their mere use of a word proves nothing. However, in all fairness, long before Mr. McNeile wrote, I duly cited all the passages in Clement, Ignatius, and Hermas, where the word election is used: being nine, in Clement; two, in Ignatius; and seven, in Hermes. They will be found, rendered into English, while the originals are carefully given in the margin, in my Primitive Doctrine of Election, book ii. chap. ii: and your readers may judge for themselves whether they afford any proof that the Augustinian or Calvinistic doctrine of election was the doctrine of the primitive Church.

In my various Works written on the sound and tangible principle which I have adopted, my object has been to shew on historical testimony, in opposition to Popery, Socinianism, and all other unscriptural systems, that the Churches of the Reformation, more especially our own Reformed Church, were no venders of what the Romanists were wont to call new learning; but, on the contrary, that their doctrines were the doctrines of the primitive Church, being, in truth, a republication of the long smothered or strangely perverted gospel of Jesus Christ. My Protestant brethren, whether cleric or laic, will, I hope, forgive me this wrong. If my alleged error be past forgiveness; and if it be thought that the greater the doctrinal discrepance, between the Primitive Church and the Reformed Church of England, the better and the more satisfactory then, I submit, we should lose no time in burning the works of Pearson, Bull, Barrow, Taylor, Beveridge, to say nothing of Cranmer aud Ridley; for their principle of resorting to historical testimony is precisely the same as my own. Nevertheless, when this principle shall be given up, we assuredly shall present a latus apertum both to Papists and to Socinians.

Sherburn House, Dec. 5, 1846.

G. S. FABER.

[We shall not ourselves renew this discussion; being content to give, on the next page, a letter on the other part. But we must protest against being supposed to admit, for a single moment, that the Book given to us by God himself, as the guide of our steps, must, to be of any use, be interpreted by some other books, written by erring men.-EDIT. C. M. R.]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCHMAN'S MONTHLY REVIEW.

SIR,-Will you allow me a place in your columns to make a few remarks on Mr. Faber's principle that "pure consenting primitive antiquity" constitutes "THE interpreter of doctrinal Scripture, a principle which appears to me to be almost the only fault of this excellent writer.

First, I will state how far I agree with him. In one place he says that without some principles of interpretation or other, the words of Scripture would only be so many sentences without any meaning at all. This may at once be conceded, not only as a truth, but as a truism.-But I go further. I quite admit with him that the man who expects that by the mere reading of the Bible he shall be able to come to a saving knowledge of its contents, will be disappointed; and I am as much an enemy as he is to that self-sufficient and presumptuous frame of mind which thinks it enough to do this, and that having so done, the Spirit will supply every thing else. No,-God's will is that we shall attain the objects of our search by the diligent use of means, and consequently he expects that we shall make this diligent use of all the aids and helps which he has placed within our reach, and without this we have no right to expect his blessing upon our studies. The real fault and fallacy of Mr. Faber's principle is this, that instead of making antiquity one (among others) of the aids and helps which God has afforded us, he erects it into the interpreter of doctrinal Scripture, from whose tribunal there is to be no appeal. That some deference is due to the mind and sentiment of the early Church, so far as we can collect it from the documents that remain to us, no sober Protestant will deny : this is fully allowed and maintained by the author of "Ancient Christianity," who cannot certainly be accused of any ultra Church predilections; but such an application for help from one of those sources of knowledge which God has afforded us, is a very different thing from bowing to the dictates of an umpire from whose tribunal there is in no case to be any appeal. We are bound to use all the materials placed within our power, and then to exercise our private judgment-in other words, that reasoning faculty which God has bestowed upon us, in pronouncing a verdict on the subject; and this is in the very nature of the case unavoidable, for it is only by the use of that private judgment, or reasoning faculty, that we can obtain the conviction of the first principle of all religion, the being of a God. Having said thus much, I trust I have laid down a broad line of separation from the mystic

and enthusiast on the one hand, both of whom fondly imagine an elapse of the Spirit specially illuminating their minds, and guiding them into all saving truth (for according to the doctrine just laid down, though the illumination of the Holy Spirit, in the ordinary, not in the miraculous exercise thereof, be admitted to be absolutely necessary, it is only so in conjunction with the other external means which God has granted for our religious edification), and from those on the other hand who would erect into an arbitrary and practically infallible tribunal, any one of those means in particular, to the exclusion as it were of the rest, which Mr. Faber appears to do by his new principle; new comparatively I call it, because if this is denied, I may take another opportunity of showing that it is only in his works written since the year 1830 he has adopted it. I will now state what appear to my mind the most striking objections to Mr. Faber's view.

A very acute and valuable writer of the present day, a general admirer (like myself) of Mr. Faber, whose name I will not mention, because he communicated it to me in a private letter, says respecting him as follows:-"In Mr. Faber there is a constant regard to "the forms of logic; and his attention to these forms often "deceive him into an impression totally erroneous as to the real strength of his reasoning, which not seldom contains an "unproved assumption in its very heart." Now if I mistake not, an unproved assumption is to be found in the proposition that "pure consenting primitive antiquity is the interpreter of doctrinal Scripture."-" Pure" and "consenting." Was doctrine in primitive times, "always, everywhere, and by all," pure and consenting? St. Paul and St. John tell a very different story. See 2 Timothy ii. 17, 18, and the messages to the angels or churches of Asia in the Revelation. Of the writings of the really primitive age, the age immediately succeeding the Apostles, much has undoubtedly perished; no one in fact will dispute that by far the greater part is lost, since nothing of it remains to us but the Epistle of Clement, that of Polycarp, the Epistle of the Church of Smyrna on Polycarp's martyrdom, and the Epistles of Ignatius. Now how, I ask, are we to ascertain whether these few scanty documents of the really primitive age constitute a part of the pure or the impure portion of antiquity? Will Mr. Faber reply that it cannot be supposed the Apostles would have appointed Ignatius or Polycarp or Clement to bishoprics had they been capable of inditing erroneous doctrine at the time of their appointment or subsequently? I answer, that the messages to five out of the seven bishops or angels of the churches of Asia Minor in the Revelation, show that the inspiration of the Apostles did not extend to the

selection of persons who in every case should be infallibly preserved from all subsequent error; nor can I think that Mr. Faber, if by God's providence he were called to suffer death for the faith, would express himself as Ignatius did, and say that if the wild beasts would not willingly devour them, he would compel them by provocation to do it, which is an act verging very closely on the confines of suicide, instead of calmly resigning himself into the hands of God, to be disposed of as He thought fit. I therefore again ask how the purity of these writings is to be tested except by an appeal and reference to Scripture; and if the orthodoxy and truth of the doctrine contained in these patristical writings is to be tested by an appeal to Scripture, they cannot themselves alone constitute the test of Scripture doctrine: so that we are ultimately thrown back in the last resort on Scripture itself. Scanty then are the remains of what are called the Apostolical Fathers; few compared with those that have perished must be the remains of the whole second, and greater part of the third century; and again I say, that, except by the test of Seripture, we cannot know whether what is preserved to us is a part of the pure or impure section of the written tradition of the Church; and as Whitby says, "Before we can know true tradition from false, we must know true faith "from false; and if we must know this faith before we can know "true tradition, we cannot need tradition to instruct us in the "true faith" Nor does this in any way hinder our accounting it comforting and confirming to our minds to find that the documents which do remain show that those who indited them agreed in the main and for the most part with ourselves; a widely different thing from setting them up as the only infallible (practically infallible) tests.

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Again let me notice another point so palpable that it seems almost impossible it should have escaped observation, but yet Mr. Faber never, anywhere that I have seen, notices it. Why is the stress always laid on "doctrinal" Scripture only. If necessary in doctrinal, to prevent various and erroneous opinions, why not in practical, in the practical precepts of Scripture also? Are these always and in every case so plain, that, by the reading the mere letter of them, every one must be of one opinion about them? Far from it. To hate our father, mother, and nearest relations; to give to every one that asketh us; not to resist evil, and to turn the left cheek to those who smite us on the right (precepts in the letter incompatible with the existence of property at all, and subversive of the order of society, rendering all law and police useless); the saving efficacy, I say, of these precepts by common consent is not to be found in the letter, but is vested exclusively in the spirit,

according to the saying of St. Paul: "He hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

The practical parts of Scripture, therefore, are just as liable to be misunderstood by those who do not diligently use all the aids and assistances which God has been pleased to put into their power for the understanding of them, as the doctrinal; and the necessity of one single definite umpire from whose tribunal there is to be no appeal, may just as well be pleaded in the one case as in the other. As Mr. Holden has well observed, "perfect unity in doctrine is as difficult of attainment as perfect virtue in practice; nevertheless both are to be diligently sought after to be obtained as much as possible; " not by setting up a single imaginary test from which there is no appeal, but "by every means in cur power." And we may rest assured that when this is not only professed to be done, but is actually and faithfully and universally performed, a unity of doctrine in all essential and saving truth, and perfection of practice, with happiness thence springing up, such as the world has never yet seen, will be beheld and experienced.

Another objection to Mr. Faber's view. According to this view, it would be utterly impossible to hope to convert a single Jew to Christianity. Christianity, we all know, is founded upon a particular interpretation of the Old Testament. Now it will not be contended that if an umpire and test such as Mr. Faber sets before us be requisite for the interpretation of the doctrinal Scripture of the New Testament, it is not, to say the least, equally so for that of the Old. Where then is the "pure consenting primitive antiquity," the "unanimous assent" to which private opinion is to submit itself, which we can offer to the Jew? To point to the universal assent of Christians is of course a palpable "petitio principii" with a Jew; for his very point of dispute with Christians is about the right meaning of the Old Testament; and as for the unanimous consent of the Jews themselves, the librarians and keepers of the Old Testament, from whose hands originally we received them, we know that the great body of the nation did reject, and do yet reject, the Christian interpretation, while only a few comparatively received and propagated it.

Lastly, let us see how Mr. Faber's principle works in practice. Some years ago Mr. Newman and he disagreed respecting the Bible doctrine of justification: well, they agreed to refer their dispute to Clement, an umpire from whose judgment there could be. no appeal, because as a witness to a matter of fact, viz. how the doctrine was received and understood by the primitive Church, as