class of ecclesiastics. The exorcists were officers who undertook to expel demons, as physicians do to heal diseases.

There were many other influences, not now to be spoken of, which concurred in bringing forward the sacramental superstition; but the one we have here in view would have been enough alone. When all the more fervent-minded of the clergy, along with the ambitious, and the credulous, affected celibacy and were in fact ascetics-debarred from every salutary and corrective motive, these would be tending, with the regulars, toward the miraculous, in both kinds. It cannot be imagined that men breathing the stifling atmosphere of religious houses, and ever gaping for miracles-seeing visions, hearing voices, encountering legions of demons-that such should be contented to rest in a ritual purely spiritual and rational, and which secured edification by the divine blessing upon the use of ordinary means of instruction and persuasion. No such rule of simplicity could satisfy men who, instead of coming from their homes, to church, and of returning from church to their homes, issued from cloisters, and returned to cloisters. The sacramental miracles, which blaze on the pages of Chrysostom-' the terrible mysteries,' which archangels dared not look upon, are the awful rites of a religion whose ministers (the serious and sincere among them) have been wrought up into an habitual frenzy, and to whom nothing is real, but the unreal.

The sacraments, just as we find them alluded to in the New Testament, may well and fitly be administered by one who, in going forth to his duties, returns a chubby infant to its mother's arms, and who, in returning, is greeted by laughing eyes and clapping of hands. The religion of the Apostles is part and parcel with the natural and domestic condition of the human heart; it is pure, kindly, gentle, and soothing to every affection of our nature. Its observances are not terrible'- astounding'—' ineffable :' they are not the wonder-fraught rites of the nicene church;-no, because the apostolic ministers-bishops, presbyters, deacons, were men still; but the nicene bishops, priests, deacons-what must we call them, seeing that they had put off from themselves all the better qualities of the manly rature? The difference between the apostolic and the nicene clergy, as to their personal

and social condition, just measures out the confessed difference between the apostolic rites, and the nicene mysteries.

But further; the sacramental doctrine and practice of the nicene, and of the ante-nicene church, had a special ecclesiastical import, which offers itself to the eye of every impartial inquirer. The Church, very early, had gathered around itself a various mass, which it had to govern by means altogether of a factitious kind. While, on the one side, it had forfeited the vital energy of apostolic truth, having compromised as well doctrines as precepts, it had driven a portion of its members into a position where to govern them at all was a task of the highest imaginable difficulty. Not now to speak of the clergy themselves, let it be considered that every local church had under its care companies of women, elder and younger, who being removed from their natural guardians, whether husbands, or parents, or brothers, had also been pushed forward to sustain a part they were few of them equal to. These women were, for the most part, dependent for their daily bread upon the Church, and the condition of their receiving this eleemosynary maintenance, was their being in communion therewith. As poor merely, their moral and spiritual state might have been overlooked; but as virgins, they could advance no claim irrespective of their personal deserts.

Unless we bear these simple facts in mind, it will be impossible to understand the motive of that intense anxiety not to be excluded from communion, which induced the nuns to submit, as reported by Cyprian and by Chrysostom, to the last humiliations, in attestation of their virtue. These things were not occasional, but ordinary; and not even the vicious operation of the ascetic institute can be believed so far to have robbed woman of her proper nature, and of her self-respect, as is implied in these revolting usages-unless it be under the pressure of some cruel necessity. Pitiable indeed was the condition of multitudes of young women who had been driven by fanatical or licentious priests, or cruel relatives, at the earliest age, into convents (or into the profession of virginity) and who, thus reduced to helplessness, were compelled, from time to time, to earn their ticket for the sacrament, and for their bread, by shameful compliances.

It is manifest however, that an influence of a higher sort than

that which might arise from the mere anxiety of a pensioner, would be kept in force, if possible. That is to say, communion with the Church, and a participation in the right which sealed and signified that communion, besides its vulgar import to these pensioners, would be surrounded with loftier and more impressive sentiments. The clergy, feeling the peculiar difficulty of their task in having to govern before the eye of the Church and the world, the virgin company, would do and say everything tending to strengthen their influence over the imaginations of the governed, and to bring them within the range of more refined hopes and fears.

As to the genuine motives of piety, it were absurd to suppose that these could take effect upon the minds of women such as were those spoken of by Cyprian, Jerome, and Chrysostom. Yet such, even the most frivolous, and the most licentious, are often vividly alive to superstitious terrors. In modern catholic countries this combination is found to involve nothing that is incompatible; and the nuns of Antioch, in the nicene age, gave proof also of the harmony of these same elements.

The clergy had a cumbrous engine to work; and, to keep it in order, they availed themselves of every means which they found would take effect upon it. Hence the mysterious terrors wherewith the eucharistic rite was enveloped. Minds hardened against the genuine motives of the Gospel, might yet be overawed by the terrors of the eucharistic ceremonial; and might be made to tremble by the threat of being driven from the altar. One cannot read those over-wrought passages in which the great nicene preachers are labouring to invest the celebration of the mysteries with terrors-even with horrors, and not feel that there was an unconfessed motive, a secret necessity, a latent reason of government, at the bottom of all this astounding rhetoric. The Apostles were accustomed to speak in no such style of their breaking of bread;' no, for the Apostles had no convents and monasteries to manage.

The eucharistic rite may very well be regarded as the hinge of the ecclesiastical economy of the nicene age. There was a tendency of every thing toward it; it was more thought of and regarded than any other element of the religious system; the highest benefits were connected with a due participation in it,

and the most terrible evils were the consequences of even a temporary exclusion from the privilege. Before the time when the Church wielded secular powers, excommunication was its last resource, in dealing with the refractory; and after the time when ecclesiastical censures were followed by civil pains, it continued to be the terrible precursive act of a process which might deprive the victim of fortune, liberty, life, and consign him, as was believed, to eternal misery.

Now it can never be believed that this well-designated' terrible mystery,' should have continued, from age to age, unchanged, while the scheme of government of which it was the hinge, was advancing from the simplest condition of a humble association of guileless men and women, to that of a complicated, wealthy, and ambitious polity, embracing interests of all kinds, and binding together various bodies; and these wrought up to a state of artificial excitement. Look at the apostolic church, such as we may suppose it to have been in reading the Acts of the Apostles: -look at the churches of the nicene age, at Antioch, Constantinople, Rome, Milan, three centuries afterwards; and then consider whether that breaking of bread' which was the symbol of communion in the one society, was likely to have undergone no changes when it came to be the symbol of communion in the other! In truth, the two rites differ just as the two societies differ; and the two differed in their first principles, in their ingredients, and in their spiritual and moral characteristics.

What is now proposed to the protestant church is in substance this-To leave, as crude, or as 'undeveloped,' the ritual elements of christianity, such as they may be gathered from the monuments of the apostolic age; and to take these elements from the hands of the ascetic, unmarried (often licentious, ambitious, fanatical) and superstitious clergy of the fourth century.

Were it not better to yield ourselves at once to the welldigested doctrine and practice of the later (romish) church? If a power of gradual development belongs at all to the Church (and unless this be supposed, the ripened doctrine and worship of the nicene age has no authority, and is nothing but innovation) then, how can we be sure that this power had exhausted itself, or had been abrogated, precisely in the fourth century? On what

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on the strength of your private interpretation of the canonical writings, you go the whole length of heretics and ultra protestants, who do nothing worse; and all the difference between' you and them, will be a difference in particulars. This is not to adhere to church principles.

'Now, as you well know, the ascetic doctrine, expressed in the monastic life, and the consequent celibacy of the clergy, claim all the weight and authority that can be derived from the sanction of high antiquity and universal consent. You know that the monastic system was an intimate and inseparable element of the religious and ecclesiastical system, at the time to which you attribute such an authority, as that it should overrule the later enactments of the romish church. You have yourselves admitted the abstract excellence of the ascetic life;-you adopt, as far as you can, its characteristic devotional exercises, and you give the world reason to believe that the restoration of the monastic orders would be by no means disagreeable to you.

But, to advance so far, is to advance too far, or not far enough. You stand in an ambiguous position which it is hard to justify on any general principle whatsoever. Even if the reformers had some pretexts forchange, in relation to certain abuses of the romish church, it was their high sin to have rejected and blasphemed the monastic system-unquestionably ancient as it is :—this system was no popish corruption; and to cast it out as evil, is to subvert the first principle of church authority, and to set up another, even that of the ultra-protestant principle. But what say you to the church within which, at the peril of your souls, you remain, and at whose altar you minister? Your church has outraged catholic antiquity by its rejection of monasticism. Your church has no holy virgins but was there any ancient church that had not, or that did not make its boast of them? Your church has not a monastery, or a convent, or a hermit, or any one of those things which the church universal of the nicene age regarded as of the highest value. Call now St. Athanasius, and St. Basil, and St. Ambrose, and St. John Chrysostom, and St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Augustine, call them from their high seats in glory, and let them judge between you and us! What name think you would these holy doctors bestow upon a church shorn of all the