evident that the christianized populace of his charge were then in full course along the broad road of superstitious profligacy. Augustine remonstrated-wept-groaned-trembled preachedwrote, and finally bequeathed to the world his high approval of a system which had already nearly or quite extinguished domestic piety throughout christendom, and had brought the general standard of morals down to the very lowest level. Salvian following close on his steps, mournfully walks over the ruins of the christian world; and when he comes to Carthage, he finds it the home of every unclean thing! Is there no lesson in all this?

At Carthage, in urbe Christiana, in urbe Ecclesiastica,' the last enormities of a debauched people, were not merely universally, but publicly, and under the very eye of the magistrates, perpetrated; and that without shame,' videbant judices, et acquiescebant.' Of those who, as he foresaw, would be irritated by this testimony, our author demands, whether any parallel wickedness could be found among the barbarians; or if found was not condemned, repressed, and punished (p. 284); and he affirms of the Vandals especially, that, though exposed to the temptations of sudden wealth, and having the opportunity to learn every vice from the people they conquered, they nevertheless had preserved the simplicity and purity of their own manners (p. 287), and used all means in their power for restoring public virtue, or decency at least; and that, in the measures they adopted with this view, they exhibited equal mildness and firmness.

In his eighth book—or the fragment of it which remains, Salvian justifies the boldness he had used in arraigning the vices of his christian contemporaries ;-he reverts to the case of the Carthaginian church, in which, as it appears, christianity, notwithstanding its nominal predominance, only shared the homage of the people, who, like the mixed population of Samaria, 'feared the Lord, and served their idols :'-he also states the curious fact that a 'religious person' hardly dared to show himself within the city; and we may be willing to allow that this odium, attaching to the order, in such a place, was to the credit of the monks; among whom, no doubt, there were many devout and blameless men, and these in Carthage would of course be the objects of popular hatred.

We pause for a moment, in our course; this being a proper place for adverting to some specific objections which have been. vehemently urged against certain passages in the preceding numbers.

-The nicene church principles are not the same thing as popery ; nor are the Oxford Tract writers the restorers (or not intentionally so) of popery.-The two systems differ theologically, in several points that must be allowed to be important; and they differ in their relation to ourselves, politically and ecclesiastically, so obtrusively as to have hidden from our view THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MORAL IDENTITY of the two.

The two systems, in their spiritual aspect, as considered in relation to genuine christianity, are barely to be distinguished, the one as effectively eclipsing the glory and beauty of God's salvation as the other: yet the one, as well as the other, retaining enough of the rudiments of Truth to support the piety of a few;-and both setting before the multitude a doctrine fatal to the soul.

As to the visible and direct influence of the two systems upon the morals of a community, while the two are broadly the same in their result, there is yet a difference, clearly in favour of romanism, or let us say of popery, and which may be established, in the most satisfactory and conclusive manner, by an appeal to facts, rigorously and impartially adduced.

In this sense then, and how much soever it may jar with notions that have been very generally entertained, and whatever high offence the assertion may give to certain persons, I here distinctly repeat my affirmation that romanism was a reform (or, if there be any other word of nearly the same meaning, but more agreeable to our ears) a reform, or a correction of the nicene church system. In thus reiterating this unacceptable assertion, I am prepared, if required to do so, to defend my ground by copious citations of historical and ecclesiastical evidence; and particularly by an appeal to the writings of the early popes, and to the acts of councils.

As an inference from this advisedly-made assertion, I am prepared to say That, considered as a question affecting the morals

That prodigious collection, the Acta Conciliorum, affords abundant evidence to this effect.

of the people, it were better for us to return without reserve to the church of Rome (horrid supposition as it is) than to surrender ourselves to the system which Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, the Gregories, and Augustine bequeathed to the nations. Nicene church principles, as now attempted to be put in the room of the principles of the Reformation, if in some points theologically better, or less encumbered, than the popery of the council of Trent, would, as I verily believe, more quickly and certainly deluge England with fanatical debauchery, than would such romanism as the church of Rome would, at this moment, gladly establish among us.

Leo the Great, the contemporary of Salvian (and the same is true of Gregory the Great, and of Hildebrand) an upright, and probably a good man, looking abroad upon that wild chaos of moral enormities which Salvian describes, and seeing the professedly christian world to be wallowing in abominations from which heathens would have shrunk, and which barbarian hordes blushed to witness, entertained, with a pious zeal, and pursued with a righteous magnanimity, the project of reform.

With this

purpose in view, he well felt that a power must be consolidated, such as should be competent to deal with the most powerful delinquents. Salvian's testimony, especially that part of it which, as coming more within the province of the civil historian, I have passed over, and which nothing but the consciousness of truth could have emboldened him to utter, this testimony clearly proves that the universal corruption, even in its most loathsome forms, enjoyed the protection of the rich and powerful, and that it was formally licensed by the magisterial class.

What then could be done?-Augustine, in referring to the outrageous debaucheries which had long attended the church festivals, affirms his belief that no remedy could be found short of the interference of a general council. Leo, and his statesmanlike successors, if they did not theoretically know, yet practically knew, that, when a widely-extended social system has fallen into the lowest condition of confusion, and has lost the last energies of virtue, it must no longer be looked to as competent to its own regeneration. If restored at all, it must be by a single mind and hand. There would be no hope but in the steadily directed intensity

of a spiritual monarchy, based on the profoundest principlesin harmony with human nature-aided by factitious assumptions, which men of all nations would bow to, and already possessed of prescriptive reverence, and a usage of appeal.

Leo, and others treading in his steps-and some of them with very honest intentions, as well as a holy ambition, bent all their endeavours toward the one indispensable preliminary of consolidating the hierarchical influence, around the chair of Peter. This done, the uproar might be stilled; the church might be purified; or at least a tide might be turned into the vast SENTINA ECCLESIASTICA, which should prevent the accumulation of impurities, and freshen a little its contents from time to time; and especially a force might be employed which should compel a profligate magistracy to admit, and to enforce necessary laws against destructive vices. Popes, individually, and according to their personal temper, looked more to the great moral intention of the papal supremacy, or more to the mere aggrandizement of the church; and at length the latter came, as was natural, to be the almost exclusive object-the former only qualifying the latter, or supplying it with a needful pretext. So it was with Innocent III.

Meantime a conservative and sanative power was established, extending its influence over western christendom; and in fact a check was given to the abounding profligacy. Rome fixed her hook in the nose of leviathan: the beast was curbed, and Europe was rescued from a condition which, if ever it last long, can be remedied only by the extermination of the people. The nicene divines, headstrong in their ascetic fanaticism, and unused to admit calm calculations of the remoter tendencies of things, had lent their credit to a system which could have no other issue than that which it had; and which Salvian has described in its frightful details.

Popery then, was a reform of the antecedent church system; inasmuch as it created and employed a force, counteractive of the evils which that system, and which itself too, could not but generate. The great men of the fourth century believed that the system contained within itself a counteractive power. A few years furnished lamentable evidence of the fallacy of such a belief. The popes snatched at the only alternative-the creating a power exterior to the system, and assuming to be independent of it, by

virtue of the special authority vested in the successors of Peter. This scheme was practicable; and Time has pronounced its eulogium. Terrible as is popery, it is infinitely less terrible than its own naked substance, apart from its form. If at the present moment there are popish nations in a moral condition almost as degraded as that into which christendom at large had sunk in the fifth century, it is because the corrective energies of the papal hierarchy have long been dormant.

In what way the nicene church system necessarily brought about the universal ulceration of the social body, and how it effected this so speedily, is no mystery; nor can any but the most infatuated minds fail to discern a connexion of causes which stands prominent on the surface of the facts. Thus for example (as every modern writer of any independence has observed) when the doctors of the church, one and all, favoured, and by their declamatory eloquence promoted, those superstitious usages which were as near as possible akin to the still-existing and ancient polytheism; when they taught a rude fanatical populace to commend their petitions to celestial beings, and to do, in a word, every thing they had been used to do-using only new names, are we to be amazed at the consequence? Let us listen to Chrysostom, Gregory Nyssen, Jerome, and Theodoret, on these very topics, and then affect to wonder when we find, not merely pagan vices mixed with christian ceremonies; but, after a little while, an actual and open admixture of the rites of the ancient polytheism, with the festivals of the church.

But there is even more in this connexion than may appear, or than modern writers have adverted to. If we heartily believe that christianity is from God, we are bound to look beyond the obvious operation of visible causes, when considering the course of events connected with its history. It was indeed natural, and inevitable too, that the lamentable indiscretion of the nicene doctors should have had the effect of re-establishing polytheism on ground which the gospel had for a while occupied; but this was not all. With the Old Testament before us, and its stern rebukes of idolatry in our recollection, can we indeed persuade ourselves to believe that, to the divine eye, it was a venial imprudence only, and a matter almost of indifference, when preachers of the