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own, to put on his perfect righteousness, and then the Spirit of God, the Comforter, who is the Spirit of truth, will come and dwell in our hearts, and purify and sanctify them, so that they shall become living temples of God."— (pp. 26-30.)

Thus we have conducted our readers through the first of these excellent Sermons. We think they will agree with us, that it is difficult to overrate the importance of having such decided views concerning the daily need of the Holy Spirit, set forth by a man so distinguished and highly-esteemed, in such an assembly.

Moreover there is an inference, of peculiar value, derivable from the Archdeacon's clear exposition of the way in which it was expedient for the disciples, and for all mankind, that Christ should withdraw his bodily presence from the earth. It is an inference, condemnatory of the Church of Rome. What is Romanism, but an exhibition of the carnal mind, which would have Christ back again in the body, that men may walk by sight, and not by faith? What is the elevation and adoration of the host, but an attempt of this kind?-what the bowing down before a crucifix, where the Saviour is made present by the power of art, and by a heated imagination?-what the institution of a pope, as the human representative of Christ ?-what the use of images, by means of which saints and mediators are rendered visible, and are seen to smile, and have even been heard to speak, according to the belief of their raptured suppliants?-what, in short, is the whole papal system, with its vast, material machinery for producing devotion, its endless appeals to the senses, its interposition of a countless body of living and dead men between God and the soul: what is it all, but a conspiracy of the natural heart carried on through ages, to go back to Jewish times, before the day of Pentecost; to restore the "beggarly elements," which St. Paul tells us we must rise above, if we are truly to reach the Saviour; to unspiritualize our religion, make void the mission of the Comforter, and change the character of the Christian dispensation, which Christ, when he left the earth, ordained to be the dispensation of the Spirit? We think that no reflecting person can rise from the perusal of Archdeacon Hare's Sermon without drawing this inference, so important at the present time, when many who are called Protestants, but have the popery of human nature in their hearts, are most ignorantly and foolishly hankering after the helps, as they are falsely termed, to devotion, so abundantly supplied by the Church of Rome,-instead of depending consciously and prayerfully, on the daily and hourly assistance of the Holy Ghost; without the practical recognition and invocation of which assistance, the belief in the existence of the Holy Ghost becomes a dead letter and a mockery. "In one

way or other," says the Archdeacon, in his Note C, Vol. II., " we all want to touch the hem of Christ's earthly garment. If we can do this, we think ourselves safe; but we cannot conceive how it is possible that a man should believe and be saved. 'Quia carnales sumus,' says Calvin on the text, nihil difficilius est, quam præposterum hunc affectum ex animis nostris revellere, quo Christum e cœlo ad nos detrahimus.'"

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If any competent person would but put pen to paper, and write a short, vigorous tract, to shew that Romanism is a virtual denial of the Trinity, by practically superseding the Holy Ghost, he would, we venture to suggest, do good service to the cause of truth and charity.

Having made so many remarks on the first Sermon, we must rapidly glance at the succeeding ones. We are happy to meet with the repetition of such truths, as that "no man is sanctified by the Spirit of Christ, until he has been justified by the righteousness of Christ," p. 32; and that " as none can come to the Father, except through the Son, so none can own in his heart that Jesus Christ is God, except through the conviction wrought in him by the Spirit of God, the Comforter." p. 33. The text of the Second Sermon is: "He shall reprove the world of sin," &c. John xvi. 8, 9. The Archdeacon would prefer translating the original word for reprove into the English convince,-not only because it is a more accurate translation, but also because mere reproving never changed the heart. No agency short of the Spirit's can produce this change.

"To convince the world of sin, by shewing it how sin has tainted its heart, and flows through its veins, and is mixed up with its life-blood, this is a work which no earthly power can accomplish. No human teacher can do this. Conscience cannot do it. Law, in none of its forms human or divine can do it. Nay the gospel itself cannot do it. Although the Word of God is the sword of the Spirit, yet unless the Spirit of God draws forth that sword, it lies powerless in its sheath. Only when the Spirit of God wields it, is it quick and powerful, and sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, a discerner of the thoughts and purposes of the heart."-(p. 40.)

There are in this Sermon some valuable and thoughtful remarks on the province of conscience. Conscience is not capable of deciding what is right in itself-it only reproves us for not acting up to what we think to be right. This distinction is of great consequence, and is brought into good use by our Author in Note W in the second volume, where Luther is shewn to have clearly held it, and Mr. Ward to have entirely missed it. The Archdeacon's words in the Sermon before us are:

"Its voice is merely a kind of tribunician veto, forbidding what is recognized to be wrong but it has no vote in the council of the mind, no discernment in itself to determine what is wrong."-( p. 47.)

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This view of the office of conscience is well illustrated in the Note just referred to, by citing the remarkable words of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when pressed by his threatening adversaries to recant: "Unless I, and the texts which I have quoted, are refuted by testimonies out of Holy Scripture, or by open and clear reasons and arguments, and unless my conscience is thus bound by God's Word, I cannot and will not recant anything; because it is neither safe nor advisable to do anything against one's conscience. Here I stand. I can do nothing else; God help me! Amen!" "This," as the Archdeacon says, Luther's practical exposition of Conscience"-whilst Mr. Ward, unhappily for himself, has called it, and made it, his "guide to salvation!" The Archdeacon well adds, with reference to this and similar mistakes: "Conscience is a word, with which sundry tricks have been played by the new School at Oxford." Mr. Sewell preached a sermon there some time ago, on the subject of the office of Conscience, in opposition to Mr. Ward's views. The sermon was published, and was, in point of language and feeling, powerful and eloquent; and so far as it set forth the need of an outward guide for conscience, a law to which appeal might be made by reason, it was serviceable to the truth; but when it enumerated parents, the state, and the church, as alone furnishing external guidance, and omitted the Scriptures, it made a capital error according to Mr. Sewell's own argument-an error, over which we could not but deeply grieve, yet at which, as made by the author of the "Christian Morals," we could in no wise wonder. Not having before noticed that sermon, we take this opportunity of drawing attention to its dangerous and anti-scriptural tendency, in the hope that if any of our readers were dazzled and bewildered by it at the time, they may now, when they look at it again, and coolly reflect on it, perceive that it is a sermon calculated to do much more harm than good.

In thus defining the office of conscience, it must not be supposed that the Archdeacon doubts the existence of the Moral Sense in us. On the contrary, he is one of the most earnest and successful opponents of the low views of Paley, which in our younger days reigned supreme in Cambridge. Only, he would have us not identify the moral sense with the conscience, which takes that sense as one of its guides, external to itself. And he very carefully warns us, how weak is the moral sense, through the corruption of man by the Fall of Adam, and through the perverse maxims and

customs of the world around us.

1846.

Reviewed in our February Number, 1841.

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With regard to the nature of the great sin, whereof the Comforter, and he alone, was to produce in man a real, heart-felt conviction, according to the text, "He shall convince the world of sin-because they believe not in me!" we cannot forbear letting the Archdeacon speak for himself, long as our quotation will be. The unspeakable importance of shewing clearly that the sin of unbelief in Christ lies at the root of all other sins must be our justification.

"When the Spirit of God came to convince the world of sin, what was the sin he began with convincing men of? If any of us had to convince a person of the sinfulness of the world, how should we set about it? We should talk -should we not?-of the intemperance, and licentiousness, and dishonesty, and fraud, and falsehood, and envy, and ill-nature, and cruelty, and avarice, and ambition, whereby man has turned God's earth into a place of weeping, and gnashing of teeth. These, however, are not the sins of which the Spirit of God convinces the world; because all these might be swept away; and yet, unless far more was done, the world would still continue just as sinful as before. All these sins, this whole terrible brood of sin, were indeed to be found in every quarter of the earth, so far as it was then peopled, in our Lord's days, no less plentifully than they are now. They had swollen themselves out, and rose up on every side in the face of heaven, like huge mountains; they flowed from country to country, from clime to clime, like rivers; they spread themselves abroad like lakes and seas, lakes of brimstone and dead seas, within the exhalations of which no soul could come and live. Whithersoever the eye turned, it saw one sin riding on the back, or starting from the womb, of another. Nevertheless the Spirit of God, when he came to convince the world of sin, and to bring that conviction home to the hearts of mankind, did not choose out any of these open, glaring sins, to taunt and confound them with. He went straight to that sin, which is the root and source of all others, want of faith, the evil heart of unbelief. When the Comforter is come, he will convince the worid of sin, because they believe not

in me.

"Now this is a sin, that the world till then had never dreamt of as such : and even at this day, few take much thought about it, except those who have been convinced of it by the Spirit, and who therefore have been in great measure delivered from it..... The chief part look solely to their sins of commission; mainly, to the evil deeds they may have done; then to the evil words they may have spoken; sometimes, it may be, to their evil thoughts. .... Yet our excellent confession should make us equally mindful of our sins of omission..... These are far the larger and more numerous half of the two; and no less deadly than the other; even as hunger, if unfed, is no less deadly than sickness..... As for those who are not endeavouring earnestly to walk in the law of God, and seeking the help of his Spirit that they may be enabled to walk therein, their sins of omission eat up the whole of their lives. The whole of their lives is one black blot, one vast sin of omission, broken here and there by sins of commission flashing through it..... As in positive sins, in sins of commission, we sin in deed and word and thought, so in negative sins, in sins of omission, do we likewise sin not only in deed and word, but also in thought. And this last head of sins, the sins of omission in thought, contains the great prime sin, of which the Comforter came to convince mankind, the sin of unbelief, the sin of want of faith, the sin of living without God in the world. Laws, inasmuch as by their nature they deal only with that which manifests itself outwardly, in deed or in word, take no cognizance of this sin. Conscience, which only sounds when some positive sin is trampling upon it, is silent about this. Therefore, if we were to be convinced of it at all,

pressing was our need that the Spirit of God should graciously vouchsafe to convince us."-(pp. 56-60.)

"Faith in God, we have seen, is the source of all spiritual life, which can flow only from communion with him; and the want of that faith is the barrenness out of which all sin springs. Without that faith we have nothing to stand on, nothing to hold by our reason has no assurance of an allcontrolling law, our life no heavenly archetype, our heart no eternal home. From that faith, however, we have departed so far, that of ourselves we can never regain it. We can no more bring ourselves to believe in God, than we can mount after the eagle up the crystal stairs of the sky..... In Christ, on the other hand, we may believe. That is to say, the Godhead is brought down to us in Christ in a manner which does not surpass the reach of our hearts and minds. Nor is there anything in Christ to frighten us away from him all his words are full of mercy and love; and he is ever calling us to come to him. Although we are sinners, the shame of our sins need not make us afraid to approach him; for it was to sinners he especially came, to call them to repentance and newness of life. Therefore, if we will not believe in Christ, there must be some deep-rooted power of sin within us, that keeps us away from him."—(p. 69.)

The Archdeacon then dispose us to unbelief.

goes into the several kinds of sin, which Lastly, he says:

"Of every form of sin, by which men are withheld from believing in Christ, the Comforter came to convince the world. 'The Comforter.' Does it seem a strange name to any of you, my brethren, for him who came on such an errand? Does it seem to you, that in convincing you of your sins, instead of comforting you he must needs cover you with shame and confusion, and make you sink to the ground in unutterable anguish and dismay? No, dear brethren, it is not so. Those among you, whom the Spirit has indeed convinced of sin, will avouch that it is not. They will avouch that in convincing them of sin, he has proved that he is indeed the Comforter. If the conviction and consciousness of sin arises from any other source, then indeed it is enough to crush us with shame, and to harrow us with unimaginable fears. But when it comes from the Spirit of God, it comes with healing and comfort on its wings. Remember what the sin is, of which he convinces usthat we believe not in Christ. All other conviction of sin would be without hope: here the hope accompanies the conviction, and is one with it. If we have a deep and lively feeling of the sin of not believing in Christ, we must feel at the same time that Christ came to take away this along with all other sins. He came, that we might believe in him, and that through this faith we might overcome the world, with all its temptations, its fears, and its shame, as well as its pleasures and lusts. And O what comfort can be like that, which it yields to the broken and contrite spirit, to feel that the Son of God has taken away his sins-that, if he has a true living faith in Christ, they are blotted out for ever, and become as though they had never been? What joy, what peace can be like this, to feel that we are not our own, but Christ's? that we are become members of his holy body, and that our life has been swallowed up in his? that we can rest in his love with the same undoubting confidence with which a child rests in the arms of its mother? that, if we believe in him, we have nothing to fear about the feebleness and falling short of our services? for that he will work out our salvation for us; yea, that he has wrought it out. Who, then, is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died for us, to take away our sins, and is risen again for us, that we may be supported under every trial and danger, and strengthened against every temptation, and delivered from the sin of unbelief and all other sins, and girded with the righteousness of faith, and crowned with all the graces which spring from faith, and at length may be received into the presence of that Father, into which our elder brother has entered before us."-(pp. 71, 72 )

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