Farewell to the First Congregational Church in Norwalk, Conn. (bound with other addresses)

of the OMo, coining down a thousand miles from the "Western slope of the Alleghanies ; of the Cum- berland and the Tennessee, the last sweeping its current far into the State of Alabama ; of the Ar. kansas and the Red River, coming down from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles from the West. And now it occurs to him how distant he is from the At- lantic shore. Green Bay, that some few years since used to lie at so vast a distance West, lies now three hundred miles to the Eastward ; beyond it come the ■ great lakes ; ' and then four hundred miles farther to the Atlantic! Yet the point where he stands is but little more than one-third of the distance to the shores of our country on the Pacific ! And now what impression is fixed upon the mind of the traveller from the East ? An impres- sion of the vastness of his country far beyond any thing that he had ever conceived before ; that the East is soon to be a mere trifling adjunct of the West — no, not of the West, for the great West is still be- yond him, but of the great central valley ; that the heart of our country is, beyond all question, to be on the borders of the Mississippi. Though most of the land seems vacant, yet towns and villages are spring- ing up with immense rapidity. But let emigrants 9omain such numbers as they will ; let Europe pour her living masses on our shores — on these wide fields many years must elapse, before it shall not seem that as fast as they come they are scattered and lost. And now Eastern Asia begins to be stir- red, and the people of China are crowding to our Western shores ! In due time, this land is to be 15 filled. . Ah ! what shall he its destiny then ? Shall the republic be preserved? Shall our posterity have freedom to worship God? Shall this land be a land of Gpspel light when it shall number its- three hundred or five hundred millions ? These are questions of fearful import, not only to our children, and our children's children, but to the whole world. The battle of the- great day — ^for pure religion and for the freedom of mankind — ^is, I am persuaded, to be fought in that great valley. " Multitudes, multi- tudes in the valley of decision ; for the day of the Lord is near in the- valley of decision ; " not, we may trust, with confused noise of warriors, and with gar- ments rolled in "blood, but with the weapons of light and truth, against the powers of error and darkness ; and whoever wins that valley will, in one hundred years .hence, rule the world. If evangelical truth, how auspicious the day ! If Romanism, or Roman- ism combined • with infidelity and socialism, and agrarianism, — ^for Rome will league with any thing on earth or in hell to crush the rising power of free- dom and truth, — then how dismal the cloud that shall shut out even the light of hope from all man- kind ! If our great experiment of freedom and of self-government fails, what further continent re- mains? what other wilderness, whither freedom and truth may flee for shelter ? If this land, with its advancing millions shall be lost to true religion, can the world supply the missionaries that are once more to conquer it for Christ ? Believe it, we stand at a point of more momentous interest to our coun- try than that occupied by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 16 or by our fathers at the time of the Kevolution. Other men have labored, and we are entered into their labors. The Eeformers, the early Puritans, the Pilgrims, they who saved this land from the de^- signs of Prance and the Pope, they who established the constitution under which we became a nation, rather than a neighborhood of feeble and disjointed States, — all these, each in their day, labored for our good. How rich the harvest for which our hands have not labored ! But if we have entered into harvests prepared by the toils of others, we have also entered into their labors. By the toils of others this land was prepared, freedom achieved, and the institutions of government, of learning and religion established; by our labors, undei- God, aU these blessings are to be preserved. The Lord seems to have ordained that such blessings shall not be pre- served without labor. Since we cannot send mis- sionaries to papal lands, God is bringing the subjects of papal despotism to our doors, and planting them in the midst of our bibles, churches, and schools^ and under the protection of our civil institutions and laws. Since we have felt it a trouble to send missionaries in adequate numbers to the heathen, God is bringing the heathen hither. And remem- ber that the single nation from which they come, numbers its four hundred millions. She can spare a hundred millions for us in fifty years, and grow all the stronger and the richer. Now God wiU make the Christians of this land labor for life. They shall hold forth, the light of truth, they shall plant and sustain the institutions of learning and religion IV in this land, or they shall be overwhelmed ! O my people, blessed with such light and freedom and prosperity, preserve this land ! O my people now on the stage of action, gird yourselves for the con- test ! No future generations can do your work. No amount of effort and liberality on the part of your children and your children's children can re- medy the want of effort and liberality now ! Now the character of your country is forming ; now it is plastic, and may be moulded. The next genera- tion may see it fixed, either for good or for evil,, for a thousand years ! So speaks the voice of Divine Providence to us ; and never was a more momentous trust given to any people or to any generation, than that which the Lord has devolved upon us, — ^to save this land for freedom and for Christ, Having viewed our country as a field for Chris- tian effort, let us consider, , 2. THE WOEK TO BE DONE. 1. There is ample room for the most active ex- ertions of Christians of every name. Let none envy the prosperity of others, but rejoice that by any means the Gospel is preached in that widely extend- ed field. May the Lord of the Harvest send forth laborers into his harvest ; and send whom he will. The only fear is, that with the intensest activity of all, the fields may spread beyond the reach of all the reapers. 2. No means of doing good which Grod has ap- pointed, or which has been tested by experience, should be neglected. Send teachers. Encourage 18 the emigration of pious families ; if in colonies, their concentrated light will shine the brighter ; if singly, they will still be the salt of the land. Em- ploy the press. Eaise np Baxter, Flavel, Edwards, Legh Richmond, Andrew Fuller, Payson and Nevins ; multiply them, and send them out to preach the Gospel by every fireside, with their best digested discourses, and in their holiest frames. Send the colporteur, to distribute books and tracts, to converse with people by the wayside, and in the remotest cabins where the minister of the Gospel has not yet reached, fetter than this, send the Bible. If yoii send Baxter and Flavel, it is surely better to send Moses and the Prophets, and the Apostles, and Evangelists with the words of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Send the Sabbath School agent. Let . him gather the children and establish a school wherever he can, and wait not for the gathering of a Church. But, 3. While we give all due importance to these methods of doing good, surely no enlightened friend of Christianity would advise us to rely exclu- sively on these, or to regard them in any other light than as auxiliary to the instrumentalities which God has ordained, the ministry and the Church. If some hundreds of individual men were sent to scatter seed wheat, broadcast, over the untilled forests and prairies of the West, here and there a stalk would, beyond question, spring up and bring forth fruit, sixty or an hundred fold. Here and there a few continuous rods of ground would flourish with a most exuberant harvest. But if one should then draw the 19 conclusion that the means peculiarly adapted to that western field, — the cheapest and the most efficient means, — is not to clear the forests, and till the prairies, and fence the fields, and plant the hus- bandman to cultivate and nourish, and gather by a steady and uniform labor ; but to send itinerants to scatter the seed wheat and pass hastily onward, and then to write back and publish glowing accounts of how much seed wheat they have scattered, and how, here and there, a mighty stalk has sprang up and flourished, no conclusion could be more erro- neous ; no husbandry could be more mistaken and thriftless than that which should concentrate the main energies of the country on such a system of efforts as these. So in cultivating the spiritual field. The regular, permanent, indispensable agencies, are the ministry and the Church. No agencies are so economical, none are so efficient, as these; These are the agencies which Grod ordained.' The isolated fire, kindled up by the flying agent, dies without the fostering care of the ministry and the Church. The broad woodlands and prairies of the West abound in scattered Christians, who, on removing from the sanc- tuaries of the East, sought out some well watered and fertile plain where they could grow rich, rather than some neighborhood of Christian institutions where their souls might be fed, and where their children might be trained up for God. The too frequent result . of such a choice has been backsliding or open aposta- sy. It was not without reason that Christ gave as- cension gifts for the edifying of the Church. Even in-the midst of a Christian community, the Christian 20 who forsakes the assembling of himself with the Church, as the manner of some is, becomes soon a withered branch. The communities who try to dis- pense with the sanctuary, the ministry, and the Church, always find religion decaying among them, and vice and crime progressing. Let the process go on, and they become as heathen. The Chris,tian Churches, who conclude to dispense with ' pastors, and to employ casual and transient laborers, ever grow weaker and weaker ; their policy of saving ex- pense always resulting like the policy of the farmer who starves his land through parsimony, and loses his farm. We can by no means dispense with the Divine ordinances, the sanctuary, the ministry, and the Church. All other societies and agencies for the propagation of Christianity, for the maintenance of truth, or for reformation in morals, depend upon the Church. All become powerless and die when- ever the Church decays. The Church dies without the ministry ; the ministry dies without the Church. God has appointed the one for the " edifying of the body of Christ," and he made the other " the pillar and ground of the truth." Whatever other agencies we may employ, we can by no means dispense with these as first and foremost. If therefore we would evangelize the West, we must by no means make the Church and the ministry a secondary concern. Let flying agents wake up here and there a soul as they shall be able : but to till the field, to gather in and to preserve the harvest, to train Christians up to the stature of perfect men, to establish fountains which shall send forth streams of living water, and 21 help to swell the river that shall make glad the city of our God, plant the Church, and nourish it till it shall be able to live without your care. This is the cheapest, the most efficient, the most permanent of all agencies for planting and perpetuating the Gos- pel in that vacant field. I hesitate not to declare my full conviction that the work of Home Missions is the great cause of all causes to be sustained for the Evangelization of this land.