must have led all foreigners to shut their ears. In addressing those without, Paul, equally with Colenso, had to start from the assumption, that the heathen who listens judges from his common sense and conscience. Before he is converted, he cannot be made to assume the truth and authority of a Hebrew book; yet he is expected to renounce all trust in the authority and truth of his native traditions and native priests. The first appeal of the Christian Apostle to him is an exhortation to use his commonsense; to cease to be a child; to disbelieve "old wives' fables; to trust conscience as a voice of God within him,-not always clear, full, and certain, yet a precious guide, without which he must ever remain in darkness. The next appeal presents to him (not a code, but) some portion of Christian doctrine, to be judged of in contrast with heathen follies. To inculcate free-thinking is the first great effort of the missionary, in old or new times: not one step can he take, if he do not effectually imbue the heathen hearer with this revolutionary element. Nor is he anxious to obtrude upon him any dark questions about which there can be possible dispute among Christians themselves; much less to put forward as the Creed to be received on the threshold of the Church such a doctrine as the infallibility of a great volume. But after calling men to exercise their critical powers freely in rejecting heathen mysteries or other sacred follies, and to adopt this and that Christian truth, not because enjoined by external authority, but because they are inwardly discerned as true by the heathen's own mind; it would have been a moral impossibility to demand of the convert a renunciation of the same free-thinking, the moment he had passed through the waters of Baptism. It would have been a gross fraud and treachery, to "call him to Liberty and then entangle him under a yoke of Bondage ;" in which very words Paul denounces the attempt of his Jewish brethren to subject the Gentile converts to the yoke of the Pentateuch. Moreover, it would have been a wicked sophism to exalt conscience as the voice of God, as long as the Apostle wanted its aid in a heathen for the overthrow of a heathen doctrine, and then to scold it down as the voice of the Devil, whenever it resists in a Christian some notion recommended on Christian authority. No Christian teacher will surely pretend, that by entering the Church and receiving the living Spirit promised by Christ, a man became less able to judge for and by his own mind and conscience as to what (alleged) divine truths are really true, than he had been in his heathen state. For

these and other reasons, great severity of language and contempt is directed by Paul against those who sought to subject the Gentiles to the authority of the "Bible;" men who "desire to be teachers of the Law, understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm." For such men he invents the contumelious expression, The concision; judging them unworthy of the title Circumcision, which had in the past a sacred and honourable history, and in the present is glorified by a spiritual interpretation in which its gross materialism is burnt up and perishes. For we (he says) are the Circumcision; who worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh."

Thus, the first great error of the Reformers was, that in their desire to find a firm standing-ground, from which to oppose the errors and pretensions of the old Church, and hereby work back to Apostolic beliefs, they set up for the "Bible" claims wholly unapostolic, assuming it to be that Infallible Arbiter of truth which the Pope and Councils pretended to be. The further the Reformation went in space and time, the more glaring and outrageous did this error become, until little by little the old Church began to appear more reasonable in its fundamental assumptions than the new. Thus, in Ultra-Protestantism, and eminently in Scotland, notions about the Old Testament and the Sabbath established themselves, which would have excited indignation and contempt in Luther and Calvin. We call the error glaring, to put forth as Apostolic doctrine, "The Bible, and the Bible only, is our religion," though notoriously, on the one hand, the book of the New Testament did not yet exist when the Apostles preached; and, on the other hand, the Jewish Scriptures, however used as material of argument to be spiritualized freely, are not only never put forward in any extant Apostolic document as a law of life or as a rule of truth, but, so far as we know this to have been attempted, the attempt is denounced by the great Gentile Apostle as a making void of the grace of Christ. Further, when the observance of the Sabbath is by name classed by St. Paul with new moons and things gone by; and when it is named by Jesus only to be undervalued; we call it outrageous that the would-be Reformers should go back to "beggarly elements," as the indignant Apostle calls them. We might proceed to entitle the error grotesque, of setting up as essential to Christianity a belief in Noah's ark, the passage of the Red Sea, the speaking ass or serpent. Who can imagine Paul or John at Athens preaching at

Mars' Hill, and staking the truth of Christ with a disciple of Aristotle on any of these things; or, say, on the universal deluge, or on the morality of the sacrifice of Isaac ? The first Apostles (and their successors for some time) had too strong sense, and too deep a moral nature, to fall into any of these monstrosities, which would have nipped Christianity in the bud. They keenly felt that the strength and core of their doctrine lay in its moral superiority, and that it was to the MORAL CONSCIENCE that they must appeal; while to encumber their doctrine by alleged miracles a thousand years old, or stories about events long earlier than the art of writing, would have been insanity and a sort of suicide. Our Indian missionaries well know what certain discomfiture they encounter, if they invite a battle of traditional miracles: but, even without any such experience, all ought to see how impossible it was for a Christian Apostle to refuse baptism to a heathen because he did not believe the miracles of the Pentateuch (for, what evidence could he possibly offer?); or, what more unequitable, than, having baptized him while in unbelief of these miracles, to revile him for the unbelief after he was within the Church? In the "Acts of the Apostles," and in the "Apostles' Creed," we see no trace of a convert being expected to believe in the Pentateuch.

But a second error committed by the Reformers (though, we believe, unintended by those of the first generation) has been still more fatal in its results. We refer to the dogmatizing as to what Books were canonical, and the making of doctrinal Articles. In the first instance, it was but natural to set forth in what they agreed, both as a mutual satisfaction, and as a protest against evil imputations. But the moment that such documents were imposed as authoritative, the whole position of the Protestant Church became logically untenable; for the imposer made himself a Pope, while declaiming against Popish usurpation and if such formulas were allowed to be practically without appeal and unchangeable, no other result was possible than what has occurred. On the one side, schisms and secessions, in spite of persecution; on the other, stagnation and congelation in the residual Church, which submitted tamely to the imposition. Thenceforth, the Christian not only had not the freedom of members of the ancient church of Corinth or Ephesus (where a private member might frankly and flatly oppose* an Apostle, without being thought to

Diotrephes, it seems, refused to allow John's epistle to be read to the church. But perhaps this was not the Apostle, but John the elder of Ephesus.

become an "infidel"), but he was no longer allowed to listen to an Apostle with his own ears; he was commanded to accept the Apostle's meaning second-hand. And why so? Is it because the layman is too stupid, and cannot be trusted to interpret the Apostle correctly? Is it because he is unlearned ?-because he needs to read the original Greek, and go through theological study, before he will be competent? Nay, not so; for, wonderful to tell, the layman alone is left free. He retains "private judgment;" but the learned clergyman, the professor of theology, the bishop, are precisely those who are forbidden* to judge for themselves what an Apostle meant! Of course, the explanation of this is purely political and tyrannical, not religious; otherwise such a development was morally impossible. The imposers were laymen; the accomplices were a certain number of active and eager priests; the victims were the priests collectively, present and future, and the millions who were to be taught. The princes and statesmen whose power enacted these things, played a game of their own, which, however iniquitous, had a certain self-consistency, so long as they forbade (as they always did at first forbid) the preaching and teaching of unordained persons, who had not subscribed the State Articles. But from the day that they ceased to prosecute and punish unauthorized teaching, all use in the imposition of the Articles broke down. A liberty was given to the laity and to the ignorant, which was refused to the clergy, to the bishops, to the very professors of theology. Such a system does not produce the external Church unity for which alone a tyrannical ruler cares; nor can it tend to Truth, for which we presume a good Christian

to care.

The permanent imposition of creeds and tests compiled within half a century of the first awakening, is the more unequitable and the more disastrous, from the remarkable confusion of thought which then prevailed as to the joint authority of Fathers, Councils, and the Scripture. In those days, and indeed much later, classical scholars like Rollin equalized historical authorities: incorporated into one system the Assyrian and Argive dynasties, the Theseus of Plutarch, the Cyrus of Herodotus, and the Pericles of Thucydides; mingled Dionysius and Livy into one history, as though they could not be at variance. The very same amiable puerility

*Yet not strictly so. We are reminded by the Bishop of London, that a clergyman is bound to think freely, but bound also to abandon his profession if he alight on something opposed to his subscriptions! We are all free to break the law, but under heavy penalties.

led theological inquirers to assume that the "early" Church agreed with the Apostles; and under the word "early" they liberally included the first four centuries at least. It was assumed that the Three Creeds were (of course) apostolic, and that the First Four Councils were valid and authoritative. The reason,

indeed, was alleged that "they could be proved by Scripture;" but any one who denied the fact was unceremoniously overruled; and, in the Anglican Church at least, immense weight was given to the "Fathers" of the fourth century, and, both here and in Germany, to Augustine in particular, who was born three hundred years after the death of the Apostle Paul. No influence could justly be claimed by his date; yet as a fact an enormous authority was conceded to him, not merely as a wise and good man, but as a "Father" of the Church. This is the more remarkable, inasmuch as some of his doctrines are rejected with exasperation by the Council of Trent, and have been ascribed to his youthful Manicheeism by some of our High Church. Such were the mixed sources of the Anglican test-subscriptions; a heterogeneous mass from the New Testament, Fathers, Creeds, and Councils, assumed to be harmonious by minds but half open to the facts of ecclesiastical history-ignorant how in those four centuries copious streams from Alexandrian Platonism, from Persian Manicheeism, from Gnosticism, and from Judaism, had mingled with the generally noble teachings of Paul, who, in fighting against Rabbinism on its own chosen ground, had himself unawares become far too Rabbinical in his argumentation.

The peculiar calamity of this to the Protestant churches lay in the fact that from Paul to Augustine was a period of perpetually increasing degradation to the intellect of mankind, and with it to Christian doctrine. Hume has not gone beyond the truth in his keen remark, that on every successive controversy the more irrational side prevailed. Augustine, with much depth of sentiment, and a noble sincerity which will ever be honoured, had undoubtedly a most gloomy religion, which taught funereal conceptions of God, and led men to brood over their own wickedness, instead of subduing it by noble action, and filling their minds with a cheerful faith. From him came to Luther, to Calvin, and to the Puritans, all that was darkest and most painful in their creed. From him, we presume, the Anglican Church derives its protest against Pelagius," as also the atrocious notion that we are not born children of God, but children of wrath; although the word (no doubt) is Paul's. What has it availed to pretend that the Apostolic

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