touching prayers for our deliverance and rest; and the very earth which, sprinkled with blessed water, falls heavy upon our coffin, shall seem rich with her benedictions, embalming our remains beyond Egypt's skill for a glorious resurrection."*

Verily this is sacramentalism in deed and in truth-sacramentalism genuine and intense, livingly realised and practically carried out-sacramentalism, with which no imitation yet produced on Anglican ground can, in the eye of a true votary, admit of being for an instant compared. By all means, if we are to be saved by sacraments, let us throw ourselves on them wholly, and live in their element continually. The greater their number, and the more entirely they meet our every exigency of life, the better. True, indeed, to a man who has really felt the burden of sin, and the healing power of the living Word, miserable comforters will they be all. Better to him one single sentence from the lips of his Lord, than a thousand such appliances of untempered mortar. Rooted and built up on the true foundation, he needs no such feeble buttresses of wood, hay, and stubble to sustain his hope. "That healing, and soothing, and bracing unction, which comes so seasonably to strengthen the Christian athlete in his final conflict!"-how infinitely better one single whispered word of the blessed God at such a noment!" Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me." "The church on earth bearing the soul committed to its care to the very threshold of the eternal gates!"-were not this better, "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee;" "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for THOU art with me?" Drops of "blessed water, falling heavy upon our coffin, embalming our remains for a glorious resurrection!" Oh! away with such sentimental drivelling in presence of the dread realities of death and the grave, and let me rather grasp that promise of my Lord as my only anointing for the burying "I am the Resurection and the Life: he that believeth in ME, though he were dead, yet shall he live." Still, if sacramental charms be the great source of saving grace, and not the living God speaking directly to the sinner's soul by his own Word, and applying the signs and seals of his covenant spiritually to their consciences and hearts, that assuredly is the way effectually to apply them. Such mere playing at sacramentalism as the Anglican divines have attained to such mere flourishing in men's eyes of "the golden keys" of ghostly power, which they scarce ever use-may amuse the sentimental votary, but can never either satisfy the understanding, or fill

* Dr Wiseman's Essays, vol. ii. pp. 337, 338.

the hearts, of earnest men.* Such an amphibious and half-andhalf life, can only, to clear and thorough-going minds at least, be a state of transition. Those who have tasted the genuine fruits of living sacramentalism, where it grows in its own native clime, will scarcely care to seek it again in the cold seats of its mere artificial and scanty culture.

Thus we have, we trust, sufficiently shown, that there is in reality no tenable middle ground between the principles of Protestantism and the principles of Romanism. We must take our choice between the religion of the Bible on the one hand, and the religion of the Church on the other. The Bible, the one test of truth, in opposition to a dogmatic infallibility; the Bible, the one bond of spiritual unity, in opposition to the binding force of an external visible centre; the Bible, "the power of God unto salvation," in opposition to a system of sacramental charms; the Bible, in the hands of the Spirit, in opposition to the Church in the hands of the priest, such are the only two real alternatives, and on one or other we must take our stand. Every theory which attempts to establish a middle ground between them, will prove on trial a mere sham and make-believe-existing only on paper, and incapable of being carried out in practice-only so many slippery positions on the inclined plane that leads from the firm rock of truth to the rank and treacherous swamps of error.

We have felt it painful to have been obliged in this controversy, even to seem to take the part of our common adversary against those with whom, amid all their aberrations, we may be supposed to entertain a far greater sympathy; but we had no alternative. It has been our unwelcome lot to witness this forlorn division of the professedly Protestant host, madly leaving the entrenched and impregnable camp of their brethren in arms, and, in sheer infatuation, and heedless of all warnings, marching full within the lines of the enemy, loudly proclaiming the while that theirs was the only true position, at once for effective assault and secure defence. What other result could possibly be expected in such circumstances, than that they should be ignominiously routed, and either cut to pieces or carried as helpless captives to the camp of the enemy. We beheld the ill-starred movement; we foresaw its consequences; we proclaimed the danger; but all in vain. "No position like ours," they cried, "for effectually assaulting Popery, and repel* Lyra Apostolica. The Three Absolutions. Page 15:"Each morn and eve the golden keys

Are lifted in the sacred hand,

To show the sinner on his knees,

Where Heaven's bright doors will open stand."

Golden keys indeed!-made for glitter and show, and for proud ecclesiastics to shake in the face of poor homeless dissenters,-but after all a sorry substitute for those massy iron keys, which he of the vatican wears at his girdle, opening and shutting heaven, and at the clank of which the nations crouch and tremble.

ling the common enemy;" and so they rushed blindly on. That the consequences anticipated by every intelligent Protestant have actually happened, we need scarcely say. The battle between them and their Romanist antagonists is really at an end. Confidently as they rushed on to the assault, they staggered and recoiled in the encounter, retired from position to position, till their ranks were thoroughly broken, and the rout became complete. Single points of importance they may have held good as the novelty of this or that ceremony, or of this or that assumption of Papal tyranny; but meanwhile their main battle gave way before the heavy onslaught of the enemy, and their ranks were scattered beyond the possibility of rallying. Their very leader, whose voice hitherto had been to them as a trumpet-blast, capitulated, and delivered himself up bound and handcuffed to the enemy. Many more of every degree followed the ignominious example. Since then they have borne all the aspect of a broken and discomfited host. Never appearing in the open field, they have maintained a mere desultory and guerilla warfare. Bereft of heart and hope, they have ceased from all aggressive demonstrations, and confined themselves to a system of irresolute and feeble defensive operations. They who, erewhile, flushed with hope and early success, boldly hurled forth their defiance to all the world, claimed broad England as indefeasibly their own, and summoned Romanists and Dissenters alike to surrender to their claims, are now content to exist on sufferance, and stand on their defence. Instead of calling upon their old antagonists to come out from the apostasy, and seek a sounder faith and purer worship within their mother Church of England, they are only solicitous to prove that they themselves may feel secure within her pale, and are but too glad to leave others alone where they are.* Their toilsome demonstrations are directed now to show, not that Romanists should come over to them, but that they themselves may have some plausible case for not going over to Rome; while, ever and anon, one and another of their younger and more earnest followers are cutting the knot, and shaking themselves free from their perplexities, by throwing themselves into the arms of that system, in which, by the confession of both parties alike, they are safe.

Such is the inglorious issue of that once triumphant movement which was to revive in England all the glories of the Nicene age, to realise all the grandeur of the Roman system without its corruptions, and absorb all the various forms of dissent into itself!

See, for instance, such pamphlets as " Reasons for feeling secure in the Church of England, a Letter to a Friend, in answer to Doubts expressed, in reference to the Claims of the Church of Rome. By the Rev. Edward Munro." Mr Keble's "Sermons, Academical and Occasional," preface; and the "Christian Remembrancer," (Tractarian Quarterly) for years past, passim, &c. &c.

There are many thoughts of a practical kind which the subject may well awaken, and which, did our space permit, we would willingly pursue at length. In particular it is surely worthy of most anxious consideration how we may best contribute to reinvigorate and conserve those great Protestant principles which are so fearfully imperilled by the movement we have been contemplating. How to arrest the progress of an evil so wide-spreading and so formidable—an evil which not only in a general way tends towards, but directly and inevitably, and just in proportion as it exists, works the ruin of whatever is sacred and precious in Protestant truth, is a question which may well occupy the deepest thoughts of our highest minds. The disease is before us, manifesting itself indeed no longer by such open and portentous signs as some years ago, but working insidiously, and perhaps not the less fatally, in secret. Where, then, is the remedy? Before indicating our reply to this question, let us endeavour to make a more exact diagnosis of the malady itself, as it manifests itself in some of the chief classes of those in the sister kingdom who have been infected with it.

While an extreme and hurtful ecclesiasticism characterises all the adherents of this movement, and constitutes the radical principle of all their aberrations, this general tendency exhibits itself under various special phases, according to the particular bias or character of those who have imbibed it. Thus, first of all, we have what may be distinguished as the ascetico-devotional class. Of this section, Dr Pusey himself may be taken as a characteristic example. Serious, earnest, thoughtful, smitten with a sense of sin, without apparently having fully tasted the peace of the gospel, and so rather painfully seeking than having joyfully found the hidden treasure, they have aimed at a deeper, severer, more self-mortifying form of piety than was prevalent in their day. Clothing themselves with sackcloth, and eating ashes like bread, they have striven hard after the sacrifices of a broken heart, while the "joy of God's salvation" has been little known. The "Dies ira, dies illa" has been the keynote of their strain ; and although its cheering “quem tu salvas, salvas gratis" has not, we trust, been entirely hid from them, yet, like a faint star, it has shone on them but feebly and unsteadily. They have given themselves to prayer, fasting, confession, severe selfdiscipline, and daily sacrifices of praise. They have sympathised rather with Luther weeping in his convent cell, than when, filled with the great light that had burst upon him, he pealed forth his glad Eureka to the world. We are disposed to speak of these men tenderly. If there is much in them to condemn, there is much also from which we may all most

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profitably learn. In a superficial age, when multitudes are disposed to take everything for granted, so far as spiritual religion is concerned, the spectacle of souls struggling earnestly, though in a mistaken way, after inward purity may be much better used as a lesson and a warning than as a mark for scorn. May not this perilous tendency be in a great measure traced to a reaction from the feeble and frothy charac ter of much of our own current evangelism, awakening in fervent but imperfectly enlightened minds a feeling of indignant revulsion from what seemed to them effete and powerless, and a longing for something deeper and more real in the life of God in the soul?

A second class, some of them perhaps partaking largely of the element already described, but standing out by certain distinct characteristics of their own, are what we would call the speculative-ideal school. If Dr Pusey serve as the representative of the former class, Dr Newman is as decidedly the characteristic type of this. Mainly at one with his distinguished compeer on most points, and working with him hand-in-hand in the same great enterprise for years, he yet differed from him in this, that while the Regius Professor occupied himself almost solely with special doctrines and praetices which both wished to see restored, he was from the first the votary of an idea. The one yearned after the revival of confession, fasting, frequent communion, inward discipline, and the like; the latter panted after the resurrection of the Church. Of an imaginative temperament, and constructive genius, the system never appeared to him as a mere set of forgotten truths and neglected observances, the revival of which was much to be wished; but as one great whole which was to be realised in living presence and mighty power upon the earth. A grand ideal lived within him, and fascinated him. The majestic image of a visible unearthly kingdom in the world, but not of it; everywhere spread, yet everywhere one, and radiant in the varied graces of unity, sanctity, universality, perpetuity; the mother of martyrs, the home of saints, the refuge of penitents, the depositary of truth, the treasure-house of grace;-such was throughout the object of his fond idolatry and eager search. If he find it not here, he must seek it elsewhere; nor can he rest until he feels, or at least most strongly believes, that it is found. To use the masterly portraiture of one whose too early removal from the scene of this and every other strife, we cannot but deeply deplore :

"His imagination and feelings were irreparably engaged, and reason as usual was soon busily active in devising subtle argumentative grounds to justify his choice. He had before his fancy a bright idea of unity, perpetuity, holiness, self-denial, majesty,-in short, that