sight appear a very difficult task to mystify a reader. Yet here our author's failure is really pitiable. He gives a few quotations from fathers and Roman-catholic doctors, upon the scriptures, and then with ridiculous imprudence allows the drift of the entire section to ooze out in the following passage.

"It may be almost laid down as an historical fact, that the mystical interpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall together.”—(p. 324 )

It may almost be laid down, indeed! Why, sir, that was the very thing you ought either to have laid down, or not to have laid down. If you had designed to suggest it by the former mode, you should have boldly enunciated it at the head of your section, and brought your array of patristic quotations to support it, accompanying each, of course, with an elucidation of your own-gentle or strong, as the case might require: or if the passage was at once impracticable and necessary, you should have accommodated it to your purpose, by a mystical interpretation of it. Following here the example of the blessed St. Clement of Alexandria, who finds a proof of the doctrine of the mystical interpretation of scripture, in the mystical interpretation of a text (Strom. 6). If your suggestion of this falsehood was to have been accomplished by the latter mode, you should have remembered the dictum of another exalted dignitary of your Church (not yet canonized that we have heard of-we mean Cardinal Prince Talleyrand), and made every word of your section the means of concealing it. It should have lurked unseen, yet lightly felt, in every sentence. It should have played at hide and seek with the reader through page after page; and if at length it had appeared at all, it should only have been as the issue of a well-feigned struggle of great severity with the remainder of carnal understanding within you. Managed by either of these methods, it would have powerfully aided the cause of your ghostly advisers (be they material or immaterial); but as you have put it, we are thankful to express our firm conviction that it will deceive no one.

But even this blunder sinks into insignificance, when compared with the grand mistake with which Mr. N. concludes this section. We give the passage entire, and the gravity of the mistake must be our apology for the length of the quotation.

"With this passage from Lengerke, a learned German, illustrating the bearing of the allegorical method upon the Judaic and Athanasian controversies, it will be well to compare the following passage from the latitudinarian Hales's Golden Remains,' as directed against the Theology of Rome. 'The literal, plain, and uncontroversable meaning of scripture,' he says, 'without any addition or supply by way of interpretation, is that alone which for ground of faith we are necessarily bound to expect; except it be there, where the Holy Ghost himself treads us out another way. I take not this to

be any particular conceit of mine, but that unto which our Church stands necessarily bound. When we receded from the Church of Rome, one motive was, because she added unto scripture her glosses as canonical, to supply what the plain text of scripture could not yield. If, in place of hers, we set up our own glosses, this to do were nothing else but to pull down Baal, and set up an ephod, to run round and meet the Church of Rome again in the same point in which at first we left her... This doctrine of the literal sense was never grievous or prejudicial to any, but only to those who were inwardly conscious that their positions were not sufficiently grounded. When Cardinal Cajetan, in the days of our grandfathers, had forsaken that vein of postilling and allegorising on scripture, which for a long time had prevailed in the Church, and betaken himself unto the literal sense, it was a thing so distasteful unto the Church of Rome, that he was forced to find out many shifts and make many apologies for himself. The truth is (as it will appear to him that reads his writings), this sticking close to the literal sense was that alone which made him to shake off many of those tenets upon which the Church of Rome and the reformed Churches differ. But when the importunity of the Reformers, and the great credit of Calvin's writings in that kind, had forced the divines of Rome to level their interpretations by the same line; when they saw that no pains, no subtlety of wit was strong enough to defeat the literal evidence of scripture, it drove them on those desperate shoals, on which at this day they stick, to call in question as far as they durst, the credit of the Hebrew text, and countenance against it a corrupt translation; to add traditions unto scripture, and to make the Church's interpretation, so pretended, to be above exception.'

"He presently adds concerning the allegorical sense: If we absolutely condemn these interpretations, then must we condemn a great part of antiquity, who are very much conversant in this kind of interpreting. For the most partial for antiquity cannot choose but see and confess thus much, that for the literal sense, the interpreters of our own times, because of their skill in the original languages, their care of pressing the circumstances and coherence of the text, of comparing like places of scripture with like, have generally surpassed the best of the ancients.'

"The use of scripture then, especially its spiritual or second sense, as a medium of thought and deduction, is a characteristic principle of the development of doctrine in the Church."-(pp. 335-327.)

Now can fatuity go further than this? To conclude a very feeble attempt to support a palpably false position, with a manly, vigorous, unanswerable exposure of his own delusion, copied from an antagonist, and just in the place in his own book where that antagonist would himself have inserted it, is no small mistake, we humbly submit.

If Mr. Newman remains in the Romish communion, we rather think we have seen the last of him, for some time, as a controversialist; and as to the sanction of the proper authorities, why! sooner than put his imprimatur to the book that contains this passage, the Pope would reject Mr. N. and all his disciples!

The following portion of Mr. Newman's book (chap. vi. sect. 1), On the supremacy of faith, need not long detain us. The object of it is of course to perplex the reader, by confounding faith and credulity in his apprehensions. We will not insult our readers with definitions of these terms, which are doubtless familiar to

them. We have merely to observe that the execution here also is deplorably feeble. It abounds with passages of raw unconcocted folly, like this

"I suppose it (faith) hardly had any exercise under the law; the zeal and obedience of the ancient people being employed in the maintenance of divine worship, and the overthrow of idolatry, not in the assertion of opinion."(p. 339.)

An assertion which serves in no degree the matter in hand, yet is imminently dangerous to his purpose. Its sheer and palpable absurdity is very likely to rouse the conscience, and startle the understanding of the reader; whereas Mr. Newman intends all the while to lull both to sleep.

Again; what but fatuity bordering upon madness, can have induced him to insert passages like the following?

"St. Gregory Thaumaturges, returning,' he says, 'from the city, and revisiting its environs, he increased the devotion of the people everywhere by instituting festive meetings in honour of those who had fought for the faith. The bodies of the martyrs were distributed in different places, and the people assembled and made merry, as the year came round, holding festival in their honour. This indeed was a proof of his great wisdom .. for, perceiving that the childish and untrained populace were retained in their idolatrous error by sensual indulgences, in order that what was of first importance should at any rate be secured to them, viz. that they should look to God in place of their vain rites, he allowed them to be merry and solace themselves at the monuments of the holy martyrs, as if their behaviour would in time undergo a spontaneous change into greater seriousness and strictness, and faith would lead them to it; which has actually been the happy issue in that population, all sensual gratification having turned into a spiritual form of rejoicing.' There is no reason to suppose that the license here spoken of passed the limits of harmless though rude festivity; for it is observable that the same reason, the need of holydays for the multitude, is assigned by Origen, St. Gregory's master, to explain the establishment of the Lord's day also, and the paschal and the pentecostal festivals, which have never been viewed as unlawful compliances; and moreover the people were eventually reclaimed from their gross habits by his indulgent policy, a successful issue which could not have followed an accommodation to what was sinful.

"The example set by St. Gregory in an age of persecution was impetuously followed when a time of peace succeeded. In the course of the fourth century two movements or developments spread over the face of Christendom, with a rapidity characteristic of the Church; the one ascetic, the other ritual or ceremonial. We are told in various ways by Eusebius, that Constantine, in order to recommend the new religion to the heathen, transferred into it the outward ornaments to which they had been accustomed in their own. It is not necessary to go into a subject which the diligence of Protestant writers has made familiar to most of us. The use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints, and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees; incense, lamps, and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness; holy water; asylums; holydays and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields; sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison, are all of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the Church."-(pp. 258--360.)

"To their temples we come, not once or twice a year or five times, but

often do we hold celebrations; often, nay daily, do we present hymns to their Lord. And the sound in health ask for its preservation, and those who struggle with any disease for a release from their sufferings; the childless for children, the barren to become mothers, and those who enjoy the blessing for its safe-keeping. Those too who are setting out for a foreign land beg that they may be their fellow-travellers and guides of the journey; those who have come safe back acknowledge the grace, not coming to them as to gods, but beseeching them as divine men, and asking their intercession. And that they obtain what they ask in faith, their dedications openly witness, in token of their care. For some bring likenesses of eyes, others of feet, others of hands; some of gold, others of silver; and their Lord accepts even the small and cheap, measuring the gift by the offerer's ability.... Philosophers and orators are consigned to oblivion, and kings and captains are not known even by name to the many; but the names of the martyrs are better known to all than the names of those dearest to them. And they make a point of giving them to their children, with a view of gaining for them thereby safety and protection.... Nay, of the so-called gods, so utterly have the sacred places been destroyed, that not even their outline remains, nor the shape of their altars is known to men of this generation, while their materials have been devoted to the shrines of the martyrs. For the Lord has introduced His own dead in the place of your gods; of the one He hath made a riddance, on the other He hath conferred their honours. For the Pandian festival, the Diasia, and the Dionysia, and your other feasts, we have the celebrations of Peter, of Paul, of Thomas, of Sergius, of Marcellus, of Leontius, of Panteleëmon, of Antony, of Maurice, and of the other martyrs; and for that ancient procession, and indecency of work and word, are held modest festivities, without intemperance, or revel, or laughter, but with divine hymns, and attendance on holy discourses and prayers, adorned with laudable tears.' This was the view of the Evidences of Christianity,' which a bishop of the fifth century (Theodoret) offered for the conversion of unbelievers.-(pp. 361, 362.)

Mr. Newman's avowed purpose in the compilation of his book has evidently been to smooth the way for the speedy return to the bosom of Rome of that section of his former associates who are permitted by their consciences or their dispensations, while holding all Romish doctrine, still to receive the emoluments, and minister in the sanctuaries, of "another part of the Lord's vineyard "to adopt the unctuous phraseology of Dr. Pusey. The method by which he attempts to accomplish this in the present section, is, we humbly submit, strictly original. He exhibits his crapulary powers to his astonished readers. He crams down the throat of his own credulity, the rioting and drunkenness copied from the heathen orgies, which are sanctioned by the Church of Rome, the heathen superstitions, yea, the heathen idolatries of Rome! -in a word, every abomination which the most zealous of her opponents have charged upon that foulest of apostasies: And then parades the perfect ease with which he is capable of believing in the power of the Church to convert them all into Christian mysteries and means of grace. Just as the fire-eater at a village wake devours in public a hearty meal of pins, needles, ribbons, feathers, and artificial flowers, washing all down with a draught of burning pitch; and then (to the unspeakable astonishment of the crowd of

gaping rustics, who expect every moment to see him burst asunder,) struts forth on his platform with a placid smile of comfort and satiety. Nor dare we pronounce that this feat of Mr. Newman's will be altogether unsuccessful. There certainly are raw, ignorant, self-sufficient young gentlemen at Oxford (perhaps at Cambridge too), in whose breasts it may excite some degree of emulation. For it just now occurs to us that his brother artiste never performs in our village, but we hear of some naughty boy who has burnt his mouth in an unsuccessful attempt to imitate him.

It would answer no purpose to follow our intellectual Thaumaturge through the remaining sections of his production. We pause for one moment at chap. vii. sect. 5, to indulge in, or smile at, an intricate and elaborate proof of the development of theological science, which was written by Mr. Newman seven years ago for the British Critic and is now quoted in this place. The basis of the argument is the use in the epistles of Ignatius, written in the first century, of terms and phrases of dogmatic theology, which did not come into currency with ecclesiastical writers until the seventh or eighth centuries. The argument itself is carefully and skilfully elaborated, and elegantly expressed. Mr. Newman is capable of no such mental effort now. Every page of the work before us bears evidence of this. Its object is to prove that the same doctrines which were formally developed in the seventh century, existed already, perfectly formed in the mind of the apostolical Ignatius, before the conclusion of the first. But, alas! for the cause of doctrinal development! and also for the unwelcome publication of Mr. Cureton! The discovery by this justly-noted scholar of a Syriac copy of the Ignatian epistles, written certainly not later than the fourth century, shows that without one exception all the words and phrases cited by Mr. Newman as the ground of his argument, are interpolations of a subsequent date and consequently that the doctrines they embody, developed in the epistles of Ignatius, about the same time that they developed in the Church, that is, some five or six hundred years after the martyrdom of that saint!

We cannot refrain from making a remark upon our neophyte's defence of that grossly idolatrous appeal to one of the lower passions -'the cultus of our lady St. Mary.' He first traces the development of this abomination to-we really know not what. We are very doubtful that Mr. Newman understands himself in this part of his work. We are quite sure he does not intend his readers to understand him. He then proceeds to defend it, upon the ground that it does not interfere at all with the worship of the persons of the Godhead. In proof of this he informs us that he has examined a great number of the small books of devotion which are distributed