Church of England from all communions, not episcopal ;inasmuch as these are the results of the recent controversy, a renewal of the organic struggle is inevitable; and probably it is not very remote in time; but who shall pretend to divine the issue of that next coming convulsion? It will affect the world!

The Author embraces this opportunity-the only one he is likely to command-for returning his cordial thanks, and which he has a pleasure (he does not say pride) in doing publicly, to those Clergymen, and others—more than a very few, who have so kindly, in the course of his labours, conveyed to him the assurance of their concurrence and approval. To these notes and letters-not excepting the anonymous among them, he assigns a high value: often, indeed, has the arrival of one such friendly communication induced him to return to his task, when it had been almost abandoned.

To these, his friends, and to those who may be likeminded with them, the Author commends the subjects, some of them important, that are embraced in this Supplement: whatever may be the immediate, or apparent bearing of these topics, they are brought forward with no unfriendly feeling toward the Established Church; nor will any such motive be imputed to him by those who, with him, fervently desire to see that Church standing before the world-consistently Protestant, and purely Scriptural.

STANFORD RIVERS,

November 30, 1843.

ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY,

&c. &c.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE MODE IN WHICH THE FATHERS ARE CITED BY THE COMPILERS OF THE FORMULARIES OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

AMONG the Formularies of the English Church, it is the Book of Homilies alone that contains explicit references to the ecclesiastical writers of the early centuries. But the Book of Homilies, by the acknowledgment of all parties, breathes the spirit of Protestantism, and is incontrovertibly decisive in the testimony it bears against those errors-received at the hands of antiquity, which the Romish Church has transmitted, together with its own corruptions.

A startling difficulty meets us, however, at this point; for these Sermons, the whole drift and purport of which is to denounce the idolatries and the perversions whereof the Reformation has relieved us, abound with references-and these in the most respectful style, to the writers to whose works, and to whose personal influence, must be traced-as mere matter of history, the very errors in question!

By means of what hypothesis, then, are we to explain so strange a solecism? An answer to this question, if satisfactory, carries with it momentous consequences, and will repay the labour which it may involve.

B

"Must it not be inferred" (some will say) "from the reverential style in which the authors of this Book mention and quote the Fathers, that they did not consider them as implicated in the errors protested against by themselves, and the Reformers generally? And does it not hence follow, that the Founders of the English Church intended to lean for support upon the illustrious doctors of the ancient Church; and that their protest was directed against nothing beyond the more recent corruptions of the Papacy?"

We shall not anticipate a reply to these queries, which can be authentically derived only from an elaborate scrutiny of the facts and some of these are not to be met with on the mere surface of our documents; and if in this instance the writer, deeply impressed with the importance of the particular inquiry whereupon he now enters, has not spared himself the most irksome toils in the collection of his materials, he respectfully asks of the reader a few hours' patient attention to the evidence he has thus accumulated.

Deferring, then, our reply to the reasonable questions above stated, until our case be fully laid before the reader, we must yet briefly explain the grounds upon which the evidence now to be adduced has been collected :

Every reader of the Homilies must have remarked in them a frequent want of precision, and of verbal accuracy in the quotation of Scripture; so that even after a large allowance has been made on account of the unfixed state of the English versions at that time, it will still be unavoidable to admit that the writers gave themselves too little pains in collating, with the original, or with versions, those passages of the Bible which, at the moment, they had occasion to adduce.

This incidental circumstance will prepare us to expect a still greater vagueness, and more frequent inaccuracies when the "old doctors and ancient Fathers" are to be quoted. The Fathers had perhaps been perused with some diligence, in early life; and thus a recollection of certain signal passages would naturally remain upon the memory; and from such stores, and while the books or manuscripts were no longer within their reach, the Homilists drew the illustrations, or the supposed corroborations

which their argument needed;—and especially, any that might seem adapted to the urgent purpose of repelling the charge of novelty and innovation, so constantly brought against the "Novators," by their opponents.

There is moreover another supposition, probable in itself, and which, as we shall see, the facts seem to suggest-namely―That the writers of the Homilies, having at some early period of their studies, filled their common-place books with pithy insulated sentences, and with passages of the kind that seemed to bear favourably upon the great controversy of the times, they, as occasion required, turned to this Thesaurus, and thence copied out whatever might serve the immediate purpose of their argument; and this without seeking to know, or even suspecting, what might occur in the very same page of the book quoted ;—much less what was the general purport and theological character of the author's writings, whom they thus incautiously referred to.

Some supposition of this kind we shall find to be absolutely indispensable for enabling us to explain, in any manner, several of those astounding solecisms which meet us in these venerable compositions. Let it be imagined that the writer, under a certain head in his book of common places, had inserted some just and striking sentences from Augustine, or Chrysostom-not noting at the time of making this extract what might be the drift of the treatise, or even of the very paragraph;-much less considering the general tendency of the same Father's theology. The citation-adduced to sustain a protestant argument, is not perhaps verbally false-it may even be literally exact; nevertheless, if considered in its connexion, it must be rejected as argumentatively inconclusive, or logically fallacious. We may be sure that if the writer had taken the trouble to look to the connexion, he would have shuddered at the thought of availing himself of so unsound a support!

The Reformers, incessantly reproached as they were by their adversaries, as innovators-broachers of novelties, and preachers of a religion not older than themselves, or than John Huss and Wickliffe, were naturally forward to snatch at any seeming support which their doctrine might derive from those writers to whom Romanists themselves appealed as ultimate