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OF

The_Monthly_Religious Magazine,

EDITED BY

PROF. F. D. HUNTINGTON, D.D.

THE design of this work may be best learned by a reference to the contents of its
several volumes. The Editor's endeavor is, to make it to enforce the duties, illustrate
the truths, and strengthen the hopes, of a practical, renewing, and cheerful Faith.
His highest ambition respecting it is, that it should furnish interesting and improv-
ing reading for families, and, by a devout spirit, a sympathy with all the truly
humane movements of the times, and a good measure of literary care, at once quicken
the zeal and encourage the trust of those who are seeking to attain "the life that is
hid with Christ in God." Besides original articles of a miscellaneous character, each
number contains a sermon, not before published.

The January number commences the fifteenth volume and thirteenth year of the
work. Each number contains 60 pages, royal octavo, making two volumes a year of
about 360 pages each. Terms, $3 per annum.

Numbers sent for examination, when requested.

Complete sets of this Work, from its commencement, neatly bound in twelve

volumes.

Also, complete sets of the "CHILD'S FRIEND," bound in twenty-five volumes.
Both of these Periodicals are valuable and useful for Parish and Sunday-school
Libraries, and will be sold for that purpose at a very liberal discount.

Subscribers furnished with the back volumes, in exchange for the numbers, by
paying cost of the binding.

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THERE is a "higher world," an immortal life, that we can enter as well with this opening year as by and by, when our years are finished; when destruction has done its work upon our flesh, and we are buried.

Indeed, this is one of the most radical defects in our piety, and one of the most discouraging signs in relation to our spiritual progress, that we persist in separating the spiritual world from our present world, heaven from earth, as if they were antagonists by nature. When shall we leave off waiting for our celestial inheritance, and march straight in and take possession of it, by the prayer of faith, and the duty of the passing hour? When shall we truly believe that there can be no heaven of peace for us hereafter, unless we dwell in a heaven of purity here? By the common consent of language, the movement of Christian progress is called an ascending movement; the path of increasing goodness is described as, an upward path; gaining in character is climbing. We all speak of the noble and generous mind as an elevated mind; of magnanimous traits as exalted traits; of pure or devout purposes as high purposes. Paul refers to the Christian calling as the "high calling." Virtue is thus placed on a height by the usages of speech, showing that the idea is rooted in the common mind of ages. The ancient classics con

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vey the same figure, in a heathen dress, when they locate the Temple of Fame on a mountain-top. In fact, this conception of goodness as above, and evil as below, takes innumerable forms of expression, and seems to be wrought into the very texture of our traditionary beliefs. Most of the terms by which we designate moral qualities are tinged, at least, with this metaphor. Thus, heaven, the perfect world, is put above; God's throne is "lifted up;" and God himself is the "high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity." Prayers ascend: aspiration, or worship, is a breathing upward. We rise into faith. The grandest revelations of truth are made as "from above," and generally, as if to sanction the image, on the higher points of the earth, as Sinai, the Mount of Transfiguration, Zion, Calvary. Celestial voices, in days of miracle, came out of the sky. Jesus "ascended up where he was before." In the poem of the Apocalypse, the city of God is "above." So we say, on the other hand, men sink down into vice, — fall into temptation. Meanness, etymologically, is equivalent to lowness; depravity is base, — i.e., low; hell is beneath, "lower regions," we say; sin goes down to destruction. Owing to laws of association that we cannot now trace back, but which must have had a basis originally, these notions are universal; and this common conception of duty as a struggling up, and of spiritual culture as an ascent into a higher region, becomes an inspiriting thought. To overcome gravitation invigorates the energies: it rouses a worthy ambition; it stimulates effort; it inspires resolution; it appeals to our manhood, if there is any particle of manhood left extant in us; it touches just where the trumpet that calls heroes to battle touches; it stirs the blood, if the blood has not altogether turned to water, in our veins; and thrills our hearts, if those hearts are not palsied.

"Come up hither," then, is the call of Christianity, the cry of the gospel, the message of Jesus, the entreaty of the spiritual world, present, future, and eternal; and it is issued to every soul, and to all of life. Let us follow it in some of its directions, as it goes out, on the morning breath of the year, among the sons of

men.

Ever since its first proclamation from the lips of Jesus in Judea, the whole spirit and influence of his religion-working in the heart of humanity, and leavening the masses of society, elevating the tone of men's sentiments and manners has been

as if it said to the world at large, "Come up hither." Taking its stand above every example, on a platform higher than the prevailing tone of conduct in any age or any people, it has both urged and lifted civilization up towards its own original and divine pattern. With one hand, it has enlarged the extent of Christendom, pushing its conquests of the cross into new and untrodden territories, invading the empire of paganism with the peaceful inroads of light and love; while, with the other, it has been raising to a purer consistency the temper of Christendom itself. So it is at this moment. Abroad, among the nations, Christianity is levelling; but it creates a level by lifting all up to a higher point than is yet attained by any, levels by an instrument that sets its standard above any station occupied yet, not by striking an average. It aims at a perfection, which, at any given moment, seems ideal, but which is constantly being proved, as time runs on, to be practical. The dream of one century it makes the fact of the next; the hope of yesterday, the realization of to-morrow; the longing of this generation, the fruition of the succeeding; the Utopia of the fathers, the actual, solid inheritance of the children. Watch its whole uplifting action on the nations, from the first moment that John the Baptist preached repentance, and the new kingdom, in the wilderness. See it giving a spring to progress, order to government, authority to law, sacredness to marriage, a blessing to labor, innocence to amusement, clearness to hope, and certainty to faith; and answer if it does not stand over men, bidding them "Come up hither.”

The same we find to be its audible message, if we look out across the turbulent surface of the social life to-day. The injured and oppressed classes, especially in the Old-World monarchies, the Russian serf, the Austrian victim of privilege, the Italian peasant, the French operative, the English chartist, the Irish rebel, are all restless, because, in their ignorant and passionate nature, God has indirectly and dimly planted the germs of those principles of equality and independence which restricted immunities, hereditary titles, and royal monopolies, have striven to trample out. The citizen resists the king; the populace reckon with the nobility; mobs clamor for constitutions; those that do the work ask a share in its fruits; those that raise the corn ask to eat of the bread, however violent, lawless, ineffectual the mode of their asking,

because the democracy of the Bible has

sent down into their unlettered minds some strong precepts of its everlasting charter of freedom. The voice that cries to all those corrupt institutions, those abusive dynasties, those iniquitous taxations, and those wronged and starving citizens, alike is, “Come up hither," through change, through penitence, through re-organized rights and better laws: come up out of tyranny to justice; out of standing armies to industry and to peace; out of despotic inequalities to republican liberty; out of luxury and starvation

side by side, in mournful contrast and reciprocal ruin — to simplicity, temperance, and righteousness. So also it speaks to whatever frauds pollute, or oppressions deform, our better system; more heedful, in some things, of its command, but sadly imperfect yet. It speaks to the despot here to come up out of his selfishness to the rectitude of nature and the mercy of humanity, dropping his scourge; it calls the degraded tribes of intemperance and lust to come up out of their degradation to the glory of the divine image; it calls all that are crushed by the hardheartedness of their fellows to come up out of bondage to selfownership, to the dignity of the Lord's freemen, to be kings and priests unto God. Thus, to every abject class or individual in the world's society, - doomed to darkness, and, through darkness, to crime, shut out from improvement, and so shut in to depravity; to the millions that sigh, all over the earth, under evils they were not meant to bear, Christ "Come up hither."

says,

Again Christ makes the same invitation to the moral as well as the social and civil condition of the world; and, to begin at the lowest grade of that condition, he makes it to those in whose besotted hearts hardly the faintest traces of their primitive innocence are left. To these, staggering under their awful load, — the dissolute, the lustful, the cruel, the malicious, the criminal, the brutish, he speaks; for he was always the friend even of publicans and sinners, and came to call them, not the righteous, to repentance. He speaks to them; and, far down in their misery, they can hear some faint whisper of his gracious words, "Come up hither" come out of your dens of dissipation; out of your wretched orgies of sensual indulgence; out of your cellars of filth, and your garrets of infamy; and, not less, out of your gilded chambers, decorated and garnished outwardly, but gloomier than dead men's sepulchres to the light of the soul; where reckless vice

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