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tinguishing tenet of the school of Luther, that through the incurable nature of our corruption we cannot.' -Ib. p. 68, 69.

"On the whole, then, I conclude as follows: that though the gift which justifies us is, as we have seen, a something distinct from us, and lodged in us, yet it involves in its idea its own work in us, and (as it were) takes up into itself that renovation of the soul, those holy deeds and sufferings, which are as if a radiance streaming from it.' -Ib. p. 204.

""Compare this with the language of the eleventh article. We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.'

"Observe, also, the language to which such views of Justification lead. Our chief strength must be the altar; it must be in sacraments and prayers, and a good life to give efficacy to them; and in secret alms to the poor to buy their prayers, which have great power with God.'- Tracts for the Times, No. 80, p. 125. 'Some Catholic verities there are, which are rather impressed upon the surface of Holy Scripture than involved in the depth of its meaning; such we would maintain to be among others the doctrine of justification by works.' - British Critic, No. lx. p. 42.

"The passage of Hooker, referred to in the Charge, is as follows:- This is the mystery of the man of sin. This maze the Church of Rome doth cause her followers to tread, when they ask her the way of justification..... Whether they speak of the first or second justification, they ification they make the essence of it a divine quality qual inherent, they make it righteousness which is in us. If it be in us, then it is ours, as our souls are ours, though we have them from God, and can hold them no longer than pleaseth Him; for if he withdraw the breath of our nostrils, we fall to dust; but the righteousness wherein we must be found, if we will be justified, is not our own; therefore we cannot be justified by any inherent quality.' - Hooker's Works, Keble's Edition, vol. iii. p. 489,490. ""Not to adduce other proofs of this, we have the memorable one in this country, when there broke in upon us an age, which has been well called one of "light, but not of love;" when the knowledge of divine truths was forced upon men of corrupt lives, and put forward without this sacred reserve. The CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 49.

consequence of this indelicate exposure of religion was, the perpetration of crimes almost unequalled in the annals of the world.' Tract 80, p. 60.*

"To require, as is sometimes done, from both grown persons and children, an explicit declaration of a belief in the atonement, and the full assurance of its power, appears equally untenable.' Ib. p. 77.

""In whatever way we consider it, there is no scriptural sanction for the necessity of our always thrusting forward the doctrine of the atonement without reserve.'-Tract 87, p. 69.

"See the whole of Tracts 80 and 87, in which the principle of reserve in communicating religious knowledge is elaborately defended. See particularly the practical carrying out of this principle in its application to the erection of churches _ ' which from commodiousness and easiness of access are to invite, and from their little cost partake more of a low contriving expediency than of a generous love of God; '-to the distribution of bibles and religious publications, and to national schools." Tract 80, p. 67-71; 87, p. 121.

"A writer in the British Critic car

* We were at a loss to know what Mr. Williams means by this allegation, that the preaching of "Christ crucified" has led to "the perpetration of crimes almost unequalled in the annals of the world," till we recollected that Mr. Norris of Hackney ingeniously contrived to adduce the horrible murders of Marr and Williamson in 1811, as proofs of the demoralising effects of Bible Societies; not indeed that the murderers were members of such societies, or had probably ever heard of them; but certain it was that such societies existed, and that such crimes were committed; argal, post hoc, propter hoc. A reverend speaker at a public meeting remarked that he was not surprised at this logic, for that he orce met with an elderly lady who seriously told him that nothing had ever prospered in this country since Lunardi went up in a balloon. What does the writer of Tract 80 really mean? The Apostle Paul, who had no reserve in preaching Christ crucified, tells us that the Gospel when neglected or abused, becomes a savour of death unto death; and fearfully true is it that "men of corrupt lives" may turn even the grace of God into licentiousness; but to declare that the scriptural setting forth of divine truth is the actual cause of "the perpetration of crimes almost unequalled in the annals of the world," is -to speak mildly a very awful assertion.

G

ries the principle of reserve a step fur-
ther, and specifies it as peculiarly to be
observed in missionary preaching among
the heathen. The same thought re-
conciles us in some measure to a more
exciting tone of preaching than is con-
sistent with the perfect theory of the
Catholic system. Not, indeed, to the
prominent exhibition in preaching of the
Christian mysteries, (for this were inad-
missible under far more extreme cir-
cumstances, and even upon the supposi-
tion of our congregations being literally
heathen; indeed the more inadmissible,
the farther the hearers receded from
the perfect state,) but to a more alarm-
ing tone than would be necessary or
right under a stricter administration of
the church.' British Critic, vol. xxvii.
p. 261. We would not hazard an un-
qualified objection even against the cru-
cifix as an object for very private con-
templation under certain trying circum-
stances; say, for instance, a surgical
operation
The crucifix, openly
exhibited, produces the same sort of un-
comfortable feeling with certain Pro-
testant exposures in preaching of the
mystery which it represents.' Ib. p.

271.

...

"Take the language of the Tracts in the order of their appearance.

"" The intelligible argument of UltraProtestantism may be taken, and we may say. "the Bible, and nothing but the Bible;" but this is an unthankful rejection of another great gift, equally from God, such as no true Anglican can tolerate.' Tract 71, p. 8.

"The true creed is the Catholic interpretation of Scripture, or scripturally proved tradition; Scripture by itself teaches mediately and proves decisively; tradition by itself proves negatively and teaches positively; Scripture and tradition taken together are the joint rule of faith.' Tract 78, p. 2.

"The nondescript system of religion now in fashion, that nothing is to be believed but what is clearly in Scripture, that all its own doctrines are clearly there and none other, and that as to history it is no matter what it says and what it does not say, except so far that it must be used to prove the canonicity of Scripture, has all the external extravagance of latitudinarianism without its internal consistency. Latitudinarianism is consistent, because it is intellectually deeper. Both, however, are mere theories in theology, and ought to be discarded by serious men.' Tract 85, p. 25.

""All Protestants, then, in this country, Churchmen, Presbyterians, Baptists, Arminians, Calvinists, Lutherans, Friends, Independents, Wesleyans, Unitarians, and whatever other sect claims the Pro

testant name, all who consider the Bible as the one standard of faith, and much more if they think it the standard of morals and discipline, are more or less in this difficulty.' Ib. p. 29.

"Both the history of its composition (of the Bible) and its internal structure are against its being a complete depository of the Divine will, unless the early church says that it is. Now the early church does not tell us this. It does not seem to have considered that a complete code of morals, or of church government, or of rites, or of discipline, is in Scripture; and therefore, so far, the original improbability remains in force. Again, this antecedent improbability tells, even in the case of the doctrines of faith, as far as this, but it reconciles us to the necessity of gaining them indirectly from Scripture, for it is a near thing (if I may so speak) that they are in Scripture at all; the wonder is, that they are all there; humanly judging, they would not be there but for God's interposition; and, therefore, since they are there by a sort of accident, it is not strange they shall be but latent there, and only indirectly producible thence.'-Ib. pp. 33, 34.

"The Church not only transmits the faith by human means, but has a supernatural gift for that purpose.' Newman on Romanism, pp. 232, 233.

"The Church Catholic is unerring in its declarations of faith on saving doctrines.' - Ib. p. 259.

"" Scripture is the foundation of the creed; but belief in Scripture is not the foundation of belief in the creed.' Ib. p. 290.

"" Scripture was never intended to teach doctrine to the many.'-Ib. p. 189. "" If one external means of informa

tion(the Word) is admitted as intervening between the Holy Ghost and the soul, why not another (the Church)?' Newman's Lectures on the Church, p. 87.

""The divinity of traditionary religion.' - Newman's Arians, p. 87.

"We wish our author (the writer of Tract 86) had entered a more decided protest than he has against the common Protestant objection to the practice of extreme unction. The case of that practice is a proof of the danger of going by Scripture only.'--British Critic, vol. xxvii. p. 259.

""Now to the Catholic Christian, as we have already intimated, the uncatholic appearance of Scripture, putting it at the highest, is a subject of not even momentary perplexity. He does not, like the Protestant, profess that the Bible only is his rule of faith and practice; he interprets it by the Church, as well as the Church by it..... He

has known the Church longer than the Scriptures; the Scriptures, perhaps, 'from a child,' but the Church from an infant!! He is born into the Church, when a few days or a few weeks old, his eyes open upon a visible system; and he comes, when he comes, to the study of the Bible, with a heart preengaged to the Church, and a mind preoccupied with Catholic impressions. He does not apply himself to the Bible, with the view of testing the religious discipline in which he has been nurtured; as well might we think of his proceeding to investigate, upon scriptural principles, the claims of his parents or instructors.' - Ib. No. 60, pp. 435. See also On Romanism, pp. 308

-310.

"That the Bible, then, is in the hands of the Church to be dealt with in such a way as the Church shall consider best for the expression of her own mind at the time. this may surely be considered as a Catholic axiom.' Ib. p. 453. This disposes at once of one of the constituents of the famous axiom 'Quod semper,' &c.

....

"There will be a number of refined and affectionate minds, who, disappointed in finding full matter for their devotional feelings in the English system, as at present conducted, betake themselves, through human frailty, to Rome.' Tract 71, p. 4.

"I consider its existing creed and popular worship to be as near idolatry as any portion of that Church can be, from which it is said that "the idols"

shall be "utterly abolished.' "-Letter to Dr. Jelf, p. 7. Compare this language with that of Bishop Horsley, 'I set out with this principle, that the Church of Rome is at this day a corrupt church, a church corrupted with idolatry; with idolatry very much the same in kind and degree with the worst that ever prevailed among the Egyptians or the Canaanites, till within one, or two centuries at the most, of the time of Moses.' Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Messiah, dispersed among the Heathen, p. 58.

""Other points of doctrine, more or less Catholic, which occur at the moment as answering to this description, (of Catholic verities impressed upon the surface of Holy Scripture) are the following: baptismal regeneration, the sacred presence in the eucharist, the oneness of the visible church, the primacy of St. Peter.' - Tract 71, p. 423, Note.

""The English Church, as such, is not Protestant, only politically, that is externally, or so far as it has been made an establishment, and subjected to na

tional and foreign influences.'-Tract 71, p. 32. As a whole' the Catholic ritual was a precious possession, and if we, who have escaped from Popery, have lost not only the possession but the sense of its value, it is a serious question whether we are not like men who recover from some grievous illness, with the loss or injury of their sight or hearing.' - Tract 34, p. 7. Lower strains befit her depressed condition; and with such, in the English liturgy, she is actually provided.' The Church has sullied her baptismal robe of purity; she is not permitted to come into the Divine presence at all, until she has done penance; nor, when admitted, is she privileged to raise her voice in the language of joy and confidence, without many a faltering note of fear and self-reproach.'-British Critic, vol. xxvii. p. 254, 255.

"I can see no other claim which the Prayer-book has on a layman's deference as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary and Missal have not in a far greater degree.' Froude's Remains, p. 403.

"The services of our Church are characterised by a peculiar tone of sadness and humiliation; and we are throughout made thereby to use the language of those who have fallen away from the richer inheritance and the privilege of sons.' Tract 86, p. 66.

"The English Church seems at least to give an uncertain sound; she fails in one of her very principal duties, that of witnessing plainly and directly to Catholic truth; she seems to include whom she ought to repel, to teach what she is bound to anathematize; and it is difficult to estimate the amount of responsibility she year by year incurs on account of those (claiming, as many of them do, our warm love for zeal and earnest piety, worthy of a purer faith) who remain buried in the darkness of Protestant error, because she fails in her duty of holding clearly forth to them the light of Gospel truth. If it appears undutiful in a member of the English Church to speak so strongly of her defective state, let it be imputed to a strong conviction, that, till we have the grace of humility in a far greater degree than we seem in general, since the schism of the sixteenth century, to have had it, there is little hope of our Church taking its proper place, whether in England or Christendom. Let those whose love for her is lukewarm, content themselves with mourning in private over her decayed condition, her true and faithful children will en. deavour to waken the minds of their brethren to a sense of her present degradation.'-A Few More Words in sup

port of No. 90 of the Tracts for the Times, by the Rev. William George Ward, M.A., p. 28-30.

"It is impossible to admit the truth of Dr. Wiseman's comment on language of this kind: 'General dissatisfaction at the system of the Anglican Church is clearly expressed in the words of these authors; it is not a blame cast on one article or another, it is not blemish found in one practice, or a Catholic

want in a second, or a Protestant ascen

dancy in a third; but there is an impatient sickness of the whole; it is the weariness of a man who carries a bur

then, it is not of any individual stick, of his fagot that he complains, it is the bundle which tires and worries him. The dependence of the Church on the State, its Egyptian taskmaster and oppressor, (as they deem it,) the want of a proper influence of the clergy in the appointment of their bishops, and of power in the Church in enforcing spiri

tual measures; the destruction conciliary authority in the hierarchy; the Protestant spirit of the articles in the aggregate, and their insupportable uncatholicism in specific points; the loss

of ordinances, sacraments, and liturgical

rites; the extinction

and ascetic feelings and observances; the decay of "awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called Catholic;" the miserable feeling of solitariness and separation above described; -these are but a portion of the grievances whereof we meet complaints at every turn, the removal of which would involve so thorough a change in the essential condition of the Anglican Church, as these writers must feel would bring her within the sphere of attraction of all-absorbing unity, and could not long withhold her from the embrace of its centre.' Letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, pp. 16, 17.

"That the feelings which have been expressed, in favour of a return to unity by the Anglican Church, are every day widely spreading and deeply sinking, no one who has means of judging, I think, can doubt. Those sentiments have a

the leaven, and it is fermenting; and places where it might least be expected, seem to have received it in secret and mysterious ways." Letter, p. 21.

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To have been obliged, for his and for truth's sake, to append such a tissue of exceptionable passages, in justification of godly monitions" in the Charge, must have been grievous to the fatherly heart of a faithful prelate; and more especially so, if within the precincts of his own pastoral jurisdiction the errors to which he refers had any where penetrated. It might be, that when his Lordship commenced his Visitation, some persons, unacquainted with the true character

and tendencies of the doctrines adverted to, considered that so solemn a warning might have been spared; and that any little effervescence of opinion-as they

might account it--was best left to subside, and work itself clear, without official interference, at least beyond a passing allusion. Possibly his Lordship had himself indulged that hope, and followed that course, as long as he considered there was any warrant to do so; but if any doubt existed in any mind three months ago, the secession to Popery of such a man as Mr. Sibthorp, a clergyman in his Lordship's own diocese, shews that the "time to be silent" had passed, and the "time to speak" arrived. If opinions were held and preached in his diocese during many years, which in November ripened into

silent echo in hundreds of sympathising avowed Popery, it cannot be said

bosoms, and they who receive as sounds dear to them, are not idle in communicating their own thoughts to many more over whom they have influence; and thus has a far more general

sense been awakened, than appears at first sight, to the religious state of things. There are many evidences (which it uld be hardly proper to detail) that lic feelings have penetrated deeper society than at first one would suspect. Whole parishes have received

that two months previously they were so incipient and immature that there was no cause for a warning voice. We mention the

case of Mr. Sibthorp, because it is one of painful notoriety; but we do not know that six months since that individual had apparently advanced nearer to Rome

than some other clergymen who were, and are, setting forth the opinions which he then held, and preparing many of their flocks for a journey thither, even should they themselves be mercifully withstrained from making it. We should say, therefore, that it was a happy circumstance for the Bishop of Winchester, that he was led to speak as he did in his Charge: for it is now plain to all men that his monition was not without cause; and he is freed from the imputation of negligence unfaithfulness,

or

which might have been urged,

had he refrained from the discharge of a painful duty in warning his clergy against such perilous delusions. The lovers of emblematic devices, some of whom have been rather hasty in their words about his Lordship's Charge, should not forget that the pastoral crosier is significantly not only a crook to bring back the wandering sheep, but a staff to repel the wolf from the fold; and Popery is a wolf which is lurking to catch and scatter the sheep; and it well knows how, as Dr. Wiseman avows, to find access through many of the ninety gaps in the hedge which the Tractarians have prepared for it.

We now turn to the faithful and affectionate warnings of another much-esteemed and beloved

prelate, who from the far-off East is echoing back the fatherly admonitions and remonstrances of not a few of his Right Reverend brethren in England, against the destructive dogmas contained in the code of the Ninety Articles. Bishop Wilson had not, from the first, under-estimated the unscriptural character and baneful tendencies of the Tractarian system; but he hoped that the evil was partial and temporary, and like many other novelties, it

might die away, and be forgotten. How differently he now thinks appears from the following energetic sentences.

"I have made up my mind. I take a very different view of the case now from what I did three years since. I then addressed a few cautionary remarks to my reverend brethren in my public Charge on the question as it then lay before me. I did not conceal even at that early period my fears of the tendencies of the traditional school. But I leaned to the side of charity. I hoped the leaders would have retracted, or ceased to repeat, their errors. I hoped the character of those errors would have been soon acknowledged, when the

novelty had passed. But I was mis

"I now look on the progress of these doctrines in a very different light. I am an alarmist. I believe our church was never in the danger she now is, except perhaps immediately before the great rebellion. Not the high church party of which Archbishop Laud was then the head, nor the non-jurors who condemned the glorious revolution of 1688, carried out so many of the main principles of the Church of Rome, and professed them so formally, fully, and systematically within the Church of England, as is now openly done.

"I must not be wanting to Christianity in the East on this great occasion, little as I can hope to effect. I have already in part answered the appeals made to me for my opinion from every part of the diocese, and I may say India, in various discourses delivered in the progress of my visitation. I seize the first opportunity on my return to the metropolis, to lift up, as I am now doing, my warning voice, on this occasion of a solemn ordination."

"I am full of fear; everything is at stake. There seems to be something judicial in the rapid spread of these opinions. If they should come over here, and pervade the teaching of our chaplains, the views and proceedings of our missionaries, our friendly relations with other bodies of Christians, and our position amongst the Hindoos and Mahometans, 'Ichabod, the glory is departed,' may be inscribed on our church in India. All real advances in the con

version of the heathen will stop. Our scattered Christian flocks will miss the sound and wholesome nourishment for their souls. Our converts will quickly dwindle away to a nominal profession. Our native catechists and missionaries will be bewildered. A scheme which substitutes self and form and authority

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