cause them to appear the same. The Creed of the one, is the Lie of the other. What was the mystery of godliness in the old church, this new faith unblushingly declares to be the mystery of iniquity. In such circumstances we have no choice, except to say with which of the two interests we hold it best to make common cause. To justify the one, is necessarily to condemn the other. To show respect towards this new faith, because it is outwardly respectable, must we cover with reproach and disgrace the old faith from the days of Polycarp and Ignatius to those of Ambrose and Augustine? Do we owe no respect also, and no charity, to the first Christian ages? What right indeed can those have to demand our tenderness and forbearance, in so grave a case, who make no account whatever of the reputation or credit of whole centuries of past Christian history, but modestly require us to set them all down as heretical and false over against themselves? What is the peculiar merit of this Baptistic Puritanism, a thing comparatively of yesterday, that it should be allowed thus to insult all Christian antiquity, and have full exemption at the same time from every unfavorable judgment upon its own pretensions and claims?" What!" we may well say to it in the language of St. Paul," Came the word of God out from you; or came it unto you only?" Who art thou, upstart system! that thou shouldst set thyself in such proud style above the universal church of antiquity-the immediate successors of the Apostles, the noble army of martyrs, the goodly fellowship of the fathers, the vast cloud of witnesses that look down upon us from these ages of faith-charging it with wholesale superstition and folly, and requiring us to renounce its creed, the whole scheme and habit of its religious life, and to accept from thy hands, in place of it, another form of belief, another scheme of doctrine altogether, as infallibly true and right? Who gave thee this authority? Whence came such infallibility?

With immense self-complacency, the system lays its hand on the Bible, and says: This is my warrant. Aye, but who is to interpret this written revelation? Reason, replies the system. "The Bible is the church's supreme law, reason is her court. The Bible is the compass; reason, lighted by the Spirit of God, is the binnacle lamp." There we have it. Reason, every man's reason for himself, the world's private judgment and common sense with such religious illumination as it may come to in its own sphere, is the court, the tribunal, by which the law in this case is to take the form of truth and life. Is that not rationalism almost without disguise? What more could the worst radi.

calism ask or want? But for the present, let that pass. Baptistic Puritanism appeals to the Bible. We now boldly deny, that it has the Bible on its side. This goes on the contrary full as much against its claims and pretensions throughout, as Christian antiquity itself. When it seems to have any part of the Bible in its favor, it is only by reading into it in the first place its own sense, by begging before hand the whole question in debate, by taking for granted what is to be proved, and by making its own rationalistic hypothesis in this way the standpoint from which is taken afterwards every observation of the Divine text. Even then the result is at best but a lame and forced construction. The New Testament is as far removed, as it well can be, from the Baptistic and Independent habit of mind. It proceeds throughout on the assumption, that Christianity is a mystery, a constitution above nature, objectively at hand under a real historical form in the world, to which men must submit by faith in such view in order to be saved. This of itself involves the whole doctrine of the Church, with its Divine jurisdiction and heavenly powers, its ministry starting from Christ, its grace bearing sacraments, its unity and catholicity, the universal course of the new creation, we may say, as it is made to pass before us in the Creed. Only let the standpoint of this old faith be taken, in reading the Scriptures, the same that was occupied by the church in the beginning, and it will soon be found all that is needed, to expose the huge illusions of the Baptistic exegesis, and to set the Bible before us in a wholly different light and sense.

And why should not this old standpoint be taken, when we thus approach the Bible? Why should we renounce the posture of faith in which the ancient church stood, and take, at the bidding of Puritanism, what must be considered as compared with it a posture of infidelity or no-faith, that we may be supposed to study God's word to purpose and effect? The absurdity of such a requirement is greater than can be easily expressed. Its most enormous presumption may well fill us with wonder and surprise.

J. W. N

THE

MERCERSBURG REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1852.

VOL. IV.----NO. VI.

CYPRIAN.

Fourth and Last Article.

THE year 252 brought with it new trials for the Christian Church. There would seem to be a mysterious sympathy between the moral and physical worlds, by which every great catastrophe or crisis in the first is found to be marked more or less distinctly by corresponding tokens and signs in the second. When the foundations of society are about to give way, men's hearts are made often to faint and fear by strange signs of wrath in the course of nature. So it was before the destruction of Jerusalem; and something of the same sort we meet with in the last period of the old Pagan empire of Rome. The decline of the state, the breaking up of the ancient order of life, seemed to draw along with it calamity and disaster in all conceivable forms. The universal course of the world was so ordered, as to proclaim continually its own vanity and misery. On this subject we may learn much from Augustine. Long before his time however, these signs of wrath had begun to show themselves in the economy of God's providence, filling whole lands with ap

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prehension and fear. Wars, rumors of wars, famine, pestilence, and flood, united with the sense of perpetual political insecurity, to make men weary of the present, and to beget within them a feeling of desperation at the same time with regard to the future. At the time of which we now speak, under the reign of Gallus and Volusianus, a most fearful plague was moving, like a Divine curse, over the length and breadth of the civilized world. With this were joined in some parts of the empire other public calamities, such as drought and famine. As usual, these visitations served to inflame the popular heathen mind against the followers of Christ. They were regarded always as the enemies of the reigning order of things; they refused to take part in the religious sacrifices that were ordered to propitiate the gods; and it became a merit accordingly, in the eyes of fanaticism, to stir up the magistrates against them as a class of persons who had no right to live. The way was opened thus for a new persecution.

It was in reference to this, that the term of penitential discipline was cut short, as already remarked, in the case of those who had before fallen and were now seeking to be restored again to the peace of the church. "Inasmuch as we see," Cyprian writes to Cornelius of Rome in the name of a whole African council (Ep. 57), "that the day of another persecution is close at hand, and are admonished by many urgent signs to arm and prepare ourselves for the conflict set before us by the enemy, as also by our exhortations to get in readiness the people whom God has deigned to commit to our charge, and to gather within the Lord's camp all his soldiers who call for arms and ask to be led to battle-we have judged, in obedience to necessity, that reconciliation should be given to such as have not forsaken the church, but have persevered since the first day of their fall in doing penance, bewailing their sin and imploring mercy of the Lord, and that they ought to be equipped and furnished for the struggle which is drawing near. For heed must be given to the fair signs and warnings of the time, that the sheep may not be left exposed by the shepherds, but the whole flock be collected together, and the Lord's army made ready for the contest of the heavenly war." In such circumstances it might be trusted, that no improper advantage would be taken of this indulgence. It was to be hoped that penitents thus restored would be found ready now, with others, to die for their faith; in which case the reconciliation would turn out to have been on the part of the bishops, "whose office it was as priests to celebrate daily sacrifices to God," a true priestly function preparing victims for the

glorious altar of martyrdom. If however any should seek restoration without this mind, they must be left to the judgment of the Lord. It was not meet that their fault should stand in the way of so great a benefit, in favor of others who might be ready in truth to embrace the martyr's crown. "Nor let any one object," the epistle goes on to say, " that he who receives martyrdom is baptized in his own blood, and needs no peace from the bishop, having in prospect the crown of a higher acceptance and more glorious reward from the Lord. For in the first place, no one can be equal to martyrdom, who is not armed for battle by the church, and the mind must fail which is not raised and inflamed by the participation of the eucharist. Our Lord says in his Gospel When they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak; for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak; for it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you' (Matth. x: 19, 20). But when it is said that the Spirit of the Father speaks in those who are delivered up and called to confess the Saviour's name, how can any one be found ready and prepared for such confession, who shall not first have received by the peace of the church the Spirit of the Father, who himself speaks and confesses in us by the strength he imparts to his servants?" Then in the second place, if flight were chosen instead of the martyr's crown, and the penitent should be cut off by untimely death in the period of his exile, " must it not be laid to our account that so good a soldier, who gave up all and forsook house and parents and children to follow his Lord, has departed this life without peace and communion?" May not the shepherds be charged in the day of judgment with unfaithfulness to their trust, who thus neglect the sheep so solemnly committed to their hands?

No military chief, on the eve of battle, could be more solicitous for the good conduct of his soldiers, than Cyprian was that the professed servants of Christ should quit themselves valiantly for the faith in this new trial. His care and zeal extended to places at a distance, as well as to his own immediate charge. We have a long admirable letter from him addressed to the people of Thibaris, which sounds still like the voice of a heavenly trumpet, calling upon men to forsake all joyfully for Christ. He sees the fashion of the world passing away, the last time evidently at hand, the power of Antichist ready to appear in full revelation; and finds in all this only the stronger reason for renouncing its expectations in every form, and making full earnest with the promise of life and immortality contained in the Gospel. Let persecutions come. They were to be expected.