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the request, subject to the sole condition of laying before Parliament every year a return, which should state what requests had been made and to what he had consented. On the one hand, no High Churchman could assert that the enactment bore a hostile aspect to the Church. We do not affect to agree with High Churchmen, only not needlessly to clash with their theory. At present the bishops are too like the Grand Llama of Thibet, in theory a god on earth, in practice a puppet. So, all our clergy are ecclesiastically endowed with divine power of binding and loosing, but politically are themselves bound in heavy fetters. We would not give to any of them, singly or collectively, power to tighten other people's chains: nevertheless it would be an access to a bishop's dignity to be empowered to loose the bonds of others, and of course his own. On the other hand, no statesman would need to fear that the clergy would move too fast for the congregations and thus involve public strife; for the "responsibilities of office" would lie heavily on the bishops, nor is there the slightest chance of their making too many concessions or too fast. By such a method the Parliament would in ten years' time have materials before it distinctly showing the true state of clerical opinion; but independently of that, the Liturgy would be, bit by bit, rid of whatever acts as an exasperating prick, instead of subserving its legitimate devotional uses. The schism between the pious thought of this century and the enactments of the past would be healed in the only possible way, by modifying those enactments, but without unseemly struggles or heart-hardening familiar arguings concerning things ineffably sacred.

When through the vast development of modern knowledge the ablest minds have run far a-head of the contemporaries of Laud or Sherlock in Cosmogony, in Ethnology, in Astronomy, in Physiology, in History, in Metaphysics, in Morals, in the laws of Literary Interpretation, in questions of Literary Genuineness, in understanding of the mind of Antiquity;—is any one senseless enough to think that he can do anything but swamp and drown the Church by keeping fast tied round the neck of her clergy, under sacred pretences, loads of opinion which even Puritans and Biblists cannot receive ?

FROM LUTHER TO COLENSO.

[1863.]

ABRIDGED FROM "THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW."

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HAT was the problem presented to the mind of Luther and his contemporary religious reformers? Undoubtedly it was to recover Apostolic doctrine. Every other reply is a mistaking of means for end. Individual freedom, or, as it was called, private judgment, was generally esteemed to be not only in itself a right and a duty, but also to conduce to this great end, the recovery of Apostolic truth. But freedom was trampled under foot unceremoniously, by Luther equally as by Calvin, the moment it appeared to lead away from what they esteemed to be the Truth of the Gospel, which they identified with the doctrine of the Apostles of Christ, as appreciated by themselves. It has often been observed, that that large freedom of mind and expression which we have really attained, was by no means desired or approved by the Reformers, to whose bold assertion of it for themselves we are greatly indebted.

That the Reformation was everywhere arrested prematurely and but half completed, has been many times elaborately set forth. As regards the Continent, the noble work of Ranke on "The Popes" displays the combined political and ecclesiastical forces which, soon after Luther's death, commenced a steady retrogression, and gave a permanent triumph to the house of Hapsburgh and the Jesuits over a vast breadth of the Continent. In England the premature death of our Edward VI. notoriously checked the Reforming movement. The violent reaction under Queen Mary was by no means brought back by Elizabeth to the point from which Mary started; and notoriously out of the trimming principles of Elizabeth rose the schism of the Puritans. How the Puritanical, or rather the Calvinistic, doctrine aided to arrest the Reformation, has been caustically stated in the wellknown phrase of Hume, that when men were called to choose whether God was a wafer or was a tyrant, they acquiesced in accepting him as a wafer. One small sect of Christians, called

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in modern days Unitarians, has long since asserted that in respect to various doctrines the Reformation did not go so far as it ought. But until quite recent times the full meaning of this complaint has been most imperfectly conceived, nor has any organized community of Christians-with partial and fitful exception of the Quakers-yet taken it up on its rightful and broad ground. In France and Germany the matter is better understood; but in England few indeed of those who mean to be Protestants of a high and pure order discern in what points the Reformers lamentably failed of going back to Apostolic teaching. Nothing was more natural, or primâ facie more reasonable than the first proceeding of Luther and his fellows-we may add, of his predecessors in England, from Wickliffe downward. In order to return to Apostolic doctrine, they threw themselves back on the (reputed) Apostolic writings, accepting them with little or no scruple from the testimony of the Church: then, finding these writings to be widely at variance with the Church-teaching, they used them to supersede and overthrow the current opinion of Church authority. Thus, against the written code of the Councils and the unwritten dogmatic power of the Pope and clergy, they set up the written code of the New Testament, as contained in certain books called Canonical. They forgot that Apostles had not only often doubted, and sometimes met for consultation; but had, at least on one great and critical question, publicly quarrelled, and that Paul (by his own account) had denounced Peter as making vain the grace of God: and consequently, that the "Apostolic doctrine" which had to be "recovered" was not the private opinions or passing arguments of any one Apostle, but the broad and deep truth which they held in common. This, and this only, was Christianity. Perhaps at first the Reformers were intending to enact a negative rather than a positive written law; at least the 6th Article of the Church of England is remarkably negative in its tone. It says that Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; and therefore nothing may be imposed which cannot be proved therefrom. The spirit which dictated that Article is widely different from that of him who says, "Every thing must be believed which I can logically infer therefrom." The first Reformers made a noble step in the direction of truth, as great as could be expected from men reared amid such confused thought and manifold errors. It is not wonderful that they did not see, but it is guilt in us, if we insist on shutting our eyes and refusing to see, that they were not at

all putting their pupils into the same position of noble freedom in which the Apostles put their converts. For the "Bible" (or, if so it be limited, the New Testament,) to which the Reformers pointed as the necessary and sufficient Guide-as the Sacred Code as the law of Life-as the test of Truth and decider of controversies, did not exist during the preaching of Paul; and was scarcely collected into a single corpus, much less was recognized as a code, for more than a century after the death of Jesus. This single fact, notorious and undeniable, shows at once how delusive was the work of the Reformation; how widely its preachers erred from their own avowed and essential aim, of reproducing the position of the Apostolic Church.

The contrast between the spiritual status of Paul's converts and of modern Anglicans, whether of the high or low church, is flagrant; as is that between the Apostles themselves and the hierarchy supposed to be their successors. Between the fisher

man and the prelate in his palace or his carriage: between the tentmaker at his work, or trudging on foot in the dusty road, and the lord bishop on the benches of Parliament and in the Royal levee, there is not a greater outward contrast than between the Law as conceived by Paul and by an ordinary Anglican. Paul did not put a Bible into the hands of converts, as that to which they were to submit; nor did he even hand to them a fragment of the New Testament, as the law of their faith and life. Nothing can be more unshrinking than his language concerning Freedom, while with the modern (would-be) Christian the word Freethinking is identified with impiety. The written word is by Paul occasionally extolled as having served a good purpose in its day, but is avowed to be substantially superseded by the coming of the Spirit. It was suited to the son of the bondwoman, and even to the true heir so long as he was in childhood; but now,-the law of the Spirit of life has made us free from the law of sin and death, that is, from the old law of the letter. "Ye have been called unto Liberty," says he: "only use not liberty as an occasion of the flesh; but by Love serve one another." Inward light and inward love are the only Law preached by him: they are his Thirty-nine Articles: all law of "the letter" he both practically and expressly by word disowns. For the letter " (he says) "killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." It is quite undeniable, that however much he may argue from the Old Testament to prove a point to those who believed the authority of the book, he scornfully rejects it as an authority, whenever its

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results oppose that which we ought to discern by the Spirit. The book was with him a material to be judiciously used,* not a law to be slavishly submitted to. It is equally undeniable, that he did not put any other written code in its place; and so far from indicating that this was a temporary and lamentable defect, to be soon repaired by the composition of a new statutebook, he glories in the absence of a written code, as characteristic of his Gospel. "For if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, how shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious?" His pointed depreciation of "the letter" in numerous passages is the more remarkable, inasmuch as to those born in heathenism and accustomed to a wretchedly low morality, the danger of the Old Man encroaching on the New, and obscuring the purer insight, was real and urgent yet it did not lead Paul to construct or recommend any general code of morality or of doctrine. He was satisfied to give his opinion as a wise man on each practical case, as it occurred. Nor did any part of the Christian Church, until long after, stand up for any law of the letter, except so far as it was avowedly Judaical and devoted to ceremonies.

So too as regards Freedom the tone of this great Apostle is in vehement opposition to that of Churchmen in every modern sect called orthodox. To him the word Freedom was not hateful or alarming, but matter of boasting. But what sympathy with freedom has any collective hierarchy ever shown? When do they sound the trumpet of the Gospel :-Stand fast in your freedom: Beloved! judge the spirits: Let the prophets speak, and let the rest (the laity) judge: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good: Let no man judge you in regard to meat or drink, new moons or sabbaths, which were mere shadows of things to come: Remember that the law of the Spirit within you has set you free from the old law ?-Such doctrine differs as much from that of mere textual expositors, as the genial breeze of summer from the chill of Arctic regions. But in fact we might have been able to predict, before opening the leaves of the Apostolic epistles, that Freedom of Judgment, freedom unfettered by any authoritative written law, was, and could not but be, the key-note sounding beneath all their preaching. It was the condition of listening to them. To have preached the authority of an established code

* This is undoubtedly the meaning of the celebrated text, 2 Tim. iii. 16: "Every divinely inspired writing is also profitable for teaching," &c., &c.

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