640 The Greek Church. [Dec. 



cealed, or that its concealment was for our good while here. We dis- 

 miss the topic, by saying, that to the Christian there can be no safe guide, 

 but the very word of scripture ; that where it goes on he should follow 

 unhesitatingly, and to the utmost bound, but that where it stops he 

 cannot wisely tread a step further. He is in the hands of a merciful, as 

 well as mighty being, and he may rest secure in the conviction, that all 

 has been told to him that it is good for his highest interests to know. 



It would be a curious and melancholy chapter in the history of church 

 corruptions, to see how large a share is to be attributed directly to the 

 attempts to define the state of future existence. Scripture limits itself 

 to the simplest outline. It declares that, on the giving of the body to 

 the grave, the soul of the righteous continues to exist, in joyful anti- 

 cipation of a still higher advance in power, happiness, and glory. It 

 calls that superior state Heaven, and declares it to be a consummation 

 of happiness inexhaustible and magnificent beyond the imaginations of 

 man. There ceases its description. The various pursuits that must 

 occupy the risen spii'it in its new world of light and powei', the new 

 and exulting faculties that it must possess, the exquisite and exalted 

 enjoyments that must crowd on it hour by houi', the superb discoveries, 

 where creation with all its Avonders may lie open before its glance, the 

 whole illustrious scene of intellectual enjoyment and physical power 

 expanded before its wing, by the bounty of Omnipotence desirous to 

 reward, — all this, and perhaps millions of times more than this, are 

 compressed into the simple words, " We shall be like Him, for we shall 

 see Him as he is." 



But the compression is not to be expanded by our presumptuous 

 curiosity without sin and danger. 



The evidence is full in the history of Romish perversion. Fable 

 upon fable has described the condition of the departed, as if the fabulist 

 had himself ascended the stars. Out of fable grew ritual, from ritual 

 sprang superstitions of every shade, and to this hour the Romanists 

 decide that saints and martyrs are admitted at once to the divine 

 presence, Avhere they of course become intercessors, — and that heretics are 

 plunged down at once into the bottomless pit, and that popish sinners, 

 guilty of every crime but that of doubting the infallibility of Rome, are 

 deposited in an intermediate place of penalty, from whose length and 

 intensity they can be saved by the payment of money to that Church of 

 imposture, which so haughtily proclaims itself the possessor of the keys 

 of hell and heaven. 



The Greek Church is singularly wedded to ceremonial. Its people 

 are, perhaps, the greatest fasters in the world ; or, perhaps, to be 

 equalled only by tlie resolution with which the Turk goes through the 

 long day of his Ramadan. They have the Romish Lent — a fast from 

 Whitsuntide to St. Peter's day. A fast from the 3d to the 15th of 

 August, in celebration of the Assumption. A fast for the forty days 

 before Christmas. And in the monasteries, a fast from the 1st to the 

 14th of September, in honour of the exaltation of the Cross. And those 

 five fasts are often distinguished by abstinence even from fish. In return, 

 their saints' days are very frequent, and those are feasts ; the church 

 ceremonial thus keeping the people in a constant alternation of misery 

 and riot, utter hunger and extravagant and imperious indulgence. 



The Greek is an idolator, with this trivial distinction from the 

 Romanist, that he worships not statues but pictures. He prides him- 



