the estimation even of able and good and holy men, is nothing more than a mere assembly of men combined for the purpose of serving God, meeting together to hear His word; and regulating their union by such rules as appear to them most accordant thereto. And hence it follows that Dr. Chalmers cannot know the blessedness which the ministers of the English Church feel in tracing their right to the ministry immediately to an Apostolical commission. He tells us that he regards all the Evangelical sects as equally Apostolical; and those who deny the claim he designates as" domineering Churchmen who arrogate a mystic superiority to themselves." Alas! how little do men often understand of the real feelings and motives of those whom they censure! It is the consciousness of personal unworthiness which leads a minister of Christ most prominently to put forward his divine commission. He claims to be heard; is it strange, is it domineering, if he adds, "Hear me, although unworthy, because I come to you sent by those who have received express commission from God to send forth labourers into His vineyard." On what other title could he rest his claim? Shall he say, Hear me for I am your minister?" This may be a valid appeal to those who have voluntarily joined themselves to any religious society, but what force would it have when addressed to those of whom Dr. Chalmers chiefly speaks, the outcasts from all religious societies, the ignorant, the neglected, the obdurate? Shall he say, "Hear me for I am holier than thou?" Surely his very claim would prove its own refutation. What is it then upon which Dr. Chalmers would have him ground his pretensions? He tells us that neither he nor the ministers of the English Church have any more Apostolical authority than those independent teachers, who avowedly rest their claim to be ministers on the choice of their congregations voluntarily recognising their ministry. On what authority would he have us appeal to men and demand their submission? On the authority of the State. He tells us that it is by virtue of a compact with the government that the ministers of an establishment undertake the care of the whole population. Before they were established, they were the ministers only of such as willingly recognised them; when established they assume the care of all within their several districts. He tells us that in the established Church of Ireland, for instance, in the last century, "There was a mistaken policy, maintained and avowed even by their best clergymen, in the form of an honest though grievously mistaken principle as if they went beyond their legitimate province if they at all meddled with the Catholic (i. e. Romish) population."-p. 127. And what is his inference? ing the vineyard of the Lord? NO. LI.—JULY, 1839. Does he accuse them of neglect- R high calling as Christian ministers; as forgetful of His words who bade His Apostles preach the Gospel unto every creature? by no means: he only blames them for not having "Done what they might or what they ought for the cultivation of the vineyard made over by the State to their care; and which in return for their maintenance they should by this time have put into right order and now been keeping in order."-p. 125. Well may Dr. Chalmers call upon the Church of England to abandon "her mysterious and transcendental pretensions." From the day that any clergyman adopts his theory, he must come to his parishioners at large as one who derives his claim to be a minister at all, only from the choice of one out of ten thousand Churches of human origin and authority; as one who claims to be heard by them only as sent to them with a commission from the State! And can it really be that at this moment when Popery is labouring to advance her cause on every side of us; can it be that the English clergy are urged at this very moment by a sincere friend to adopt a course so suicidal? So it is: and that friend, with all his great and acknowledged ability, with all his disinterested zeal, believes that he is doing us good service; because, alas! having never experienced it, he knows not what it is to be the bearer of an Apostolical commission; to stand forth, not as the minister of an Evangelical Protestant denomination, but as the priest of the one Catholic and Apostolic Church. But shall we in the hour of battle change our panoply of gold for a covering of rags? shall we prepare ourselves to meet those who advance with high although unfounded claim of a divine commission by laying aside that which we do really possess and ranging ourselves as the servants of the State? ἦ κεν γηθήσαι Πρίαμος, Πριάμοιό τε παῖδες. Great would be the exultation at Rome, loud the exclamations of Stoneyhurst and Maynooth, at such an act of infatuation. And even if the result were sure to be otherwise; if we could allure back the wanderers from our communion, if we could ensure a political victory for the Establishment, we dare not do it at the cost of so many essential parts of that truth, wherewith we have been charged not by man but by God. Even could it be shown that by holding fast our present claims we ensure the confiscation of the property of the English Church and the downfal of the happiness of England (could this be shown, as it never can), we dare not change our course. It were a great evil that England should defile herself with another national sacrilege, a great evil that she should forfeit her national prosperity; but it were a much greater evil that we should prefer even our country to Him who has said- "Whoso loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me;" to His Church, and to His truth. It were a greater evil to her no less than to ourselves for however great may be her guilt, there remains a hope while the Church, her holy guest, stands still in the midst of her with her white robes unstained before the altar of her God, to intercede, according to her vocation, even for her enemies. But who can express the misery of that nation whose light is become darkness of that people among whom the Church of God herself has come under the awful denunciation, " Cursed is the man that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, and in his heart departeth from the Lord." Dr. Chalmers indeed maintains that the Church may accept the terms which he proposes without any sacrifice of her purity. She may "enter into the service of the state," she may " receive the vineyard from the state," she may "abandon all mysterious and transcendental pretensions," without losing any of her purity. Far from us be the thought! Wealth indeed in itself is dangerous to the Church, but she needs it as an instrument to be employed for the good of the people; and moreover, when the hearts of Churchmen are warmed aright to love and honour her for the sake of her Lord, if they have it they cannot refrain from offering it to her use. Thus it is that the Church, which often flourishes most in the hour of poverty, cannot long continue to flourish without becoming rich. This is the Lord's appointment, and riches thus acquired, although not insensible of their dangerous quality, the Church has ever thankfully accepted. But endowments acquired as Dr. Chalmers recommends, by a sacrifice of some of her principles, would be but the forty pieces of silver given to the disciple as the price of his treason to his Lord. "I, if I yet please men, am not the servant of Christ." If any Church be taken into the service of the state, she has become false to her Lord; she is no true servant of Christ; she is married to another. Nor is this any hypothesis of our own. If our readers would know the effect which the system of Dr. Chalmers is calculated to produce even upon the highest minds, they need not look farthey need only go to the lectures before us. The author of those lectures is a man of high and cultivated intellectual powers; he is a man of undoubted piety and sincerity, of a spirit altogether elevated above selfish and interested motives; he is therefore no fair specimen of the natural tendency of his principles and of their practical working on the minds of ordinary men. And yet he is himself a proof that a man cannot cease to recognise the blessed doctrine of the Catholic Church-that he cannot cease to see Christ present in mystery in His Church, and begin to regard it only as a piece of human machinery, without going on to lean upon man, even in things which he will himself admit to be purely spiritual, without subjecting to the human intellect that which is confessedly divine. Let our readers observe that the words which we are about to quote from Dr. Chalmers express no transient opinion-they were not inconsiderately spoken-they were not even hastily written, but they have been published by him repeatedly as his solemn and deliberate opinion. First, they formed part of a sermon, then that sermon was published, and lastly, they are quoted, so high is the author's sense of their importance, in a note to the volume before us. "While we cannot but lament the deadly mischief, which the secondrate philosophy of infidels has done to the inferior spirits of our world; we feel it almost a proud thing for Christianity that all the giants and the men of might of other days, the Newtons, the Boyles, the Lockes, and the Bacons of high England, have worshipped so profoundly at its shrine. But chief of these is our great Sir Isaac."-(Note, p. 121.) * A proud thing, be it observed, not for our nation, or for our national Church, or for our national religion; but for Christianity, for the faith of Christ, that Sir Isaac Newton worshipped at its shrine! It is the deliberate, the often-reiterated judgment of Dr. Chalmers, that the Creator of the world became flesh and lived and laboured and died in order to found a religion; and yet that for the faith so founded it is a proud thing to have been received by one of the sinners whom He came to redeem from everlasting misery; only because that miserable sinner happened to be somewhat superior to his fellows in intellectual powers. If we had met with such a statement in Gibbon or Voltaire, we should have turned from it as a most revolting blasphemy. Finding it where we do, shall we not heartily pray God to defend the English Church from the prevalence of views, which when adopted by the mind of Thomas Chalmers, can lead him to declare it a proud thing for the religion of Christ, that it was the religion of Sir Isaac Newton? * It were beside the question to inquire, whether all these great men fully deserved the commendation here bestowed upon their Christianity. MR. EVANS has published a second series of his "Biography of the Early Church" (Rivingtons). Mr. Evans is one of those writers, members of the University of Cambridge, such as the late Mr. Rose and Mr. Chevallier, who, before any thing was published elsewhere, directed the attention of the rising generation to higher and more primitive views of Christian truth than had latterly been in esteem among us. May he long continue to edify the Church by his writings! We do not profess entirely to acquiesce either in his views or his tone; his tone especially is somewhat too literary and intellectual, and, in consequence, too eclectic, to please us; but we are very grateful to him for so good a deed as his dedicating the stores of a rich and imaginative mind to the service of antiquity. While we are utterly surfeited and sick of "Evidences" for Revealed Religion, as we have explained at length in the early part of this Number, we are addressed, as if our appetite was fresh, by a series of fourteen Demonstrations, all about "the necessity of a divine revelation, the genuineness and authenticity of Scripture, its Inspiration, its Miracles, &c. &c." by Ministers of the "Established Church in Glasgow," (Collins) extending to nearly 600 pages, and to copies "8000," stereotyped, and "placed within the reach of the humblest classes." This is munificently and charitably done by a number of gentlemen in Glasgow, but it is melancholy that any serious man should think that this is the way in which truth is savingly propagated or maintained. A suggestion is thrown out in the Preface that "the Evidences" should be "taught in a catechetical form in our juvenile schools." Unhappy scholars! unhappy Church, which having no root in itself and not venturing to speak with authority, is obliged to betake itself to disputations, "never-ending, still beginning!" Can alliance more ill-matched and strange be imagined than this, which sheer necessity has brought about, between pseudo-spiritualism and the evidential method? More venerable surely were the old Covenanters who upheld their Puritanism by the sword, than those who would make Christians by Littleton and Paley. 66 Mr. Coleridge's " Companion to the First Lessons on Sundays, Fasts and Festivals," (Rivingtons) is intended, and well adapted, "to explain briefly and familiarly those passages that occur in them, which, from any cause, are not obviously intelligible by an ordinary reader;" and so to encourage conversation among the members of a family on the facts of Scripture which they have heard read." It is a useful little book, and will be found perhaps to convey instruction to the respected author's brethren in the priesthood, as well as to those for whom it is immediately intended. "Letters to the Authors of the Plain Tracts for Critical Times by a Layman" (Cadell) are thoughtfully written in defence of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and the author finds, “upon perusal, that they directly and most powerfully" tend to a "breach betwixt the Evangelical and High Church parties," and therefore" has been led to attempt a refutation of their contents." |