by men in many senses respectable. In cities and large towns it is very little understood to how great an extent the Church, throughout the country, is putting the whole of her credit and future influence in jeopardy, by the inconsiderate and ill-timed arrogance of some of her clergy. As a means of frightening the common people from the meeting-house, it proves almost entirely unavailing, wherever dissent actually gets a footing; for the people quickly learn to treat with the contempt it deserves so insufferable a want of charity. Episcopal charges, whatever topics they omit, ought to contain pointed cautions against this mischievous illiberality.

Let those who entertain this high church intolerance, consider that, in the actual application which they must make of it, the most serious danger imaginable is incurred, and the greatest possible violence is done to the dictates of good sense, and to the genuine impulses of Christian love. It is no trivial offence, we may be sure, and no slight peril, to miscall God's work and Satan's. This was, in substance, the very sin of the Pharisees, which our Lord branded with the mark of unpardonable blasphemy. The bold bigotry that does not hesitate to assign millions of Christ's humble disciples to perdition, makes the pillars of heaven tremble. Better had it been for the man who dares to do so, that a millstone should have been hung around his neck, and he cast into the sea.' pp. 403-405.

*

• Transubstantiation is a credible dogma; but this enormity insults reason quite as much as it does despite to pious benevolence, and actually breaks down the mind that submits to it. What can a man be worth, either in reason or in feeling, after he has thus been trodden in the dust, and made sport of by bigotry so preposterous? It might indeed seem altogether frivolous to advert seriously to extravagances of this sort, if it were not very true that they pervade the Church, and, under different forms and pretexts, infect the clerical order to a degree that involves the Establishment in an extreme danger. Church Reform may help us, but the Church must look well to herself, and purge out thoroughly the old leaven of popish intolerance, or no reform will save her. Let the common people, throughout the country, hear Methodists and Dissenters spoken of from the pulpit, frequently and freely, as Christian brethren: not a hat the less would be doffed in the porch on a Sunday: on the contrary, so much frank truth and charity, uttered by the clergy, would immensely benefit the Church at the present crisis. Whatever may be the faults or errors of the Separatists, they themselves, very many of them, are Christians, and as good Christians as Churchmen; and to deny this, or to be reluctant to confess it, is not to injure them, but ourselves: nay, it is an impudent impiety, such as a wise and good man must shudder to think of, and will never patiently bear.'

pp. 406, 7.

Here, the Author, by implication, professes himself a churchman; whether a conformist or nonconformist, is still left doubtful. In fact, we suspect that the church to which he belongs is the Church of Utopia, which, if its antiquity does not reach quite so

high as the apostolic age, has its origin concealed in venerable obscurity, and boasts of an undoubted sacerdotal succession. Far be it from us, however, to wish to make out our Author to be a Dissenter, or a seceder from Dissent; for we must admit that the volume would come with a much better grace from a born and bred Church-of-England-man, like Alexander Knox, than from one who had quarrelled with the sectarianism of his early years, and was writing under the influence of that re-action of sentiment which has the same effect as prejudice. Still, the Author betrays so little acquaintance with the actual state of things within the Establishment, that he evidently cannot have felt the pressure of those evils which gall the conscience, cripple the usefulness, and break the spirit of many a pious clergyman who starves upon a stipend, compared with which the average income of a Dissenting minister is competency. The wearer of the shoe best knows where it pinches. The feeling manner in which the evils connected with the voluntary system and the ultra-democracy of low dissent, are dwelt upon in this volume, indicates that they must have come distinctly under the Author's observation. But the fairest witness is not to be relied on as a judge: his testimony, though entirely true, is but part of the case, and the verdict must be governed by the pleadings on both sides. Now with all the Writer's candour, in spite of all his self-control and his honest endeavours to sustain the character of an impartial mediator between the contending parties, it is evident that he is disposed to treat the Church with the respectful courtesy of a stranger, while he uses, towards Dissent, the brusque familiarity of a faithful friend. He philosophises on the evils of the one: he declaims against those of the other. He says, to the Churchman, 'Hear me, I beseech you,' and, I think you must admit this and this: to the Dissenter, his tone is- Deny it if you can.' It may be that the disparagement of his former works in some Dissenting journals may have unconsciously produced this perceptible difference of manner, which we regret chiefly because it will tend to lessen the usefulness of his labours. He has evidently braced his mind to endure with a disdainful patience whatever opprobrium may be cast upon him by the votaries of Congregationalism. We hope that he will meet from them with kinder treatment-not than he deserves, but than he seems to invite and expect. The volume, though it rudely crosses certain prevalent Dissenting opinions, contains a manly assertion of the rights of a Christian people; and while it aims to supply a correction of some popular mistakes with regard to the past history of the Church, affords a valuable illustration of those circumstances which led to the development and consummation of spiritual despotism. In short, the work is replete with instruction. to all parties; and though we shall have occasion to impugn

many of the Author's positions, we hope to be able to shew that it makes altogether more for, than against the principles and system he has so determinately assailed.

The first chapter, on the present crisis of church power,' might have been suppressed without any disadvantage to the work. It is a sort of desultory preface, in which the Author, with more courage than discretion, opens an attack upon the 'Periodic Press', and appeals from Reviewers to readers. It would lead us too wide from our present purpose, to examine his remarks upon this subject. Some of them, though true in a great measure of the daily journals, are grossly inapplicable to periodicals published at intervals of several months, and comprising the leisurely and often elaborated compositions of writers of the first rank in literature. It is notorious that all the best writers of the day have been occasional contributors to our periodical journals. The way in which our Author speaks of the paper or the re“ view, as productions of the same class, and talks of men spending their days and nights under the very roofs that shake with ‘the mighty throes of the printing engine,' as if there were no difference between the daily leader of the Times or the Chronicle, and the critical paper furnished by some retired scholar for a Monthly or Quarterly Review,—is a fair specimen of that fondness for generalization which leads him to overlook or to contemn the most important specific differences. Do all Reviewers, he might be asked, live in an Editor's room?? Will he venture to affirm that humble and fervent piety' is not the characteristic of any who are engaged in the service of our periodic literature? Such sweeping and opprobrious allegations are extremely unbecoming in a writer who owes not a little to Reviews, and is himself, as has been humorously remarked, an annual periodical.'

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This first chapter is the most exceptionable part of the work, and seems written under that very description of epidemic excitement which it laments and deprecates. The general argument of the volume is thus announced at the outset.

‹ The alliance between Church and State is loudly denounced as the source and means of spiritual despotism. But history shews that sacerdotal tyranny may reach its height while the Church is struggling against a hostile civil power.

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Again: the maintenance of the clergy through the medium of a legal provision has, with as little regard to the genuine lessons of experience, been assigned as a chief cause of the corruption of Christianity. No allegation can stand more fully contradicted by the records of antiquity than does this; nor can any thing be more easy than to disprove the assertion.

Once more: the arrogant and encroaching episcopacy of the early ages, from which the proper counterpoise had been removed, has fur

nished a specious argument in modern times, bearing against that form of church government which is strongly inferred to have been sanctioned by apostolic practice, which is approved by the common sense of mankind in parallel instances; and a form, too, which the spread of Christianity at once demands, and insensibly introduces. A main intention then of the present volume is to point out to the candid reader the unsoundness of certain popular opinions on the above-named important subjects; and to shew the futility of the arguments that have had any such assumptions as their basis.' pp. 1, 2.

Now here we must protest in limine against this extremely incorrect representation of the opinions which our Author attributes to those who are opposed to State establishments and the hierarchical polity. From what writers does he take the statements which he undertakes to controvert? The alliance between Church and State, in its worst form, is but the alliance between spiritual despotism and civil despotism,-between sacerdotal tyranny and imperial autocrasy; and it would be absurd, therefore, to speak of the alliance between the two as the source of either. The spiritual despotism of the Papacy retains its iron grasp upon the minds of the priest-ruled peasantry of Ireland, not merely without the aid of the civil power, but in opposition to it. With this extant fact before us, there can be no occasion to cite history to prove what, so far as we are aware, no one has been so inconsiderate as to deny.

Again the position, that the maintenance of the clergy through the medium of a legal provision, has been a chief cause ' of the corruption of Christianity', is one which, we admit, it is an easy task to disprove, but not quite so easy to fasten upon the opponents of Ecclesiastical Establishments. We must say, that the Author was bound in honesty to specify the writers whose allegations he undertook to controvert. Those who consider the first political establishment of Christianity under Constantine as an era from which the rapid deterioration of the Church may be dated, have never taken, so far as we are aware, this limited and inaccurate view of the subject. The opinion, whether right or wrong, is not of very modern date. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and our own Chaucer and Gower held the same language on this point. The lines translated by Milton from the Inferno must be familiar to our readers :

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Oh, Constantine! of how much ill was cause,
Not thy conversion, but those rich domains
That the first wealthy pope received of thee!'

But Milton, so far from dating the corruption of the Church from the conversion of Constantine, cites Eusebius to prove, that in those that must be called the ancientest and most virgin times between Christ and Constantine,' a universal tetter of 'impurity had envenomed every part, order, and degree of the

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'church'; while its pastors, burning in contentions one towards another, and increasing in hatred and bitterness, outrageously sought to uphold lordship and command as it were a tyranny." His argument is, that the establishment of Christianity did not prove a cure for these evils. But it will be objected,' he says, that this was an unsettled state of the Church,' (that before Constantine,) wanting the temporal magistrate to suppress the license of false brethren, and the extravagancy of still new opinions; a time not imitable for church government, where the "temporal and spiritual power did not close in one belief, as under "Constantine.' He then proceeds to examine the pretended reformation wrought by the imperial convert. 'If he had curbed

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the growing pride, avarice, and luxury of the clergy, then every page of his story should have swelled with his faults.'

' And what reformation he wrought for his own time, it would not 'be amiss to consider: he appointed certain times for fasts and feasts, built stately churches, gave large immunities to the clergy, great riches and promotions to bishops, gave and ministered occasion to bring in a deluge of ceremonies, thereby either to draw in the heathen by a resemblance of their rites, or to set a gloss upon the simplicity and plainness of Christianity; which, 6 to the gorgeous solemnities of paganism, and the sense of the 'world's children, seemed but a homely and yeomanly religion; 'for the beauty of inward sanctity was not within their pro* spect.'

Lardner, while, with his characteristic candour, he does full justice to the merits of Constantine, (inserting in a note Vitringa's apology for those parts of his conduct which are not unexceptionable,') offers the following admirable observations upon the distinguishing feature of his policy, the persecution alike of the heathen and of all Christian heretics. Our readers will not be displeased at having the entire passage brought under their

notice.

"The unequal treatment of Catholics and heretics, soon after 'the first ceasing of the persecution, and the opening of liberty 'to the professors of the Christian religion, is not to be justified ' in point of religion or policy. We do not lay all the blame of this upon Constantine. If there be any fault, it will partly fall upon the Christians, both ministers and others, with whom he ' advised. But it seems that Constantine should not have made ' himself a party with any of the sects into which the Christian

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* Of Reformation in England. Milton, though he cites Dante, whose lines seem to refer to the pretended donation to the Bishop of Rome, evidently lays no stress upon that immaterial circumstance. It is certain that Constantine encouraged bequests to the Church, one of the most pernicious sources of its dishonest wealth.