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REVIEW S.

The Triple Crown; or the Power, Course, and Doom of the Papacy. By WILLIAM URWICK, D.D. Dublin: Robertson. 1852. pp. 454.

The Perverter in High Life: a true Narrative of Jesuit Duplicity. London: Partridge and Oakey. 1851. pp. 226. The Witnesses in Sackcloth; or a descriptive Account of the Attack made on the Reformed Churches of France in the Seventeenth Century. By a Descendant of a Refugee.

Romanism at Home: being Letters to the Honourable R. B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States. By KIRWAN. Edinburgh: Johnstone. pp. 218.

THAT since the passing of the act of Emancipation the partisans of Rome have made great efforts to enlarge the boundaries of their church in this country is an undeniable fact, and that these efforts have to some extent succeeded, is equally true. Yet, if churches have multiplied, if monasteries and convents, with their various crowd of mendicants, passionists, benedictines, brothers and sisters of the sacred heart, minims, cordeliers, and ursulines, in innumerable array, have sprung up like shadows from the dim ages of antiquity, beckoning the student and the enthusiast to their cloistral solitude, if liberal donatives have been freely offered to win the lower classes to the sanctuaries of idolatrous worship, it is at least as certain that the abundant labours of Romanists have availed but little to proselytize the masses of our countrymen, or to move them from their steadfast love for civil and religious liberty. Converts have not been many from among the poor. But few of the middle

classes have yielded to Rome's seductive influence. Her chiefest conquests have been made in the higher ranks of English society, among educated men, the pride of their alma mater, and the hope of the church in whose bosom they were cherished. But however numerous the converts may have been, and however striking the display of Romish practices and buildings, it may be doubted whether the revived attention of protestants to the subject has not resulted in much larger gains to the cause of truth and freedom. Certain it is that the long dormant spirit of aggression on Rome has again been awakened among the various religious bodies of this country. Almost every sect turns its organization to some good purpose, and puts forth its labourers into this field. The press groans with books and tracts innumerable, assailing every accessible point of the Romish defences, and painting for modern eyes the portraiture of enormities which distance and time had veiled and divested of some of their most repulsive features.

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It were easy to account for the gain Rome has made among the imaginative. There is always a large class of persons whose religious emotions are easily excited by a gorgeous and solemn ritual, and the musical devotion of a sensuous worship. of a cathedral is impressive to such minds; it invites contemplation, and seems to give infinitude to feeling. All the arrangements of such buildings incite the play of fancy. Thoughts may cluster around the massy columns, and seem led by the pointed arches they support to the high majesty of heaven. Every grinning corbel, every carved monstrosity,

tones of the daily service of prayer steal away the passionate aspirations of the soul, and bear them far from the strifes of time. That many who have been wont to take part in the service of the college chapel, should be attracted to the more complete worship of the Romish church, in which the sensuousness of religious worship is carried to its utmost extreme, can excite no surprise. Their education, their early impressions, all tend to such forms. To them worship is nothing if it be not largely commingled with the outward and visible symbol.

has its use; while the soft and thrilling | human merit, and find in supposed pur gatorial fires a more complete purga tive from sin than His blood, which is said, in scripture, to cleanse from all sin. It is, indeed, most strange that any who have once enjoyed sweet converse with God by the alone intervention of the great Intercessor, Christ Jesus, should now be induced to resort to saintly service, and to trust their cause in the hands of inferior and multitudinous mediators, of whose compassion they know nothing, and whose power to deliver is altogether supposititious. We wonder that thoughtful men should take refuge in a church, whose boasted unity is the oneness of a despotic usurpation, and commit their salvation to the care of a priesthood whose claims of exclusive power to save deny the words of him who said, "I am the door, by ME if any man enter in he shall be saved." Yet such cases are not rare.

But putting aside the imaginative, the fanatical, the thoughtless, and others whose adhesion to Rome may have been determined by still lower motives, there is a class whose perversion is not so easily accounted for. We have seen the children of evangelical parents become priests of the apostate church. We have known men once ornaments and preachers of evangelic truth abandon the pulpits of the establishment for the monk's cowl, and the Jesuit's gown. A clear sighted vision, and years of bold proclamation of the doctrine of man's justification before God through faith only, have not availed to hinder such from yielding to the allurements of the man of sin. It is no satisfactory explanation to throw out a doubt of their sincerity, or of their true conversion. If there be any certain marks by which a regenerated nature may be known, some of these individuals have borne them; while the sacrifices they have made of friendships, of position, of respect, and of property, testify to the genuineness of their convictions.

Still, it is an anomaly not to be overlooked, that men who have once to all appearance realized the blessedness of the man whose sins are covered by the all-sufficient merit of the Redeemer's sacrifice, should mix up therewith

Not a few of the best converts Rome has made were trained in schools of evangelic piety, and own for ancestry the names of men honoured in these last times as faithful expounders of the pure gospel, and large contributors to that revival of true godliness which marked the opening years of the century.

A reason for this may perhaps be found in one aspect of Romish theology, to which there is little that is analogous in the teaching of protestants. Rome has multiform ways of attracting to herself the hearts of men; and one of the most alluring of these, to a certain order of minds, is the means she presents in abundance for the cultivation of the highest forms of a contemplative and spiritual life. The greatest masters of the interior life, of the hidden life with God, peculiarly characteristic of the regenerate soul aspiring after high degrees of communion with the invisible, are to be found among the retired inmates of the cloister. From

them have emanated works of the profoundest piety, expressive of the deeper emotions of the aspiring spirit. The meditations of these recluses are not seldom found in the hands of the most pious of protestant Christians, breathing as they do the purest sentiments, the holiest attachment to Christ and God, and revealing the sighings of the heart after fellowship with the Eternal. And this because protestantism presents but few manuals of the kind.

The object of this study is the entire sanctification of the soul. The Redeemer often urged on his disciples the need of frequent and earnest prayer, Luke xviii. 1. His own example-the entire nights in which he sought communion with God, were comments on the precept he gave, Luke vi. 12. The forty days and nights of his sojourn in the desert, and the night of his passion, were spent in contemplation and prayer. Paul, again and again, repeats this lesson; and Peter adds his exhortation to "watch unto prayer," Eph. vi. 18; Rom. xii. 11; 1 Pet. iv. 8.

For the manner of prayer, Jesus teaches us to withdraw from the observation of men. He himself withdrew into desert places. In the private chamber the heart can pour out its griefs, its aspirations before God. There, with David, it may meditate on the divine nature, the love of God, the compassions of the Infinite, the purity of the Holy One, the sweetness of Divine friendship, and importunately press after their realization in itself. As the child of God by faith in Christ Jesus, the regenerate soul now desires to walk in love, to express, in every word, the love to God that animates it, to imbue every thought with this element, to live a loving life with God and men.

But this state of pure love can only be attained through many watchings and many prayers. Conflicts of many kinds have to be endured, before the soul

shall realize its blessedness and its peace-its perfect peace. "So run that ye may obtain," says the apostle. "Fight the good fight of faith, and lay hold on eternal life." The race is an arduous one, the warfare full of vicissitude and danger. The world, in its thousand-fold forms of temptation, besets the runner's path. The flesh, with all its passions and sensualities, counsels the pursuit of ease; while the devil, with weapons of fiery temptation and trial, strives to consume the energies of love.

The provision made by our popular protestantism for the cultivation of the higher forms of piety and devotion is but scant, if, indeed, it can be said, at the present time, to exist at all. Few are the guides placed in the hands of the people to instruct them how to live to God and with God. Great and laudable diligence is displayed in awakening conviction in the unthinking and careless, in leading the sinner to the atoning blood, in displaying the fulness and freeness of that salvation which Calvary secured for the guilty. But where shall we discover equal solicitude in the popular teaching of the day for the spiritual welfare of the believer, and his continued progress in the path of holiness and purity? Not that we would be understood as implying that practical godliness is never insisted upon, nor the duties of practical piety forgotten. These are often powerfully urged and still further enforced by the consciences of the enlightened; but we do miss the directing hand in this difficult path, the kind monitor, the wise assistant. Duty may be fully set before us, but the how to fulfil it is wanting. If prayer and the perusal of the divine word be urged, and the duty of their observance recognized, yet is there given no practical lessons as to the best method of reaping the most advantage from these necessary practices of piety.

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It is a mistake to suppose that the life of church members requires no careful cultivation on the part of the ministry. It is the most important feature of the pastoral relation. For want of attention to it, many who began to run well gradually relapse into indifference or fall away. The moral affections demand as much training as the intellectual powers; and forming, as they do, the motive power of individual man, they should receive the most sedulous regard. But where is the ministry that leads on the immature to perfection-the children of grace to the stature of men in Christ Jesus? where are the helps to self-discipline, to meditation and prayer, -so essential in the earliest stages of the Christian life? where do we find, in the pulpit or the press, an urgent demand on Christian men to seek after the attainment of purity of thought and feeling, loveliness of character, and that "holiness without which no man shall see the Lord?" where are the means, by the diligent use of which the child of God may grow in grace, and in the knowledge of Christ Jesus? Because these are wanting, it is, we fear, an age of low attainment, and of spiritual dwarfishness.

Many have felt this, and have sought in the mystic theology of Rome the satisfaction denied them in their own communion.

and bustling philanthropies of the day. Communion with God is welcomed, even in the solitude of the cloister, with all the mortifications and hardships of convent rule, since there is but little room for it amid the publicities of modern piety, and the éclat of platform celebrity. The platitudes of the evangelical pulpit, and the common-places of our protestant theology, have ceased to interest minds conscious of a deeper experience, and longing after higher and holier communion with the invisible. Hence many have been led on by the fervent, yet profound piety of a Fenelon to the study of St. Francis de Sales, from Thomas à Kempis to the counsels of perfection displayed in the works of Rodriguez. They have there found a response to the yearnings of a soul in love with God, and anxious to have its being penetrated with His sublime presence.

The result has been most mischievous. Romish dogmas have come to be thought less erroneous because held in combination with so much that is true and precious. The dross has been accepted for the sake of the gold imbedded therein.

We must confess that while we long to see a revived piety in our churches, it is our conviction that it can only be obtained by a more diligent regard to the various aspects of the Christian life, and a practical observance of those rules of piety and holy living which experience has approved as essential to the existence and growth of spirituality, and holiness of thought and feeling.

The numerous works, some of them injurious enough because imbued with Romish error, that have issued from the Tractarian press, evince this tendency of unsatisfied desire, and the longing after a deeper and purer spiritual life. The errors and enormities of Rome have been forgotten or passed by in the joy of finding a spirituality of feeling that certainly is absent from the modern phases of our protestant theology. The monastic institution has been regarded with favour because of its opportunities for meditation and frequent prayer, denied to the active in an authentic form.

Very brief must be our remarks on the works before us. Dr. Urwick is well-known as an able assailant of the errors of Rome, and his present work will not diminish his reputation. Of the next on our list we can but express our conviction, that if in substance true, it would have been better had the author given us the narrative

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