its unhappy influence in the land. If they seek only the restoration of a former faith, and think that the majority of the English clergy have apostatized from the tenets of the Reformation, let them, in God's name, trace the nature and extent of that apostacy. If they would bring forward new principles, and engraft improvements upon the Reformation, let the character and amount of these new and improved principles be declared, together with the reasons on which they are founded. We are the old party, and the defensive party; our opinions are known, and attacked because they are known. But it is high time that some definite causes of opposition should be stated, instead of general insinuations and vague surmises. Oh, let us at least have objections which we can honestly meet, and antagonists with whom we can fairly grapple.

We emphatically repeat-for it is a matter of the last consequence to our argument-that we conceive ourselves to belong to that which is the old party, and now the defensive party, and the party, as we sincerely believe, attached to those genuine doctrines of the Reformation, which at different periods may have been preached with more or less of efficacy; or adorned more or less by the lives of those who have professed them; but which, as far as we know, have never been abandoned. We make no pretence to the reception of new lights; we do not expatiate upon the revival of religion, or talk of completing the Reformation by carrying it forward to an ulterior and higher point. If any men entertain such views, with those men we differ. But we are not the occasion of any schism; the differences only exist in the extent to which other parties have created them.

And yet it is very probable, that, in the vast majority of cases, a few brief sentences of frank and decisive explanation would remove the difference, by showing it to be imaginary, or verbal, or the result of a mutual misapprehension; or by proving that the disagreements existed only to that slight amount upon minuter subjects, to which they must always exist, until there is an exact conformity in the construction of various minds; and until the rays of intellectual light fall upon them all at precisely the same angle. Then, as to the Revivalists, we would ask them distinctly to announce, in what sense, and with what latitude, they use the phrase "revival of religion," of which we hear so much? If they mean by it merely a greater vitality and earnestness in religion, a fresh vigour of faith and liveliness of devotion, a larger measure of charity, an increased degree of personal exertion and personal holiness, then we can have no quarrel with them, except for the ambiguity of their language. We rejoice at such a revival of religion, wherever it occurs; and we honour the human instruments, who, under the blessing of God, produce it. But

if men can call themselves Revivalists, under the impression that they are a species of spiritual resurrectionists, whose business is to dig up out of their graves tenets which have been buried in the slumber of death, then we must say, that we see no necessity for the resuscitation or revivification of evangelical tenets; for we know of no evangelical tenets which have, since the Reformation, been defunct. In a word, we hail, with the utmost gratification, the diffusion and growth of Christian piety; but we stand upon our guard; and feelings, we acknowledge, of suspicion and apprehension, come across us, when we hear of a revival of Christian doctrine. We think the character of our doctrines to be of an importance, which far transcends every other consideration, and we wish to maintain our doctrines as they are.

Upon this subject we would say one word more in entire frankness. We hear a great deal about the value of an Established Church, as being an establishment; about the necessity of its maintenance and the ruin of its subversion. To these statements we cordially assent. We can discern the folly, and the mischief, and the injustice, of cutting away one half of the institution, and dreaming that the other will survive it; of shattering a machinery which has worked, and is working throughout the land, a vast aggregate of multifarious benefits; of laying prostrate a system which is connected with all the monuments of our history and the ancient habits of our people; and which, while it is of national establishment, is also for the most part of private endowment. But still the best measure of the value of an establishment must be the value of the doctrines to which it is attached, and which it serves, perhaps, to enshrine and embalm. As the existence of the establishment communicates to the doctrines an augmentation of authority and an increased power of diffusion, so the doctrines alone, in an age of intelligence and intellectual activity, can uphold and consecrate the establishment. We hope and trust that both may be saved; we would struggle to save both at every hazard and at every sacrifice; but let it be distinctly understood, that it is for the sake of the doctrines that we would adhere to the establishment, and not for the sake of the establishment that we would guard the doctrines. We would keep the casket for the jewel which it contains, rather than the jewel for the casket that encloses it. These two, positions, then we would lay down: First, the purity, the reasonableness, the scriptural spirituality of the doctrines, can alone, in times like these, be, under Providence, the strength and stay of an Established Church; for without this cardinal pre-eminence, neither could the establishment be preserved, nor would it be worth preservation. Secondly, even if the case were otherwise, and the alternative were

offered, there is no rational and pious Christian, who would not infinitely prefer that the doctrines should be preserved without the establishment, than that the establishment should be preserved without the doctrines. Not for one hour, not for one moment, should we hesitate. The inference on both grounds is, that no tampering with the Articles can ever be allowed; no amalgamation or compromise with the Dissenters for the attainment-of what, shall we say? of peace, and amity, and agreement? no, but of a brief, and shameful, and fatal truce; not merely, in short, no recognition of a principle such as Dr. Arnold's, which, under the pretence of widening the foundations of an establishment, would strike away one main use of au establishment, as a landmark and safeguard of sound doctrine; but no sanction or admission of extravagances and innovations, however popular they may happen to be within the Church itself; no departure from the sacred tenets and discipline of our fathers in the faith.

Is it wonderful, then, if our patience ebbs within us, when we see many among the best and wisest men in the kingdom represented by others, altogether their inferiors in education and mental powers, as little better than nominal or half-formed Christians, mere infants in religion, who can never hope to attain the perfect stature of faith and grace? What? do we not find amongst these men as profound, and humble, and trembling a sense of the weakness and insufficiency and corruption of human nature, and the consequent want of a thorough change and regeneration of character, through the help of an agency mightier than our own; as entire a conviction, as just an appreciation of the Divinity of the Lord Jesus, of the necessity and value of the Atonement by His death, of the need of faith in order to justification, and of the aids and influences of the Spirit, in order to sanctification, of the incompetency of mere intellect, the mere faculty of drawing logical inferences to "make man wise unto salvation," without the holier energy of moral tastes and dispositions, as among the wildest and most hotheaded enthusiasts, who would decry the orthodox pastors of the Church as nothing more than ethical teachers, fond of enlarging on the dignity of man's being, and the merit of man's works; and prone to reject or explain away the peculiar and characteristic mysteries of the Gospel? In their exhibition of the Christian Faith, what doctrine, we would confidently ask, is merged or forgotten? What tenet is cut down into a meagre nullity? What peculiarity is dilated into a disproportioned importance? What part of religion is suffered to eclipse and over-power, to absorb and swallow all the rest? Where is the shadow of a slur cast upon any one of the marvels of our redemption? They may pause, indeed, before they so strip man of his moral capacities as to strip

him also of his moral responsibility; they may pause before they admit doctrines which would revive in the Christian Church the darkest and most appalling fatalism of the ancient necessitarians; they may discern unspeakable danger in making religion only a thing of impulse, or feeling, or sudden or intuitive belief; they may claim for reason her legitimate province in matters of faith, and for the noblest endowments of the understanding an ample exercise; they may insist upon the use of varied and extensive knowledge; but all these things they would nevertheless subordinate to holiness and purity of heart; and they can deem the meekness, and simplicity, and docility of a child, as more indispensable than the most practised skill and erudition of a philosopher.

Do these assertions require proof? The evidence is overwhelming. The rank which England holds among Christian nations is our witness. The theological literature of the country is our witness. The whole host of illustrious writers nurtured in the bosom of that Church which they lived to exalt, men who have been the very beacons and bulwarks of genuine Christianity, are our witnesses. The very volumes now before us are our witnesses.

That sound and sterling religion which has been our boast and blessing as a community, and which we devoutly trust has made the temporal and eternal happiness of millions of individuals, we mainly owe to the orthodox divines of the Church of England; and the preservation among us of that sound and sterling religion we shall, under that same Providence, owe mainly to their successors; and the benefits of maintaining the soundness and orthodoxy of the English Church, must stretch far beyond the shores of our own country, and extend far beyond the limits of the present time.

On the one hand, if we look to the history of the past, we see only an accumulated debt of gratitude, which the whole of Christendom owes to the illustrious defenders of our English Protestantism. We need not refer to the days of Wiclif or Cranmer, but we would point to the series of theologians who arose, as lights in the world, from the period of the Reformation to the middle of the last century; theologians, who have not only asserted and maintained a pure and scriptural religion in the eastern hemisphere, but sown its seeds in the western, and planted its standard, and set up its landmarks, (still useful because still partially observed), and spread a heavenly illumination, which, even if its sun be any, where gone down, must ever preserve a brightness and a beauty even in its twilight. Again, when, in the eighteenth century, an unhallowed philosophy, which had enlisted in its ranks the most shining, if not the most solid, talents of the world, made its com

bined and systematic attack upon Christianity with the weapons now of reason, now of ridicule, here of a pretended erudition, there of a sarcastic levity; and when the belief of many nations had succumbed and fallen before it, who were the men who rushed forward to stem the tide of ungodlines and beat it back from our coasts? Were they Dissenters? No. Were they any others than our orthodox divines? Once more we say, for the most part, no. The champions of Christianity were men like Horsley and the rest, who stood almost by the side of Burke with intellects almost as gigantic; and, as he saved us from infidelity by keeping off anarchy, so they saved us from anarchy by keeping off infidelity. Oh, who can survey with a steady glance the portentous peril of those times, and not be sure, that if God had permitted that attack for an awful season to be successful, and religion had been overthrown in England, it would have been overthrown with a more appalling, perhaps an irrecoverable, ruin upon the continent; and all Europe, in her agony of spirit, would have had double cause to exclaim, "Ichabod, the glory is departed, for the Ark of the Lord is taken?"

Shall the lesson be lost? Have not these times their portents also? When we think of the corruptions and superstitions of Catholic states, with that hateful offspring of unbelief, which they infallibly engender; when we think of the neology, the rationalism, the unchristianized Christianity too prevalent in Germany; when we think of the unspiritual theology of Geneva, and the rapid strides which Unitarianism is making among our brethren beyond the Atlantic, to what secondary agency can we turn, under Providence, but to the same orthodox establishment which has already preserved us? What other barrier can we find, on the one side, against a rampant or mystical extravagance; on the other, against that cold distortion of the Gospel, which seems, by a lamentable dexterity, to encumber itself with the difficulties both of Christianity and of Deism, without being able to rest upon the divine authority of the one, or take advantage of the human freedom of the other; and which would convert the rich and flowing rivers of Salvation into the stagnant, and sullen, and pestiferous, waters of the Dead Sea? Our hearts would sink within us, and our imaginations would be overshadowed by a thousand presages of darkness and disaster, if the old orthodoxy of the Church of England were now decried and abandoned. Upon no instrumentality of earth can we depend, but upon a sound, regular, well-organized divinity; upon minds, disciplined by study and education, and armed at all points from the arsenals of theological research, as well as tempered by the spirit of the Gospel of Christ. Can religious feelings and reli