"I have undertaken to show, by numerous and varied citations, not merely that the doctrine and practice of religious celibacy occupied a prominent place in the theological and ecclesiastical system of the Nicene church, a fact hardly needing to be proved, but that the institute was intimately and inseparably connected with, and that it powerfully affected, every other element of ancient Christianity, whether dogmatic, ethical, ritual, or hierarchical. If, then, such a connexion can be proved to have existed, we must either adopt its notions and usages in this essential particular, or must surrender very much of our veneration for ancient Christianity. "The fact of the intimate connexion here affirmed is really not less obvious or easily established than that of the mere existence of the institute itself. Modern church writers may, indeed, have thrown the unpleasing subject into the back-ground, and so it may have attracted much less attention than its importance deserves; but we no sooner open the patristic folios than we find it confronting us, on almost every page; and if either the general averment were questioned, or the bearing of the celibate upon every part of ancient Christianity were denied, volumes might be filled with the proofs that attest the one as well as the other. Both these facts must be admitted by all unprejudiced inquirers who shall take the pains to look into the extant remains of Christian antiquity."-Vol. I. P. 131.

"Do not the fathers then worship God? do they not adore the Son of God? Assuredly: but when they muster all the forces of their eloquence, when they catch fire, and swell, as if inspired, whenever (I must be permitted to make the allusion, for it is really appropriate,) whenever they take their seat upon the tripod and begin to foam, the subject of the rhapsody is sure to be a blessed martyr,' it may be an apostle; or a recently departed 'doctor,' or, a virgin confessor;' or it is the relics of such a one, and the miraculous virtues of his sacred dust. If, in turning over these folios, the eye is any where caught by the frequency of interjections, such a page is quite as likely to be found to sparkle and flash with the commendations of the mother of God, or of her companion saints, as with the praises of the Son; and more often does the flood-tide of eloquence swell with the mysterious virtues of the sacraments than with the power and grace of the Saviour. The Saviour does indeed sit enthroned within the veil of the Christian temple; but what the Christian populace hear most about, is-the temple itself, and its embroideries, and its gildings, and its ministers, and it rites, and the saints that fill its niches. In a word, what was visible, and what was human, stood in front of what is invisible and divine: and when we find a system of blasphemous idolatry fully expanded in the middle ages, this system cannot, in any equity, be spoken of as any thing else than a following out of the adulatory rhapsodies of the great writers and preachers of the Nicene church."-Vol. I. p. 188.

"Let not the Protestant reader, who may lately have heard Ambrose named as one of the great three, to whom we are to look for our idea of finished Christianity, let him not be startled at this praying to a saint. Ambrose in the west, as well as Nazianzen, Nyssen, Chrysostom, in the east, and others, too many to name, had convinced himself that no prayers were so well expedited on high, as those which were presented by a saint and martyr already in the skies! In fact, a good choice as to the 'patrocinium,' was the main point in the business of prayer. These matters were, however, regulated by a certain propriety and conventional usage,-may we say, etiquette: it was not on every sort of occasion that the Virgin was to be troubled with the wants and wishes of mortals: each saint had, indeed, come to have his department; and each was applied to in his particular line. In connexion with subjects such as this how can one be serious? unless indeed considerations are admitted that agitate the mind with emotions of indignation and disgust."-Vol. I. p. 212.

"It was, however, a consolation to Ambrose, in the loss of his brother, that he had lived to return to Milan, where the sacred dust would be at all times accessib'e, affording to him means of devotion of no ordinary value-habeo sepulcrum,' says he, super quod jaceam, et commendabiliorem Deo futurum esse me credam, quod supra sancti corporis ossa requiescam.' Ambrose was truly a gainer by the death of his brother; for in place of his mere bodily presence, as a living coadjutor, he had the justifying merits of hist bones, and the benefit of his intercession in heaven! Ungracious task indeed is it to adduce these instances of blasphemous superstition, as attaching to a name like that of Ambrose; but what choice is left us when, as now, the Christian community, little suspecting what is implied in the advice, are enjoined to take their faith and practice from the divines of the Nicene age, and from Ambrose, Athanasius, and Basil, especially?”—Ib.

"The florid orators, bishops and great divines of the fourth century, we find, one and all, throughout the east, throughout the west, throughout the African church, lauding and lifting to the skies whatever is formal in religion, whatever is external, accessory, ritual, ecclesiastical: it was upon these things that they spent their strength it was these that strung their energies, these that fired their souls. Virginity they put first and foremost; then came maceration of the body, tears, psalm-singing, prostrations on the bare earth, humiliations, alms-giving, expiatory labours and sufferings, the kind offices of the saints in heaven, the wonder-working efficacy of the sacraments, the unutterable powers of the clergy: these were the rife and favoured themes of animated sermons, and of prolix treatises; and such was the style, temper, spirit, and practice of the church, from the banks of the Tigris, to the shores of the Atlantic, and from the Scandinavian morasses, to the burning

sands of the great desert; such, so far as our extant materials give us any information. And all this was what it should have been! and this is what now we should be tending toward !”—Vol. I. p. 265.

These are strong statements. But so far as historical facts are concerned, they are placed by our author beyond all contradiction. The Nicene Christianity bore no resemblance whateyer to Protestantism. It carried in it all the principles of Romanism; so that this is to be considered in many respects an improvement on the older system, a regulation and correction of its abuses, and not by any means the bringing in of something always progressively worse. The model saint of the period is presented to us in the person of St. Antony, the "Patriarch of Monks." Asceticism is made to be the highest style of piety. The merit of celibacy, the glorification of virginity, veneration for relics, all sorts of miracles, the idea of purgatory, the worship of saints, prayers for the dead, submission to the authority of the church, and faith in the sacraments as truly supernatural mysteries, come everywhere into view as the universal staple of religious thought. All this is so clearly established by the historical monuments which have come down to us from this age, that he who runs may read-unless indeed he choose rather to shut his own eyes. And what are we to think then of those, who are ready to take offence with the declaration of so plain a truth, as though it involved a deadly stab at the whole cause of Protestantism, and were the next thing in fact to a full acknowledg ment of the claims of Roue! Alas for our Protestantism, if it is to stand by the feeble arm of such defenders. The noise they make is found to be at last, the proclamation simply of their own shame.

It is simply ridiculous then to make any question about the reigning state of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, as related to Romanism and Popery. Our representation has not been a whit too strong for the actual truth of the case, but may be considered as falling short of this altogether. It is the merest romance, when such a man as Bishop Wilson, or any other Evangelical Protestant of the present day, allows himself to dream that such men as Ambrose and Augustine were orthodox and pious after his own fashion, that the main elements of their religion were of a truly Protestant cast, and that they were in a great measure free from the ideas which afterwards took full possession of the church under what is called the Roman apostacy. Every imagination of this sort is a perfect illusion. These

fathers, and along with them the entire church of their time, were in all material respects fully committed to the later Roman system; and at some points indeed stood farther off from Evangelical Protestantism than the full grown Popery of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Let this truth then be known and kept in mind. Here at least is a fixed fact in church history, which only the most disgraceful ignorance can pretend to dispute. Let it be made familiar to our thoughts. Nicene Christianity, the system which the fourth century inherited from the third and handed forward to the fifth, was not Protestantism; much less Puritanism; bore no resemblance to this whatever; but in all essential principles and characteristics was nothing more nor less than Romanism itself. The great Athanasius, now in London or New York, would be found worshipping only at Catholic altars. Augustine would not be acknowledged by any evangelical sect. Chrysostom would feel the Puritanism of New England more inhospitable and dry than the Egyptian desert.

For his own immediate and main object then, the argument of Mr. Isaac Taylor, it seems to us, is unanswerably conclusive and overwhelming. Anglicanism builds its pretensions throughout on the position, that antiquity as far down as to the fifth century is in its favor, and at the same time against those features of Romanisin which go beyond its measure; that these Roman features came in gradually at a later period, along with the rise of the Papacy, as innovations and corruptions; and that it is possible now to cast them all off as purely outward excrescences or incrustations, and so to find in the Nicene system a true picture of what the church was in the beginning, and the fair pattern at the same time of modern Episcopacy after the Oxford scheme. This whole position, it is perfectly certain, cannot stand. It is historically false. To trust it is only to lean upon a broken reed. There is no such distinction here as it asserts, between the older and later church systems. The Nicene Christianity was in its whole constitution of one order with Romanism. The worst corruptions, as they are usually called, of this later system, were all at work in the older system. They are not by any means the inventions and devices of the Papacy, as distinguished from the supposed Patriarchal or Episcopal order of more ancient times. The idea of a steadily growing apostacy and defection from such primitive state of the church, under the usurped dominion of Rome, is a purely arbitrary fiction, which the least true study of antiquity must soon scatter to the winds. In many things, the later order was a decided improvement on the order that went before. The Papacy

was a wholesome reformatory and regulative power for the most part, in its relation to what are called Popish abuses and corruptions, rather than the proper fountain itself of these evils. They belonged to the inheritance it received from the Nicene age, the period in which modern Anglicanism now affects to glory as the model and pattern of an uncorrupted Christianity just like its own. All this, we say, Mr. Taylor makes perfectly clear. Puseyism, in his hands, is convicted of miserable pedantry. Its rule is too wide a great deal for its own pretensions. The line it pretends to draw between Nicene Episcopacy and Popery for the purpose of marking off a jure divino system of church principles to suit itself, is one that exists only in hypothesis and dream, and not at all in true history. Both historically and logically the premises of the fourth century complete themselves in the full Papal system, and under any form short of this are something, not better than such proper conclusion, but in all respects worse.

As far too as an argument may seem to hold in the relation of the church at different times to the reigning moral and social life in the midst of which it appears, the Nicene Christianity has nothing to plead in its own recommendation. It is a most gloomy picture in this view that Mr. Taylor gives us particularly of the fifth century, from Salvian and other writers. All sorts of immorality prevailed throughout the nominally Christian church. Society showed itself rotten to the core. The Gothis and Vandals surpassed, in many cases, the morality of those who professed the true religion and participated in its sacraments. It is evident enough too from Chrysostom and others, that the state of things in the fourth century was much the same, the visible church being literally flooded with immorality and vice. Mr. Taylor brings this forward, as an exemplification of the nat ural and necessary operation of the Nicene theology. This is plainly a false use of the case. It had other causes sufficiently intelligible in the social state of the world at the time. But the fact is one, which on many accounts it is important to understand and hold in mind. Romanism in later times was not embosomed generally in moral associations so bad as those of this older period; and its worst social phases at the present time, as we are accustomed to think of them in connection with such countries as Spain or Italy or Austria, are far less revolting than the life of nominal Christendom in Europe generally, and throughout North Africa, in the days of Augustine. If modern Catholicism may be convicted of being a false religion on this ground, it is certain that the whole Christianity of the Nicene