following short extract from the conclusion may give our readers some faint idea of the strain which runs through this precious compound of zeal, pretension, and folly :

"We had Bishops once, and Clergy, and a King, who would have taught, and led, and ruled us in the faith and fear of God; who desired the unity of the whole Church, both East and West, on Catholic principles; who were stout Protestants indeed, in some sense, and called themselves so, and were disposed, mistakenly, as it seems to me. but not without a purpose for which that mistake was permitted, to defend our own, and even the foreign Refor. mation, and to wink for a time, at much evil, if by any means the foreigners could be corrected, and would not run down from Babylon' (as they termed it) into Egypt;' and yet withal, so far were they from the Principle of Protestantism,' as the world now understands it, so honestly, even if in some political respects imperfectly, Catholic, that the heretical Protestants accused them of being more Popish than the Pope of Rome himself.' And we cut off their heads. We made to ourselves such Bishops and Priests, and such a Civil Government, as was after our own hearts, and now we have no business to complain. * The thrones of our Bishops are not vacant: they are filled indeed for the present by witnesses against us, guardians for a time, but by the side of them, as invisible assessors, present, though invisible, sit the spirits of those whom we beheaded, ready to re-appear and clothe themselves, as it were, again with flesh in their successors."(pp. 113, 114.)

Where views are thus wide as the poles asunder, it is plainly needful to recur to first principles, and to trace the whole subject to its solid and scriptural foundations. This office we shall now attempt, very briefly, to discharge. We have a deep impression of the vast importance of the questions in debate, and that the glory or the ruin of our Church depend on their practical decision. To the law and the testimony shall be our appeal; but our limits will barely allow us to state the main steps of the argument, and the conclusion to which it leads. The confirmation of it, in all its parts, would of itself require volumes. But we are persuaded that the principles we shall unfold are the very truths of God's word, and their consistent application at the present time of unspeakable and momentous importance, involving in it the stability and greatness, or else the fall and final apostasy of our beloved Church.

What then are the original constitution, the true nature, the past history and future prospects of the Church of Christ among the Gentiles? It is plainly, from the very first, a graft on the stock of Israel. To the Jewish Church belonged the covenants, the adoption, and the promises. But when the great body of the Jews rejected their Messiah and his gospel, the natural branches were broken off through unbelief, and a people were called from among the Gentiles, in their place, to be the visible Church of God. Still, at the very time when this change was made, a clear warning was given that the great body of the Gentile Church, in later times, would copy the sins and at length the unbelief of the

Jews; that mercy would then return to God's ancient people; that, as before, the faithful part of the Gentile Churches would be the instruments to convey back their own privileges to the Jews, and that then a wider and mightier dispensation of grace would begin, and the receiving of Israel be as life from the dead to the unbelieving Gentile world. It is this great doctrine of Scripture which gives its deep interest to the present crisis of Divine Providence, and shows the vast importance to our own Church of a right judgment upon the course which she ought now to pursue.

Such being the origin and final issue of the Gentile Church, let us next enquire into its real nature, and the elements of its constitution. There are three distinct aspects in which the word of God holds it up to our view. First, there is the invisible Church, consisting of all true believers in every age. These are set before us under various titles, and many emblems are used to describe them. They are the spiritual and lively body, of which Christ is the head. They are the mystic bride, of which He is the celestial Bridegroom, the sheep who shall never perish, but be placed at the right hand of the Judge; the general assembly and Church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven. Their unity is the unseen unity of faith and love. It begins in the secret and mysterious counsel of God, is successively realized from age to age on the hearts of believers by the operation of the Holy Spirit, and is finally manifested in the kingdom of glory. To the Church, in this its first and highest aspect alone, is given the promise of perpetual endurance, and victory over all her enemies. The unfruitful branches may be cut off; the seed upon the stony ground may wither away; the building upon the sand may perish; the gates of hell may prevail against the companies of formal christians; but this blessed company of Christ's faithful people shall never fail or be extinct upon earth, till the last trump shall summon them to their joyful meeting in the kingdom of God.

The second aspect of the Church is that of a visible ordinance or assembly of ordinances, appointed for a witness of Divine truth to the world; for the conversion of sinners, and the instruction and discipline of all who profess the Christian name. In this view, it is described as a candlestick, which receives the oil of Divine truth, and by its sevenfold branches dispenses light to the world. It is the altar of sacrifice, upon which visible acts of worship are solemnly performed in the sight of men. It is the mystical Jerusalem, which, by its towers, and palaces, and bulwarks, bears visible witness to the power and dominion of the Saviour, and from which the champions of the cross issue forth for their warfare with the kingdom of darkness. Viewed thus as a Divine ordi

nance, it bears a strong and close analogy to the Levitical economy of the Law, but with important points of contrast. It has its sacred ministry, not however by natural descent, but by successive ordination. It has its sacraments, but few, simple, and bloodless; answering to the nature of the gospel as a dispensation of truth and grace. It has its Sabbath, yet not of legal injunction, but of Christian liberty and resurrection-joy. It has its festivals, but not as prescribed appointments of any express law of Christ, but rather the spontaneous overflowings of gratitude, devotion and love.

The Church, in this second aspect, has therefore a mixed character. It partakes of Divine authority and human weakness; it is heaven-born, and yet defectible and exposed to corruption; it has no promise of more than a limited continuance, till the temporary end of its institution is accomplished. In the absence of such a promise, the analogy of Jewish history, the word of prophecy, and the experience of ages teach us the same lesson, of its gradual declension, and its constant liability to grow corrupt and to degenerate from its Divine original. We are thus taught that its early purity and zeal would be succeeded by the bitterness of strife and the rage of contending factions; that its brightness would be clouded and darkened from a long famine of the word of God; that persecution, the sway of false doctrine and of civil violence, would sink it into the paleness of death, and complete the dismal marks of almost total degeneracy and corruption. Such is the true picture which the annals of the visible Church present to our view, in exact accordance with the warnings of prophecy, and the grand lessons of Old Testament history for two thousand years.

The last aspect of the Church is that in which it includes all the vast body of professors of the Christian name. It is thus set before us under various and expressive titles-the many who are called, but of whom few only are chosen; the field where the tares and wheat grow together till the harvest; the virgins, of whom some are wise and some foolish; the worshippers of the temple, of whom some worship only in the outer court, and others worship in spirit and truth in the inner sanctuary. Of the Church, in this wider sense, we have the plain and repeated warning that it would become the theatre of a wide-spread apostasy, gathering unity and strength with the lapse of ages; with a visible head, a local and clearly-revealed centre, a mystery of iniquity and a Babel of confusion, from which the people of Christ are commanded to separate, with a fearful sentence on them if they refuse to obey. It needs but a slight knowledge of Church history to determine what that system is, which has the city of seven hills for its seat; and for its main features, lying miracles, legendary falsehoods, arbitrary pro

hibitions of marriage and commands of abstinence, and persecution, even to death, of the true servants of God.

Till the period of the Reformation, these heavenly and earthly elements of the Church continued mingled together; the faithful, for the most part, were mixed up with the mass of formal professors, the visible ordinance was gradually corrupted more and more, and the predicted Apostasy was forming and ripening into maturity within the pale of the covenant. But before the dispensation of grace was to close in judgment, the word of prophecy had given warning, and history has confirmed its truth,-that a great, though imperfect separation was to be made. The everlasting gospel, so long obscured amid the corruptions of the Church, was to be revived in its Divine and wondrous energy. The apostasy was to be detected and exposed. There was to be a partial, though as yet only a partial rebuilding of God's spiritual house, and the true temple of God, which has no communion with idols, was to be publicly severed from those idolatrous worshippers who had usurped Such accordingly was the great work of that era, which, following the lesson of the Divine word, in spite of Mr. Palmer's anathemas, we shall still call the blessed and glorious' Reformation.

its name.

The specific and appointed work of that great era was to revive the spirit of Christianity, and to expose the corruption of its forms; to exhibit the free grace of the everlasting gospel, and unmask each idolatrous and self-righteous perversion. Now the very effect of this heavenly office was to place the Reformation in a seeming attitude of opposition to the forms of the Church as well as to their corruption; and to those elements of discipline and righteousness, which form the counter-pole, in the full system of truth, to grace and free promise. Hence, through the weakness and perverseness of man, a great danger on the opposite side. Most of the Protestant Churches emerged from the crisis, even at the time, more or less maimed and imperfect in their outward order; and their history since has furnished but too many examples of antinomian corruption in practice, with schisms, heresies and infidelity, and the whole brood and progeny of lawless self-will. But the struggle was not yet ended. The time of forbearance to the Gentile churches had some centuries still to run out. The apostacy of Rome, though real and deep, was not yet total; the ordinances of God were too precious in themselves, and too valuable for the stability of the Church, to be at once set aside. It remained then, for the more permanent stay of the truth, to combine the orthodox faith of the early ages, with the fuller light thrown in the Reformation on the living application of that faith to the heart; and uniting both, to embody them in as large and full a remnant of primitive form as could well be rescued

from the darkness of superstitious abuse, and from the idolatrous and self-righteous perversions of the Papal system.

Such was the peculiar office assigned to our own favoured Church. It has thus united in its constitution three great elements, no where else to be found in full combination; it is at once Orthodox, Protestant and Primitive. It is Orthodox, or Catholic, by its full profession of those three creeds which embody the testimony of the early Church to the great objective truths of our faith. It is Protestant, by those Articles and Homilies which exhibit so fully the way in which truth must be applied unto the heart for salvation, and which bear full witness of the only righteousness of Christ and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit. And it is Primitive, by its Liturgy and Services of Ordination, so accordant with the usages of early times, and by those orders of visible ministry which have been in the Church from the beginning. Thus was our Church made the most noble bulwark of Divine truth in these latter days; the firmest and most unchanging, and yet the most calm, and moderate, and discriminating in its testimony against the apostacies of Rome; while it furnished a needful corrective to the spirit of innovation in the other Reformed churches, and became a faithful witness for Primitive order, and a constant rebuke upon every departure from sound doctrine among the more unstable professors of the Protestant name.

One great evil, however, arose out of these very excellencies of the Anglican Church. Like the country which God had assigned for her habitation, she became isolated from neighbouring communions. With Rome, corrupt and idolatrous, she could hold no fellowship, without renouncing her glory as foremost among the daughters of the Reformation. And with the other Reformed churches, besides political difficulties, she seemed scarcely able to combine, without a sacrifice of her Primitive order. Two parties, besides, were ever at work within her own pale; one, in its reverence to antiquity, looking back towards Rome with a wistful eye; and the other, in some from real zeal for the truth untempered with discretion, in some from the recklessness of self-will,— ready to decry whatever was held in common with the Romish Church, however clearly to be traced high above the stream of her corruptions. And the effect of this internal strife was, to prevent all ecclesiastical fellowship, either with foreign Protestant Churches or the Church of Rome.

The providence of God is now teaching us, by many evident tokens, that our isolation is to continue no longer. The temporary object for which it was suffered has been accomplished. For three centuries we have been thus, like Palestine of old, a fortress