Romanism, and exhibiting the strongest tendencies to do so, more and more; the only explanation needed is to be found in its entire defection from the Scriptural doctrine of how a sinner can be “just with God;" and the only antidote required is the clear understanding, the faithful teaching, the full carrying out of that same great doctrine, so mighty in the war of the Reformation, so feared and hated and libelled in he Councils of the Church of Rome,-Justification, by the Imputed Righteousness of Christ, through the alone agency of a living faith.

Clearly as the strength of Romanism was known, by the English Reformers, to lie in her errors concerning Justification, there were not wanting, even in their times, those who, for lack of a right view of the relative bearing of this subject on all other parts of divinity, were disproportionately occupied with manifestations of Romanism, which, however evil, should have been regarded only as the poisonous issues of that one central source of error in religion "where Satan's seat is." To such mistakes, the celebrated Reformer Foxe, referred, when, in his discourse, entitled "Christ Triumphant,' he said, "It is necessary that this doctrine (Justification) should be retained and preached in the Church; which, being of long time hidden from Christians and almost extinguished, the heroical, and mighty spirit of Christ, by the ministry and preaching of Martin Luther hath kindled and raised up again in the Church. Yet such is the mischief and misery of these wicked days, through the subtle practicing of Satan, that all Christendom is in an uproar by matters of contentions; and in the mean time, all regard of that which is the most principal point of our salvation is set at nought, and almost brought again to utter decay."

The Reformer is evidently referring to contentions about the more superficial parts of Romanism; as if the symptoms were the disease, while its "evil heart of unbelief" was overlooked. Such has been far too much the case, in what has been said and written concerning the system of doctrine which is considered in this volume.

Had it been always tried by such an eye as that which searched the heart of Romanism at the Reformation; or as that with which our Andrews and Hall and Usher and Davenant detected the mainspring of all Romish corruptions, in the controversies of their day, we should not have heard less indeed of the tendencies of this

* Elsewhere, this Reformer speaks, as all English Reformers were wont to speak, of "the grave and excellent judgment of Martin Luther, that most singular and chosen instrument of setting forth the gospel of Christ."

new divinity to the more manifest heresies of Popery; but we should have heard much more of its identity with Popery in that grand defection from the truth concerning the sinner's justification before God, from which, as from a root, all these evil branches spring.

Few evidences of that sad decline in the Church of England from the spirit and doctrine of her martyred Reformers, which the eighteenth and latter part of the seventeenth century exhibited, are more striking than that which appears in the almost entire exclusion from the controversies carried on in those days, with Rome, of the doctrine of justification. In the days of the Reformation, who would have written upon Popery and not spoken of the doctrine of justification by inherent righteousness, as its main and vital principle? Read the solemn confessions of the Anglican Martyrs! They are full of protests against this chief corruption. What pains does the venerable Latimer take to be distinct and continual on this head! How does Hooper labor it! The controversial work of Haddon, in the reign of Elizabeth, against the Portuguese divine, Osorius,-written as a sort of State-Book, as Strype calls it, in defense of the English Reformation, and completed by Foxe,— is occupied, in a very large part of its pages, with the single subject of justification. How much the judicious Hooker made of it, whoever has read his Discourse of Justification cannot but know. Such views of the eminent prominence of this subject in all controversies with Rome continued unabated up to the seventeenth century. The works of Perkins, a great light at Cambridge, and a strong adversary of Rome, who died in the beginning of that century, are stored with it. In Usher's writings it is the grand topic. Bishop Downame devoted a whole folio. volume of controversy with Rome to this one point. The same sense of the great importance of the difference between the faith of the Anglican Church, and that of the Church of Rome, on this head, appears in the works of Andrews, Hall, Davenant, Hopkins, Jackson, &c. But as we approach the latter periods of that century, when it is acknowledged that true religion was greatly on the wane in the Church of England, we find this great subject more and more excluded from the controversies with Rome, as if the greater number of Protestant writers were either agreed with her doctrine in that particular, or considered the objections of Protestants of no great importance. When however we have reached the eighteenth century, wherein it is universally conceded that the spiritual character of the Church of England was at its lowest depression, we take leave of Justification by Faith, as occupying any conspicuous place in the differences

between Popery and Protestantism. The axe is laid no more at the root of the tree. The great effort against Popery is to trim off some of its branches.

This lamentable change in the doctrinal character of the divines of the Church of England, must be considered as having received one of its earliest impulses from the writings of that learned continental writer Hugo Grotius. His peculiar views on justification, met with favor from Archbishop Laud. Sheldon, after the Restoration, renewed their influence. They were rescued from the disgrace of being associated with the rapidly growing irreligion of that age, by finding in the main, a most learned and vigorous champion in that truly excellent Prelate, Bishop Bull. This eminent divine had commenced his studies in divinity under a Puritan and Non-Conformist, named Thomas. Recoiling from the Antinomianism which he perceived to be rapidly growing up under the extremes of doctrine to which many of that school had gone, he became a devoted reader of Grotius and Episcopius, associating with those writers the works of Hammond and Jeremy Taylor, wherein he perceived no little sympathy with the views of the former, on the subject of justification. In the year 1669 was first published his Harmonia Apostolica, for the reconciliation of the Epistle of St. James with those of St. Paul, in reference to that matter. By this work, far more than any other, was the standard of Orthodoxy, among the Divines of the Church of England, on Justification and its kindred subjects, reduced to that low degree which afterwards reigned so widely in the times of the Non-Jurors, and which went on debilitating and exanimating the religion of the Anglican Church; till, in the latter part of the last century, by "the renewing of the Holy Ghost," there took place the contemporaneous and connected blessings of the revival of true spiritual piety, and the return of the teaching and preaching of the doctrine of the Reformers, as to the sinner's justification before God.

But greatly as the Antinomian abuses during the time of the Commonwealth, followed by the general languor in regard to religious doctrine which the excitements of that stormy period had left upon the public mind, and the flood of licentiousness which ensued, had prepared the way for the gradual reception of such doctrines as were taught by the disciples of Bull, often going beyond their teacher; the famous work of that great Master did not appear without arousing the strongest opposition to its doctrines, as an abandonment of the principles of the Reformation, inconsistent with the Articles and Homilies of the Church of England, and

essentially in agreement with the vital principle of Romanism. "There was presently (says Nelson, in his Life of Bull,) no small alarm both in the Church and out of it, from Mr. Bull's performance; as if the Church of England and the whole Protestant religion were, by it, in danger. For his departing herein from the private opinions of some doctors of our Church, was, by several, interpreted for no less than a departing from the faith by her delivered; hence there arose in the Church no small contention whether this interpretation of Scripture were conformable to the Articles of Religion, and the Homily of Justification therein referred to: some maintained with our author that it was; some doubted about it, and others downright denied it, and condemned it as heretical. There was many a hard censure passed upon the book-yea, there were not wanting then, even men of some eminence in our Church, who, with all their might, opposed him, probably out of a well-meant zeal, and would certainly have overwhelmed him and his doctrine, had it been possible."

Thus much is acknowledged by the non-juring Nelson, who fully embraced the views of Bull. Among the Bishops who resisted the influence of those views, the one who proceeded much farther than any of his brethren, was Morley, Bishop of Winchester. Lectures were read against them, before the University of Oxford, by Dr. Barlow, then Margaret Professor of Divinity, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln.* But the most conspicuous writer in the Church of England, against the doctrines of Bull, was Dr. Tully, Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, a divine of high standing in the University for learning, eloquence, piety, zeal, and usefulness. This writer was amazed at the indifference or insensibility to the interests of religion, of many who endeavored to persuade him to decline the controversy, on the ground that the points in dispute were matters of comparative unimportance, not worth the risking of the peace of the Church, while to him they seemed to involve "the most noble and momentous of all controversies," and to put in jeopardy "the very palladium of the Reformation." Under this conviction he published, in 1674, a Latin Treatise, entitled "Justification, as delivered by St. Paul, without works, asserted and illustrated according to the sense of the Church of England, and of all the rest of the Re

* The present Margaret Professor, Dr. Fausset, has followed the example of his learned Predecessor, in having published strongly against the new and enlarged edition of Bull's doctrines, as exhibited in the new divinity of Oxford; while the Regius Professor of Divinity, Dr. Hampden, has borne a noble testimony to the truth, against the same errors, in a late Sermon on Justification by faith.

formed Churches, against the late innovators." In the publication of that work, the author was encouraged by Bishop Morley, who read it in manuscript, with approbation. Therein, it was charged that the doctrine of Justification, as expounded by the author of the Harmonia, "was properly heretical, as being contrary, in a fundamental point, to the testimony of Scripture, and against the opinion of the Catholic fathers, the judgment of the Church of England, and the determinations of all the foreign reformed Churches."

The grand question in dispute, "the tò Koroueror" according to Dr. Tully, was expressed precisely as in the ensuing volume we have stated the main question between Popery and the new Divinity, on the one hand, and the doctrine of the Anglican Church, on the other, viz. "what is that, for the sake of which God may receive a sinner to grace, may acquit him from the curse of the law, and make him an heir of everlasting life."* The side espoused by Dr. Tully, which was precisely that of justification through faith only, by the imputed righteousness of Christ, was maintained by reference to the Ancient Fathers, the literal and grammatical sense of the Articles and Homilies of the Church of England, and the testimony of her most famous divines, such as Andrews and Hooker.

The feeble attempt of Bishop Bull, in his Apologia, to answer the appeal of Dr. Tully to the standard divines of the Church, and the anxiety of his biographer to claim for him that he should be judged, not by the Anglican Reformers, but by the Ancient Fathers, and the Holy Scriptures, are strong evidences how futile was considered in that day, the pretense that such doctrine as that of the Harmonia had received the suffrages of those divines whom the Church then looked to, as her standard writers.

If it shall be the honor of this volume, in any degree, to revive the attention of the members of the Church, especially of her clergy, and candidates for orders, to the works of the elder divines of the seventeenth century, such as Usher, Hall, Hopkins, Andrews, &c., as well as to those of the age preceding them, up to the period of the Reformation, so that the nervous and clear displays of divine truth, as therein abounding, and as distinguished from that feeble, confused, mode of representing the way of salvation which characterises the majority of the more modern Anglican divines, shall become more thoroughly studied and appreciated, then, whatever becomes of the doctrine herein opposed, this book will be amply rewarded.

It may perhaps be considered a great defect of this volume, that * Apologia pro Harmonia, Scct. 3. § 7.