greater certainty. If the sentiments then of Cranmer are to be deemed of importance, they may be ascertained from a treatise upon the reformation of Ecclesiastical laws, which was composed under his superintendency, and probably with much of his individual assistance. In this work the scrupulous superstition of those is expressly condemned as impious, who so completely tie down the grace of God and the holy Spirit to the sacramental elements, as explicitly to affirm, that no infant can obtain eternal salvation, who dies before baptism: an opinion, it is said, far different from ours (14).

;

But more direct proof than this may be adduced, and proof which may, perhaps, be deemed conclusive. At the commencement of our baptismal service the Minister prays, that the child to be baptized may be received into the ark of Christ's Church to which, as the form originally stood, it was added, ́ ́and so saved from perishing;" expressions too unequivocal to be misconceived. But when our Liturgy was in the first instance revised and corrected, which, it should be noticed, was immediately before the appearance of our Articles, this offensive passage was entirely omitted; an

omission certainly not made without reason, nor adopted without design (15).

Indeed had our Reformers on this occasion deliberately patronized the tenet, which some attribute to them, they would have directly incurred, what it is supposed they wished to avoid, the charge of singularity. No doubt can exist that Luther disapproved it. Calvin likewise was far from admitting it in an unqualified sense, hesitating to avow the distinction which his theory required (16); while the Zuinglians unreservedly opposed it in the most manly way, maintaining, upon their favourite principle of Universal Redemption, that all infants without exception, whether baptized, or unbaptized, are saved through God's gracious promise, and in virtue of his Covenant, by the expiation which Christ made upon the cross for the whole race of mankind; an expiation only capable of being rendered void in its effects by wilful perversity and conscious crime (17).

To conclude, from a retrospective view of what has been advanced, it appears, that the Reformers of this country, like their predecessors in Germany, solely wished to establish the doctrine of a mental degeneracy, which the Church of Rome denied.

Against the subtleties of the Schools both entertained an equal, and avowed an open, hostility. Impressed with a due sense of human frailty, and instructed by the unerring page of Revelation, they rejected with contempt the dreams of Sophists; and on the other hand inculcated a creed, which was more popular because less abstruse, and which, appealing to the affections, seemed to be no less founded on the general experience of mankind, than on the common basis of Scripture and Reason.

They encountered not the formidable logic of the Schools from any principle of vain glory, to display their eloquence or ability; nor did they represent human nature as corrupted, by way of furnishing a pretext for criminal indulgences, (for all were good men, and some in this country proved their sincerity by sacrificing life to conscience;) but weary of scholastical trifling, and zealous for the propagation of revealed truth, they endeavoured to produce in the minds of others the same conviction which they felt in their own. Avoiding one extreme, they meant not to rush into another; and whatsoever use ignorant or enthusiastical men may have since made of any strong expressions, which they adopted,

offensive only when misapplied, they never intended so to degrade our nature, as if it were lost to every sense of moral excellence (18); they were alone desirous of reducing its proud pretensions to the unadulterated standard of holy Scripture, to demonstrate, that the Christian redemption is not useless, nor grace promised us in vain (19). Neither were their efforts unavailing. In proportion as the sacred Writings, to which they constantly referred, became more read and better understood, the credit of the theological dictators of preceding ages was gradually diminished, until at length the fairy visions and phantastical speculations, with which a credulous world had been long amused, vanished before the splendour of Gospel day. So puerile indeed were some of these eccentric writers in their glosses upon the fall of man, and the transmission of its effects, that the Church of Rome herself began to grow ashamed of such folly; and to slight in one respect at least the authority of those, who had been her instructors for centuries. From the general disrepute, however, which has since attached to scholastical theories among Protestants, a manifest inconvenience has arisen; much mis

apprehension respecting the opinions, which were opposed to them, has sometimes unavoidably taken place in the mind of the modern controversialist, who averting his eye from them, and directing it to another quarter, has often lost sight of the only object, upon which it should have been constantly fixed. Of the justice of this remark we shall be further convinced as we proceed in the enquiry, through the whole of which we shall almost always find it necessary to keep in view the dogmas of the Scholastics, of those once applauded reasoners, who supported with the acuteness of men the reveries of children, who laboured to perplex with subtleties the plainest and most simple truths, and who never were more pleased, than when entangling common sense in the web of their sophistry, or fanning into flame the secret spark of human pride.