ERRORS OF ROMANISM.

There are but two things with which we can successfully combat popery, and these two are love and faith; love against its bigotry, faith against its form. Love will conquer when nothing else can; and formalism cannot prevail where faith is in active operation. A simple desire for the glory of God and the good of souls, simplicity and singleness of purpose for the world's conversion-this will conquer popery, and nothing else will.

We sometimes think that one of the greatest differences between this and the eternal world will be the simplicity of that world, and of our spirits in it. Simplicity is strength. It was Luther's strength in the first conflict with the papal power. It lay in one sentence. The great reformer was well nigh inspired to find out that truth of justification by faith, and to disinter it from the grave of tradition and ceremony under which it lay buried, and to hold it up so that men should see its living glory. For nothing is a greater characteristic of inspiration than this: the seeing of great truths in their simplicity, all extraneous things being cut off. This was what made Christ speak as never man spake; truth from the bosom of eternity. This was subjectively the inspiration of the apostles. And there is a sort of inspiration now, or the power of inspiration, in the possession of the mind by one grand truth. This is what the physicians call madness; but madness is nearly allied to great power and wisdom; and sure we are, that not only the papists, in Luther's time, but some of the reformers also, thought Luther was mad, and this truth of justification by faith, the devil that possessed him.

It is this truth, which many in this age are losing sight of. They are attracted by form and tradition; they dwell with fondness on what is time-worn and venerable in past dispensations, instead of the dawn of spirituality in the coming glory of the new. They regard truth as the backward birth of time and the church, instead of the increasing disclosure of God's providence and word. They are conservatives in the church of that which is without faith and without vitality, and they seek a unity in the church, which is the spurious figment of ambition and

aggrandizement, and not founded on the principle of individual union with Christ. They accustom themselves to designate the blessed reformation itself, as that great "schism" which "shattered the sacramentum unitatis," since which era "the truth has not dwelt simply and securely in any visible tabernacle." They blind themselves to all the lessons which history and experience have taught in regard to the errors of the church of Rome, and especially the tremendous consequence of attaching to tradition the value of inspiration. They renounce the great principle rescued from the grasp of religious despotism by the reformation, of individual study of the scriptures, with the right of private judgment. And they send us to the drag-net of tradition and the tomes of fathers, baptized in pagan philosophy, to see assuredly what the scriptures do mean. They adopt and praise a system of teaching, which dwells upon the external and ritual parts of religious service, while it loses sight of their inner meaning, and spiritual life; and if they do not send us to the seven sacraments of Rome, with prayers for the dead and purgatorial penance for the living, they speak of the simple sacraments of Christ's institution, as containing an intrinsic saving efficacy; as being the only sources of divine grace to the exclusion of every other, and as constituting the keys of heaven. Thus they teach; and they hesitate not distinctly to declare the Lutheran doctrine of justification to be the greatest of all heresies.

All this is portentous, betokening dissolution to the church wherever it prevails. There is a passage in Cowper's poems, which if the poet could now rise from the dead, he would believe himself to have prophesied when he wrote it:

When nations are to perish in their sins,
'Tis in the church the leprosy begins;
The priest, whose office is, with zeal sincere,
To watch the fountain, and preserve it clear,
Carelessly nods and sleeps upon the brink,
While others poison what the sheep must drink;
Or waking at the call of lust alone,

Infuses lies and errors of his own:
His unsuspecting sheep believe it pure;
And, tainted by the very means of cure,
Catch from each other a contagious spot,
The foul forerunner of a general rot.

Then truth is hushed, that heresy may preach,
And all is trash which reason cannot reach :
Then God's own image on the soul impress'd,
Becomes a mockery, and a standing jest;
And faith, the root whence only can arise
The graces of a life that wins the skies,
Loses at once all value and esteem,

Pronounced by grey beards a pernicious dream.
Then CEREMONY leads her bigots forth,
Prepared to fight for shadows of no worth;
While truths on which eternal things depend,
Find not, or hardly find, a single friend.
As soldiers watch the signal of command,
They learn to bow, to sit, to kneel, to stand,
Happy to fill religion's vacant place
With hollow form, and gesture, and grimace.
Such, when the teacher of his church was there,
People and priest, the sons of Israel were.
Stiff in the letter, lax in the design
And import of their oracles divine;
Their learning legendary, false, absurd,
And yet exalted above God's own word;
They drew a curse from an intended good,
Puffed up with gifts they never understood.
He judged them with as terrible a frown,

As if not love, but wrath had brought him down.

We believe that there is to be a great division through the world, between what is of Rome and what is of the gospel ; between what is formal and what is spiritual. If we are not mistaken, all error will be reduced to a singular sort of unity, and Antichrist will be the great towering form, around which its enormous crystals congregate. That there is such a principle of centralization in error as well as truth, no one can doubt who believes that the cause and source of error is not so much weakness as sin. The church of Rome owes her supremacy to the despotic unity with which she has pursued the worship of form; the aggrandizement of the church being the object of her efforts. The disciples of Christ must owe their success in the conflict with Romanism to the power of faith, in the simplicity of their purpose, for the conversion of the soul.-American Biblical Repository.

THE APOSTLE OF AMERICAN PURITANISM. Among our fathers, the name of Robinson stands conspicuous, for he must be regarded as the great apostle of American Puritanism, although he was never permitted to accompany his flock in their pilgrimage to "freedom's holy land." Indeed, none of the great reformers of the preceding century is more deserving of celebrity. He was not surpassed even by Luther himself, in many of those qualities which belong to a master mind. Nor was the work he was destined to accomplish of much less importance in the blessings it was to confer on mankind. He had not that striking, commanding impetuosity of character, which belonged to the great German reformer, and it would have proved fatal to his cause if he had possessed it; but he had equal integrity, with more mildness, and with a moral firmness the most uncompromising. He swerved not from the path of right in the days of persecution, attended with imminent perils. He was unmoved by the voice of praise, and declined the honourable proposals made to him by the Leyden professors, who would have induced him to accept emolument and place for himself in the university. He chose rather to suffer affliction, and refused to be separated from his beloved pilgrim flock. His disinterestedness is perhaps the most prominent of his virtues. Although he may be called the founder of a new church, he was entirely free from the ambition of apostleship, and did every thing in his power to discountenance a bigoted attachment to himself, which the great excellence of his character might have very naturally produced among his followers. Especially did he renounce, with great earnestness, all pretensions to be regarded as an authority in matters of religious faith, although he was learned in all the religious controversies of the day, and a powerful disputant with the most eminent theologians of the period when Arminius and Episcopius flourished, as the doctors of Amsterdam have borne ample testimony. His liberality deserves honourable mention, which was especially displayed towards those, who, on account of his faith, had driven him into exile. This appears from his controversy with the Brownists, with whom some respectable historians have erroneously identified the church of Robinson. He denounced their exclusiveness,

and declared his readiness to commune with the Church of England, and his approval of her doctrines, and expressed his opposition only to her prelatical pretensions.

Who among the great names we are accustomed to venerate displayed greater moral firmness than Robinson in the execution of his purposes? Both his object and his plans seemed to be attended with almost insuperable difficulties. In the general estimation of the world at that time, the realization of his hopes was at least as problematical as the existence of another continent before the days of the great Genoese mariner. But he was set for the defence of principles which he knew to be true, although the world denounced them as delusions. Banished from his native land, with peril of martyrdom if he should return, he was doomed to dwell among strangers, not having the sympathies of whole provinces, nor receiving the smiles and safe conduct of princes, as did Luther when he went forth to war with wickedness in high places. He was compelled to suffer reproach without commiseration. Not only the Catholics, but the Protestant world also looked on with indifference, or to ridicule the man who dared to assert the necessity of a progressive reformation in the church, and who had started the chimerical project of a church-state in the bleak barren coasts of North America, “amid wilde beasts and wilde men.” Yet he failed not fearlessly to point out the defects of the reformation, in an age when the influence of its burning and shining light was at its spring-tide, and especially to plead against hierarchical oppres

sion.

At length, discouraged with the dark prospect which shut out all hope of the farther progress of religious reform and freedom in the state, he earnestly set himself and his faithful followers to prepare for their great mission to the new world. And now there was wanting something besides the zeal of a reformer, to inspire a consistent as well as undying devotion to the cause in which they had engaged. Mere enthusiasm might have led them to embark in an enterprise far more hopeless. There was needed the sound wisdom of the philosopher, combined with what is much more rarely met with, the patience and practical discretion of the great statesman, to render successful this novel scheme of colonization. The memorials that yet remain, though defective, are enough to shew that he possessed all these qualifications