puts an individual in a situation where public injury may be done, he shall have some pledge against that injury. The constitution is essentially Protestant; he has every right to demand of those who solicit to be put into its administration, that they shall divest themselves of what he considers and can prove from history to have been already eminently dangerous to British freedom of thought and action. The Roman Catholic spurns at all conditions, and demands that our welfare should be subjected to him on his own terms.

If it be in the competence of man to make himself master of any public question, it must be in England. The truth may lie concealed in Spain, or Italy, or France, or Austria, or in any country where men are prohibited from enquiring for themselves. But in England, if thorough and endless discussions can detect its shape, it will be seen in all its dimensions. We have had the "Catholic question" before us for almost three hundred years; it has been sifted and searched completely if ever question was, yet the "spiritual supremacy" of the Pope has been always the declared point of danger! Is it to be presumed, that considering the superior rationality and intelligence of the British nation, they should have been so long totally mistaken in the object of their alarm. We have a succession of statutes disabling Papists from sitting in parliament, and each with some added safeguard, down to the period when the constitution was finally established in 1688. And in that moment of our settled and completed freedom what was the first step of the enfranchised parliament? Why, an embodying of all the old precautions against foreign interference under spiritual pretences; the substance of our forefather's wisdom concentrated in the formal "oath of supremacy."

"The very first Act of Parliament under the new dynasty, and which may, therefore, be considered the fundamental article of the Constitution, as then established, enacts that in all future Parliaments, the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and the declaration required by the Act of the 30 Car. II., ""for disabling Papists from sitting in Parliament," shall be taken and subscribed by every Member of either House of Parliament, as by that Act is ordained; that is to say. person who now is, or hereafter shall be, a Peer of this Realm, or Member of the House of Peers, shall vote, or make his proxy, in the House of Peers, or sit there, during any debate; nor any person that nów is, or hereafter shall be, a Member of the House of Commons, shall

1 W. and M., c. 1.

"That no

vote in the House of Commons, or sit there, during any debate, after their Speaker is chosen, until such Peer or Member shall, from time to time, respectively take the said oaths, and subscribe and repeat the declaration therein mentioned." "

And the same are required to be taken and subscribed in each House respectively, before a full House, with the Speaker in his chair; and any person offending herein incurs a penalty of 500l., and is disabled to sit in either House, or execute any public office, civil or military.

"After thus excluding the subjects of the See of Rome from the two Houses of Parliament, equal care was taken to exclude them from the Throne. For by the 9th section of the Act *, commonly called the Bill of Rights, it is enacted, That all and every person or persons that are, or shall be, reconciled to, or shall hold communion with, the See or Church of Rome, or shall profess the Popish religion, or shall marry a Papist, shall be excluded, and be for ever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the Crown and Government of this Realm and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, or any part of the same; or to have, use, or exercise any regal power, authority, or jurisdiction, within the same; and in all and every such case and cases, the people of these realms shall be, and are hereby absolved of their allegiance; and the said Crown and Government shall, from time to time, descend to and be enjoyed by such person or persons, being Protestants, as should have inherited and enjoyed the same, in case the said person or persons so reconciled, holding communion, or professing or marrying as aforesaid, were entirely dead.'

"And by the 10th section of the Bill of Rights, every King and Queen of this realm, who at any time hereafter shall come to and succeed in the imperial crown of this kingdom, are required, on the first day of the meeting of the first Parliament, next after coming to the crown, setting on the throne in the House of Peers, in the presence of the Lords and Commons, or at his or her coronation, to subscribe and audibly repeat the declaration required of the members of both Houses by the last-mentioned Act.

"Thus was the Church of England made the sanctuary of the Constitution, of which the first principle is the exclusion of the Papal Supremacy, and the second the exclusion of those who submit to it, from all participation in the functions of government and legislation."— P. 51.

Our limits prevent us from observing on the third pamphlet further than that it is spiritedly written, and exhibits considerable humour, and evident personal knowledge of "Popery in Ireland."

* 1 W. and M., st. 2. c. 2.

The Ecclesiastical History of the second and third Centuries illustrated from the Writings of Tertullian. By JOHN, BISHOP OF BRISTOL, Master of Christ's College, and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. 8vo. Pp. 608. 12s. 6d. London. Rivingtons. 1826.

ON few subjects have the opinions of the learned in modern times been more divided than on the authority of the ancient Fathers. Roman Catholic writers lavish unbounded praise upon their merits, and appeal to them with a respect, and even reverence, but little inferior to that which is paid to the inspired volume. Some among the Protestants, on the other hand, disparage them as if they fell below the common standard of human intellect, and disdain their decisions, as the decisions of the weakest and blindest of men. The truth, as often happens, lies between both extremes. To inspiration they have no claim; and as men they were not exempt from the infirmities of our fallen state, exposed likewise to some errors arising from the then state of letters and of society, and from the peculiar eircumstances in which they were placed; yet they had some advantages from living in ages so near to the origin of the Christian faith, when the stream of traditionary truth was flowing in its purest channel; they were men of unquestioned piety and integrity; and therefore unexceptionable witnesses to the primitive faith. Some there are too ignorant to consult them, too insolent to peruse them, or too presumptuous to listen to the dictates of the recorded wisdom of antiquity, but to despise the authority of writers so well situated for the acquirement and transmission of truth, is not the part either of a candid or a sound mind. Granting them to be only men of common sense and common honesty, and their authority as witnesses to the Apostolical doctrines and practices is undeniable; an authority which would be scarcely affected if we were to allow most of the charges preferred against them by a Whitby, a Daille, a Barbeyrac, and a Rosenmüller.

In regard to the history of the Church their testimony is essentially important, and some even of those who spurn their authority in matters of doctrine, nevertheless pay due respect to their attestation in matters of history. Without their aid it would be impossible to compose any thing which would deserve to be called an ecclesiastical history. But it is an assertion which hardly admits of doubt that their writings have never yet been so carefully examined, with a view to this particular

subject, as their importance demands. Such a task, indeed, is almost beyond the reach of any single mind to accomplish; those learned men, therefore, who search the volumes of any ancient Father for the purpose of so applying them, are performing an acceptable service to the cause of letters and theology. Among writers of this description, the Right Reverend author of the work before us holds a conspicuous rank. His design was to illustrate the ecclesiastical history of the second and third centuries from the writings of Tertullian, which he has accomplished with great ability and judgment, and has thus brought the testimony of this Father to bear upon the history of this period in a manner the most full and complete.

The scattered hints relating to the biography of Tertullian, preserved in the ancient writings have been collected by the assiduity of Du Pin, Cave, Tillemont, Lardner, &c.; and in a preliminary chapter the Bishop of Bristol prefixes an account of the life and writings of Tertullian. No precise information can be obtained respecting the date of his birth, or any of the principal occurrences of his life; it is certain, however, that he, flourished during the reigns of Severus and Antoninus Caracalla, or between the years 193 and 216. Lardner places him at the year 200. He was married, as appears from two Treatises among his works addressed to his wife, and it is asserted by Jerome that he was a Presbyter of the Church.

The most remarkable incident in Tertullian's life was his adoption of the errors of Montanus, which Pamelius and others have imputed to disappointed ambition, in being defeated in his pretensions to the see, either of Rome or of Carthage. But probably the true cause, as the Bishop of Bristol observes, must be sought "in the constitution and temper of his mind, to which the austere doctrines and practice of the new prophet were perfectly congenial, and of which the natural warmth and acerbity were, as Jerome informs us, increased by the censures, perhaps by the misrepresentations of the Roman clergy." (P. 36.) Be this as it may, his attachment to the doctrines of Montanus is evident from his works; for he often uses the authority of the new prophecy, enforces the necessity of frequent fasts, condemns marriages, or at least gives a decided preference to a life of celibacy, proscribes second marriages, and recommends a severe and ascetic course of life. To this defection from the Church is to be attributed that dissimilitude among the treatises, those different representations, and those contrarieties of opinion which it is not difficult to discover in the works of Tertullian.

In considering these circumstances in the life and writings of

this Father, an objection naturally occurs against his authority. What reliance, it may be asked, can we place upon the judgment of one who could be deluded into a belief of the extravagant pretensions of Montanus? What credit is due to the testimony of so violent a partisan of that heresiarch? Or what advantage can be derived from studying the works of so credulous and superstitious an author? This is an objection lying at the very groundwork of the Bishop of Bristol's inquiry in the volume before us, and it is thus excellently rebutted by his Lordship:

"These are questions easily asked and answered without hesitation by men who take the royal road to theological knowledge; who either through want of the leisure, or impatience of the labour, requisite for the examination of the writings of the Fathers, find it convenient to conceal their ignorance under an air of contempt. Thus a hasty and unfair sentence of condemnation has been passed upon the Fathers, and their works have fallen into unmerited disrepute. The sentence is hasty, because it speaks great ignorance of human nature, which often presents the curious phenomenon of an union of the most opposite qualities in the same mind of vigour, acuteness and discrimination on some subjects, with imbecility, dullness, and bigotry on others. The sentence is unfair, because it condemns the Fathers for faults, which were those, not of the individuals, but of the age; of the elder Pliny and Marcus Antoninus, as well as of Tertullian. It is moreover unfair, because the persons who argue thus in the case of the Fathers, argue differently in other cases. Without intending to compare the gentle, the amiable, the accomplished Fenelon, with the harsh, the fiery, the unpolished Tertullian, or to class the spiritual reveries of Madame Guyon with the extravagancies of Montanus and his prophetesses, it may be remarked that the predilection of Fenelon for the notions of the mystics betrayed a mental weakness, differing in degree, rather than in kind, from that which led Tertullian to the adoption of Montanism. We do not, however, on account of this weakness in Fenelon, throw aside his works as utterly undeserving of notice, or deem it a sufficient ground for questioning the superiority of his genius and talent; we regard with surprise and regret this additional instance of human infirmity, but continue to read Telemachus with instruction and delight. Let us shew the same candour and sound judgment in the case of the Fathers; let us separate the wheat from the tares, and not involve them in one indiscriminate conflagration. The assertion may appear paradoxical, but is nevertheless true, that the value of Tertullian's writings to the theological student arises in a great measure from his errors. When he became a Montanist he set himself to expose what he deemed faulty in the practice and discipline of the Church; thus we are told indirectly what that practice and that discipline were, and we obtain information which, but for this secession from the Church, his works would scarcely have supplied. In a word,