ness.

unquestionable evidences, in their life and temper, that they are 'new creatures in Christ Jesus;' being filled, manifestly so, with faith, and abounding in good works, and affording, by a continuance in well doing,' such proofs of personal discipleship as are not to be questioned without impiety, as well as uncharitableUnder any such supposed condition of a christian country, while the evidences of personal piety had become, in very many instances, indisputable, and, at the same moment, ecclesiastical ambiguities were of a peculiarly perplexing kind, it must surely indicate the very temper of the blind zealot who 'knows not what spirit he is of,' to reject the clearer species of proof, and to insist upon the more obscure that is to say, to judge of men according to an ecclesiastical rule, that rule being itself flawed; and to spurn the permanent and hardly fallacious criterion of christian faith and conduct.

:

To have taken so venturous a course even in the earliest age, substituting the worse criterion for the better, and while the visible church was the most clearly marked off from competitors, would have been unjustifiable :-to do so at this time of day, and after the convulsions and the indiscretions of eighteen centuries have shed perplexity over all ecclesiastical questions-to do so now, and to unchurch, and unchristianize christian men, whose faith is pure, and whose conduct is exemplary, to do this, or even to murmur out the desire to do it, is proof of a tendency of mind, which, considered in its relation to the light of modern times, might well be exchanged for the temper of Ferdinand's inquisitors. Looking to his future reckoning before the dread tribunal of the Righteous Judge, a man had much better have been racking and burning heretics, in the fifteenth century, than growling against christian people, in the nineteenth.

All this may be said without in the least degree disparaging the just pretensions of some one church, or form of government, as intrinsically better than any other. The best pretensions of this sort involve some abstract argumentation, not appreciable by all minds, and some critical inquiries, of which but few can be masters, and some historical statements, of a recondite, and perhaps questionable quality; and perhaps, some political or economic accessory consideration, which religious minds may be

reluctant to listen to. All such reasons of preference, moreover, how sound soever they may be, are liable to become less and less distinct, or convincing, by relative changes that are taking place among surrounding bodies.

Meantime the individual demonstration of christian character -the direct proof that such and such persons are members of the true church—are Christ's genuine disciples, is not of a variable sort, nor intricate, nor dependent upon research; and it is, as one may say, gushing fresh from its proper springs, in each single instance. It is therefore what must be happening within the christian pale continually, that the proof of the christian character of individuals—that proof which appeals immediately to our christian sympathies (if we have any) appears, as indeed it really is, incomparably stronger than the argumentative proof of the superiority of some one visible church. Whenever such jarrings of the two kinds of proof take place, as when christian excellence is found out of the pale of a church making high pretensions, the minds of men are driven to the alternative, either of violating, in a dangerous manner, their best convictions, or, of compromising high church doctrines.

Consistent romanists have no way of escape left for them from the horrible necessity of blaspheming the Holy Spirit in his operations on the hearts of men, and of coolly consigning entire communities, including the most eminent individuals, to eternal perdition. When pious romanists are thus driven over this precipice of horror by their theory, one averts the eye from the sad spectacle. Execrable theory which forced such blasphemy from the lips of Fenelon and Pascal!

Our modern professors of high church principles, if they evade the frightful impiety of denying the possibility of salvation to dissidents, one and all, do so only by the help of subterfuges, of that quality which, when they are met with on the common walks of life, draw contempt upon whoever resorts to them, and to which has been assigned the significant term sneaking. In a free christian country, high church doctrines can be worn in no other way than as a man might wear-in-doors and out; a towering tuft borrowed from a peacock's tail, which he must doff and re-adjust, every time he passes from one chamber to another.

'Christian folks may be christian folks, out of our church ;oh yes-for the mercies of heaven are infinite!-but they are so by a sort of miracle, for they possess no ministry of the word, no sacraments, no regeneration, no covenanted forgiveness of sins, and can claim no viaticum.' But now here meets us a difficulty. -To have compromised principles so far as to have granted that people out of the Church may be saved, is a dangerous, and an expensive act, which, if too often repeated, must bring the theory itself into a precarious position. Yet this is not the worst ;-SO true it is that one false step involves another, and a more fatal one. If once we allow that men out of the Church may yet be christians, we leave an opening for that sort of evidence which may tend to prove that such unchurched christians are, some of them, eminent christians—christians such as that, if we could but make intimate acquaintance with them without being apprised of the fact of their being still unregenerate, and that they have never tasted the bread of life, we should, without a doubt, think them worthy of our highest regard. Or, to state the perplexing case in another manner :-two christian men may be introduced to us, concerning whose ecclesiastical condition we know nothing:we admire the temper and conduct of both-we know not which of the two to prefer-in fact, we cannot discriminate the christianity of the one, from that of the other. But at length out comes the tremendous secret, that, while M. N. is of the church, X. Y. is of none! We look again, and in alarm, at the two specimens, and yet, do what we will, are foiled in the endeavour to fix upon any solid moral or spiritual quality, present in the one-wanting in the other, which should indicate the vast disparity between a living member of the Church, and an outcast.

Now while the first compromise of our theory impairs it more than a little, this practical dilemma, to which it has brought us, seems to evaporate it altogether. No language has terms emphatic enough for setting forth the ineffable efficacy of those means of grace which the church, and the church exclusively, is empowered to convey; and yet, bring this alleged efficacy to a practical test in the instance of individuals, enjoying, and not enjoying this advantage, and we dare not undertake, by the sole aid of it, to distinguish one christian man from another! We

have been saying that the atmosphere, in certain districts, is destitute of the vital element; but when we place side by side two individuals, one of whom has always breathed genuine air, while the other has been dragging on a dying life upon nothing better than azote, they appear equally ruddy, they are equally robust, they are equally happy :-the one can stand under as heavy a burden as the other, and can run as fast, and as far: what then will most men think of our chemical intolerance, in denying the vitality of the air which the one of them has breathed?

It can excite no surprise that, in the first age, when so many causes concurred to keep the visible church in close coincidence with the true (although they were never identical) the important distinction between the two should almost be lost sight of, and that a usage should prevail of employing the phrase proper to each, convertibly, until a feeling had grown out of this confusion which wanted nothing but provocation to ripen it into the fiercest intolerance. What, in Clement of Rome, or Ignatius, or even Irenæus, was little more than the inobservance of a distinction which ought to have been better regarded, became, in Cyprian, a haughty sentiment, generating despotism, and aggravating schism; in Jerome and Ambrose it was a pride of power, seeking to satiate an insatiable revenge, in the destruction of dissidents. Carried on only a little further, until the Church had firmly grasped her two swords,' and then the egg burst into a crocodile-The simple error of the apostolic bishops, received its large interpretation in those papal edicts which consigned entire nations to destruction.

Inasmuch as nothing which is human can rest very long precisely on the saine foundations, it could not but happen that the two centres-that of the true, and that of the visible church, should be shifting their relative position, from age to age. It must follow therefore, as a general rule, that the coincidence will be inversely as the distance of time. Unhappily, church authorities have almost always assumed the coincidence to be permanent. This unwarrantable assumption has been the text of ecclesiastical arrogance, and the axiom of persecution. Call in question this axiom, and then what are the proceedings of the

Holy Office already condemned by every principle of the Gospel, of abstract morality, and of political reason? they are not more wicked, than they are absurd.

But the auto-da-fé of the holy office is nothing but the full ripe fruit of that tree, of which the sap is- church principles:' in other words, the appropriation, to a particular visible church, in a late age, of what belongs only to the true church, or universal body of genuine christians. This tree may happen to have been planted in a shallow soil, where it never could show a proud head; or it may have stood exposed to the huffing gusts of political liberty, which have blighted its blossoms, year after year; but the tree is the tree-the sap is the same succus amarus, and we may certainly know what will come of it, in sunshine and shelter, even although, at present, there be nothing more to alarm us than the rustling of its melancholy foliage in Oxford Tracts for the Times; or than the plaintive sighs of the Lyra Apostolica despondingly hung upon its branches.*

The well established tradition† concerning the gospel of Mark, that it was written under the eye, or at the instance of Peter, and submitted to his revision, may justly be considered as giving a peculiar importance to those passages in which this evangelist adds incidents or expressions, not found in the other narratives of our Lord's ministry: and if generally so, peculiarly in the two or three instances where Christ's very words could not but have been indelibly impressed upon the memory and heart of the

The Lyra Apostolica!' Beautiful as are many of these compositions, the collection, breathing smothered vengeance as it does, and ill disguising the rancour of disappointed political ambition, must be regarded as altogether the most ominous of all the publications issued under the auspices of the Oxford Tract writers. Men whose bosoms are heaving with violent suppressed emotions are wont to mutter their real purposes in sleep. Poetry is the language of men's waking dreams, and may often be taken as a truer indication of their designs, than their prose, or than their colloquial discourse. Render some of these lyrics into homely prose, and they mean what would differ very little from the high church doings of 1715, and 45; not to say of 1555.

+ Eusebius collects and reports these traditions, which are confirmed by other evidence.