But they have not been possessed, as have many others, with the demon of ferocity, and the desire of our extermination or subjugation.

Many of them, I am persuaded, have never been willing to support the war at all. Even while condemning, perhaps, our secession, they have not wished to put the question to the bloody issues of the sword.

In all this I may, of course, be measurably mistaken. But that will not invalidate my assertion that the Episcopal Church, throughout this country, had been comparatively free from the fanaticism which has brought the war and all these sorrows upon us, and, that had she been the prevailing Church of the country, there would have been comparatively no soil wherein for that pernicious plant of abolitionism to grow—there would have been no need of secession—no cause of war, at least on that account. Whatever evils other and political differences might have precipitated upon us in time, this war has been brought upon us by fanaticism which knew no footing in the Church to which we belong.

But there are other religious bodies at the North, who, like ourselves, have comparatively kept out, or kept down this moral miasm, though, excepting the Church of Rome, not, we think, so fully as among ourselves. All honor to them. And if we can detect the common principle, which has been for us all so great a prophylactic, we will assuredly have learned one of the most important lessons of the hour.

I am persuaded that, aside from the divine character which we claim for the Church, the great secret—philosophically speaking—has been in the traditional character of her belief and teachings. She accepts no novelties in religion. She admits novel applications of old truths; things thus new and old she has among her treasures. But the truth, or the principle, is always an old one; and so far as circumstances remain the same, the application is the old one also. What was the truth, whether of principle or of application, to the first Christians, she believes to be the truth now. What was the meaning of the Gospel, when St. Paul wrote the Epistle to Philemon, or when St. Paul or St. Peter in the flesh, commanded servants to be obedient to their masters, she believes to be its meaning now.

If slavery were wrong now, and to be condemned, she believes it would have been wrong then, and would have been condemned then. She accepts no new Gospel, according to Garrison, or Phillips, or Beecher, or anybody else. She remembers that immediately after enforcing upon Timothy to teach obedience to servants, St. Paul adds: “If any man teach otherwise and consent not unto wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, he is proud—or, as in the margin, he is a fool—knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth.” She takes the old Gospel, with its old traditional interpretation.— And so long as she is faithful to this rule, no fanaticism can creep in. And you will find that the exemption of other religious bodies, at the North, from the taint of abolitionism, has been in direct proportion to the prevalence among them of this same traditional principle;† while just in proportion to its abandonment has the door been opened for new notions, new translations, new interpretations, heresies, schisms, fanaticisms..

And I believe that one great lesson which God is teaching us at this dark hour, is the value of a traditional religious system. It is the only safe system. It is the only system which gives us any security for the religious belief of our neighbors or of our descendants—the only system which can secure us against agrarianism, abolitionism, or any other heresy, which, like them, may uproot the social compact, or our religious faith.

But, because traditions have been forged or abused, and because our Saviour condemned those “traditions of the elders,” which contravened the law of God, and because Rome has brought in many unfounded doctrines, under the name of tradition, multitudes of superficial thinkers have gone on to condemn all traditions—forgetful of St. Paul's express injunction to the Thessalonians—(2. Thess. ii: 15) to hold the traditions they had been taught, and (iii: 6,) “to withdraw themselves from every brother, walking not after the tradition received of the Apostles.” Traditions were doctrines or practices handed down. Of these some were inspired and good; others were human and bad. The bad were to be rejected; the good were to be preserved. But the Gospel system was to be traditional. And the great principle of the traditional system, such as our Church maintains, is that of holding nothing as revealed truth, or as the sound interpretation of revealed truth, which we have not received from the Apostles, and which was not received by the first Christians from the Apostles. We reject all new Revelations or developments of Revelation; and upon points of practice, in common to us with the first Christians, all new interpretations of Revelation. And so we exclude in the mass, both Romanism and Neology—all the modern developments of Romanism on the one hand, and all the still more modern inventions of Puritanism and Neology on the other.