wealth he dedicated to Religious uses, those of four sorts; the first to relieve the poor, the second to the building and maintenance of two Monasteries, the third of a School, where he had perswaded the Sons of many Noblemen to study Sacred Knowledge and Liberal Arts, some say at Oxford; the fourth was for the releif of Foreign Churches, as far as India to the shrine of St. Thomas, sending thether Sigelm Bishop of Sherburn, who both return'd safe, and brought with him many rich Gems and Spices; guifts also and a letter he receav'd from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, sent many to Rome, and for them receav'd Reliques. Thus far, and much more might be said of his Noble Mind, which render'd him the Miror of Princes.' There is one other passage which we crave permission to lay before the reader, a passage which one of the greatest and most eloquent of English writers-we refer to no less a man than Bishop Warburtonaffirmed to be without an equal in English literature, excepting the conclusion of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. It is at the end of the second book of the History, and runs as follows: Henceforth we are to stear by another sort of Authors; neer anough to the things they write, as in thir own Countrie, if that would serve; in time not much belated, some of equal age; in expression barbarous; and to say how judicious, I suspend a while: this we must expect; in civil matters to find them dubious Relaters, and still to the best advantage of what they term Holy Church, meaning indeed themselvs: in most other matters of Religion, blind, astonish'd, and strook with Superstition as with a Planet; in one word, Monks. Yet these Guides, where can be had no better, must be follow'd; in gross, it may be true anough; in circumstance each man as his judgment gives him, may reserve his Faith, or bestow it. But so different a state of things requires a several Relation.' Milton's History ends with the Norman Conquest, terminating, as Symmons remarks, just at the moment in which it was to become interesting. Occupied almost exclusively with the fables of early history, and the wars of Britons and Romans, Saxons and Danes, it possesses no other claims to a permanent renown than its great painstaking, scholarship, and the occasional grandeur of its style and dignity of its thought. Hitherto, these qualities do not seem to have been considered sufficient to secure for it either a publisher or a public. The reader, from the extracts we have given, will be able to judge for himself whether the verdict passed upon it by this silence and neglect has been on the part of the author deserved, or on the part of posterity just, fair, or intelligent. A Christian Common-Place Book. 'WISDOM THAT IS HID, AND TREASURE THAT IS NOT SEEN WHAT PROFIt is THERE IN THEM BOTH ?'-Jesus the Son of Sirach. that FEW men suspect how much mere talk enemy: it is well said to him that his courage is better kept till wanted. Loud utterance of virtuous indignation against evil, from the platform or in the drawingroom, do not characterise the spiritual giant. So much indignation as is expressed, has found vent, is wasted, is taken away from the work of coping with evil the man has so much less left. And hence, he who restrains that love of talk, lays up a fund of spiritual strength.-F. W. ROBERTSON, It cannot be denied that religious opinions, apart from the realizations of faith, are a matter of grave importance. But there is like to be little straightness in them, till the obliquities of sin begin to be straightened by a regenerate experience; and for just this reason Isuppose it is, that the Scriptures omit even to name orthodoxy or straight opinion at all, deeming it enough to insist that we walk straight-footedly in the gospel of truth (Gal. ii. 14), and make straight paths of self-sacrifice and duty to accommodate the lameness of our feet (Heb. xii. 3); on the wise principle, I suppose, that, being cleared of our prejudices and the obliquities of passion, having a single eye that looks right on, and living in a life of simple trust and devotion to the will of God, we have that which is better, in fact, than argument, to straighten our opinions; for the head will never stumble, if the feet do not.--DR. BUSHNELL. Christians have often been taunted by infidels with the bearing of the evangelical system on the good and wise of ancient paganism. Then you mean,' say they, to send Homer, Aristotle, Plato, and all the great men of antiquity, to hell! Our answer is, 'No. Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and all other men, will be judged equitably, according to their works. If their light was small, their responsibility also was small; if their light was none, their responsibility was none; and the responsibility thus absolutely varying with, and being exactly proportionate to, the light enjoyed, there cannot be an act of injustice done to any man.' In this view, common sense is not against God's government, but on its side. J. H. HINTON. GOWER.-Go out into the woods and valleys when your head is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweetbreathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you; while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you, like the comforters of Job. ATHERTON. - Doubtless, many of these stricken spirits suffered such disappointments at some early period of their history. Failure was inevitable, and the disease was heightened. How Coleridge felt this, when he says So mournfully, in his Ode to DejectionIt were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light which that in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within. -R. A. VAUGHAN, Christ was severe only with corruption. On other occasions, his burning censures fell only upon the hypocritical and wicked professors of religion; he had nothing but tenderness and tears for the simply evil; he poured his hot displeasure only on the hardened wretches that covered their real sin with seeming sanctity. And it is remarkable, also, that his approaches to force were always directed to the exposure of this class. He never forced men into the temple, says Milton-he only forced men out of it.-A. J. MORRIS. What is the religion of many of you? Is it not a buying and selling in the temple? that is, while you have religious sentiments, and perform religious services, is not your great end profit and advantage? is not gain godliness, in the highest sense? are not your chief motions derived from fear and hope? Are the infinite blessedness of being a Christian, the grace and glory of God, the excellence and beauty of spiritual truth, the boundless love and forbearance shown to you, the rightness and justice of divine service, the inherent charms of holiness-are these the things that most govern and stimulate you? Mere regard to your safety or your profit can no more make a spiritual man, than you can hire an unmusical ear to be ravished by melody, or bribe a vitiated palate to delight in sweetest viands. And when that which is spiritual is thus treated-when the supreme care is happiness and security, and Divine favour and human obedience are regarded mainly in their relation to them; when a man asks only, not how he may be heavenly, but how he may get to heaven -not how he may be like God, but how he may escape his wrath; when the hig hest view of Christ's redemption is that of a clever device to abolish misery and danger, and prudence is the peculiar excellence of godliness; when religion appears as a ladder set up between heaven and earth for all God's angels to descend and minister to man, but not for aspirations and holy communications to ascend from man to God; when Christianity is contemplated as a sort of gigantic scheme of political economy, and the Lord of all is regarded chiefly as the most useful being in existence-we may condemn the merchant Jews that defiled the temple, but we make our hearts, designed for the holy places of the Most High, the scenes of an infinitely more degraded and disastrous traffic.-A. J. MORRIS. A Mother's Hymn. My child is lying on my knees, And she is well, yea, bathed in bliss, And truthfulness and grace. Am ignorant and weak; And then I must not speak. For all behind the starry sky, Behind the world so broad, Behind men's hearts and souls doth lie The Infinite of God. If true to her, though dark with doubt If I am low and sinful, bring More love where need is rife; Thou knowest what an awful thing It is to be a life. Hast thou not wisdom to enwrap My waywardness around, And hold me quietly on the lap Of love without a bound? And so I sit in thy wide space, G. MACDONALD. The Right Use of the Early Fathers.* IF the material principle of the Reformation, JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE, has always been justly esteemed the glory of the Lutheran branch of Protestantism, its formal principle, THE BIBLE ALONE, THE RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE, has from the first been no less the especial badge of the Reformed or Calvinistic communions. Of course in saying this it is by no means meant to affirm that either of the great twin truths has, at any time, been the exclusive property of but one wing of the anti-papal host, but simply that as the right division, with the monk of Wittenberg at its head, first stormed, and has since bravely held against all opposition, the one commanding post, so the defence of the other has been mainly the business of the left. It is, doubtless, to their profounder conviction of the sole authority of Holy Scripture, as the unique depository of the revealed will of God, that we are to trace the simpler worship and the less hierarchical polity which distinguish the Reformed from their Lutheran, and, we may add, their Anglican brethren. For the Church of England in these, and in other respects as well, is the insular counterpart of Lutheranism on the continent the same in its proud exclusiveness and in its exaggerated notions of ecclesiastical office and sacramental grace. In like manner, the Reformed there are the type of the Dissenting opposition here. It was quite in the spirit of the communion to which he belonged that JEAN DAILLE, one of the most learned theologians of his age, and the brightest ornament of the French Reformed Church of the seventeenth century, wrote his celebrated work, ' On the Right Use of the Fathers.' First composed in his native language, and published in 1631, it afterwards appeared in Latin, with his latest corrections and additions in 1656. It has since been translated into several modern languages, including our own, and has been often reprinted. It is acknowledged on all hands to have been what our German neighbours are wont to call an epoch-making work, and to have been the heaviest blow ever struck at the superstitious reverence in which the Fathers had till then been held, even amongst the Protestants. Luther and Calvin indeed, and others of the Reformers, had thrown out many obiter dicta, far from respectful to these worthies. The first in particular was very unceremonious at times in his language about them. Thus in his 'Table-talk' we hear him saying, 'Behold what great darkness is in the books of the Fathers concerning faith; yet if the article of justification be darkened, it is impossible to smother the grossest errors of mankind. St. Jerome, indeed, wrote upon Matthew, upon the 'On the Right Use of the Early Fathers; Two Scries of Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge. By the Rev. J. J. Blunt, B.D., late Margaret Professor of Divinity.' London: Murray. 1857. 8vo. Pp. xvi. 650. Epistles to Galatians and Titus; but, alas! very coldly. Ambrose wrote six books upon the first book of Moses, but they are very poor. Augustin wrote nothing to the purpose concerning faith, for he was first roused up and made a man of by the Pelagians in striving against them. I can find no exposition upon the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians wherein anything is taught pure and aright?' He says, 'they often stumbled and went astray, and mingled in their books many monkish things;' and ridicules, amongst other instances, Gregory's explaining the five pounds in the parable to be the five senses, which,' as the Reformer maliciously observes, the beasts also possess.' 'The more I read the books of the Fathers,' he adds, 'the more I find myself scandalized; for they were but men, and, to speak the truth, with all their repute and authority, undervalued the books and writings of the sacred apostles of Christ. It would be easy, were it necessary, to match these occasional outbursts of impatience from the writings of the Swiss and French Reformers. But this was not the usual way in which even these heroic men were wont to speak of the Fathers, and still less, before the appearance of Daille's work, was it that of their followers. It was reserved for the systematic and elaborate assault so skilfully planned and so learnedly executed by the friend of Milton's 'noble Du Plessis' to bring about a disenchantment in this respect, no less complete than the awakening from the nightmare of medievalism, effected by the stinging satire of Cervantes. If to anyone belongs the honour of having smitten from its pedestal the idol of patristic authority, it is to Daillé. Accordingly, when in the glow of the Tractarian controversy, ten or a dozen years ago, the party which imagined the safety of the Establishment to depend on its being revolutionized in a so-called Catholic sense, were moving heaven and earth to set this Dagon up again, it was found necessary for this purpose to bring into discredit Daille's masterly work. This task the Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge took upon himself in the first of the two courses of lectures of which the volume before us consists. It was delivered for the first time in the October term of 1845, and was repeated, as occasion served, with additions and alterations, till his recent death. The second series treats more positively of the Right Use of the Early Fathers. We may make this the text of a subsequent paper on the same subject. At present, it will be possible only briefly to notice the assumed confutation of Daillé and his ally, Barbeyrac, Professor of Jurisprudence at Groningen, who, in 1728, published, a similarly damaging work on "The Morality of the Fathers.' Daill's elaborate treatise is arranged under two general heads. He first undertakes to show that the testimony of the Fathers, owing to various causes, which he details at length, is vague, uncertain, and obscure; and he next takes the high ground of principle, challenging their worshippers to prove why, even were it not so, their authority should be held decisive of our modern controversies. The counts of the indictment under the first division of the subject are such as these -the paucity of their extant writings, especially of those of the Ante |