of the sun,'—that he should come as Redeemer to Zion, and to them that turn from transgression in Jacob.'

Such is the plain teaching—the palpable meaning of the text. To what period of the Church's history does it relate ? All Christians agree that by the Lord' here the Messiah is intended. Many consider the passage as referring to his first coming, and of course believe it to be fulfilled-or in a course of fulfilment.

But to this interpretation of the text there are objections which, to us, appear insuperable. At our Lord's first advent, he came not in the garb of a warrior—in power and majesty—“having

on the breast-plate of righteousness, and clothed with the garments of vengeance;” but he was meek and lowly,—despised and rejected of men.

He came, not to recompense his adversaries and to take vengeance upon his enemies; but, to offer an atonement for sin, and to proclaim the doctrine of pardon and salvation. It is true He then came to Zion, and was with the descendants of Jacob in Judea ;-—not however to be acknowledged and adored by the Jews, but to be rejected and crucified. “He came to his own, but his own received him not.” There is, therefore, internal evidence, clear and conclusive, that the text relates not to the first advent, and has not yet received its accomplishment.

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But in addition to these inferential arguments deduced from the prophecy itself, we have the direct testimony of the Holy Ghost. The inspired Apostle St. Paul,-himself a converted Jew,-writing to the Gentile Christians at Rome, and speaking of the conversion and restoration of the Jews as a future event, says—“I would not that ye should be ignorant of this mystery,—that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in: and so all Israel shall be saved : as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins."*

Where did St. Paul find the passage here quoted except in our text? He refers the date of its fulfilment to the period when all Israel shall be saved and the fulness of the Gentiles shall be brought in. Under the sanction of such a Commentator, we hesitate not to give a similar interpretation. We feel that we are in no danger of perverting it when we apply the text to those grand events of sorrow and of joy-of wrath and of mercy-of judgment and of salvation—that will be the accompaniments of the second Advent of our Lord.

We have, in our preceding discourses, treated of the prominent events which the pen of prophecy

has recorded as antecedents of the coming of our Lord to judgment—or the “great day of his appearing and kingdom.” We have traced the rise and growth of that great Mohammedan imposture 'employed, in the providence of God, as the scourge of guilty and idolatrous Churches in the East,—and of that formidable system of spiritual tyranny which corrupted the Church in the West, and, for so long a period, darkened the sanctuaries of God with the cloud of superstition, and kept his faithful witnesses prophesying in sackcloth, and his servants groaning under the yoke of spiritual bondage.

We have had our attention arrested and fixed in admiration upon the bright day of light and deliverance which broke forth at the Reformation like the sun bursting through a cloud of thickest darkness. We have gazed with rapture upon the progress of the Angel flying through the unclouded firmament of heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach unto all them that dwell upon the face of the earth. We have indulged in the bright visions of hope, and begun to flatter ourselves that all the evils and errors of the latter times'-or the reign of superstition, were passing or had passed away forever, and that the light, whose renovated dawn we had hailed, would shine brighter and brighter till the whole world should rejoice in the radiance of millenial day.

But in the midst of these brilliant imaginings, we looked again more intently into the glass of prophecy, and we saw foreshadowings of a deeper darkness: they image forth the black cloud of the last days.” That cloud is heterogeneous in its character. It contains within its bowels factions, and schisms, and heresies ;-the impieties and blasphemies of infidelity; all the elements of individual and

* ; social crime-of riot and impurity, lawlessness and blood. It embodies all the crimes and abominations of Antichrist, in his last and worst form, to awaken the slumbering justice and call forth the flaming vengeance of the Most High when he shall come forth out of his place to shake terribly the earth.

It is with unaffected pain and humiliation that we have been obliged to refer to the factious spirit which has led to separations from the Church, and to the soul-destroying heresies which are its legitimate progeny. It is with profound mortification and regret that, in the midst of great cotemporary evils, which should incite us to closer union and to a more combined and undivided exertion of our Ecclesiastical strength, we are forced to advert to a schismatical, but, we trust, vain attempt within the Church to slacken the bonds of unity, and to carry us back from light to darkness, from liberty to bondage.

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It is with still greater humiliation and sorrow that we have been compelled to denounce that corrupting justify; inasmuch as they have not separated from the Church and profess not to favour any divisions in it. The author would gladly blot it out if he could do so with a clear conscience. But if clergymen of a Reformed Church, eating of its bread and serving at its altars, speak in disparaging terms of the characters and work of the martyred men by whom the Reformation was effected: if, while in theory magnifying the powers and prerogatives of the Episcopal office, they, in fact, persist in advocating usages and propagating doctrines which have been censured by the Bishops who, according to the divine will, have the oversight and government over them: if, after having subscribed the Articles of religion in their plain and grammatical sense, they sophistically argue that men may conscientiously subscribe them, who belong to the corrupt Church against whose errors the Articles were intended to protect: then, even those among us who respect their private characters, and sympathize with their views so far as they are truly Catholic,-athough disposed to acquit them of intentional schism, must admit the schismatical tendency of their course.

Soon after the republication of "The Tracts for the Times" was commenced in New York, the author took occasion to express his sentiments in reference to their dangerous tendency in a series of "Letters to a friend" published in the Episcopal Recorder over the signature of J. W. M. The sentiments therein expressed have been fully confirmed by the further revelations of the system in subsequent tracts up to its most offensive development in Tract No. 90, and in the review of Jewel's life and writings by the British Critic.

An attempt has been made in certain quarters to produce an impression that the views of the Tractarians are identical with those of High Churchmen. Although the author professes to be nothing more than a Churchman, yet, as an act of justice, he takes pleasure in stating the fact, that the particular views of the Pusey and Newman school have been condemned by none more decidedly than by many who choose to designate their grade of Churchmanship by the prefix High. We protest against the confounding of things essen