and the violence with which his refusal was assailed is a curious proof of the jealousy with which one scrupulous conscience is regarded, and the real difficulties which it may throw in the way of secular policy. For his more learned works, Bishop Beveridge is known to the Church Catholic, and these were published under his own superintendence. For his others his name is endeared to the Church of England in particular. His Sermons, written from time to time to meet the exigencies of his flock, were not published till after his death, and for these he cared to be known only to those to whom he spoke, the souls over whom he watched during so many years with such anxious and unremitting watchfulness. There are, as has been frequently observed, in the works of Bishop Beveridge, occasional tinges of those opinions which were so rife in his early years, and of which Dr. Tuckney, the Master of his College and Professor of Divinity, was the well-known maintainer in his day; and there are, on the other hand, here and there in his Sermons, those occasional protests against the characteristics of the Church of Rome, common, more or less, to all our divines. But his mind was too essentially practical to entertain Calvinistic opinions; and he was too entirely in earnest in teaching positive truth, and providing real food for his flock, to spend his time and waste his energies in the bare contradiction of error. Homeliness and naturalness are his great characteristics. He writes with the plain, unaffected simplicity, and utter carelessness of all ornament, of a man full of the importance of his subject, who felt the entire reality of every word he uttered, and was living under the habitual influence of the truths he taught. And we may well enter into the feeling with which the excellent Robert Nelson speaks of the preservation of the Sermons (not apparently intended for the press), as the productions of one who “had a way of gaining people's hearts and touching their consciences, which bore some resemblance to the Apostolical age," and to whose Christian instruction many, within Nelson's own knowledge, "owed, under God, their change of lives." It only remains to state, that the Sermons are carefully reprinted from the best edition of the works, published in two volumes folio, in 1720, collated with the late edition of the Rev. Hartwell Horne. CONTENTS. THE TRUE NATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, THE OFFICE |