"Zuinglians and Calvinists explain away in metaphor the doctrine of the sacraments, deny baptismal regeneration and the real presence of our Lord in the eucharist, from their excessive zeal for the doctrine of justification by faith." Nevertheless, when in addition to all this he has appeased his conscience for having married and acquired a competency, as easily as at the beginning in the matter of his ordination; has ventured upon the surplice, and "preached a series of discourses on the Prayer Book, beginning at the title-page and going straight through the preface,"-convinced all his opponents and satisfied all his churchwardens; there comes a point at which our prebendary's heart misgives, that the juste milieu party may think he has gone far enough, while he is still anxious for the advancement of his people. But oh! the bliss of novel-writing again, nothing so easy as to introduce a thorough-going Tractarian by way of curate, and enter into controversy with him against the introduction of the wafer instead of bread, and other similar extremities, on account of the prejudices of the people, taking care always to give him the best of the argument, even while he reduces him to submission. This done, we have a chapter of course upon church-architecture, galleries, fonts and cast-ends, things never divorced from the affections of an Oxford student, in which the prebendary grows as gossiping and irreverent as the chaplain. Then follows a chapter in defence of the later Tracts of the Times, even to No. 90, and the Tract upon Reserve, of which Mr. Gresley approves, all except the title; containing an attack upon the bishop of Worcester, and this candid confession for himself, "Nothing except their actually joining the Romish communion," which he thinks as unlikely as that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself should become a papist-"Nothing short of this shall ever induce me to retract my fixed opinions that the Tract-writers (taking their writings as a whole) are the ablest and truest maintainers which our Church has had for many years." These, and a long dissertation on the "Case of Dissenters," with which we, as churchmen, have as little to do in this place as that has with his story, brings us to Mr. Gresley's "recapitulary remarks." Of this important chapter to which we have previously referred, the leading points are,-1st. that John Bunyan and the Dairyman's Daughter might have been saved all the trouble of their repentance and conversion, and the world have escaped Legh Richmond and the Pilgrim's Progress, if they had been duly baptized; since it is expressly for the saving of so much trouble, that the Church "takes each child into her arms, and by the use of Christ's holy ordinance, confers on him a new nature by water and the Spirit; unites him at once with the body of Christ, and

makes him an adopted child of God: "--and secondly, the plain matter of fact that Cecil, had he lived now, would have been a Tractarian convert, and very good high-churchman. We have already recommended this chapter to our evangelical readers. Mr. Gresley is what our country-people call a "plain-spoken gentleman,” and has no desire to be misunderstood, or to pass for what he is not. We like the distinctness of the following summary :

"The Churchman (Tractarian), like the Evangelical, preaches his awakening sermons, and makes his earnest appeals to those who have fallen from grace, accompanied by vivid manifestations of God's love through Christ to even the worst sinner." (We ourselves have heard abroad the Roman Catholic preachers do the same.) "The difference is, that whereas the Evangelical makes this the whole, or by far the most prominent part, of his scheme, the Churchman looks on it rather as a supplement or last resort; and builds his principal hope on the preservation and carrying out of the baptismal grace, according to the scheme so plainly marked out in the services of the Church. Such appears to be the broad difference between the Church scheme and that of the Evangelicals. The Evangelical dwells almost entirely on conversion; the Churchman" (so called by himself) "preaches baptismal regeneration, and to those who have fallen, repentance.”

May the difference on our side be never narrowed, it cannot be greatly widened on the other.

From the remaining work in our list we are desirous to excuse ourselves; it is published without a name, and differs little from its kith and kin. They are already legion, and may be multiplied a hundred-fold, because they require in the production neither thought nor talent. If the writer has not capability enough to make his own argument strong, he is always competent to make his opponent's weak; and whenever he finds himself at a loss, he can at least close the disputation and pronounce the parties satisfied. Of the specimens immediately before us, we have selected for criticism the lightest and the heaviest-whether best or worst we cannot say,-and pass by the third with only a single extract, selected for its originality.

"Our Church deemed herself secure against innovation, when she compelled her members to swear to perform the public service according to the Book of Common Prayer, deeming the rubric a part and portion of the book. She did not believe the incumbents in her pale would so far forget their duty to their mother, as to dare to collate a volume of psalms and hymns, designed, as the title declared, for the use of the Church of England, the writings of dissenters and enemies of the Church, and insult one of her bishops by placing the Church hymn of Ken amidst the lines of Toplady, Berridge, Venn, Wesley, and Montgomery; nor did she believe that one of her bishops should be found, as at this time, who would permit such a collection to be dedicated to him by its author, an incumbent in his diocese."

So much for Tractarian reverence for episcopal authority. The prelate here alluded to is, obviously, the bishop of London!

HOLY SCRIPTURE THE ULTIMATE RULE OF FAITH TO A CHRISTIAN MAN. By the Rev. W. FITZGERALD, B.A., Trinity College, Dublin. London: Seeley and Burnside. 1842.

"THE surrender of our private judgment upon any important religious question seems,' says this writer, "to involve, as the grounds of such a proceeding, two persuasions; a persuasion of our own incompetency, after our best exertions, to determine the question proposed; and a persuasion of the perfect competency and qualifications of the parties, to whose guidance we submit our understandings. The first of these conditions cannot honestly be fulfilled but after a careful review, to the best of a man's ability, of the question to be decided, and the nature of the matters involved in it. The second seems to require a similar examination of the qualifications of our guides, as compared with the question in which we seek their assistance." But, constituted as man is, the surrender of private judgment, for which some contend so carnestly, is itself an act of private judgment, and that in a twofold sense; first, in the act by which we resolve to submit our understandings to some guide in general; and secondly, in the act by which, out of the multiplicity of possible guides, we determine our implicit submission to some one guide in particular. It was just as much an act of private judgment which carried Mr. Sibthorp and Mr. Wackerbarth to the communion of the church of Rome, and it is just as much a continued exercise of private judgment which will keep them there, as it was an act of private judgment which raised up an Augustinian friar to bear testimony against the monstrous abuse and absurdity of indulgences, and a continued exercise of the same private judgment which led him from one step to another, until Germany was irradiated with the light of the liberated Gospel, and the symbols of the Romish apostacy were cast to the moles and to the bats. The very disclaimer of private judgment, therefore, is itself the exercise of private judgment, and an exercise to which all the difficulties and dangers must attach which can be supposed to attach to any other exercise of the same function. In this respect, the man has clearly no alternative—private judgment, whether in returning to Rome, in approximating to it, in protesting against, or in receding from it, he must exercise, whether with or without the consciousness of his own concurrence; and it therefore becomes a question of the

highest interest and importance, how he may be directed in its exercise upon right and safe principles. It is granted that this duty may be difficult, and that it may be dangerous; but it is far more dangerous to shrink from the task which Almighty God hath set us to perform-nay, the performance of which, whether perfectly or imperfectly, adequately or inadequately, absolutely or partially, He hath imposed upon us as an inevitable necessity. We may decline to "try the spirits, whether they are of God," but acquiescence, substituted for enquiry, is only the abandonment of a right, and not the exemption from a duty. Division itself were preferable to a unity such as this. We proceed therefore, having thus premised the necessity of private judgment, to examine, with Mr. Fitzgerald, the grounds on which it may be exercised with the greatest degree of safety, and with the slightest risk of error; and in so doing, though the first appearance of his book is almost as unattractive as it is unobtrusive, there will, we think, be little difficulty in extracting from it the solid and adequate material for a careful review of this all-important question, "What is the ultimate Rule of Faith to a Christian man ?"

The writings of the New Testament are admitted, by all who are even nominally Christians, to contain the very words in which the first preachers of the Gospel, who were immediately appointed by the Lord Himself to instruct the world in the way of salvation, were directed to narrate His life, actions, and discourses, together with the principal occurrences which took place on the founding of His Church; and to publish, expound, and defend the doctrines of Christianity. Consequently, where the meaning of these writings is clear and explicit, they must be allowed to control and transcend all other testimony; and to them, so far as they have common matter, all other documents of evidence, concerning the Apostolic teaching, must be referred. Especially are we bound to try by this touchstone such traditive doctrines or practices as do not connect themselves, by direct testimony, with the Apostles, but which are connected with them by a process of reasoning, founded only on probable presumptions. One of the heaviest charges. which Christ and his Apostles brought against the Jewish teachers was, that they had superadded oral traditions (pretending a divine original, but in reality human) to the perfect rule of the written law and if the written word of the Old Testament was thus evidently designed by God to be the PERFECT RULE OF FAITH to the Jewish church, how can we forbear to conclude, from analogy, that the written word of the New Testament was, in a similar way, designed to be the PERFECT RULE of the Christian Church? The writers of the New Testament were fully aware of the imperfections

of oral tradition, and wrote, in some cases at least, for the express purpose of guarding against these imperfections. Thus St. Luke WROTE, that Theophilus "might know the CERTAINTY of the things wherein he had been instructed." St. John notes and corrects a false tradition which had gone abroad respecting himself—that he should never die. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, corrects an oral tradition of his preaching circumcision, which had prevailed even amongst those who had seen and heard him, and were converted by his means. St. Peter WRITES a summary of his doctrine to the Church, that after his decease, "THEY MIGHT HAVE THESE THINGS CONSTANTLY IN REMEMBRANCE." Hence, it is evident, that oral tradition developed its tendency to mislead, even in the life-time of the Apostles; it is evident that the churches were actually misled thereby; it is evident also, that one and a chief purpose of the Apostles in writing was to supply a lasting and authentic safeguard against such errors and impositions. And hence too it is still further manifest, that whatever may have come to us in the name and on the authority of tradition, must, if it contain common matter, be tested by the authentic and accredited documents; while, if it do not contain common matter, it is either subordinate or spurious-spurious, if it contain contradictory matter, since two opposites cannot be true; and subordinate, even if it contain consistent matter: in a word, that while Scripture declares authoritatively what we must do and what we must believe, tradition can extend no farther than to recommend to our credence what it teaches, and to suggest, in the way of practice, what we had better not leave undone. Scripture teaches with authority; not as the Scribes of old, or the modern doctors of Rome.

We have thus advanced one step in our enquiry, beyond the necessity which exists, in every case, for the exercise of private judgment, and the moral impossibility of a total surrender, the very profession of which is a positive exercise of it. We see that every man is bound to exercise a judgment in the consideration of that testimony which, from its very nature, must control and determine every other the New Testament. But we find, in the New Testament, an important distinction drawn between the faith and the wisdom of the Christian religion. The former is that summary of doctrine which was esteemed necessary and adequate to salvation, and upon the professed belief of which men were received, by communion, into the visible church; and this is, in its most strict and proper sense, the GOSPEL. The latter, the wisdom of the Christian religion, is a much larger and more scientific body of truth, related to and illustrating the faith, but not essential to it; developed by reasoning and analogies, and harmonizing doctrines