confidential conversation, renewed again and again, by the Bishop himself, and by able and earnest chaplains,-it is by the manifestly serious effort of the ordaining prelate, to learn without mistake, the state of the candidate's heart before God; that the true pastor will be brought into action, and trained to make full proof of his ministry, and to do the work of an evangelist, who saves both his own soul and those that hear him. And if an objection is allowed to prevail, on the score of the length or the arduousness of such a scrutiny, and the impracticability of maintaining such a system of vigilance, in an establishment so extensive and numerous, the answer is, that without it, the true interests of the constitution are betrayed, and its objects sacrificed ;—" the hedge is broken down, and the wild boar out of the wood doth waste it." We may retain the form of godliness, but we shall be strangers to its power. The Bishop says on this part of the subject; "So much labour has been spent, and so much perverted enquiry employed, in mystifying the requirements of common honesty in this matter, that they who are charged to enforce subscription as a preliminary to conferring orders, seems to me compelled to be even painfully explicit." Of course, holding such views, neither Dr. Wilberforce nor we can have any sympathy with the fastidious delicacy of the Head of Brazenose, who has so fractiously thwarted the judicious exercise of patronage by the Dean of Manchester, on the ground that to ask close and searching questions, "implies an injurious and insulting suspicion of integrity." Such an objection, if it is worth anything, would sweep away all safeguards, subscriptions, and examinations, and would assuredly be the very last course adopted by the school from which it emanates. Our remarks will be well borne out by the following queries, from the Bishop's charge :

"Are you living as a witness for Christ, or for Antichrist? Are you resisting sloth, the rule of pleasure and self-indulgence, or are you yielding to them? Are you now cursing your brethren, or not caring for them, or are you already blessing them? Is your Lord dear to you? Have you groaned beneath the burthen of your sinful being? And has he turned, or is he promising to turn, those groans to joy? Do you know anything of the sinfulness of sin, of the sharpness and hardness of maintaining a warfare with it? Is the Christian life a reality in you? Do you know indeed what it is to have a place in the kingdom of grace, and in the strength of that grace do you desire to gather in the lost to Christ, their Lord and yours? In your present position are you seeking to live so as to glorify God? and is it your great aim in choosing this more especial service within the courts of his house, that you may glorify him more abundantly?"-(pp. 12, 13.)

We perceive, gladly, that on one point, and that a main one in Christian and pastoral training, Dr. Wilberforce has spoken very strongly, viz. on the supremacy of Holy Scripture.

"We must be deep students of God's word. Where else are we to learn our witness of Christ's resurrection? Here it is written clear and full. The Old Testament in type, shadow, prophecy, and promise; the New in fulfilment, act, history, and grace, show him continually forth. In it, day by day, we must live with him. Thus must our message sink into our own hearts. Even as they who lived with him upon earth, who companied with him ‘all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among them,' learned unawares, day by day, the truth they needed, so must it be with us. His word must be our meditation, our study, the subject of our prayers, the matter for our selfexamination, the instructor of our praises, our guide, our light, our refreshment, our teacher. We must scrupulously exclude all rival teachers; the holiest and best must not come into any competition with it. Not in the early Church, not in the holiest fathers, not in recorded visions, not in any or all of these are we to learn the witness of Jesus,-but in his word. It is at this day of the greatest moment to be explicit here. Want of clearness on this point, more, I believe, than anything besides, has tended to the unsettlement and fall of those who once seemed to be pillars of the faith amongst us. Once let the mind begin to allow itself to look out of God's word for some clearer light than is there to be found, and it is the prey of every phantom and delusion. Once begin to set your scriptural faith right by your gleanings amongst fathers and councils, and there is no amount of error which you may not most logically develope. Let us clearly understand what God's gift to us in holy scripture is, how alone and unapproachable it stands, and we shall be safe from these delusions. What that gift is, we cannot surely doubt. To the Church at the beginning, in the persons of the apostles, was given, by the first outpouring of the Spirit, the full knowledge of the revelation of God in Christ as far as man can receive it. They knew all that can be known until we see 'face to face.' There was no limit in the communication, no invincible imperfection in its recipients. Here the words of Christ are plain: When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into ALL TRUTH;' 'but the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father shall send in my name, he shall teach you ALL THINGS;" and that which they thus knew perfectly by revelation, they unerringly wrote down beneath the guidance of the same Spirit. God's written word is the transcript of that revelation. In it Christ is revealed, and revealeth the Father by the Holy Ghost; so that here, and here only, is THE TRUTH ;-not the germ of truth to be developed, but all saving truth which can by any be received."-(pp. 28-30.)

This is a most valuable testimony against one of the most corrupting and ruinous errors of the Romanizing party. We agree with the Bishop most fully; and are satisfied that a sound opinion on this great point has force ultimately to purify and correct every erroneous notion, which a man may have been led by extraneous influences to entertain. One of these errors, however, immediately follows this very valuable statement; and one which, we doubt not, the writer will at length see to be incompatible with his former opinion. The Bishop says:—

"Of this truth the Church was to be the keeper and the witness;' to her was given, not to discover more, but to preserve uncorrupted what she had received; to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints; and this she was to do, first by exhibiting in appointed acts and institutions what she had at first with the fullest clearness received-and hence her authority as an historical witness to facts; and secondly, as well by keep. ing uncorrupt the sincere word of inspiration, as by fixing with logical exactness, in opposition to the various glosses of heretics or the vagaries of private

interpretation, what had always been received as the true doctrinal interpretation of that text of scripture which admitted of a diverse rendering-and hence the authority of early creeds and universal consent, which rest, not on any power of development, but on the power of being a true witness conceded to the Church; who cannot coin new truth, but can witness to the King's mint-mark upon his own coinage; who cannot add one iota to the necessary faith, but who hath authority in matters of faith,' declaring, as a faithful witness, amidst the necessary uncertainties of language, how at all times THE ONE INSPIRED RECORD hath been understood."-(pp. 30, 31.)

The

Dr. Wilberforce has surely mistaken here both the order of words in the article, and the sense which they were intended to convey; and the first error has led to the subsequent one. article runs thus :-" Quare licet Ecclesia sit sacrorum librorum testes et conservatrix." This is very distinct. The subject is the "sacred books," and the church is affirmed to be in the first place a witness to the books, as being those originally delivered to the church's care; and in the next place she is a conservatrix, keeper or guardian of them, from the corruption, adulteration or excision, to which they might have been liable; but on their being so preserved, they speak on their own authority in every age, and to every reader with divine power for themselves. But, if instead of this, we are to assume that the church, (i.e., in the sense of those who so use the term, the body of clergy,) is to be accounted the keeper, not of the books merely, but, of "the truth" in the books, and witnesses of what that truth is, the church has then come, in a new and inadmissible character, between mankind and the scriptures of God, and one on which the article predicates nothing. It presents an authoritative interpretation, and calls upon the people to hang on the lips of the church, or the clergy, for a testimony and assurance as to that which is to be believed. This notion of the church's authority, "to fix with logical exactness, the true doctrinal interpretation of the text," comes very little short of the Romish requisition to receive the meaning of scripture "according to the unanimous consent of the fathers," and would soon land the christian community, and individual consciences, in serious difficulty. Where does this power of infallible witness to truth exist? Is it in the clergy alone, or the clergy and laity together? Is it in the men of by-gone times; or in the men of to-day? Is it in the convocation of 1562, that framed our articles, or that of 1571, which ratified them, or in both, and therefore inevitably gone by, and lost for ever? Or is it in any convocation to be assembled to-morrow, and which might at last repudiate the sound teaching of the Reformation, and stamp with its imprimatur, if not "The Ideal of a true Church," at least the semi-pelagianism of the dominant party? Is this accredited and endorsed truth to be found in the dogmatizing of a

con

restless sect, whose sentiments have been annually varying for these last ten years, and who have most of them ended their strange course by denouncing the community, which originally they spired" to defend, as being no part of the Church of Christ at all? How accurately and how wisely have our Articles defined the position and authority of the divine record, and the relative position of the Christian community! The code of doctrinal averments is not to pass current and demand acceptance because the Church puts her stamp upon it, but because it speaks for itself in the record. We must receive it there, as it is abundantly evidenced to be, and "as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh in them that believe." The literal and grammatical meaning of Scripture rules all interpretation and preaching, and prohibits the intrusion of any thing additional or at variance with it. No other course is safe. We repeat the Bishop's weighty words, "Once let the mind begin to allow itself to look out of God's word for some clearer light than is there to be found, and it is the prey of every phantom and delusion." We feel assured that the Bishop will readily perceive the incongruity of the two views which he has given. The one, of the paramount authority of God's word;— the other, the paramount authority of the Church as an interpreter. The error in his mind will be more readily discovered, by his notice of the inverse order in which he has been unconsciously led to quote, in support of his position, the words of the Article. He says "the keeper and the witness:" and so it is always quoted by that restless and cunning party, who know the value to themselves of the inversion. They quote it falsely, with a bad intention, till it fixes its domicile on the ear, and then from mere habit good men so quote it also. But the order is of vast importance to the meaning. Had the compilers of the Articles intended to affirm the notion of the Bishop, they would have said as he says"first a keeper, and then a witness." But they do not. They say, the Church first witnesses to the books, and then keeps them. The perverted order alters the character and application of the word "witness," and makes it capable of the gloss, that it is a witness to the contents. This is only one instance out of many, of that dishonest spirit which seems almost invariably to accompany a Romanizing tendency. They garble and pervert with unblushing boldness, till the error fastens on the mind of the fairest and most honourable men. It shows us every day more fully the value of strict verbal accuracy; the importance of taking nothing for granted in dealing with them. It teaches us also thankfulness for the "logical exactness " of our Reformers. If they under any insidious influence had negligently permitted the inversion of the order of

these two nouns, they would have gone far towards compromising a vital doctrine.

On another subject also, we could have wished that the Bishop had been more explicit. It is called for by the character of the times and the special aspect of its controversies. He says:

"They (i. e. the ministers) are sent to bear witness of Christ's resurrection. This is their whole charge; for all is shut up in this. They come from God to the world with the message of reconciliation; and this message is, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself'-the incarnation of the eternal Son, his death, his rising again; and from this the truth of the ever-blessed Trinity, and man's restored relation to his God, this is their witness this is what the heart of one and another longs for unconsciously: this is what the mortification and asceticism of the natural man are so humbly craving for where they can never find it: this is that which will meet all the world's needs. This simple declaration of the truth of God was that which, when He gave us in this land the marvellous blessing of the Reformation, supplied the pressing necessities of that time; it is this which will meet our urgent needs at this time. By it only, and through it by bringing out the relation of redeemed man to the ever-blessed Trinity, can we supply to ourselves and ours that unity and common life of which there is, alas! so little, and for which so many are disposed to seek amongst the dead, amongst the cere-cloths and wrappings of an ancient superstition.

"This, then, my reverend brethren, is henceforth to be your charge; you are to witness of life to a dead world, of light to them that sit in darkness. Christ's resurrection is to be the beginning and ending of your message.' -(pp. 26, 27.)

This is in many respects a valuable statement; and yet there is one essentially momentous feature of the doctrine of the resurrection which is entirely lost sight of. It is also that very doctrine which has been the most bitterly assailed and calumniated by the Tractarians and which has been ever affirmed by the Reforming fathers, to be the test of a standing or a falling Church. On the doctrine of justification by faith, the Bishop has said nothing. And yet this is one of the most important objects of the resurrection. "Christ was delivered for our offences and raised again for our justification." The doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus, is the doctrine of a free pardon to the sinner who believes. And in the teaching of the apostles, both to Jews and Gentiles, (Acts ii. 13-15.) the acquittal of the apprehended criminal is shown to turn absolutely and entirely on the release of the surety from the prison of death and the grave. In the Bishop's enumeration of the blessings flowing to us from the resurrection, this essential truth is omitted. We do not for an instant surmise that as to the doctrine he has the slightest hesitation; but at the present crisis, we should have been glad to see it, where it ought ever to be, occupying the head and front of the battle, and set forth as the only true and firm foundation of peace to the human soul. It is against this truth that Rome and her secret