have retorted, that they likewise fully admitted the uses of the bodily organization of religion, but would die sooner than let it stifle the spirit which it was only meant to subserve; nor were they slow to match the nicknames of their antagonists with some round abuse of formalists and pharisees, wherever the same might lurk. The question was thus, as it is at this day, a question of degree; and, like every such question, scarcely admitting of any termination but the weariness of the combatants or of the public.

That each view of religion was liable to grievous perversion is only to say that each was in the hands of men. There certainly must be somewhere a due proportion of the ecclesiastical and spiritual elements to each other; and no doubt the principle of Christian love did actually bind men to that proportion as long as the "first love" lasted. As it failed, the failure brought its own punishment in disorder and confusion. Each might then gain an accidental superiority; but the process was obvious and irresistible by which the men of rule and discipline, possessing the places of power, gradually overcame opposition, and being left unbalanced by the requisite spiritual antagonism, inevitably gravitated earthward. The caloric of spiritual ardour either evaporating altogether, or being confined to particular regions (the monastery or the desert), the mass closed, condensed, crystallized, and the frozen product was— Popery.

At length a counter effort was made. That prodigious man, Luther, was the chief instrument of awakening the western world to attempt it. A sudden access of spiritual heat entered the torpid frame of the Church. In some places the old organization could not stand the expansive power, and burst in shivers around it; in others it was considerably softened and enlivened by it, and might have been far more so but for the unfortunate bond of pretended infallibility which made the Roman teachers too proud to be taught. In others, again, the spiritual impulse, unguided, ran loose of all restraint, proclaimed it an insult to enforce any, and presented in Quakerism and similar formations the proper pole of ultra-Catholicism— each mistaken, because each extreme.

It is not wonderful that after the Reformation, under the free develop ment of opinion that has since then existed in all Protestant countries, the fundamental opposition of which we have spoken should have become more and more prominently exhibited. Between the two extremes, Spirit without Form and Form without Spirit, the various religious communities have veered; each happily persuaded of its own absolute perfection while it lasted, and all (as in controversy bound) vigorously charging their rivals with the most remote and repulsive forms of the views the said rivals appeared to advocate. In general these charges were pretty equally true on all sides. The present age is no exception.

Still

Doth the old instinct bring back the old names,

and the old necessities of controversy bring with them the same old shifts and devices. Plain people will know how to hold the balance. The Oxonian divine is at heart a papist, upon the same principles that the evangelical clergyman is secretly an independent. Jewel was "an irreverent dissenter" with exactly the same amount of certainty that Laud was intriguing to be a cardinal. He who with one piercing eye has caught Dr. Wiseman in a certain apartment of Oriel College, planning the best method of swamping the existing Church Establishment, has doubtless with the other observed Mr. Baptist Noel in secret conclave with Mr. John Burnet for the same purpose. When will men rise above these childish tricks? When will they learn to write under the eye of God and their own conscience, and cease to think that those falsehoods may be safely vented in religious disputes which on any other subject would meet with the disgust and contempt of the world?

But we must not lose our temper (like so many other mediators) while exhorting our neighbours to keep theirs. Our readers will now have perceived the general purport of the dispute. The rival parties, to judge from their own way of speaking, which is the only fair way of judging, appear both equally to admit that the inward spiritual state is the chief point alike

in Church and Individual: they differ as to the means which they conceive that God has provided to preserve it. And upon this latter point, too, the difference is to a considerable extent one only of degree. For both profess to think that the arrangements of the Church are of great utility and importance to religion; but the one, the party stigmatized by their adversaries as popish, declare their conviction that the episcopal succession of the ministry and due reception of the sacraments are ordinarily indispensable for the purposes of God-matters to which men are perpetually bound, irrespectively of any perception of mere temporary utility; the others, whom their adversaries compliment with the title of ultra-Protestant, maintain that such external ordinances, whether of men or things, have little or no claim beyond that palpable production of direct spiritual improvement which originally gave them birth.

The one, accordingly, regard the whole scheme of the Church of Christ as something very solemn and mysterious, its structure in its chief characteristics unalterable, and its sacramental rites, when received by faith, as possessing a mode of efficacy which in the present state of being we cannot expect fully to understand, but which we have reason to believe to be of the deepest moment. The others reject all such suppositions as the inventions of a mystical temper, and while preserving, in obedience to our Lord's commands, the rites of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, consider the whole purpose of these to be intelligible on very ordinary grounds, and all other Church regulations to be left entirely free to all men to arrange as shall to them seem most expedient. In support of their respective views the one appeals to the spirit of Christian antiquity as evolving the meaning of the briefer hints of Scripture; the other considers such an authority precarious, or even worse than precarious, and professes to discover an almost immediate corruption of Christianity through the whole world after the death of the apostles, if not before it. Into connected questions we cannot now enter. The principal is that of the relation of Faith and practical Holiness to Justification; on which the Oxonians hold that the pure Lutheran theory (which makes mere con

fidence in Christ the condition at all times of life) is neither that of the Church of England, nor can by any artifice be kept practically clear of antinomianism; while their adversaries proclaim that every addition to that condition, or modification of it, under any circumstances of guilt whatsoever, amounts to recognising the proper merit of human works, and subverts the freedom of the Gospel. We know well how bitterly controversialists resent any attempt to rob them of a good thriving question of dispute; on that alone they are beautifully unanimous; and therefore we anticipate an universal murmur of dissatisfaction when we venture to state our long established conviction, that this last question is in a greater degree a question of words than any other in the whole compass of divinity; —that is, that both parties, when teaching practical religion, mean almost literally the same thing, differing just in the order in which they prefer to name the two elements whose relative importance is disputed; the watchword of the one being "Belief on which Holiness follows," of the other, "Holiness which is founded in Belief." Try it by one simple unanswerable test. Place an Arminian and a Calvinistic minister of equal qualifications and experience (after they have sufficiently fought the whole quinquarticular controversy through, and been much disposed to wish the existence of a little private inquisition for each other's heresy) by the bed-side of a sick man; ask the poor penitent, after they have left him, to tell you the tenor of their exhortations; and we agree to forfeit all claims to theological sagacity if there be found one hair's breadth difference in the substance of the instructions of the two. After all, can any thing parry that? The immense importance of the question in Luther's day, whose position was in many respects exceedingly like that of St. Paul himself, arose out of the peculiar circumstances of the time, and the nature of the battle he had to wage against the enormous practical abuses of the Church. The axe could be laid to the root of those fearful abuses, that sagacious and powerful spirit saw, only by incessantly preaching down the popular delusion of an earthly purchase-money of any kind

Apocalypse, of Ignatius, of Irenæus, of Cyprian; that God, as the Author not of confusion but of order, framed it to be a perpetually expanding republic of co-equal episcopates under Christ; and that any thing which tends to infringe this constitution, whether in the direction of monarchical despotism (as Popery) or of democratic despotism (as Independency), is equally a desertion of the command and design of God. And in support of this he confidently appeals to the first ages of the Church, of which records so abundantly survive; and defies alike the papist and the independent to find a shadow of their speculations there.

Such are the general views (as far as we can collect them from the enormous multitude of brochures that surround us) which, in purposed opposition to the Romanist's exclusive claims to Catholicism, and of the modern Dissenter's contemptuous rejection of that attribute, have assumed the title of Anglo-Catholic theology. The practical writings of this school of teachers are of course deeply imbued with the spirit of their theoretical views. Their chief object is to impress humility and reverence; for these, they tell us, are what the age chiefly needs.

A life of

solicitous self-government, daily and even studied self-denial, the cross not outward alone but inward too, and a constant realizing of the presence of God in his ordinances-such are the topics on which they principally insist. And that in their style there is a very unusual beauty, refinement, and tenderness, few, we suppose, on any side will be disposed to question.

Against these opinions, we need scarcely tell our readers, an opposition of no ordinary force has subsisted from nearly the period of their first publication. That this controversy, like every other protracted polemical encounter in our Church history, should abound in exaggerated criminations of all kinds, no one who bad given up the expectation of modern miracles could fail to anticipate. That it should have become a serious question on one side whether certain opposing views were not considerably "worse than atheism," on the other whether "Antichrist" in person had not become incarnate, no one even moderately versed in Strype and Collier, in Fuller and Burnet, will very deeply

marvel. But without entering mi nutely into the analysis of specific questions (which, as we have already stated, is not within our present scope), we must be allowed to say, that in the writings of the professed revivers of the ancient theology there has been a good deal to excite opposition, and to justify it too. We do not allude so much to the theological doctrines themselves when we say this; for, whatever may be our opinion of the real amount of proof that can be brought either to sustain them as true, or to prove them the doctrines of our chief divines, we are really forced to express our conviction that the public was for the most part very imperfectly informed what the doctrines truly were, about whose tendencies they heard such vague and alarming rumours. To this day the controversy has not produced one book which can be called a fair and complete exposition of the state of the whole question. Is apostolic succession really essential to a rightly constituted church? Is Baptism more than an outward introduction to an outward church, or the Eucharist more than a memorial rite? These are important questions indeed; but these were not the points that agitated the mass of the public. Alas! we feel such matters far too feebly for them alone ever to affect us thus. But there is in the public mind a hatred of priestly domination, and of popery as its most fearful embodiment, which is a just hatred, a rightful, and well-grounded, and conscientious hatred; a hatred built upon centuries of gloomy experience, and which no man should dare trifle with: and this most legitimate feeling these accomplished writers from the recesses of their colleges unduly overlooked, or even at times were so very misguided as to treat with a kind of subdued and compassionate sarcasm. Those who propose views which they must be conscious have, whether right or wrong, been suffered to fall into abeyance, are bound in common Christian charity to be excessively careful how they alarm the conscientious fears of good men. It is indeed most idle to say that the views which we have sketched are popery; they cannot well be that, unless the views of the second and third centuries of Christianity were popish; but it is perfectly true that

there is much in them which may be represented so as to look very like it, exactly as there is abundance in the forms and expressions of the early ages which it has always been the easy artifice of Romish advocates to confound under similarity of names with the unhappy inventions of later times. And if to this be added an unseasonable gentleness studiously adopted in speaking of that grievously corrupted Church, and an impatient querulousness as to the failures or difficulties of our own, no one need wonder at unfriendly suspicions arising as to the object of the entire movement. If men do hold the very innocent doctrine that the Church of Christ has ever remained in visible perpetuity on earth; that a succession derived through corrupt Rome is yet valid and real, even as a man though morally and physically diseased can possess and transmit property; if men will not borrow her own doctrine of exclusive salvation, and prefer with Hooker not to deny to her members that possibility of heaven which they deny to us; still it is needful so to do this that our unabated abhorrence of her corruptions shall be distinctly known; it is not needful that we should gaze with languid and desiring eyes upon visions of that unity which we profess to believe impossible while she remains the thing she is; as if it were not an old moral axiom that men ought to beware how they habituate themselves to desire even under conditions, that which they know they cannot without those conditions rightfully possess. The very production of such a treatise as the famous Ninetieth Tract shows how unguarded must have been the language that could make it necessary or expedient to administer that most discreditable corrective. It is now generally understood that this treatise was written to show that our Church in her Articles left her members free as to their beliefs of certain primitive tenets, and that she did not necessarily oppose any thing that could be fairly deemed catholic in Romanism, even while denouncing the real errors of that system, thus to prevent thoughtless enthusiasts from seeking Catholicism there; but in the first place, how mismanaged must have been the enthusiasm for primitive be

liefs and practices, how imprudent the forms of expression, which could occasion the danger this composition was intended to remedy; and in the second place, how still more strangely unacquainted with the state of public feeling must have been the author, to couch his treatise in such a form that at the time of its publication only the most indulgent critic could be expected to discover this to have been its object!

In the exceeding veneration of the Anglo-Catholics for all that bears the stamp of antiquity, there is also a danger which needs to be carefully guarded against. However the Spirit of God may have been present with the early church, there is most sure and sufficing proof that it was under no constant inspiration. This once admitted, criticism is legitimate. The Fathers are of higher value than an age like ours is willing to admit, as theologians of a very lofty and unworldly cast of thought; and they are still more valuable as witnesses to the hereditary beliefs of the Church; but there is still no trace about them of any thing which should emancipate them from the authority of a fair and liberal criticism. As it is quite certain that some erroneous practices stole in on the unsuspecting simplicity of the third and fourth centuries, this is enough to warrant a sympathizing indeed, but an independent examination of their views in even the second. There is surely a medium between the unwarrantable vituperation of theorists like Mr. Isaac Taylor and the ascription of infallibility. They are inva luable evidences, but the witness must not shirk cross-examination. We freely confess with Jewel and others of the most Protestant of our old divines, we do think that nothing importantly erroneous in religion has ever yet been shown to be really catholic through the whole course of these earlier ages; but this admission will still leave open to examination a great variety of minor questions that must stand or fall by their own merits. In those of our own great divines whose dearest studies, next to the Scriptures of truth, lay among these venerable authors, we find the true medium for the English churchman; in Hooker, and Bramhall, and Hammond, and