trine of Expiatory Satisfaction as superadded to the old penitential discipline of the Church.

(1.) We are assured, however, by the adventurous Bishop of Strasbourg, that Indulgences, viewed (be it carefully observed) under the present precise aspect, rest upon the authority of St. Paul.

The great Apostle, says he, teaches us positively, that to the Church belongs the double right of prescribing and of mitigating satisfactory punishments. Discuss. Amic. vol. ii. p. 227.

For the establishment of this assertion, he refers to two connected passages in the two Epistles to the Corinthians. 1 Corinth. v. 1-5. 2 Corinth. ii. 6—10.

According to the ancient and godly discipline of the primitive Church, the Corinthians, as St. Paul expresses himself, had delivered an incestuous member of their community unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. 1 Corinth. v. 5. This they did under the immediate sanction of the anxious Apostle: and, afterward, when they were satisfied as to the sincerity of the man's contrition, they pardoned him the disgrace which he had brought upon the Church, and readmitted him to the enjoyment of his former privileges as a baptised Christian. The circumstance and the ground of his readmission were communicated to St. Paul: and St. Paul, in reply, informed them; that, as they had forgiven the offender, so likewise did he for their sakes in the person of Christ. 2 Corinth. ii. 10.

Such was the very simple transaction, from which, with his wonted rapidity of facile inference, Dr. Trevern has learned, for the information of the English Laity, that, by the special authority of St. Paul, to the Church belongs the double right of prescribing and of mitigating satisfactory punishments: punishments, that is to

say, according to his avowed doctrine, which should be able to make a meritorious expiatory satisfaction, not merely to the outraged Church viewed as a body-corporate, but even to the divine justice itself.

(2.) Bad, however, as indulgences may be when viewed even under the present most unscriptural aspect, their evil admitted of a still higher degree of sublimation.

The Bishop, like a prudent controvertist, treads lightly over ground which assuredly is not hallowed. What was the crying nuisance, which first roused the honest indignation of the great and much calumniated Luther? The Pope, commencing business as a wholesale dealer, actually drove a gainful pecuniary traffic in ecclesiastical indulgences! Instruments of this description, by which the labour of making a fancied meritorious satisfaction to God by penance or by good works or by the fabled pains of Purgatory was pared down to the dwarfish standard that best suited the purse of a wealthy offender, were sold in the lump, to a tribe of monastic vagabonds, by the Prelate who claimed to be upon earth the divinely appointed Vicar of Christ. These men purchased them of the Pope, by as good a wholesale bargain as they could make and then, after the mode of itinerant pedlars, they disposed of them in retail, each indulgence of course bearing an adequate premium, to those who affected such articles of commerce. The madness of superstition could be strained no higher: the Reformation burst forth like a torrent: and Luther, with the longsuppressed Bible in his hand, gloriously merited and obtained the eternal hatred of an incorrigible Priesthood.

4. It is worthy of observation, that Dr. Trevern is wholly silent as to the imaginary fund, whence the inexhaustible stock of papal indulgences is supplied.

Whether he was himself ashamed of the doctrine of supererogation, or whether he thought it imprudent to

exhibit such a portent before the eyes of his english laic correspondent, I shall not pretend to determine. From whatever motive, he omits it altogether. Yet the lucrative absurdity is in no wise obsolete. We have the authority of the late sovereign Pontiff himself to assert that it still, even in the present day, continues to exist. Let the tale be recited in his own words: for no other can be found equally appropriate.

We have resolved, says Pope Leo in the year 1824, by virtue of the authority given to us from heaven, fully to unlock that sacred treasure, composed of the merits, sufferings, and virtues, of Christ our Lord and of his Virgin-Mother and of all the Saints, which the author of human salvation has entrusted to our dispensation— To you, therefore, venerable brethren, Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, it belongs to explain with perspicuity the power of Indulgences: what is their ef ficacy in the remission, not only of the canonical penance, but also of the temporal punishment due to the divine justice for past sin; and what succour is afforded, out of this heavenly treasure, from the merits of Christ and his Saints, to such as have departed real penitents in God's love, yet before they had duly satisfied by fruits worthy of penance for sins of commission and omission, and are now purifying in the fire of Purgatory, that an entrance may be opened for them into their eternal country where nothing defiled is admitted. Bull for the observ. of the Jubilee. A.D. 1825.

From a stock of merits, supplemental to the otherwise too scanty merits of Christ, and contributed by the dead Saints over and above what was necessary for themselves: from this heterogeneous stock, which by special divine authority the Pope even now actually claims to have at his own disposal, indulgences are issued, which shall not only remit the canonical penance imposed by the Church

and thus liberate the fortunate possessors from the temporal punishment in this world due for past sin to the divine justice, but which shall also open the very doors of Purgatory for the blissful escape of those faithful suffering spirits who departed this life without having made full satisfaction for their iniquities by fruits worthy of penance !

The time will come, it was long since foretold, when they will not endure sound doctrine: but, after their own lusts, shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from THE TRUTH, and shall be turned unto FABLES. 2 Tim. iv. 3, 4.

NUMBER IV.

ANGLICAN ORDERS.

THE Bishop of Strasbourg, in a tone of dogmatism which more prudently as well as more decorously might well have been omitted, has taken upon himself, for the honest purpose of perplexing his English Layman, to decide, that the Orders of the Anglican Church are invalid, and consequently that our pretended Clergy are mere Laics without any legitimate apostolical call to the ministration of God's word and sacraments. Discuss. Amic. Lettr. i. vol. i. p. 1–14.

Every thing, says this unprovoked calumniator of his brethren, which has been done in the Church of England under Elisabeth, has been done without right and without a shadow of possible competency. The whole is radically null, in the commencement; null, during its present existence; null, so long as it shall continue to exist.

These truths are not less clear to the intellect, than broad daylight is to the visual organs. Discuss. Amic. vol. ii. p. 408.

I. It is somewhat remarkable: that Dr. Trevern should carefully specify, as luminaries of the Gallican Church, Perron and Morin and Petau and Vansleb and Renaudot and Le Brun and Arnauld and Nicole (Discuss. Amic. vol. ii. p. 397.); and yet that he should have been as totally silent respecting the very learned and the very able Courayer, as if no such individual had ever existed. Nevertheless, on the precise point of the English Ordinations, this identical Courayer was the professed opponent of Renaudot, one of the writers mentioned by him with so much approbation.

While Dr. Trevern was engaged in the charitable and doubtless (according to the title of his Book) very amicable occupation of strenuously reviling, to an English Layman, the Orders of the Anglican Church: while he was diligently employed in assuring his correspondent, that, from the reign of Elisabeth, every thing was null; null yesterday, null to day, null to-morrow, null to the very end of time why did he not inform his meditated proselyte, that one of the ablest defences of the validity of our Ordinations was actually written; not by an individual among ourselves, but by a Latin Ecclesiastic; not by a Latin Ecclesiastic of some obscure and easily overlooked district, but by a native of the always distinguished country to which Dr. Trevern himself owes the no small honour of his own origination?

:

Was the Bishop of Strasbourg ignorant of the existence of the Work of Courayer? If so: how shall we deem so scantily instructed a controvertist in any wise competent to step forward for the purpose of gratuitously attacking the Church of England?