had assailed it were silenced and banished. "This public triumph was however rather visible than real (as we shall see); and, in fact, a pure-a truly Apostolic church, driven into inaccessible regions, toward the close of the fourth century, maintained its integrity, from age to age, in poverty, and amid the fierce persecutions, until at length the brighter light of the Lutheran reforma. tion having been kindled, the office of witnessing for the truth was transferred to men who were qualified to discharge it in a manner better adapted to the altered condition of the European nations." Such was the mode and temper in which the Protestants of the fourth century were dealt with by the dominant body, calling itself the Church. It was no wonder that good men should retreat before such a storm; especially as ferocious cruelties had been lately resorted to for crushing the remonstrants. Happily there were places of refuge; and Vigilantius, as Jerome himself informs us, had retired to a district where purity, and liberty, and truth, were in some degree secure from the hand of intole rant bigotry. But whither had this presbyter fled? I would have bound the maniac,' says Jerome, with testimonies of Scripture; but he is gonehe is off he has slipped us he is broken away! and now his voice is heard from between the Adriatic and the Cottian Alps!' That is to say, Vigilantius had retired to Piedmont, or to those secluded valleys in which, during a long course of centuries, the Church-the Church apostolic-the Church' of the Apocalypse, had a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there.' Remarkable indeed must we consider the phrase a place prepared of God,' when those Alpine ravines, with their severe climate, their difficult passes, and their rugged steeps, are regarded as having come from the hands of Him who, at the first, founded the hills, and established the mountains, and who, in this signal instance, as well as in others of a similar kind, had long before built a temple for his truth, inaccessible to the pride and cruelty of his enemies. "The succeeding history of the church of the valleys-the Vallenses, bas become familiarly known to all religious readers; nor can it be needful here to refer to facts with which few are now unacquainted. This secluded community, holding to a doctrine and wo ship substantially pure, and differing little from the principles and forms of the Reformation, may, on a firm basis of historical evidence, various in kind, and well authenticated, challenge for itself the untainted honours of genuine apostolicity." "The documents bearing upon the history of the remonstrant churches, during the lapse of the middle ages-a full thousand years-have come to us in too torn a condition, and are too thickly coated, if one might so say, with ca. lumnies, to allow any very certain conclusion to be arrived at, as to the evangelic fervour and the doctrinal purity of these communities. The extant evidence is indeed abundantly sufficient for proving that they were in the best sense orthodox; and that they distinctly recognized the great article of justification by faith. There is no room to doubt that the protest they made against the asceticism, superstition, and demonolatry of the Romish and Eastern churches, was animated by a just feeling of what the Gospel is as a scheme of mercy, diametrically opposed to every form of those illusions which lead man to look, either to himself, or to beings like himself, for his salvation. "Yet there is a difference-a vast practical difference, between a clear, verbal recognition of doctrines, such as may exclude the charge of heresy, or serious error; and that vivid consciousness of principal truths, and that commanding sense of their paramount importance, which, while it vitalizes the christian character, impels the ministers of Christ so to proclaim his Gospel as to stir the depths of the human heart, and to make itself felt and seen throughout the community where it is found. We are not affirming (for the evidence does not warrant any absolute conclusion of this kind) that the witnessing churches of the Alps and of Languedoc, were actually wanting in this vivid consciousness of evangelic principles; indeed some fragments of their history, especially what belongs to the missionary labours supported by Peter Waldo, bear this impression, and inspire the belief that he, and his zealous fellow labourers, were inferior to none in scriptural animation. Nor would it be justifiable to infer the contrary from the circumstance that their protest failed to overthrow the papal superstition, and did but just maintain itself from century to century. These faithful men did not enjoy those external means of giving breadth and solidity to their cause, of which the Lutheran reformers made so much use. They must not therefore be judged of by the event, or the final issue of the testimony they maintained. "It were calumnious, or at least unwarrantable, to affirm that Wickliffe, or that the admirable martyrs, Huss, and Jerome of Prague, were not evangelic in doctrine: they were so; and they asserted the truth, as well as denounced the various errors of the Romish superstition. Nevertheless, when we come to listen to Luther, and to his associates, it is not to be denied, that, what Wickliffe had calmly and scholastically declared, the German, the Swiss, and the English Reformers powerfully felt to be true, and spoke of with a moving energy and unction, and placed it, where it should always be found, in the very front of their message to mankind. There is, on this ground, a difference which obtrudes itself upon notice, and which, when understood, explains the very different issues of the two protests. Wickliffe denounced error, and in doing so approximated to truth: Luther denounced the errors which, from time to time, he found to be irreconcileable with the truth he had long before discovered. Wickliffe's testimony was a shaking of the papacy: Luther's, an establishment of the Gospel. At the approach of Wickliffe the minions of Rome trembled, as if a strong man armed bad burst into their house at night. When Luther spoke, they slunk into corners, as do creatures of darkness at the breaking of the day. "Whether or not this great characteristic of the Lutheran Reformation may always stand forth, duly promi nent, in the memoirs of Luther's life, as compiled by different authors, it presents itself on every page of his own writings; especially those of them to which he himself was accustomed to attach the greatest importance, and to which he was used to appeal as containing the exposition of his principles. How unlike to these vigorous compositions are the ambiguous expository works of the early divines-the Fathers! Even if the same ultimate elements of Christian truth may be gleaned from these, as from those; in how different an order are they put forward! Throughout the patristic theology, the first things are left in the rear, and the last things are thrust forward. Nothing, although it may be powerful in itself, is so advanced as powerfully to touch the human heart; for it is sheathed, it is shaded, it is removed from our reach; we do but behold it afar off. And so it is that, while the admirers of the Fathers find it easy to cull many single passages, in which right things are well said, they are unable to name any one of them, not even Augustine, and him they are reluctant to name, whose works, as a whole, have an evangelic character, or which do not, as a whole, give more countenance to the delusions of Ro manism, than they yield support to what the modern reformed churches hold to be true. "Errors, no doubt, may be gleaned from Luther's writings; but TRUTH is the presiding influence there, and error is the accident. In the writings of Luther there is conspicuously one tendency; in the writings of the best of the Fathers there are several tendencies; nor does the reader ever well know whither he is going, or on what shoal he shall at last be stranded: there is a want of determining force; there is a want of fulcrum: there is the want of a sovereign principle. "The Lutheran Reformation, with its wondrous changes, was not Luther's reformation; it was not the impatience of the human mind to rid itself of an intolerable thraldom; it was not the machination of princes and nobles to snatch for themselves the goods of the church;-it was not a natural product of the revival of learning; it was not the work of the press:—it was the proclamation anew, of Heaven's own Truth, breaking the slumbers of conscience, re-animating palsied hope in the human soul, and setting forth the Son of God, crucified, yet risen for our justification;-the Lamb of God, and He alone, our propitiation : Christ, and He alone, our Intercessor with the Father; Christ, and He alone, the Shepherd and Bishop of souls ; the King; the Judge; the Head of the Church.' These animated passages are well calculated to teach us both to understand and to value the true character of the Reformation; but the question arises, "What have been its practical consequences?" We cannot reply to this interrogation without disappointment and shame. It is too large a subject to enter upon at present; but we will quote some remarks upon it from Mr. Taylor, which will suggest monitory and afflicting matter for reflection. "But our subject has a yet more definite aspect, towards which we turn for a moment. What then, at this time, are the polemic consequences of the Reformation; or what, after the lapse of three centuries, is now the relative position of Protestantism and Romanism, considered as the two systems of religious belief, which divide the professedly Christian world? Luther and his associates unquestionably believed that the wound they had given to the Papacy was mortal:-As when a man nearly divides a snake, which he finds on his path, with a spade; he looks at the quivering creature refusing to die, and coolly says"let it alone, it will have done writhing at sunset: "so the Reformers thought that a few struggles would be all the world should see of the mighty tyranny they had smitten! It was not so. "Not only has the Papacy survived, and not only has a superstition so congenial with the human mind perpetuated itself in countries where it has not been exposed to the ordeal of open inquiry; but dogmatic Romanism, embracing the doctrinal, liturgical, and hierarchical system which was defined by the Council of Trent, holds its place firmly on controversial ground, in this free country, and in other countries where it stands unsustained by the secular arm. Let us distinctly state, and consider the fact, that, indefensible as we may consider Tridentine Romanism to be (and it is indefensible) nevertheless it does assert and maintain itself, with some success, as opposed to our Protestantism, by mere argument, on the arena of public discussion; and that, by means which must be called legitimate, it supports itself, and makes converts; and this not merely among the ignorant, but among the wellinstructed. And yet what can be more simple or conclusive than is the historical exception against the several articles of the Romanist creed and worship, as innovations, the origin of which may be pointed to? In this sense it is as easy to refute Popery as it is to prove that the Romans conquered the Britons, and the Normans the Saxons; and if, in reply to such a refutation, the preternatural theory of Romanism be advanced, which assumes a continuous legislative power to reside in the church, and in virtue of which she may, from age to age, not merely interpret Scripture, but add thereto, or take away; then again the historical proof, touching the Church of Rome, is complete, shewing first, and by the testimony of his adherents, so extreme a profligacy and ferocity to have ordinarily belonged to the Papal court and hierachy, as utterly to exclude the belief of a divine presence, favour, and superintendance, connected with persons and with bodies of men thus flagrantly wicked and cruel. And secondly the historical proof of palpable contrarieties and variations in doctrine and practice, is such as can never be made to consist with the theory of a divinely sustained infallibility. Let any one, dismissing from his mind all preference of the one side or the other, and thinking of the controversy as if it had long since gone to its place among things obsolete; let him take up Jewell's Apology, or if he please, any modern work, fairly propounding the Protestant argument, and do his best to frame a reply to it—a reply, clear, conclusive, free from evasions; and such as that a well disciplined mind, exempt from every bias, might assent to it as logically valid. Nothing of the sort could be done, nothing at all approaching to it has in any instance been effected by the ablest apologists of Romanism. Protestantism, indeed, has been severely vituperated: Fathers and councils have been cited with effect: fine theories have been ingeniously advanced: specious evasions have been made good use of many single facts have been so perversely stated as to perplex antago nists; but after all the copious historical evidence, bearing with destructive force against the pretensions of the Church of Rome, has never been rebutted. Nevertheless Romanism survives on the field of free argumentation! And thus, it may be said, do many other often refuted absurdities survive, for there is nothing so absurd as not to find whimsical adherents, and dogged apolo gists: this is true; but the fact does not fully meet the case; for in those instances to which such an explanation is really applicable, although the parties maintaining their ground, resolutely persist in their error, there is a withdrawment from loud and open controversy: -the firing ceases and the desperate garrison, reduced to the chewing of their shoes and harness, employ all their remaining strength in the effort to starve out in gallant style. This cannot be said of the Romanists of the present time; for, at this very moment a can. nonade is running along the lines of the "Church," bespeaking a force on the field. 66 May it not then be more than surmised, nay, might it not certainly be concluded that, where an argument, historically and logically bad, still keeps its position, there must be something that has been misunderstood, or left indeter minate on the side of its assailants? That this is the fact, in this case, we do not hesitate to affirm, and are prepared to maintain that Romanism should be let alone, until Protestants have better ascertained the premises of their own argument. We go on dealing heavy blows upon Popery; but every stroke seems to send ourselves back, as far as it drives in the enemy; as if we were floating on the bosom of a faithless bog. "Although there be still some obscurity, there is really no mystery attaching to the present unprosperous condition of the Protestant argument. We assail Romanism and the Papacy, but we leave unexamined, or we even accredit the ancient apostacy of which Romanism was but the child, and is but a particular type. “If indeed, in calling ourselves Protestants, we mean nothing more than to resist the usurpations of the Bishop of Rome, and to claim the eucharistic cup for the laity, and to remonstrate against the sale of pardons in the open market, and to denounce the mercenary practices that have been founded on the doctrine of purgatory, and to repress the superstition of the vulgar, in the adoration of the saints and their images; and to assert the abstract lawfulness of matrimony to the clergy;-if this be the compass and measure of our Protestantism, then let us be sure that we can do nothing better than place ourselves under the gentle and learned guidance of those Protestant divines the Oxford Tract writers, who are disclaiming the Lutheran and English Reformation, and are labouring to bring into its place the doctrine and practice of the times of Gregory the Great. "These divines will refute Romanism for us neatly, and will then give us, in its place, a scheme of doctrine and worship not a whit less superstitious, nor at all more compatible with the great principles of the Gospel;-a scheme not less despotic, not less frivolous, not less servile; in a word, a system in the room of which all reasonable men, after a little trial of it, would gladly accept the more consistent and the better ordered doctrine and discipline of the Tridentine Fathers;-Tridentine Romanism - the logical and practical form of the crude, irregularly compacted superstition toward which all the pantheism and all the polytheism of the ancient world had run, as into a general receptacle. But it is presumed that our Protestantism means much more than the stepping back a few hundred years from logical errors to illogical; from despotism to anarchy; from terrors to laxities; from craft to folly; from politic hypocrisy to insane delusion; and from a cold to a sincere fanaticism. "What we mean by Protestantism can be nothing less than a renouncing the religion of man's contrivance, and a returning to the religion which God has revealed; and to effect this return, we must recede, not toward the sixth century, not toward the fifth, nor toward the fourth, nor the third, nor the second: not to times of Polycarp, or Ignatius: not even to the age of the apostle John: but we must go where alone revealed religion is to be found — namely, in God's Book. "All this indeed has been said hundreds of times. The reformers of the sixteenth century boldly said it; and yet, even while saying it, they, with an amiable infirmity of purpose, and a half voluntary hallucination, were fain to save the corrupted christianity of the fourth century. Nay, those very divines who had done so much to pervert the doctrine and practice of the church, were always, and many of them with unquestionable sincerity, saying the very same thing Holy Scripture is our rule-we acknowledge no other ultimate authority; we make our final appeal to prophets and apostles, and to none else.' This fact, too little known, or, if known, too little regarded, ought to be clearly stated, if it were only in justice to the men whom otherwise we are compelled to condemn. The modern papistical doctrine of the joint authority of tradition and the Church, with the Scriptures, and which is now so industriously propagated within the precincts of the Protestant church, was unknown to, or but obscurely advanced by, the divines of the first five centuries. "A professed (a sincerely professed) regard to the sole authority of the Holy Scripture, will not put us in a position for contending with Romanism, so long as we cling to an indistinct opinion concerning that debased Christianity of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, whence Romanism directly sprang ;-nor so long as we adhere to an ecclesiastical theory which, if we consistently follow it, must lead us back to Rome. With many, no doubt, what chiefly obstructs their coming to a sound conviction concerning ante-papistical Christianity, is a cherished reverence for certain great names -the illustrious divines of the period we refer to. But this reverence would not be substantially impaired by our entertaining a more just notion of the theological and ecclesiastical system of that period. Does it cost us any consistency, as Protestants, to hold in reverence those great and good men who adorned the Gallican church in the seventeenth century? Surely not. Why then may we not leave Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Augustine, as well as Cyprian and Dionysius, on their pedestals of honour, while we denounce the church system of their times as an apostacy? "Not only will not Protestantism overthrow Romanism, on the field of argument, but it will not even retain its own ground, so long as it continues to rest one foot upon Holy Scripture, and the other upon the christianity of the Nicene age. Nay, as thus maintained, it is now visibly receding from the advanced position taken by the Reformers. Unless an early and a decisive revulsion takes place, the Reformation will be first compromised, then abandoned, and then condemned; and our sons will think themselves going to the utmost extent of candour, when they allow Luther, Cranmer, Jewell, to have been honest indiscreet men, whose intemperate zeal and schismatic conduct may perhaps find a palliation in the accidental abuses that had attached to the Church,' during the middle ages! "But then our safeguard against so terrible a catastrophe is not to be found in a blind and desperate determination to sever ourselves altogether from antiquity, and from all knowledge of it. The very constitution of the canon of Scripture forbids our taking any such reckless course. Catholic feeling forbids that it should be attempted, inasmuch as many of the most deluded adherents of an apostate church have yet been Christian men, and ought to be accounted our brethren, and in comparing whom with ourselves, as to personal merits or piety, it may be very doubtful on which side the beam would turn. To cut ourselves off from Christian antiquity, and to thrust our heads in between the leaves of our Bibles, as if to see nothing else, would be unphilosophical, uncharitable, illogical, and in relation to Romanism, it would be a fatal argumentative fault. "We must not be ignorant of Christian antiquity, but should learn rather to think rightly concerning it; and when we have done so, instead of receding from the Reformation, or traitorously disowning the men who effected it, we shall find ourselves qualified to take up their work, and to complete it in the same spirit, and with a happier suc. cess.' We must however repeat our reservation respecting the extent of charges against the ante-Nicene church; because, though we admit much that was wrong therein, yet it is not clear to us that Mr. Taylor does not intend to include some things which we could not allow to be inserted. There is, both in this essay, and in his "Primitive Christianity," an implication of more than he expresses; a frequent intimation that the Reformation requires to be completed. We wish he would speak out clearly. Does he mean that the Church of England, though not Popish, is Nicene, and therefore must be purified? He gives hints which we cannot reply to. If he would state what he means, we should know how to answer him. VIEW OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS. A BILL is passing through parliament without opposition, and with general public approval, appointing Prince Albert Regent, in case of the demise of the Queen, leaving issue under eighteen years of age, the period of regal majority. In our last Number we postponed remarking upon the attempt of Oxford to assassinate the Queen, till after his trial; and the jury having decided that he is insane, it were now futile to comment on his actions. The jury doubted whether the pistols were loaded with bullets; but however this might be," there could be no doubt of his intention; so that the congratulations to the Queen, and the thanksgiving to God, were not the less appropriate; nor would the horror of the murder, or the possible calamities to the nation, have been diminished, because the perpetrator was a madman. At the same time we repeat our remark of last month, as to the guardedness with which public do cuments, and still more forms of prayer and thanksgiving to God, should be drawn up, so as to express only what is clear and incontrovertible; in which view we intimated that we thought the word "traitorous" premature; and a jury has now decided that it was not applicable, at least in its full and usual sense. May the royal life, thus providentially spared, be devoted to the glory of Him whose gracious providence warded off the meditated assassination. It was painful to loyal and Christian hearts to learn that before her Majesty appeared in the house of God, to return thanks, together with her loving subjects, for her deliverance, she had paid her accustomed visit to that direful scene of evil, the opera-house. Alas, how much prayer and sympathy do those need who are placed in the very gulf-stream of worldly vanities, which the Christian, of whatever rank, promises and vows to renounce. We deeply lament, though we anti |
