come before the reader in a more persuasive form, if he read it as the author wrote it. It is scarcely necessary to add, that he now submits every part of the book to the judgment of the Church; with whose doctrine, on the subject of which it treats, he wishes all his thoughts to be coincident." The "advertisement," from a postscript to which these words are taken, contains a Palinode, in which the author takes back in detail all the hard things he had said of Rome in the days of his heresy. The determined perseverance with which he chews the cud of repentance, swallowing his bitter speeches one after another, would command our sympathy, if there were not an element of the comic about it. "1. In 1833, in the Lyra Apostolica, I called it a 'Lost Church.' "2. Also in 1833, I spoke of the 'Papal apostacy.' 6 "6. In 1834, I also used, of certain doctrines of the Church of Rome, the epithets unscriptural,' 'profane,' 'impious,' 'bold,' 'unwarranted,' 'blasphemous,' 'gross,' 'monstrous,' 'cruel,' 'administering deceitful comfort,' and unauthorized.' "7. I said in 1837, of the Church of Rome, 'In truth she is a church beside herself, &c.'"-with much more to the same purport; none of which, however, the writer lets us know, with a singular candor, was the honest result of his own convictions. The reason why he abused in such unmeasured terms "a communion so ancient, so wide spread, so fruitful in saints," was, that these views "are necessary to our position." "I have reason to fear, too, that such language is to be ascribed, in no small measure, to an impetuous temper, a hope of approving myself to persons I respect; and a wish to repel the charge of Romanism." Here is the secret. Other people, who knew him better than he knew himself, perceived that his "Via media" was carrying him straight to Rome; and so charged. To repel this charge, he set to roundly abusing the church into whose embrace he was just ready to fall. However, he now takes it all back. Besides repeatedly smiting his breast, as he goes through the roll of his sins, he sums up thus: "Of course he now withdraws the arguments alluded to, as far as they reflect on the Church of Rome, as well as the language in which they were conveyed." Postscript" Since the above was written, the author has joined the Catholic Church." This recantation bears the significant date "LITTLEMORE, Oct. 6, 1845." October sixth, as we find by referring to the calendar, is the day of Saint Faith V. and M.; one of the apocryphal Virgins of the Romish Church; by whose aid, perhaps, certain mountains of difficulty that lay between Oxford and Rome were removed; and much more than the ample 'Peccavi' of this 'advertisement,' if indeed any more, it would seem unreasonable for even Rome to demand. Whatever may be thought of the recantation, however, the Essay itself is a very serious thing. It bears evidence of profound sincerity in the writer. It is the production of an acute and practised mind, richly stored with various learning, and especially at home in the history of the Church. No reader will fail to do homage to the skill and talent it exhibits. No reader, accustomed to reverence the Scriptures, can fail to be pained at the slight regard-we may almost say, the contemptuous disregard-manifested towards the Bible, as a source of religious knowledge. No Protestant reader, but must be shocked at the strength of that delusion which leads a sincere and devout mind, educated in a better system, openly to defend the worst corruptions of the Romish Church. The manliness, if we may call it so, of the Essay, is one of its most striking features. It stands up to the Romish system in all its length and breadth, exactly as it is. It has none of the sneaking evasions which belong to Gother, and such like miserable apologists. It has nothing of the cautious reserve, which has brought reproach on the orthodoxy of the great Bishop of Meaux, and which characterizes also the work of Moehler. boldly accepts of Purgatory, cultus of saints and angels, image-worship, and adoration of the Virgin, as parts of the system; and justifies them by a mystical interpretation, a plea of exemption from the authority of the commandments, the want of "clear proof that the cultus of St. Mary, obscures the divine glory of her Son;" or by that additional revelation which is found in the development of Christian doctrine. It That there is such a thing as a development of Christian doctrine, we by no means deny; nor that some test or tests may be given by which to distinguish a legitimate development from a corruption. In opposition to that theory, already examined, which proceeds on the ground that Christianity has been, at any one period since the Apostles' days, an unfinished system, we hold to the great Protestant doctrine set forth in the Confession of our Church: That "the whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence, may be deduced from Scripture; unto which nothing, at any time, is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.' Christianity, in its integrity, is there; discoverable in all its essential features, not by a system of mystical allegorizing, but by the application of those plain, common sense rules of interpretation employed to discover the meaning of other writings. It is perfectly consistent with this view, to hold that the scheme of Christian doctrine, thus delivered, has been more and more perfectly comprehended in the lapse of time; has progressively unfolded itself to the mind of the Church; so that her statement of the Scripture system is now more clear, precise and harmonious than at the period of the Reformation; as the system of the Reformers was better developed and more consistent than that of the Fathers. Christianity came out gradually from the Scriptures, into the living consciousness of the Church; now one doctrine, and then another, according to the form and pressure of the time. It was by collision with error that she was brought to investigate and define successively the articles of the Creed.' A doctrine-even one, for example, so vital as the Divinity of Christ-remained loose and undefined; not bound to any precise expression, until a broad heresy compelled the Church to decide and pronounce distinctly from the Scriptures on the point.* So the importance and bearing of a particular doctrine might not be appreciated in some stages of the Church's progress. Those truths would be insisted on in each period which the mind of the period appreciated; which its exigencies recommend; which its distinctive forms of error assailed. Thus the doctrine of justification by faith was never so appreciated as the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae, in the best preceding ages of the Church, as it was after it had been exhumed from the rubbish under which Rome had buried it. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit's influences in regeneration, has been better appreciated and understood since the era of modern revivals, than during all the centuries that preceded the Reformation. All these doctrines are found in the Scrip • Atque ita nos ipse pictatis sensus instituit, ut si quis turbet Ecclesiam dogmate inusitato, atque eo res perveniat ut sit periculum a graviore dissidio, conveniant primum ecclesiae: questionem propositam examinent: demum justa discussione habita, definitionem ex Scriptura sumptam proferant, quae et dubitationem in plebe tollat, et os obstruat improbis et cupidis hominibus. Sic exorto Ario, coacta est Nicaena Synodus, quae sua auctoritate, et pacem restituit ecclesiis quas vexaverat, et aeternam Christi divinitatem contra sacrilegum ejus dogma asseruit.—Calv. Inst. iv. ix. 13. ture; can be stated in the very words of Scripture; and rest on Scripture evidence alone for their support; but their place in the mind of the Church they have assumed by a process of expansion and development, under appropriate circumstances. The time arrived when Christians felt as they never had before, the vital power and worth of those doctrines. They were assailed; and the Church looked more carefully for their evidence in the word of God. She reasoned upon them; tested them; began more and more to grasp and apprehend them; ascertained their relation to other parts of the Scripture system; rejected erroneous opinions that had become attached to them; finally settled upon their precise dogmatic statement, as at Dort, or Westminster; and embodied them in her formulae. of doctrine. The evidence relied on is the same in the seventeenth century as it was in the fourth. There is not a Scripture proof annexed to the third chapter of the Confession of Faith,' for example, that was not anticipated by St. Augustine; nor one adduced in support of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ that is not to be found in the Treatise of Novatian De Trinitate, appended to the works of Tertullian; nor one in proof of the resurrection of the body, that was not employed by St. Ambrose. Neither these, nor any other of the truths that make an essential part of Protestant Christianity, have grown more true in the progress of the Church; as it is alleged the doctrines of Purgatory, Papal Infallibility, and the Intercession of the Saints have, in the Romish system. The development, we admit, has not had the effect to convert a Scripture statement, which might seem only of temporary application, into a universal and perpetual truth."* has produced that beautiful and harmonious growth by which the imperfect creeds of the early church have expanded into so admirable a summary of Christian doctrine for instance, as the Westminster Confession. It has adhered to that analogy of physical growth laid down in the Canon of Vincent, of Lerins. "Crescat igitur oportet, et multum vehementerque proficiat, tam singulorum quam omnium, tam unius hominis quam totius ecclesiae, aetatum ac saeculorum gradibus, intelligentia, scientia, sapientia: sed in suo duntaxat genere; in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem seusu, eademque sententia. Imitetur animarum religio rationem corporum: quae licet annorum processu numeros suos evolvant et explicent, eadem tamen quae erant, permanent." It ⚫ Newman, of Purgatory. Essay, p. 194. Protestant Christianity is the religion of the Scriptures harmoniously developed in the life of the Church; the full grown tree whose perfect germs are found in the New Testament; the manhood (to use Vincent's illustration), of infant Christianity. If we are asked for a test by which to distinguish what may be corrupt in this developed system, from what is legitimate, we desire none better than that already quoted from the Confession of Faith, viz., that a legitimate development can be either proved by the express words of Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence deduced from it. It will be so truly the same thing it was in any preceding age of the Church, that the same Scripture statements will define it. It will not be changed into something different; as spiritual worship, into idolatry; the sole mediation of Christ, into the mediation of saints; or the sufficiency of Scripture, into reliance on tradition. It will be a profectus (as Vincent has it) not a permutatio: siquidem ad profectum pertinet (a development) ut in semet ipsa unaquaque res amplificetur: ad permutationem vero (a corruption) ut aliquid ex alio in aliud transvertatur. The Tridentine religion is a development of Scriptural Christianity, much as the worship of Dagon was a development of the worship offered in the ark, On the other hand a genuine development will meet the requirement of the critical canon Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet. We have already, however, exceeded the just limits of this article; and must confine ourselves, in conclusion, to a brief notice of Dr. Moehler, and his great work on the Doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants. The object of the 'Symbolik,' which has been called a "necessary supplement to Bossuet's History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches," is to set forth, in the most plausible manner, the teaching of the Romish Church on the points that enter into the controversy; such as "original sin and its consequences," "faith" and "good works," doctrine of the "sacraments," and of the Church; and to exhibit, on the other hand, the confused, contradictory, and one-sided views of the leading Protestant |