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injudiciously or not, but to which, in some degree, every devout and pious spirit on earth has been addicted.

In a national synod, held at St Peter's, Westminster, he forbad men to be sold as cattle, which had till then been practised. For the true reliefs and mitigations of human misery lay entirely, at that time, in the influence of Christianity; and small as that influence then was, the ferocity of the age was tempered by it; and human life was thence prevented from being entirely degraded to a level with that of the beasts which perish.

Anselm died in the sixteenth year of his archbishopric, and in the seventy-sixth year of his age. Toward the end of his life, he wrote on the Will, Predestination, and Grace, much in Augustine's manner. In prayers, meditations, and hymns, he seems to have had a peculiar delight. Eadmer says that he used to say, "If he saw hell open, and sin before him, he would leap into the former to avoid the latter." I am sorry to see this sentiment, which, stripped of figure, means no more than what all good men allow, that he feared sin more than punishment, aspersed by so good a divine as Foxe the martyrologist.* But Anselm was a Papist, and the best Protestants have not been without their prejudices.

DR JOHN JORTIN.

JOHN JORTIN was a native of St Giles's, where he was born October 23, 1698; and as he was for twenty-five years minister of a chapel in New Street, Bloomsbury, and died vicar of Kensington, nearly the whole of his life was spent in London. His education, begun at the Charter-House, was completed at Jesus College, Cambridge, and he early acquired a taste for that elegant scholarship, which formed the chief business and solace of his unambitious career, and which still preserves his name from oblivion.

* Acts and Monuments, vol. i.

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To a man of taste, leisure, and calm temperament, we fancy, that of all themes, the most attractive would be "A Life of Erasmus." To a large extent involving the inner history of Romanism, it would include the revival of letters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, whilst it gave us a glimpse of every court in Europe, it would bring us acquainted with nearly all the notabilities of the period, literary, religious, and political. Nor would the least part of the author's treat be the deliberate perusal of the ten folios which have come down to us from the pen of the clever, witty, sarcastic Hollander, so as to collect for his mosaic the best of their manycoloured gems. At the same time, Erasmus is not the sort of hero who awakens our enthusiasm, and it would require much tact and skill to interest the general reader in the long career of one whom Protestants despised as a time-server, and whom Papists detested as a traitor within their camp. Dr Jortin made the attempt. With his sense of humour, his scholarship, and his freedom from sectarianism, it was a congenial employment; and if he had arranged his materials more skilfully, he would have produced a delightful work. But he was deficient in the art of construction, and so entirely lacked the dramatic or descriptive talent, that he has given us little more than a series of epistolary extracts, interspersed with critical remarks by himself and others; and, consequently, a lively and readable "Life of Erasmus," still remains a desideratum in literature.

Owing to a certain desultory turn of mind, as well as the artistic deficiencies already indicated, Dr Jortin, notwithstanding all his erudition, could not have become the Gibbon or the Sismondi of the Christian Church; but in his "Remarks on Ecclesiastical History," he has given us five volumes of ingenious criticism on detached passages in the Church's annals, and some clever and lively remarks on its more prominent per

sonages. Most of these fragments are characterised by a feature which is not always to be found in brilliant writers. His spirit is almost invariably kindly, and his judgments lean to the mild and charitable side,

We have always

Dr Jortin lies buried at Kensington. deemed his epitaph as one of the happiest specimens of lapidary writing so brief, so worthy of a Christian's grave, and, without absolute quaintness, in its very simplicity so striking:

JO JORTIN

MORTALIS ESSE DESIIT

ANNO SALUTIS, 1770.

ÆTATIS 72.

Cyprian.

Cyprian was made Bishop of Carthage, A.D. 248. It hath been said of him that he was fond of spiritual power, and it cannot entirely be denied; but he had factious ecclesiastics and troublesome schismatics to deal with, which might lead him to insist somewhat the more on his prerogatives; and it is certain that in one point he was for restraining Episcopal encroachments. He highly approved and recommended the method of appealing to the people in the election of bishops, and of asking their consent and approbation, and of allowing them a negative. He thought that the bishops of a province had no right to make a cabal, and elect a bishop secretly by themselves, and obtrude him upon the Church. But after Christianity was the established and the ruling religion, great inconveniences, and tumults, and seditions, and massacres arose from the popular elections of bishops, and ecclesiastical preferments became more lucrative, and were thought more worthy of a battle, or of mean tricks and solicitations.

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Cyprian upon all occasions consulted his own clergy and people, and desired their consent. The bishops of Rome at that time began to take upon them and to domineer, and Stephen, dealing about his censures and excommunications, behaved himself with indecency and arrogance towards Cyprian and many others, in the affair of rebaptizing.

In a Council of Carthage, consisting of eighty-seven bishops, Cyprian said to them, "None of us ought to set himself up as a bishop of bishops, or pretend tyrannically to constrain hist colleagues, because each bishop hath a liberty and a power to act as he thinks fit, and can no more be judged by another bishop than he can judge another. But we must all wait for the judgment of Jesus Christ, to whom alone belongs the power to set us over the Church, and to judge of our actions." Du Pin inserted these words in his "Biblioth." i. p. 164, to buffet the Pope by the hand of Cyprian.

Many passages there are in Cyprian's writings containing high notions of Episcopal authority and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Whilst he strenuously opposed the domination of one pope, he seemed in some manner to make as many popes as bishops, and mere arithmetical noughts of the rest of the Christians; which yet, I believe, was not his intent.

In the persecution under Decius, he fled from Carthage, and was proscribed, and his effects were seized. He was censured by some persons as a deserter of his flock; but the decent constancy and the Christian piety with which he laid down his life afterwards, afford a presumption that he had not retired for want of courage.

His death was lamented even by many of the Pagans, whose esteem he had gained by his affable and charitable behaviour.

He often talks of his visions and revelations, some of which he had on occasions which in all appearance were small and

inconsiderable enough, whilst he had none to guide him and set him right in points of more importance. He appeals to these visions, and makes use of them to justify his conduct. It would be dealing too severely with him, considering his character in other respects, to ascribe this entirely to artifice and policy, and it would be more candid and charitable to suppose that with much piety, he had a mixture of African enthusiasm, and that what he thought upon in the day, he dreamed of at night, and the next morning took his dreams for Divine admonitions. Some perhaps will choose to leave it ambiguous-dum Elias venerit.

In his treatise "De Lapsis," he relates some strange miracles, one of which is that the consecrated bread was turned into a cinder in the hands of a profane person, who thus found, according to the proverb, pro thesauro carbones.*

When the Corinthians shewed a want of reverence and decency in receiving the Lord's Supper, what was the consequence? "For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep." The correetion was solemn and tremendous. But of these transformations what can we say? and how can we give credit to them?

* Macarius of Alexandria, a celebrated monk and saint of the fourth century, is said to have related this story, that when the monks approached to the holy communion, and stretched out their hands to receive it, devils under the figure of little ugly Ethiopian boys (who were only visible to Macarius) prevented the officiating priest, and gave to some of them coals instead of the consecrated bread, which bread, though to by-standers it seemed to be given by the priest and received by these monks, returned back again to the altar: whilst other monks, who were more pious and better disposed, when they approached to receive the sacrament, chased the evil spirits away, who fled with great terror and precipitation, because an angel, who assisted at the altar, put his hand upon the hand of the presbyter when he delivered the sacrament to these good men. This account is in the Vita Patrum, and inserted, with a thousand more stories of the same kind, in Tillemont, H. E. viii. 641. To such a degree the boldness of feigning miracles, and the facility of admitting them, was carried in those days!

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