the controversy connected with it, conveys a lesson for this, and, we may add, for all generations of believers. When we speak of its adjustment, we do not refer to any conciliar action in the premises, but to its end and to the mode of its end.

Irenæus, in writing against heretics and heresies, mentions the Ebionites as a Jewish-Christian sect living apart from the com munion of the Catholic Church. They clung to the belief that the observance of the Law was still binding upon men, although they continued to accept Jesus as the Messiah. No one can doubt that these were the successors of the Judaizers of the Apostolic age, the enemies of St. Paul, of the party that wished to identify Law and Gospel. They lingered along for centuries a miserable death-in-life not fed by the juices of the living Church, not blessed by God, not able to do anything or to say any word for the good of men. The Church in Abyssinia, we believe, still continues to practice the rite of Circumcision, and thus the Ebionites, after a fashion, may be said to have perpetuated themselves on the confines of Christian civilization. The Church did not cut them off in technical form, but true to their master idea of the "concision" they cut themselves off. By insisting upon something as necessary to salvation, as part of the new economy which did not belong to it, they lost the Church's sense of the Being of Christ and His work, they misunderstood the entire drift of the Gospel; they rejected St. Paul's view of it and used only a gospel according to the Hebrews. They disappear from the life of Christianity, and Pella is at once a byword and a wonder alike to Jew and to Christian. The more moderate of them remained within the Church, and their Jewish feelings were soon lost in the stream of Gentile faith. And so the controversy ceased. It ceased because the men who had fomented it, had no longer a thought which belonged to the real fortunes of the Christian Church. The Church no longer cared for what the Judaizers said; its sphere of activity and the level of its thought were different from theirs. The two parted company-the one with a great future before it growing and spreading, the other poor and imbecile, clinging to a past the significance of which it did not comprehend. But the Church in her thoughts and institutions bore no marks of a mere ultraism over against the Judaizers. There was a party, indeed, that repudiated everything Jewish, but it too fell away from the communion of the great body of believers. The Church accepted St. Paul's teachings respecting the Law. It preserved the Jewish Canon of Scripture; it held and recognized the historic continuity and development of Revelation until it reached its culminating point in the Lord Jesus Christ. How absurd to

regard the Catholic stand-point of the second century as a sort of compromise between Petrine and Pauline Christianity; absurd in the highest degree when we bear in mind that St. Paul's own words, written in the heat of the controversy, were reverently held from first to last as the truth respecting the relation of the Law to the Gospel. And yet Dr. Baur and his friends assure us that a compromise alone explains the posture of the Church. No wonder that Bunsen speaks of "the Tübingen Romance."

We have seen that the Judaizers finding their aspirations and notions of no avail within the Church separated from it. The controversy died because none were left to do duty in behalf of the Judaizing interest. This is but the symbol of the end of all parties identical in spirit with their own. All along the course of history men are found maintaining with the greatest pertinacity the force and authority of certain institutions or notions which may indeed have been good and valuable in their day, but are so no longer. When this happens, then if they adhere to their position they soon view all interests, human and divine, from the narrow stand-point of their own thought. It soon becomes their all; and they are all the more - violent and bitter just in proportion as they behold the living world moving on in its mighty march and leaving them behind. From the days of the Judaizers all along the course of history, one movement has followed another, party interests have divided Churches and communities; fierce invective has been heard in the house of God; fierce hatred been exhibited in the family of Jesus Christ; things have hung in equipoise, but the false has dropped off, and the Church in the possession of the unchanging truth of the Gospel has moved on. She weds at times indeed other things than true; appears covered over with the growth of centuries, but the wind and storm of thought carry these away, and that which remains is that which was in the beginning." Forms of thought undergo modifications and changes. It were folly then to spend our strength upon anything which does not belong to the proper life of the Christian Church. Our party interests, our narrow notions perish. This is the law of the Church's existence. That alone, in the ordering of Almighty God, remains which is essential to her life, her progress, and her final completion.

ART. II.-THE REV. JAMES MURDOCK, D. D.

PERHAPS We need offer no apology for inserting the following Article. It is prompted not only by our own sense of what is due to the memory of Dr. Murdock, but also by the fact of his personal and valued acquaintance with many of the leading divines and scholars of the Church, and still more by the remembrance of his efficient labors in the cause of sound learning and Ecclesiastical History, by which he will long be known and honored by many to whom he was personally a stranger. Besides, the life of so distinguished a scholar, and so excellent a man, may not be without its value, especially to the young men of the present day. The history of the Murdock family, and most of the leading facts in his own life, we take from the "Memoirs of the Class of 1797," published in 1848.

JAMES MURDOCK was born, Feb. 16th, 1776, at Westbrook, Middlesex County, Ct., of Protestant Scotch-Irish descent. His great great grandfather, JOHN MURDOCK, was a wool-comber in Limeric, in Ireland, during the reigns of Charles II, and James II. He married Mary Munson, had one son and three daughters, lost all his property in the siege of Limeric in 1691, and died about the year 1695. His only son, PETER MURDOCK, born at Limeric in 1679, came to America about the year 1700, married Mary Fithin of East Hampton, on Long Island, where he spent most of his life. He accumulated a handsome property, and died at Westbrook in 1753, aged 74. His only child, JOHN MURDOCK, was born at East Hampton in 1706, removed early to Westbrook, became a large farmer, was Major of the Provincial troops, Deacon in the Congregational Church, and Judge in the Court of Common Pleas. He died at Westbrook in 1778, aged 72. His first wife was Phebe Sill of Lyme, who died ten months after marriage. His second wife was Frances Conklin of East Hampton. She bore him thirteen children, seven sons and six daughters, all of whom lived to maturity. She died in 1799, aged 86. Three of the sons of John Murdock, graduated at Yale College; viz, Peter, graduated in 1755, and died the same year; Jonathan, graduated in 1766, became a Congregational minister, and died at Bozrah in 1813, aged 68; James, graduated in 1774, settled over the Congregational Church in Sandgate, Vt., removed to Martinsburg, N. Y., and died at Crown Point in 1840, aged 84. The other

sons were all farmers. ABRAHAM, the eleventh child and sixth son, died at Westbrook in 1777, aged 26, leaving two young children; Anna, who married J. J. Avery of Groton, bore him twelve children, and died in 1817, aged 44; and JAMES, the subject of this memoir. The wife of Abraham Murdock and mother of James, was Hannah Lay of Westbrook, a daughter of Jonathan Lay, senior, and sister of Judge Jonathan Lay of Westbrook. She married, for her second husband, Seth Smith, Esq., of East Lyme, bore him two sons, and died in 1824, aged 70.

JAMES MURDOCK, an orphan at the age of fourteen months, passed his childhood partly in East Lyme, and partly in Westbrook, with no peculiar advantages for education till the age of fifteen, when he commenced fitting for College with his uncle, Rev. Jonathan Murdock of Bozrah. He entered College, poorly fitted, in October, 1793, at the age of seventeen years, joined the College Church in October, 1794, and graduated in 1797,-taking the second appointment in a Class distinguished for talents and attainments. He bore away also the Berkeleian Premium, given to the best scholar in the Class, and to the one who passes the best examination in Latin and Greek. Thus, notwithstanding the defects of his early education, and his youth, he already gave indications of his future eminence as a scholar.

"His class," says one, "was the first which came fairly under the formative influence of President Dwight, the class of 1797-a class in many respects remarkable. Its first classmeeting, after graduation, was at the close of half a century. At that time twenty-four out of thirty-seven were still living, and twelve of them were present to rehearse to each other the experiences of fifty years. The successive College tutors of that class were James Gould, Roger Minot Sherman, and Josiah Meigs. The effect of their training, under those men and the illustrious President, appears in the stations they have held and in the work they have done for their country and for the world. Such names as Henry Baldwin, (a Judge of the Supreme Court of the U. S.,) Lyman Beecher, Diodate Brockway, (long a Fellow of Yale College,) Thomas Day, (Secretary of Connecticut, and long editor of Day's Reports,) Samuel A. Foot, (Governor of Connecticut, and U. S. Senator,) George Griffin and Seth P. Staples, (so eminent in the legal profession,) and Horatio Seymour, (U. S. Senator from Vermont,)-show what the class was. Every one of the thirty-seven was a native of New England."

In the November following, he became Preceptor of the

Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven. Relinquishing that office in March, 1799, he commenced the study of theology under President Dwight. In the following autumn, in conjunction with his Classmate, Rev. John Niles, he took charge, for one year, of Hamilton Oneida Academy, now Hamilton College, at Clinton, N. Y. In September, 1800, he_resumed the study of theology under the Rev. A. S. Norton, D. D., of Clinton, was licensed in January, 1801, by the Oneida Association, supplied New Hartford till April, and then returned to New Haven. During the summer of 1801, he preached sometime at Oxford, Conn., as a supply, and spent four weeks in the family of Rev. Azel Backus, D. D., of Bethlehem, both supplying his pulpit and instructing in his private academy. In the fall of that year, he was invited to preach as a candidate at Princeton, Worcester County, Mass. In February, 1802, he received a unanimous call to settle there, and was ordained the June following. For some years his ministry seemed to produce little fruit, but in 1810 it was attended by a revival, in which about fifty persons, most of them heads of families, were added to the church. While at Princeton, Mr. Murdock was a close student, and made considerable advances, particularly in sacred literature. In 1815, being appointed Professor of the learned languages in the University of Vermont, he resigned his pastoral charge and removed to Burlington, where he officiated, not only as Professor of the learned languages, but also as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. In 1818, he was elected Professor of Languages in Dartmouth College, an office which he declined. In the spring of 1819, being appointed Brown Professor of Sacred Rhetoric and Ecclesiastical History in the Theological Seminary at Andover, he left Vermont and returned to Massachusetts. In the autumn of that year, Harvard University conferred on him the honorary degree of S. T. D. Difficulties soon afterwards arose between him and the other Professors, respecting his course of duties in the Seminary, which continued several years, and at last issued, in 1828, in his dismission from the Institution. He removed to New Haven in 1829, where he continued to reside, retired very much from public life, and devoted to private studies and especially to Ecclesiastical History. For a few years he preached and delivered lectures in different places, but of late seldom appeared as a public speaker. made an honorary member of the New York Historical Society several years ago; also Vice President, and recently President, of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was

He was