instructed Christians, to make distinctions between the Old and the New-Testament Scriptures, as if they were the works of two different authors, and related to two different subjects. Our present sceptic is not deficient in such an attempt, although on this occasion he thinks "it is not worth while to do more than protest against the practice, so injurious to Christianity, of treating the Old and New Testament as concurrent schemes of the Divine government, and as rules of similar cast, or equal authority, for the conduct and expectations of human life." Did the Reviewer never hear that Veteri Testamento novum latet; Novo Testamento vetus patet? He goes on to say, "The system of Divine government described by the Jewish historians is scarcely less alien from that of Christianity than the system displayed by the Heathen poets. It is one perpetual system of particular providences; and those, in many instances, depending on principles, and recorded in a spirit, and in language, which too often render the First Lesson in the Morning Service a very problematical lesson to any ordinary congregation. Whilst the Pentateuch is read in a Christian church as indiscriminately as in an ancient Jewish synagogue, and received as the narrative of events, and of a people, whose case is applicable to ourselves, we cannot wonder that such a narrative is often grievously misunderstood and misapplied. It has been consequently the store-house of fanaticism in every age; from whose wall the Balfours of Burleigh, and their humble imitators in the vulgar field of Christian warfare, take down its monumental armour, 'the sword and the battle,' against both public and private peace." After the perusal of this passage, we receive as the highest compliment which could have been paid us by friend or foe, that "the spirit and language" of the Morning Watch have met with the decided reprobation of this Reviewer. We earnestly hope that every one who thinks of the spirit and language of the Old Testament as this writer thinks, will also think and say of us as he does. A system of Heathenism, the invention of Satan, scarcely less alien from the New Testament, the dictation of the Holy Ghost, than the Old Testament, which is the dictation of the same Holy Ghost! Our marvel is, what could have induced such a writer to enter at all upon a question of delicate and accurate theology, who is himself sceptical on every subject which is peculiar to Christianity. The inspiration of the Old Testament he here utterly rejects. His language is more like that of Haffner, or Ammon, in Germany, than of any one who has affected to write on what he is pleased to designate Christianity, unless it be Belsham. "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable" for various purposes, says the Apostle concerning the Old Testament: "A very problematical lesson to any ordinary congregation," says the Edinburgh Review.

If the Reviewer were honest in his approbation of the New Testament, which it is scarcely possible to suppose that he is, he must find insurmountable difficulty in those passages which declare that all the particular providences that occurred to the Jews are recorded in order to be ensamples to us; such as 1 Cor. x. 1-11; Gal. iii. and iv.; the whole Epistle to the Hebrews, particularly the eleventh chapter; to say nothing of the Apocalypse. Moreover, what wretched sophistry it is, to call that government "Divine" in the same sentence in which he declares it to be as bad as that of Jupiter and Juno! The writings of the Old Testament may, indeed, have furnished arms to the Balfours of Burleigh, but they have furnished arms for nobler warriors than ever contended with swords of steel: they furnished the panoply which has rendered the noble army of martyrs impervious to the shafts of the world, the flesh, and the devil, in every age; and they furnished the materials of consolation to the King of Martyrs himself, who conquered sin and defeated Satan with that sword of the Spirit, the Old Testament word of God alone. It is as philosophically false, as it is morally and scripturally false, to imagine that there can be any discordance between the Old and New Testaments, if their inspiration be conceded. For God is one, and the same; and immutability in conduct is an essential ingredient of perfection. Mankind, likewise, is one and the same, in every age, clime, and circumstance; varying, indeed, because imperfect, and therefore always changing, but never able to change its dependence on, relation to, and duties towards, God. God's purpose to man was declared at the first moment of Adam's creation; and however that purpose may have been postponed, in man's estimation, or may have had succeeding developments, the purpose itself is unalterable, and the end still to be completed. But, to descend from reasoning to testimony, the Seventh Article of the Church of England speaks the language of every orthodox church, and of Scripture itself, in declaring that "the Old Testament is not contrary to the New," and that, "they are not to be heard" who make a difference. Now, if a writer please to avow himself a sceptic, and attack us on those principles, well and good; but he has no right, in common consistency, while doing this in one place, to dogmatize to us on the "concurrent consent of all Christendom" in another: he has no right to call upon us to submit to the rule of a court, while denying the law by which that court is constituted. The Old and New Testament together, jointly and severally, reveal the mind of God: if the spirit of the Reviewer dislikes the spirit or language of any part of either, he dislikes the spirit and language of God; his heart is at variance with, and at enmity against, the heart of God; he is as far from being at one with God, as Bayle or Roberspierre, Mohammed or Judas

Iscariot. The god he worships is the creature of his own imagination, and, by his own confession, not the God of the Bible. As much of the Bible as is conformable to his god, he adopts; and all that is opposed to the character of his god, he rejects; and the God of the Bible, therefore, he rejects also. He would as soon worship Jupiter as the God of Moses and of Samuel; and he might as well worship Jupiter, the creation of Grecian and Egyptian delusion, as the creation of his own, which is his present object of idolatry. He must bend to worship the God of the Bible, or eternal misery must be his portion.

"In examining the texts of the New Testament, containing the promise of the Holy Spirit, it will be necessary to bear in mind the maxim which we have already applied to the texts containing the promises annexed to prayer: "Absurdities to avoid, is the only rule for interpreting many passages. This foolish saying of Jeremy Taylor is twice repeated by the Reviewer; and in his opinion the promises of answers to prayer, and of the Holy Spirit, are absurdities in the Book of God, and the great wisdom of man is to be evinced in making his escape from his Creator's absurdities!

The Reviewer commenced by saying that "the Morning Watch is a publication in ability, inconsistency, and fierceness worthy of Cromwell's camp;" and concludes by saying that the doctrines it professes are " inculcated by well-known writers of very popular talents." Yet he afterwards says that his 66 arguments are not meant for the leaders; nor has he the least desire to enter into a competition of contemptuous paragraphs with religious disputants, the pride and bitterness of whose insolent theology exceed any thing within our knowledge, at least during the last two centuries of polemics. They declare that it would not be difficult, article by article, to shew that a greater semblance of truth is preserved by the Papacy, detestable apostasy though it be, than by the system called Evangelicalism. We always thought that the worst things about Evangelicalism were its exclusiveness, which led to narrow views of God and the Divine government; and its representation of, and consequent want of sympathy with, human nature. It is, however, made abundantly clear at present, that, if what is commonly understood by a Christian spirit be an integral and essential part of Christianity, there may be a third system, guilty of a more detestable apostasy from that spirit, and therefore infinitely worse than either."-"A Christian spirit" is the same spirit that was in Christ. This spirit would have led Him to pronounce his severest curse upon an apostate, who, having been baptized into his name, and calling himself a Christian, would teach men that Moses and Isaiah inculcated doctrines and practices more like Heathenism than like the doctrines of Paul and John. The Reviewer

thinks it a mark of a most Christian spirit to bring Papists, Jews, Socinians, and Infidels, into offices of rule in a Christian nation we think it the spirit of Antichrist; and we think it agreeable to the spirit of Christ to denounce as the enemies of Christ all who so teach. A Christian spirit is not a merely good-natured liberalism, that thinks equally well of all creeds: on the contrary, such a spirit is the very opposite of a Christian spirit. Samuel in hewing Agag in pieces, Joshua in utterly exterminating the inhabitants of the plain, and Jael in driving the nail through Sisera's head, were actuated by a Christian spirit. What does the Reviewer say to Abraham's attempt at infanticide, so often mentioned with approbation in the New Testament? We are quite willing to admit that Old-Testament examples have been adopted in order to cover cruel, vindictive, and bad passions of men, and that such instances are to be found in modern works as well as in Cromwell's camp; but the Reviewer, on his side, is quite as far from the truth as such perverters themselves. Unsanctified benevolence is as antiChristian as the murders and rebellions of the Roundheads; the arts in both cases being Christian or anti-Christian according as they are in conformity with the will of Christ. The Jews were right in condemning Jesus of Nazareth, if but a man, for touching the leper and breaking the Sabbath, and calling himself the Son of God: the question was, Was he the Son of God or not? for if he were not, they were justified in their acts: if he was, they were murderers and blasphemers who put to death the Lord of Glory.

The charge of" exclusiveness," as ground of accusation against any system of revealed theology, is the most absurd that can be imagined, because it is of the essence of such a system that those to whom it is made should be in exclusive possession of it. The Mohammedan, therefore, is more consequential than the Edinburgh Review, in asserting that out of the pale of the Koran there can be no salvation, inasmuch as he believes it to be a revelation from God: the Papist, upon his principles, is right in making the same claim for his church; the Protestant for his; and the Evangelical for his. The justice of our assertion, respecting Popery having preserved a greater semblance of truth than Evangelicalism is abundantly proved by the present questions of the permanence of miraculous powers in the church. Popery has borne witness to the fact; and, knowing that the Christian church ought to possess them, believing herself to be the Christian church, and finding that she had them not, invented lying miracles, which for a long time she palmed for true upon the credulity of the world. The consequence of there being a body of truth, although perverted and buried amidst superstition at the time of the Reformation, was, that there existed a soil of good staple, in which honest seed could grow

when once sown whereas now, in this country, and indeed in all Protestant countries, there is no solid and uncompromising principle to be found in any thing: statesmen and churchmen deride the most ancient and sacred things, unless their utility is obvious to the senses of a child. One of the worst parts of Evangelicalism consists in its having carried the war so little into the quarters of the Edinburgh Review.

With respect to the spirit of this Journal, we are willing to mend it, by praying to God to mend ourselves; but we shall not consider it to be mended by differing from the spirit, or from the language, of the Old Testament, but shall esteem it a very great improvement when more of the spirit and language of Moses, and Elijah, and Isaiah, and Ezekiel, is found in every one of our pages. Never will we cease to hold up such a writer as him to whom we have been replying, other than as an impotent and ignorant blasphemer. Whatever "unmitigated contempt" he may feel for our opinions, we implore him, by that tribute of reluctant homage which the "talents" and "ability of this journal have wrung from him, to listen to a very very few remarks, before we close this reply. We have no wish, either from false modesty, or from apprehension of egotism, to conceal that amongst the contributors to the Morning Watch are men who have wasted many years in endeavouring to slake that thirst, which the poet so well describes as inherent in all, in streams that were incapable of satisfying. The desire after happiness, which is the moving principle in all mankind, has induced it to be sought after in every region of the sense and of the intellect wherein others seek it. Some have pursued the phantom amidst all the intricacies of by-gone ages; have held converse with the mighty dead, through the medium of every tongue, ancient or living, that could be attained. Some have sought it in the shining paths of modern science; but all the stores of Greece and Rome, Germany and Britain, yet "left an anxious void still aching in the heart." The weary labour of the midnight oil, the noxious fumes of the laboratory, the pestilential odour of the dissecting room, the sulphureous vapours of the mine and of the smelting-house, have all been endured: the dry technicalities of the bar were gilded by the prospects of ambition: the harp and the viol, the tabret and the pipe, and wine, in feasts, were captivating, where the work of the Lord was not regarded: the experience of the Royal Preacher was realized, and these things proved to be at last only vanity and vexation of spirit.

O happiness! our being's end and aim,

Good, pleasure, ease, content, whate'er thy name;
That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die;

Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies;
O'erlook'd, seen double, by the fool, and wise;